blah must not let this blog die.
and I should stop procrastinating whenever I feel like posting something. so there.
k let's see what's been going on - wednesday was an extremely boring day. but at least we're done with vectors I. problem is vectors II doesn't look like it'll be going any faster.
so weds was a very empty and rather boring day. I finally went for oneearth for the second time in the year though. they were electing! so bessie and I helped ask very fun questions. then we crashed the vote counting and there was quite a bit of drama. how fun.
oh and dell finally released the m11x r3. like one day after my previous post. now to get my mum to buy it for me XD.
ok that aside hmm wednesday was boring. thursday became friday. but cheng and ms poh both weren't in school so it wasn't that bad lol. plus there was no H3 so I ended at 220. yay.
but on thursday itself - mock spa was irritating. cos my NaOH bottle was leaking. so every time I tried to add some into the test-tubes it kept spilling over my hands and the test-tube rack and the table and all that. and the thing with NaOH is that it refuses to wash off your hands. and you can't quite wipe it off stuff either cos it just remains soapy and all that. plus if you have NaOH all over the place it ends up messing with your red litmus. so things got very irritating. thus ended up adding dil HNO3 / HCl (cos I was running out of HNO3) all over the place to get stuff off instead. which actually worked much better. and actually the dilute acids in the lab when you touch them they don't feel like anything. unlike the bases.
so by then it wasted quite a bit of time. then with the nitrogen compounds part of the experiment - basically you have a mess of solutions containing NH4+ / NO2- and NO3- and you have to identify which ones have which - everything involved heating the solutions. so the first solution I heated had NH4+ in it. so there was a LOT of NH3 evolved. which ended up turning all my red litmus papers (that I'd prepared and left on the bench as per wty's advice) blue ._. zzz.
by then I was so irritated that I couldn't bother driving off all the NH4+ in that tube so that I could test for nitrate so I just threw in Al foil inside and smelled it again.
lol.
for the next two test-tubes I heated both too much. so the NaOH + random solution mixture ended up spurting all over my hands. twice. so first one I put the test-tube down and went to wash my hands and whatnot. but after the second time I just couldn't be bothered and let it linger. cos really 100°C isn't all THAT hot. plus it was less than 1cm³ of solution anyway. and I had a pract to complete (by then I was really behind schedule - even kewei was ahead of me already). and really the more irritating bit is just the NaOH making everything feel soapy again. and thus messing with my red litmus papers. I think I used at least 25 pieces of those things during the mock SPA. so eventually I just gave up on testing for NH3 and used my nose instead.
it seems that I have some affinity for NaOH. or vice versa. but hey NaOH was still better than that NaBH4 disaster during the chemO pract. cos got quite a bit of anhydrous NaBH4 onto my skin during the pract without realising it. then after a while it started eating into the skin and whatnot. like it was actually stuck on my hands. ow.
also for this SPA they labelled the solutions FA0 1 2 and 3. so my FA1 test-tube was the one that spurted out and lost most of its contents thus I had to redo the test. but I was thinking of it as the SECOND test-tube thus I went to do everything with FA2 instead. which again messed me up quite abit. and resulted in me redoing everything and realising my mistake. oops.
then the organic QA since I was really rushing I just did what wty told us to do and identified by smell. then just a few confirmatory tests for the fun of it - Mg powder to the acid and 2,4-DNPH to the alcohol (in case my nose was failing me and it was actually a ketone - which it wasn't). then of course had to do iodoform test for the ketone / aldehyde / alcohol to get the structures (and I HOPE I didn't write triiodoform during the pract - which I have a strange feeling I did). so to expedite the iodoform test for the alcohol I stuck the test-tube in the flame for a bit (couldn't be bothered with the boiling water bath). which did expedite things a lot.
inorganic QA was rather fun and doable. just that sometimes you have to imagine a white ppt with Ca(OH)2. thus at the end of the whole thing since I rushed too much I discovered I had 10 minutes to spare. which basically entailed checking that everything I'd written was (largely) legible.
so after mock spa and all the washing up wty wanted to debrief us straightaway (i.e. scold people like pig who tried to cool a very hot test tube (after heating it and all that) by placing it in hot water. obviously it cracked ._.) thus when he finished his debrief the bell rang and we all hadn't cleaned up yet. so everyone was late for math and thus shangyi got rather irritated.
hmm so after friday ended I had nothing to do. so at about 230 went to the library and spent an hour and a half talking to random people inside (jem / yatyg / linsen / chew / wilbert / yap / chentian / stacey / guo). then at about 4 met the j1 mathRAs and decided to crash mathsoc interviews. lol. so ended up running errands (in mengshi's words) for them. which basically involved looking after the mathsoc j1s who were waiting outside for their interview. and of course "looking after" = playing cards. which we did until about 6+. then stayed back to talk to people and say hi to those who were going for the piano concert. then stalked shangyi with kang for a bit. then went home at 730. thus I wasted about 5 hours in school on thursday.
(not like I'd anything to do but still.)
yeah and my H3 finals are this monday! so I probably ought to start mugging.
hmm on friday I woke up at 1pm. then spent the day on the com reading random websites as usual. so didn't do much.
today I woke up at 1130. which was an improvement over yesterday. but spent most of today up to now watching stuff on youtube. and eating lunch.
now I'd probably go mug. bleh. but I'm pretty screwed for geopol anyway.
argh whatever.
