Saturday, October 24, 2009

expressing the emptiness inside me..

These few weeks are totally crap. I'm going to die from the lack of brains.

I have 4 stupid practical reports, and 2 to be handed up on 23rd October(MY BDAY). Furthermore, my mum and dad are going out so I am going to be alone unless my friends treat me to something buhhhhhhhhh, I must demand some nice food and presents to compensate for the effort that I'm going to spend finishing up my practical reports. Plus the 3 tests that'll be coming up. URGH.

Tis cruel, this poor suffering world. I still have to memorise 20 lousy amino acids.

There's a reason why I love wet labs. You can camwhore and actually do SOMETHING within these 3 hours. Today our mission was to extract caffeine from tea(tieguanyin tea, to be specific. Lovely tea). Since we had missing ppl in our group, I paired up with Pei Shan, Aysha, Evelyn and another girl. Five's a huge group, but heck care.

We trooped off to the fume cupboards, where a bunch of glass stuff were. Taking our tea leaves and other various chemicals, we began to boil tea. Actually it wasn't much tea, but more like this black goey "tar" like stuff rising up from our flask when it boiled. After boiling, we smelt it, and it smelled like overboiled tea that was strong stuff. Next was filtering our tea. We had this huge blob of fluffy cotton wool to trap debris, then our teaching assistant took one look at our ball of wool, and said

"This is too much...actually you all only need this much."

We ended up with a cotton blob the size of the nail on a little finger. I can't imagine how hard we laughed when we saw the size. The smiles soon faded when we had to filter that black mess of tar. It wouldn't go down properly, and what was left was really concentrated thick tea stuff.

Our separating funnel came into use when we threw our filtrate inside, along with dichloromethane, and it nicely separated into two layers. I shook it as per told, and the stopper cover on the separating funnel shot out like a cork on a wine bottle, due to the pressure. Then we were given the task of taking out the dichloromethane. We didn't do it properly, so there were these little black blobs floating on the surface. Pei Shan had the job of sucking them out with the dropper, tried to collate them to become one with Russia(lol at giving the blobs a name) and excising them.

After that we added more chemical to get a clear substance, then putting it in this cool machine called a rotary evaporator, and the clear stuff disappeared in a few min. What was left was this white powdery stuff with a smell like tea. That was our precious caffeine, legalised drug taken by students.

I think PeiShan was really intrigued by the caffeine cos she kept sniffing it and becoming high on it. I almost became high myself, believe me. We scrapped out the white stuff and melted it, and recorded the melting point. End of experiment.

First coke, now caffeine. I'm not going to touch tea for a while. Our group is like the most hazardous, with Aysha breaking a pasteur pipette and then Evelyn breaking another one, and our table is always filled with Kleenwipes.

I need better stuff for my birthday, needs something to reward me for finishing all them practicals.

Oh here are some funny quotes taken from stickers on the lab doors.

"Lysed to kill"
"Nice genes"(this funny one popped out after I told PS the joke on genes.)
"If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate"

Wonderful way to brighten up a dreary lab.