You aren't the only one QV. I just woke up at about 2pm, after being up all night, crystallizing...erm..well...the less said about what was being recrystallized, the better, but anyhow, didn't get more than a few snatches of sleep last night since I was busily fractionally recrystallizing something of mine to purify it. Still needs a couple of crystallizations from boiling methanol, (adding minimal boiling MeOH until my...project..is dissolved, then allowing it to drop to room temperature and after cooling in the freezer, adding ice cubes/chips, allowing some of the product to precipitate nice and cleanly for the next reaction in which it is needed, distilling off the methanol, and recovering the water-insoluble product, and repeating the process as many times as necessary, taking a cleaned cut each time until as much as possible of the clean, quality-improved product has been extracted and precipitated, perhaps one final wash with ice-cold H2O to get the last scraps, after which the methanol is distilled and recycled, and the impurities discarded for the rubbish that they are, and the cleaned product used to pad out a batch of the same, freshly made in the microwave if it proves less pure than the fresh batch to paper chromatography, or if more so then the fresh, worked up batch then it'll be used separately in the next step of what happens to it, namely, a borohydride reduction in either dry isopropanol or THF (tetrahydrofuran, a cyclic ether used as a solvent, that has 4 carbons, bridged by an oxygen atom and two C=C bonds, similar to diethyl ether although unlike ether itself, not suitable for use as an intoxicant/anaesthetic during surgery; although it is not particularly toxic either. Very useful, somewhat polar, aprotic solvent which is particularly good for reductions involving hydride reducing agent species, as the lone electron pair left on the oxygen left by the C-O-C bonding leaves it bearing a degree of negative charge, which helps it to complex to the electrophilic, positively charged hydride in solution and this makes the reduction processes tend to perform well in THF, given this particular affinity for complexation with the hydride, whilst also being very, very very stable against attack by strong bases, as ethers are very difficult to deprotonate, making it ideal for use with such strongly basic reagents as lithium aluminium hydride, sodium borohydride and sodium/potassium hydrides, Red-Al and the like)
And pleased, after somebody uploaded to a forum a link to a book hosted on LibGen (library genesis) on molecular/atomic reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry and finding that the ISPs mandated block on UK users getting access to this large online library were easily gotten around by using TOR. Just starting to read my PDF copy of the book now and even the first few pages seem like the style is well explained and easily readable. I'm liking it already and I've only just got started on their presentation on molecular orbital theory and orbital s-p shell hybridization and the quantum mechanics of the electron wavefunction and wavepacket with respect to their orbital structures and how this influences how bonding between atoms takes place. Couldn't get access at first, using a regular browser because of the ISP-level blocks, but using TOR, was able to go and get my book in less than a minute
