Picked up my med refills today, and despite working all night long, with just a few book breaks (reading a steven king novel atm, 'from a buick 8') when there is nothing to actually be DONE, feel perfectly relaxed now, was shattered and exhausted from the all-nighter in the lab beavering away at extracting the finished compound from my latest project.
A wee taster of the purified (essential in this case to do so most carefully as the route involves the use of a divalent mercury species, and these are extremely toxic compounds, nasty as hell and give me the fucking creeps working with them. In this case, mercuric sulfate and mercuric chloride (the sulfate turned out to hydrolyze, I believe from Hg (II) sulfate to Hg (I) sulfate, and the monovalent ionic Hg salts are usually a fair bit less toxic, mercurous compounds are less noxious than mercuric, although still not nice, only problem is in this case the mercuric oxidation state (Hg (II) is esential for the reaction to proceed)