That, is because you are sweet enough already my dear Renster
I got two gifts from my old man, one was so utterly fucking dog shit he left me with it and immediately went and got me a replacement. For some reason he thought I'd want SPOONS. Yes, spoons. Because I have a tendency to be somewhat...hard on them, when measuring out chemicals and I've disintegrated a few and rusted the bejeezis out of quite a few more. So he got me 3 packs of spoons for measuring out my chemicals, but also got me a very, very good penknife. Plenty quality tools, and a pair of blades sharp enough to shave with. And realizing that he REALLY fell short of the mark there with the spoons, and the look on my face, he immediately went out and got me several full-range sets of lab beakers, with sizes right down to 5ml ultramicroscale ones. Not sure how many sets, but he got me at least two, minimum, and a chemist can NEVER have too many beakers. And with beakers he doesn't have to worry about joint sizes etc. since they haven't got any.
And the ones I've got are all currently full of this, that, and the other. None of the contents needing to be mentioned by name.
Decided to splash out on 100g at least of LiAlH4 maybe a half kilo, or go somewhere in the middle as its pretty expensive, a liter of pyridine, a big jug of piperidine, some cyanuric chloride, might get myself a kg or two of either sodium or potassium cyanide while I'm at it (preferably NaCN, since the sodium cation is lighter than potassium, so per mole of NaCN one gets more cyanide anion for one's money. And no, I don't intend on using it to poison anybody. Cyanides have far better uses than that, and its most versatile stuff, aside from its infamy as a poison. Artistry, rather than murder is my aim). Going to grab myself some ammonium formate, some formamide....I've got quite the shopping list. Oh, and a few kg of iodine. Need more anhydrous ethanol as well..some calcium carbide...running down to my last few liters of methanol and isopropyl alcohol too.
If I've enough money left over, that can go on lots and lots of glassware, since I've got 700-something in the bank, and due to get paid any day soon to bring it to over a grand. Meaning....my (belated) xmas gift to myself is going to be as luxurious as the spoons were shitty. Mmmm....LAH, Red-Al, cyanide, ohboy, I'm salivating at the thought.
I'd quite like a couple of samples of arsenic too, for an element collection, as well as antimony and some of those lovely looking stepped, iridescent bismuth metal crystals. Nitrogen I can get easily of course, by deoxygenating air, or buying some liquid nitrogen and making one of those glass electrifiable glow-discharge tubes for gases which ionize the contents when the tubes are electrified, giving off the characteristic spectrum of light when the gas turns to plasma. And as for the rest of the pnictogens, the only other non-superheavy ultra-radioactive element with a half life so short the element cannot BE kept, decaying away in moments in a puff of radioactive disintegration, is phosphorus. And I've already 2kg of red phosphorus, so its a matter of making my own samples of the other allotropes and their polymorphs (fr.ex in the case of white phosphorus, it comes in cubic, monoclinic etc. forms), which I've been reserving for the first project, after building a suitably artistic, classy looking display case, since there a lot of difficult, challenging prizes to hunt down and bag, like violet phosphorus, hittorf's alpha-metallic phosphorus, scarlet (Schlenk's phosphorus, made by crystallizing red phos from phosphorus tribromide, which in and of itself, I'll make a good lot of, since it is very, very useful stuff)
Got a great bargain on the red P a while back, got money off, minimum order was 1kg, bought 2kg and each kilo was cheaper as a result, and came out to 70-something-80 euro per kg, since it was from a source who acts as a middleman for sigma-aldrich, one of the Big Name chemical supply houses, but who are a bunch of snooty cocksuckers who won't even sell so much as a drop of distilled water or a single grain of common table salt to anyone not affiliated with an organization. Guy takes orders since he can get things from them, takes a financial cut and resells anything to anyone. (well, presumably, pretty damn certain he wouldn't sell to al-qaeda, ISIS or other such scum, but to citizen scientists the guy in question is truly a boon, in that he can get the ungettable, and supply us, at a fair price added on top for himself, with all the unobtainium we could dream of. And since Sigma-Aldrich just won't deal with individuals (knowingly at least) unlike sellers who will, there is no 'hard to get precursor premium' tacked on to their prices. Places that might say, sell red phosphorus to meth cooks would jack the price up (no, that isn't the reason I wanted the RP) precisely because its hard to get, but that factor doesn't even get entertained in the minds of the tightfisted buggers at Sigma.
And their products are quality, too, they'd not have the huge business that they do if their stuff was shit)
So really, my xmas is yet to come.
