Went on a hike through the woods picking wild mushrooms. Got some charcoal burners (russula cyanoxantha) not bad grilled with a bit of butter and pepper. Blusher (Amanita rubescens) poisonous unless boiled twice before cooking and some kind of bolete. Plus done my first Birch-Benkeser reduction, a modified hybrid betwixt the two reduction schemes, tweaked to use ammonia gas passed into diethyl ether, chilled with a cryogen bath of ice/salt/calcium chloride/methylated spirit (I.e cheap crap disposable alcohol for just such purposes) and diethylene glycol (antifreeze basically, or close enough). Fair enough it did need some babysitting and on the spot mcguyvering a solution to the ammonia generator belching up clods of ammonium sulfate and caustic soda (I shoved a bit of rubber tubing up a distillation takeoff head, so it passed below the layer of diethyl ether in the flask being charged with lithium, and set the other flask, ammonia generator, so it passed through a claisen adapter, because the bastard filth damaged my condenser. Set it up as if for a short-path distillation, almost flask to flask, but the nifty trick, was to pass the tubing up through the vac takeoff still head, so it rose several inches high inside the inner diameter, that way it blocked any ammoniacal caustic slops from belching back up from the generator and into the actual flask containing the lithium, ether and recieving the ammonia. With excess lithium one doesn't even need to DRY the ammonia. Lazy, and needs tweaking but I had to go out on a hike, with my old man so we could hunt for mushrooms and enjoy a walk.
And Bugger me if it didn't work better than I ever expected. At first, thought damn, it hasn't worked, but then all of a sudden the lithium seemed to start undergoing rapid dissolution, and when this type of dissolving metal reduction kicks, one gets first a greenish or pale blue and then a DARK cyan to royal blue and eventually it can go almost black. When reduction of substrate is complete, it conveniently discharges the color of the blue, which is formed via the creation of a lithium electride, and one gets in effect, lithium surrounded by 6 NH3 ligands in a homoleptic complex, and solvated, free electrons, which are what performs the reductions.
