What have you bought lately?

[renaeden]

Haven't been and bought yet (it's too hot), but we're going to Bunnings and buying some shelves for the lounge room later today.

[Parts]

226 gallons heating oil hopefully enough for the rest of the heating season

[Lestat]

Shopping for lab glassware and reagents. Got over £1000 to spend, although limiting myself to a grand atm since I'm not quite sure what exactly I have over that much, I know its a couple of hundred, but i need to retain at least £300 for 100g of lithium aluminium hydride.

Just seen 'cow' multiple distillation swap-over devices for about £6 each, so I've bought five of them, I've wanted a cow for a while now. They allow swapping over flasks during distillations by just rotating the cow to a new flask, like a revolver magazine almost, and can be used to take cuts at different temperatures, including during vacuum distillation when one wishes to take a different cut without breaking the vacuum.

Just spent £168.70-something so far. Plus about $3-something each for the three graduated measurment cylinders (I have one, that I bought off the hellslag that used to infest my house after tellin me she was being seriously physically, mentally and sexually abused (at the time I had evidence at least of physical fighting of some nature) and some pretty nasty things being said and done to her. and as we were at the time, friends, I couldn't stand by and watch her potentially get raped 'again' by her own family. I took her in, put a roof over her head and a warm bed to sleep in, allowed her a fish tank of tropical fish, that she saved for with the allowance I gave her that came from the benefits I get, which ain't enough for the outside world. Just can't be done. But living at home, rent free at the time, I could just about keep the two of us going. Gave her a modest weekly allowance of money to spend as she would see fit.

And damned if I didn't end up having to buy litter trays, cat litter, a shite-scooper and cat food for two feline companions who she stole off a couple of people without my knowledge. No way to know their owners or trace them. Although I have to admit, they WERE cute, really damn adorably cute, and  absolutely tiny little things, grey fur and always making this tiny little mewling noise to be petted and fussed over.

So, having no idea who The Bitch stole them from, I kinda adopted them and made sure they were taken care of.

Anyhow, lots of new goodies are coming my way.

[Lestat]

Just bought myself the following:

2x250ml Dreschel bottles (these are essentially a long, tall bottle, for filling with a drying agent, and a two-way hose barb and inlet/outlet, inlet has a long stem going to the bottom, whilst the outlet has only a very short or no stem, so as to let gases be pumped through drying agents to dry them, such as through concentrated sulfuric acid)

120ml (2-diisopropylamino)ethanol (which I intend to convert to the alkyl bromide or iodide and then aminate, to give Hunig's base, diisopropylethylamine, a sterically hindered, so non-nucleophilic, strong amine base, very useful stuff, since being so sterically hindered due to the big bulky isopropyl groups, it acts as a base without tending to quaternize, or itself add to the compound being worked upon)

30g 99% diphenylacetic acid.

1x 5-liter, 4-neck round-bottom flask, 24/40 joint size (same size as most of the glassware i use, excluding microscale, I'm still working on putting together a full microscale set of lab glass),

A pair of 3-way vacuum distillation 'cow' heads (these allow selection of flask to be the receiver during a distillation, and allow swapping receivers over to collect fractions at different temperature and/or pressure during a normal or vacuum distillation without, in the latter case, which is the usual use, cutting off the vacuum.

1x 24/29x19/26 two-way distillation adapter.

3x60mm borosilicate glass powder addition funnels.

1x24/40 500ml erlenmeyer flask inc. 150ml glass fritted buchner funnel

2x 1 liter erlenmeyer flask inc. 350ml glass fritted buchners

1x 24/29 parallel downward distillation head.

1x 2 liter erlenmeyer, w/ glass fritted buchner and handheld vacuum pump for suction filtration.

1x 24/29 gas inlet adapter.

Total cost of my shopping (so far): $483.94

[Queen Victoria]

And still no mattress.      (    me)

[Lestat]

Actually your Royal Highness, I don't even ever plan on using that bed again.  I intend on cutting the frame up into pieces, cutting the mattress up, for disposal, and recycling the springs for use in building stuff, then making the entire room into a new, expanded lab space, I need more space than I have in my lab.

The entire room is to be converted into my main lab, whilst the smaller room I currently use will be converted to a clean-room for experiments in condensed matter physics, experiments with graphene, silicene, and similar, see if boron and germanium form similar 1-dimensional monatomic layers, for attempts at making my own supercapacitors, that can function at high voltage, as well as having their current massive capacitance in a small physical space, and for other chemistry for condensed matter physics, attempting to develop room temperature superconductor materials (a superconductor which functions at room temperature, or at modest cooling such as could be provided by a fridge, or peltiere cooler would be a massive breakthrough), building lasers, and if I can pull it off, building both my own polariton laser and sonoacoustic laser, (a phonon laser, or SASER, although SASERs don't involve a population-inversion like classic lasers do, they produce an extremely coherent beam or pulsed sonic discharge, a sonic laser, basically. And a powerful one could make for a lot of fun. A ultrasound or infrasonic pulse-rifle, basically a sonic emission generator, which has the directionality, and beam coherence/confinement of a laser, a sonic rather than the more conventional, at least  as far as real-world functional directed energy weapons go, photonic-electric hybrid based pulse rifle basically.

As for the polariton lasers, they are just highly efficient in terms of energy consumption vs beam/pulse strength and energy release. Relying on some novel physics as far as lasers go, but the beam is light, rather than anything weird. Its the way of generating the beam thats squirrely )

[renaeden]

A new muffler and exhaust for my car. Looks shiny.

[Lestat]

I think I know just what you feel there ren. If your anything like me getting much wanted new stuff, when that glassware comes, plus the other stuff I've got on the 'to buy' list, its a real spazz moment mixed with a 6yo kid just as he wakes on xmas morning and goes running to the tree ready to rip open the big pile of gifts for him....all the glassware I've got coming, the chemicals, and assuming it hasn't been taken by someone else whilst I saved..that lovely technetium 99 plated onto pure gold.

[Lestat]

I haven't made a decision yet, since I'm JUST starting to read about the chemistry, but I MIGHT end up buying some fine tantalum and niobium metal powder, reading about some interesting organotantalum and organoniobium chemistry for hydroaminoalkylations of alkenes..unusual reactions, and it looks like things like niobium oxychloride, niobium pentachloride and tantalum oxychloride and TaCl5 look interesting to play with too. And it looks potentially easy to prepare the pentahalides of either metal by, from the looks of it, something as simple as  packing niobium or tantalum dust into a tube, and heating it from 300 degrees 'C, and passing dry chlorine gas through it, or at higher temperatures, passing dry hydrogen chloride through it, in either case in the absence of O2, as niobium and tantalum both form oxytrichlorides.

[renaeden]

$100 worth of Tafe fees. I only have $53 left. It's really weird, I had to pay over $1000 last semester. I think a 0 has gone astray.

[Lestat]

Well I would keep my mouth shut so long as nobody comes and says anything about it Ren

Sounds like the numbers worked in your favor if it was an error. Wouldn't spend the money just yet, wait a little while just in case it both is an error for sure AND somebody catches on to the fact. Otherwise, count it as a nice little bonus. £900 isn't anything to sniff at. I could do a lot with £900..don't suppose you want to accidentally leave it at my house do you?

(actually if you did, I'd tell you, and/or bring it back to you Ren, rather than spend it, I wouldn't do that to a friend.)

[Queen Victoria]

catfood

[Calandale]

GBoH module for Boudicca's revolt, t'would seem.


Didn't realize it was coming so fast.

[odeon]

Plane tickets to Prague.

[Queen Victoria]

groceries for the humans