'Found' ? as in 'either stolen from, or liberated from, dreadful circumstances' ? if thats it, I know what you mean. Been there done that. Had to steal somebody's dobermann/rottweiler as a kid (I mean the thinner-bodied of the two breeds, I always confuse the two) and take her in. (yeah, I know, I know...a little preteen kid going in and stealing a rottweiler (I think, assuming thats the thinner built of the two) isn't exactly usual little kid activity schedule, and my folks certainly didn't know about it until it was much too late, and there was already a big black and tan stolen dog at my side, but it was being abused, and even at that age, that is something that I would never, ever stand for, and 'no' quite simply put, as to whether I 'could' keep the dog, it just wasn't a valid answer. And repeating it wasn't going to make any difference no matter how long it would be kept up. Eventually they realized that I wasn't going to break, and they could either help out with the food, help with enough money for a collar and lead etc. or try to force me to go up to some unknown's house, and tell them 'here, here's your fucking dog back that I stole to protect her from your abuse, you fucking prick' and have things near certain get very ugly very quickly. And that I'd probaby be carrying a hammer if I did get forced to go
I don't like animal cruelty. Its one of the things I like least of all, and I have a near nonexistently-short fuse when it comes to assholes that abuse animals, and when it gets set off, the result is typically violence. And i don't have limits in that kind of confrontation either. None, no more than I would if confronting a child rapist. And if that means ending the perpetrator, it isn't something I'd consider a problem in any other way than 'how do I carry this to its conclusion without anybody finding out whodunnit' Although if I can end things by stealth, its the better option. Although if I actually see somebody beating on an animal, or deliberately inflicting pain, I'll stop right there and have it out with whoever is responsible, be it a loud, humilliating public bollocking in front of all bystanders, or just kicking them into next year, or both, then whatever happens, they've brought on themselves.
I'll sneak the animal out though if I have a chance, or send in animal welfare teams (had to rescue a poor wee sugar glider that way, the poor thing was being kept in the most miserable of conditions, I'm surprised that it survived. If I had not have intervened in some way, it wouldn't have. Because it was being kept in a cage not even a foot high, a longer, shorter version of a fish tank basically. With a few fake branches to stand on and some woodchips on the bottom. Alone, and unable to move about. Sugar gliders are obligate social creatures, they NEED their own kind as company, and they need a large area to move about in, they are, as their name suggests, gliding animals, that have a membranous layer of furry skin between their limbs and body, very much like a flying squirrel. Only even cuter. I called in animal welfare on the pet shop keeping it there. And I kept calling them until I ended up telling them you go in and get that glider out, or I will. And I'll do it with extreme prejudice, want somebody put in hospital because you din't go in and rescue the glider? because thats whats going to happen if when I go back within the next one week and its still there, is going to happen. (and no, I woudn't PAY the fucker for it as a pet, not just because the price was about £70, more than I had disposable income at the time, but because I will not pay an animal abuser to cease the abuse. That would only encourage the bastard to do the same thing again. And I'd have even less tolerance a second time. I warned the pet store owner, but they did not act. Then I sent in the animal welfare lot for the last time, when they finally had been called so many times they had little choice.
I'd have loved to take the little wee mite on, absolutely adorable critter, think a cross between a flying squirrel and a dormouse (the 'edible dormouse' type, not the orangy colored thin, small kind, the plump, grey kind with the huge bushy tail and big eyes, Glis glis.) The sugar glider looks something like what one would expect the result to be if the two could be hybridized. A furry, huge-eyed, bushy-tailed flying rodentine fuzzball thats so fucking cute you can't help but instantly think 'AWWWWWWW'. But I hadn't company by way of at least one or two other fellow gliders for him/her, so I left it to animal welfare rather than going in and walking out again, plus one sugar glider. And I sure as shit wasn't about to ask the pet store to get in any others, not when the one there was being treated like that.
Quite honestly though I wanted to go in there, take every last living nonhuman thing in the building and render the place uninhabitable by anything higher life-form than bacteria, protozoa and viruses. If I'd have had enough space for that many critters, stealth would have gone out the window, and so would the pet store owner
And they wouldn't be coming back. Not unless they can bear the stench of some mid-weight dialkyl telluride. (nonlethal, at least directly, but tellurium, even in traces if absorbed, is excreted very slowly, and reputedly people cursed with 'tellurium breath' have taken their own lives, so unspeakably foul were they made to stink. Its a semimetal, in the same series as oxygen, then sulfur, then selenium, then tellurium and finally polonium. And, the highly radio-toxic polonium aside, their compounds start out alright at oxygen, start to get pretty icky at sulfur, and when a sulfur compound smells nasty, the equivalent selenium version is heinous, and the tellurium derivative is just unspeakable, the kind of thing that literally can, and indeed HAS made places uninhabitable. A scientist once accidentally dropped a vial of dibutyl telluride in a train carriage, and they had to scrap the entire train section, because it was forevermore rendered so horrendously awfully stinking. I've worked with some pretty vile sulfur compounds, and even some of the milder ones, like ammonium polysulfide smell nasty (ammonium polysufide is not nice, stinks like rotten eggs, although one can physically remain in the presence of the smell. Some of the nastier ones you'd puke and run if a single drop of say, butyl mercaptan (a mercaptan, or thiol is the sulfur version of an alcohol where sulfur replaces oxygen in R-OH, and the Se and Te analogs, R-SeH and R-TeH respectively are called selenols and tellurols, or seleno- or telluromercaptans, respectively. And in the case of some of the more horrid mercaptans, you need a drop or two to make an area about the size of a football pitch so vile you couldn't go near it, they stink like rotting eggs mixed with rotting garlic/onion, some of them with heavy overtones of burning rubber/burning plastic.
I've smelled hydrogen selenide, and its sheer foulness defies description. I've never made a selenomercaptan, and I would not DARE make a tellurol.
Today, spent about £50 on food and drink, plus, annoyingly as hell, a tin of cafe creme cigars. Only to go grab another coat than the one I was wearing at the and find, what? only a full of the same fucking cigars that I'd just bought, and smoked one of so I couldn't go and return the unneeded tin for a refund. I'm just glad I didn't decide to buy two tins, I was contemplating getting two, and if they had the original ones rather than the blue 'mild' ones, especially as I found both a tin of mild blues and one of originals in various coat pockets. So thats just around to just over a fiver spent that didn't need to be
Got two big bottle of coke, 3-4 family-size trays of tiramisu (which count in my book as a snack, I love tiramisu), a couple of bunches of bananas, a tub of ben and jerry's ice cream chocolate fudge brownie flavor, several 1-liter cartons of co-op own brand rhubarb&custard flavour milkshake, which is really fucking good stuff, I can open a carton and empty it in one big long chug and then open another its that good. Its crack cocaine reincarnated as a milkshake
A couple of big bags of 'Swizzels drumstick 'squashies', a soft squelchy chew version of the tough textured chewy sugar-candy toffee lollies, turned into a squishy, gummy candy slice type thing. Bottle of 'Britvic' lime cordial concentrate. Wanted 'Rose's' but they only had the britvic one. Also two family-sized tubs of trifle, only rather than fruit and jelly these are chocolate ones, chocoate mousse on top of a chocolate pastry kind of thing with a layer of chocolate sauce in between, and on top of the mousse, sweetened whipped cream with chocolate shavings on top, two of those, and a digestive-biscuit/vanilla cheesecake topped with a fruity jelly glaze and mixed berries.
The rest I've had before, but not the cheesecake. Although Lestat tasted said cheesecake and pronounced it good. And Lo! it is good.
I'd rather not have spent so much, just over fifty bloody pounds. But the price of food and drink is skyrocketing, and my income is not going up to match it in line with inflation. And I can't very well cut costs by reducing how much I eat. Because eventually I'd be at nothing. The last increase I had in my income was ten fucking pence, or it might have been twelve pence, I can't remember for sure. But at any rate, the absolute height of generosity (previous statement dripping with acidic, sarcastic kassiane S-worthy snark, for those aspies/auties for whom sarcasm flies overhead)
Although at least this week, its a double pay-day, so I'll get back the £50 and then another 150 or so, and atm I've already got £1100 in the bank; which means I wait until about 3AM tonight, before I check my account, and then I go rotavap-shopping on ebay and get me a rotavap. I think I'll go for. one of the 2-liter models I've seen on ebay. And if I have enough left over, I'll buy myself a new vacuum pump, and not just a rotary-vane type, but a teflon diaphragm type, that's much more tolerant of the vile types of fumes that tend to be present and need condensing with a dry ice trap to prevent as much as humanly possible of the fumes entering the pump interior and otherwise damaging the pump. I need a new one, because my last one, I had to do a vac distillation, but the timing was bad, as it was in the middle of the heatwave of last year, and it was viciously hot, midday too, and the pump overheated, even with my covering all sections that weren't vents or air intakes/outputs with towels drenched in ice water, and burnt out.
So I need a new vac pump, and especially as rotavaps have integral vacuum ports, for rotary evaporative distillation of large solvent volumes, its even faster when done under vacuum, and of course some solvents are a bugger to strip from reaction mixtures, for some reason, polar aprotic solvents come to mind, with the main exception of acetonitrile (methyl cyanide, the main aprotic polar solvent I keep on hand, I choose MeCN for the main reason of its having a low boiling point as polar aprotics go, at 81.3 to 82.1 degrees 'C, compared to the other main options of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide), DMF (dimethyformamide), HMPA (hexamethylphosporamide) and either ethylene or propylene carbonate, BP 189 'C, 152-154'C , 232.5 'C, 243' and 242 'C respectively.
The only other reasonably-boiling polar aprotic I have around that isn't excessively reactive (like acetone for example, its too reactive for many purposes, and is pretty intolerant of bases, strong acids (polymerization prone either way) and halogens/hydrohalic acid or other halogenating agents of some kinds, although it is alright with thionyl chloride, but with HX or elemental halogens, with acetone you get the mono/di/trihaloacetones and they aren't nice to work with one bit, being pretty powerful lachrymatory agents (tear-gases), chloroacetone for example will send you running, if not wearing full-face gas mask, with your eyes streaming, nose running, face burning and you coughing, choking and swearing the air blue with what breath you've got left. (got a nasty surprise once when preparing some for use in a synthesis, and it suddenly turned green and flash-boiled, vaporising the lot in a big cloud of aerosolized chloroacetone in the confines of a garage. Ever seen a chemist's shoes catch fire from friction? I haven't, I left them behind miles off that day
although even the americans and canadians here likely as not could have heard the multilingual selection of profanity right from here, accompanied by the pounding of feet, shortly after a metallic slamming noise, of a garage door being rammed upwards whilst somebody commando-rolled under the moment a sufficient gap was obtained
Hm, speaking of thionyl chloride..I need to restock on SOCl2. If I have enough money left over after getting my rotavap, and if I have enough left, then a new vac pump, if there's anything left over after that then I'm getting myself some more SOCl2, since it is, whilst its corrosive as hell-fire, fumes hydrogen chloride and sufur dioxide like a bitch in atmospheric moisture, stinks like perdition took a shit in an acid bath filled with vomit and most definitely NOT something you want to breathe the fumes of, and additionally its extremely water-sensitive and reactive with protic solvents, requiring anhydrous aprotic solvents for use, if solvents are used for a given reaction using SOCl2, it IS an extremely useful, and very fast-reacting chlorinating agent. In fact, its my favourite chlorinating agent of them all, because its a liquid, its pretty volatile, low boiling point making distillation off of and recycling unreacted thionyl chloride easy, often reactions using it are complete at the stage where SOCl2 is used within seconds to a few minutes, and the decomposition products are HCl and SO2, both gaseous, so there are no solids that make things need even the least effort to work-up, just a quick degassing under vacuum at most, will completely clean away the byproducts. So in that respect its nicer to use than phosphorus tri- or pentachloride/bromide etc. Although the phosphorus halides definitely have their uses too, but I just...well I like SOCl2 for its convenience and the great rapidity of its reaction in chlorinations as well as the gaseous decomposition products making for clean reactions that are driven to completion, going nicely to the right rather than ending up in equilibrium of partially reacted intermediates and end product. And lacks the dehydrating properties of the phosphorus halides in most cases (its not got the same tendency towards intermolecular dehydration-coupling type reactions as they do, but it does have the very useful property of being able to be used for preparation of anhydrous transition metal chloride salts where heat cannot be used to accomplish the dehydration, such as making anhydrous aluminium chloride, AlCl3, from the hydrate, since the anhydrous salt is a very useful lewis acid.)
