Yeah, its one thing if it happens fast, but watching a loved wee beastie suffer is another matter.
And I am sure you have and did make his life better than it was, especially considering it was a case of a rescue dog. Its really hard when a loved animal slowly deteriorates before your eyes. Thats what happened to my dear Sasha (the cat, I also stole a dog once, and renamed her Sasha, again, after Shulgin, you could say I am somewhat of a fan of him and his work, especially the way that when he was alive (Sasha Shulgin died not long ago:(, a loss mourned all over the scientific community) he wrote books like TIHKAL, PIHKAL and the Shulgin Index, as easily accessible and readable by lay-people who aren't chemists, albeit the second section of the first two books, in which he actually gives literal 'recipes', procedures by which a skilled chemist can replicate his work is for people who know what they are going to be up against, chemistry wise.
As he writes things like 'the product was reduced with LAH to the final amphetamine', which does NOT mean one just grinds up that product and throws lithium aluminium hydride at it, it means that the glassware used was carefully pre-baked in an oven until very, very, very dry, using appropriate greases, and connected to a flow of inert gas like helium or argon (I prefer argon as it forms a heavy, dense pad rather than floating up and away, plus helium is a much scarcer resource in terms of what is present on the planet and can be had), which is either bought as a canister of very dry gas or else led through first a dreschel bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid, and then another one to absorb any acid mix) and in a glove-box type setup, the LiAlH4 is opened, weighed, and a solution in pre-dried tetrahydrofuran or diethyl ether is prepared.
The solvent having been dessicated using first conventional distillation from regular dessicants, then by distillation from a sodium-benzophenone ketyl still, again, flame-dried glassware all the way and finally, stored over freshly flame-dried molecular sieves of a pore-size suitable for removing the last traces of H2O for a week or so and distilled for a last time over sodium metal, potassium etc, directly into the flame-dried receiver, and the preweighed LAH added SLOWLY, then a shunted soxhlet containing the substrate is used to slowly leach the substrate to be reduced (not the only way to do it but probably the best) into the LAH solution, kept cold, and under inert gas, because LiAlH4 is pyrophoric as fuck. He does warn of some things, like cyanide gas evolution in some processes, or evolution of boron trifluoride as a side product (HIGHLY toxic and extremely corrosive, nasty fucking stuff).
So he assumes people will at least do their research properly first before doing anything in his cook-book of magical tricks, as there is a lot more to 'substrate was reduced to product using lithium aluminium hydride' for example, than that simple sentence makes out as written.
But he helps explain psychedelic chemistry well, in a kinda quirky manner (I wouldn't be surprised at all if he was on the spectrum at least somewhere, from the way he writes) to non-chemist readers who are interested nevertheless, even if they don't plan on brewing up any of his psychedelic inventions (literally hundreds of them that he published, god only knows how many more were on his shelves, or as precursors never having finally been reduced to the final product)
There is one book that isn't really aimed at amateur interested only readers, 'SPIQ' or 'the simple plant isoquinolines', which is a reference book rather than like his other books. I have a copy, and its a long list of plant-derived isoquinolines, and its not the kind of book one just sits and reads through like a newspaper. But the rest are easy open reading for the interested scholar.
As for bought lately, lotsa lotsa lotsa nosh. Including a big tub (2.3kg), of chocolate flavour mix protein powder, in an effort to help supplement my generally low protein diet (I've been having problems with lacking/finding it very, very difficult to feel hungry, save only in the extreme, I could go a week and not eat without getting hungry, maybe eating just a bowl or two of cereal over the entire week, and not be hungry).
Also thinking 'hmmm...diphenylacetic acid....how does one prepare a tertiary amine starting from a phenylmethyl cyanide' and looking forward to the first time (for something else altogether, although what I don't know yet, haven't decided how to baptize it so to speak) in using my new 4-necked (24/40 joint-sizes for all of them) 5-liter round flask (not an RBF, since the bottom is slightly flattened. Would have preferred fully a RBF since the flattening means I can't subject it to full on hard vacuum, aspirator probably, and definitely for non-fully-sealed vac filtration in a buchner etc. without the risk of implosion. And that would be very, very bad. Partly because its a big bugger with thick glass walls
And that'd be a lot of shrapnel. And partly because said shrapnel would be VERY expensive shrapnel indeed, because that one flask alone cost me almost to just over £90. (yeah, i know, I know, I admit....I just can't stop myself from going on a good satisfying glassware shopping spree, any more than I can a chemical buying jaunt for lab supplies, and I definitely spare no expense in what I outfit my lab with....hopefully I'll have the resources now I've been paid again, for that absolutely gorgeous technetium (as 99Tc), really well visible sample, plated onto a slip of gold I SO want that technetium, such a rare piece, and not just a tiny plating on a steel alpha-source needle for a cloud chamber etc, but something that actually displays elemental technetium metal as a good sized amount, perfectly suited for a display piece. And maybe even have enough left over for a sample of thorium and uranium metal each too
)
