Font Size:     

Category: dogs

Wednesday, 21 November 2012

08:33 – The EU finance ministers met all night, but couldn’t agree on giving any more money to Greece. It might help if they stopped referring to these disbursements as “loans” and started referring to them as what they really are. Gifts. Meanwhile, there’s another EU summit starting, this one concerning the EU budget. As you might expect, this one is also divided along the norther-tier/southern-tier line, with the northern tier wanting to economize and the southern tier, lead by France, chanting gimme, gimme, gimme.

The euro is already toast, of course, but what we’re seeing here is the EU itself beginning to fracture. Cameron is trying desperately to keep the UK in the EU while appeasing the euroskeptics among his own Tories and in the rapidly-growing UKIP. But a majority of Brits already favor leaving the EU, and a referendum on continued EU membership can’t be far in the future. Cameron’s efforts are misguided anyway. The only part of the EU that benefits the UK is the common market, and the UK needn’t be in the EU to remain in the common market. And even if the EU were foolish enough to refuse Britain membership in the common market without membership in the EU, the economic impact on the UK would be minimal. Reduced trade with the EU might be a percentage point or two, but no more. And without the taxes associated with EU membership, nor the ridiculous level of regulation that goes with EU membership, nor the social welfare costs incurred because of EU-mandated open borders, the UK would actually be much better off. And the UK is by no means the only northern-tier EU nation that is beginning to realize that the math for EU membership doesn’t add up.

It’s about time. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has formally recommended that birth control pills be made available over-the-counter, something that should have been done 20 years ago, if not 30. Now they need to get to work on approving other drugs for OTC availability, including marijuana, oxycodone, heroin, and cocaine. Everything, in fact, except antibiotics. And while they’re at it, they should consider placing acetaminophen on Schedule I in recognition of the fact that it’s the most dangerous drug in common usage.

Work continues on building chemistry kits and biology kits for inventory. I’m also putting together a small initial run of two new kits, maybe half a dozen or so of each. I’d build more of the new kits now, but one of the components common to both is on backorder. I’m supposed to be getting a case of a hundred of those in a couple weeks.

13:10 – I just got email from WSU saying that Colin is homozygous normal with respect to the MDR1 gene. That means we don’t have to worry about giving him ivermectin-based heartworm medications, as well as a slew of other medications. We’re very relieved.

14:46 – Greece is pissed. It says it’s met all the requirements for the next aid tranche. (It hasn’t, of course; it hasn’t even come close to meeting all the requirements it agreed to before the first bailout a couple of years ago. In fact, it hasn’t even tried to do what it agreed to do.) The EU knows that Greece hasn’t met all of the requirements. Greece will promise anything to get more money and then simply not do what it promised. But EU spokesmen have had very nice things to say about how hard Greece is trying. Not that that’s bought Greece anything. Even if the tranche is approved, none of it will actually benefit Greece. It won’t even be under Greek control. The Troika controls disbursements from the bail-out funds, and all of those disbursements go to pay off creditors, mostly other eurozone governments and banks.

What I don’t understand is why Greece continues to participate in this charade. If I were the Greek government, I’d tell the eurocrats to get stuffed. I’d default on all outstanding debts and return to the drachma. Yes, that means that no one will lend any money to Greece in the forseeable future. So what? No one is lending them any money now. And, yes, it means that Greece will be doomed to at least a decade of absolute poverty and suffering, and probably two decades. Again, so what? They’re doomed now no matter what they do. And continuing as they are will simply make that suffering last longer. At least if they were free of the euro they’d be able to recover, albeit very slowly. Greece will never be a wealthy country. In fact, it will never be even a middle-class country. But this single-minded focus on staying in the EU and euro is foolish and against Greece’s own interests.

So if I were Greece, my goal would be not just a complete default, but a disorderly complete default. If I were going down, I’d want to take the entire EU with me, most particularly Germany. And, even more particularly, Angela Merkel, whom the Greeks almost universally hate. Hate with a passion. Their comparing her to Hitler was not exaggerating how they feel. And defaulting would doom Merkel politically.

Read the comments: 34 Comments

Thursday, 15 November 2012

08:00 – ObamaCare strikes. The top headline in our paper this morning was “Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center Cuts 950 Jobs“. The spokesman made a point of saying that the cuts were preemptive, and not a result of any financial difficulties. WFU/BMC is preparing itself for the new economic realities. As the article pointed out, we can expect to see similar cuts at other hospitals across the state and the nation.

That’s just the beginning of the destructive and distorting effects that ObamaCare will have on our economy and our society. I have many acquaintances who own small businesses, and several of them have told me that they’ll be making changes to minimize the effects of ObamaCare on themselves and their companies. These range from shifting away from using all full-time employees toward temporary/part-time/contract labor to cutting payrolls to get under the 50-employee statutory minimum to splitting their companies into two or three smaller companies. Two or three that currently provide health insurance have said that they plan to eliminate it because it’ll be cheaper to pay the annual fine than to continue to pay health insurance premiums. One thing is sure: ObamaCare is going to hurt small businesses and their employees.

10:04 – Well, that was interesting. They’re still re-roofing the house across the street. Colin is terrified of popping and banging sounds, so I’ve been taking him downstairs and out the back door.

The instant we went out the back door, Colin froze in his alert position. I followed his sight line and saw what I at first thought was a stray dog down in the corner of our back yard. But Colin wasn’t barking frantically, as he would if there was another dog in his yard. Instead, he froze and snarled. Let me tell you, Colin has an absolutely vicious-looking set of fangs and a low, rumbling growl that should scare anything.

It was a coyote, of course, and it quickly decided that discretion was the better part of valor. I could just see what was running through its mind in the instant before it turned and ran for its life. “Holy Shit! That thing is twice my size and its ears stick straight up. WOLLLLLFFF!”

11:31 – Well, crap. I just finished making up three liters of IKI (iodine/potassium iodide) solution for the kits. I make this solution and many others up in gallon orange juice bottles that Barbara provides me at a rate of about one a week. So, I just finished making up the three liters of IKI when I realized that I’d need to transfer it to glass bottles because the IKI penetrates the orange juice bottles if it’s left in them for more than a few days. So off I went in search of six 500 mL glass bottles with cone liners. I found six of them, all already filled with IKI solution. So now I have six liters of IKI, which is enough for about 200 kits. Oh, well. The stuff keeps forever, and fortunately I have many spare glass bottles to transfer it to.

Read the comments: 36 Comments

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

07:51 – The MDR-1 test kit for Colin showed up yesterday. It contains two tiny little brushes to do cheek swabs. The instructions said that food can interfere with the test, so we decided to do the cheek swabs first thing this morning, before Colin had eaten.

So, Colin was lying on the love seat in the den while Barbara was sitting on the sofa opening the envelopes that contain the brushes. I sat down beside him. His ears went flat as he watched Barbara opening the brush envelopes. I could tell exactly what Colin was thinking: “You’re going to stick those in my mouth and use them to obtain specimens of my squamous epithelial cheek cells, aren’t you?” I told him that was exactly what we were going to do. He cooperated pretty well. I’ll send the swabs off today for testing. My guess is that Colin doesn’t have the MDR-1 mutation, or if he does it’s heterozygous. But it’s worth $70 to find out for sure.

The paper this morning reported a horrible accident in Yadkinville, which is just down the road from us. A three-month-old baby was killed by the family dog, which apparently mistook a multi-colored stocking cap she was wearing for a ball and bit her head repeatedly. What surprised me was that the paper reported that the police had investigated and ruled the incident an unpreventable accident. Nowadays, it seems that nothing is ever an accident. There’s always someone to blame. But apparently the authorities recognized that no one was at fault here and that the family was going through enough already without criminal charges being filed.

09:50 – Riots have broken out along the southern tier of the eurozone. Riots as in Molotov cocktails and rioters throwing bricks at police, who are responding with rubber bullets. (Those, incidentally, are no joke; they can seriously injure or even kill people.) Greece is really at the tipping point. Even moderate, formerly middle class people are now talking about revolution. As one commented, what do they have to lose? As another said, all it’ll take is a spark. And they’re going to get that spark as it becomes clear that what Greece has agreed to will not be enough to secure any kind of long- or even medium-term funding.

I was amused by the list of demands made by the European Trades Union Convention, nearly all of which are utterly impossible to meet, for both political and economic reasons. Here they are:

• Economic governance at the service of sustainable growth and quality jobs,
• Economic and social justice through redistribution policies, taxation and social protection,
• Employment guarantees for young people,
• An ambitious European industrial policy steered towards a green, low-carbon economy and forward-looking sectors with employment opportunities and growth,
• A more intense fight against social and wage dumping,
• Pooling of debt through Euro-bonds,
• Effective implementation of a financial transaction tax to tackle speculation and enable investment policies,
• Harmonisation of the tax base with a minimum rate for companies across Europe,
• A determined effort to fight tax evasion and fraud,
• Respect for collective bargaining and social dialogue,
• Respect for fundamental social and trade union rights.

16:14 – I’ve spent a little bit of time visiting some of the prepper sites that have been linked to in the comments recently, and there’s something I really don’t understand. A lot of these folks seem to be overly-concerned with the shelf-life of stored foods. I mean, are they really storing 25- to 50-year supplies of food? If not, why do they care about the difference? Or perhaps they’re stocking grains and other foods by the ton, figuring that maybe their great-great-grandchildren might have some use for them.

I also think it’s interesting that they take stated shelf-lives as gospel. For example, we just bought some canned chicken chunks at Costco. They have a best-by date three years from now. I promise you, they’ll be fine a lot longer than that. After 10 or 20 years, they might show some darkening, but they’ll still be perfectly edible and will have probably 95% of the nutrition that they have now. Heck, they’ve found 4,000 year old Hostess Twinkies in Egyptian tombs, and they were still edible.

I also wonder about some of their choices of specific foods. Do they eat this stuff now, or are they figuring that it’ll be better than nothing if they get really hungry? I suppose cost is part of this. People decide what they can afford and how much food they want to store and then buy whatever that multiplier dictates. Still, I think that’s a stupid way to go about it. We buy stuff that we eat anyway. We just buy extra. So what if the canned and dry stuff we eat is a year old? If nothing else, it provides a buffer in case anything we buy is contaminated with salmonella or something. In terms of flavor and nutrition, year-old stuff is fine. Two-year-old stuff is fine. Geez, five-year-old stuff would almost certainly be just as good as new stuff. Sterile is sterile. Preserved is preserved.

Read the comments: 29 Comments

Tuesday, 13 November 2012

09:00 – UPS showed up yesterday with a partial shipment from one of our wholesalers. This was mainly small stuff that we were running short of. Fifteen dozen each of the 10 mL graduated cylinders, 15 cm plastic rulers, and 12″ lab thermometers. Oh, and a case of glass Petri dishes for the life science kits. The rest of the order is chemicals, which haven’t shipped yet.

Poor Colin. He’s terrified of banging noises, and they’re replacing the roof on the house across the street. He cringes each time he hears a pop or bang, so he’ll be doing a lot of cringing today. He’ll probably also have an accident or two in the house, because I can’t convince him to go outside.

Read the comments: 30 Comments

Friday, 9 November 2012

09:46 – Barbara’s dad is supposed to be released from the hospital this afternoon. He’s adamant that he won’t use a walker, despite the fact that everyone from his wife and daughters to the doctors, nurses, and physical therapists are telling him that he needs to. I told Barbara the solution is simple: just put the walker beside him and take away his cane. She says this latest fall really scared him, but apparently not enough. I’m afraid the next fall might kill him. And if he continues to use that cane, there will be another fall, probably sooner rather than later.

My search to find a way to prevent iodine solutions from outgassing continues. The problem is that iodine vapor really, REALLY wants to be free. The bottles aren’t leaking, but they are allowing tiny amounts of iodine vapor to escape. I’ve tried different bottles and caps. I’ve tried various types of tape, including stretched vinyl electrical tape and even Teflon tape. I’ve tried several different types of LocTite. Most of them kind of work, most of the time. But if we make up 30 or 60 bottles of iodine solution and stick them in a ziplock bag, at least one of them is almost certain to allow some iodine vapor to escape, which stains all of the labels dark brown. It’s only a cosmetic problem, but I’d like to solve it.

So I ordered a pint (473 mL) of Elmer’s original rubber cement, which is essentially pure latex rubber dissolved in n-heptane. Yesterday, I filled a 30 mL bottle with the IKI solution, brushed the bottle threads with a cotton swap dipped in the rubber cement, and screwed on the cap. So far, it appears to be working, at least for that bottle. I guess I’ll make up 30 or 60 bottles of the IKI solution with the rubber cement seal and see what happens. The bottle is LDPE and the cap is HDPE with a PP liner, none of which are severely affected by short-term exposure to n-heptane. But I do want to make sure that the solvent doesn’t weld the cap to the bottle. I should probably have gotten Obama to do this for me. Bastard.

11:31 – Nothing is ever easy. Barbara gives Colin a heartworm preventative called Interceptor. Heartworm is a horrible disease, and Colin gets a pill every month, 12 months a year. She gave him the last pill on the first of this month and asked me to order more. The problem is, Novartis has had some severe problems at the factory, starting last January, and Interceptor is no longer available and may not be available for several months.

There are alternatives, of course, but none of them are good. Except for one thing, the best alternative would be HeartGard Plus, which costs around $72 for a 12-month supply. That one thing is a showstopper, though. The active ingredient in HeartGard is ivermectin, which can kill some Border Collies as well as some other herding breeds. The problem is a mutation in the MDR1 gene. We don’t know if Colin has that mutation and, if so, whether it’s heterozygous or homozygous.

The other alternatives are much more expensive, twice to three times as much as the HeartGard. But that’s the least of the problem. The real issue is that their active ingredients are also avermectin-class drugs, albeit not ivermectin. And the multidrug sensitivity caused by the MDR1 mutation includes all of the avermectins. Fortunately, there’s a genetic test available from Washington State University. I just requested the test kit. All we have to do is get scrapings of Colin’s squamous epithelial cheek cells, send them back to WSU, and pay them $70. They’ll tell us if Colin has the MDR1 mutation and, if so, whether it’s heterozygous or homozygous.

Read the comments: 39 Comments

Wednesday, 31 October 2012

07:58 – Barbara arrived home around 19:00 yesterday evening. Colin and I celebrated by barking, wagging our tails, and doing a circle dance. It’s good to have things back to normal.

Of course, Colin will miss the Heartland marathon. While Barbara was gone, we got through the last three episodes of series five, all of series one, and the first half of series two. Colin likes to watch the horses. He also likes it when Amy encourages the horses in her sing-song voice, “Good boy!” He was particularly intent watching one episode that featured a cattle drive, with a Border Collie herding cattle. I’m sure he’d love to have been there, working the cattle himself.

Work continues on the new batches of biology and chemistry kits, along with prototypes of our next kit.

11:31 – Sorry for the service interruption. The shared server that hosts my web sites was down. Apparently, I was the first person to inform Dreamhost. A few minutes after I submitted a problem report they rebooted the server and everything appears to be working normally. We now return to our regularly-scheduled program.

Read the comments: 22 Comments

Sunday, 28 October 2012

08:33 – Barbara is due back around mid-afternoon. They’ll probably be driving back through wind and rain, although we haven’t seen much of either here yet. The forecasts have the weather from the hurricane moving in here tomorrow and Tuesday and then blowing through by Wednesday. It’s supposed to cool down here later in the week, with highs in the mid-40’s (~ 7C) and lows near freezing.

I plan to spend some time today labeling bottles for the new batch of 30 chemistry kits while I watch Heartland re-runs. I’ll also spend some time cleaning up before Barbara gets home. She always does a quick scan when she arrives home, counts the dog to make sure it’s not missing, and so on. (Bill, the boyfriend of the woman who lives across the street, restores old cars. He’s always offering to trade me one of his cars for one of our Border Collies. I once actually had a deal worked out with him to trade him Malcolm for his fully-restored 1951 Packard, but then Barbara heard about it. Yesterday, he offered to trade me his Porsche for Colin. I told him I would, but Barbara would notice.)

08:47 – Well, just as I posted that, Barbara called to say her dad is in the hospital. He was having trouble breathing due to his chronic congestive heart failure. They called 911 around 1:00 a.m. The paramedics transported him to the hospital, where of course they immediately put him on diuretics. They want to keep him at least overnight, and possibly longer. That means Barbara has to stay down there with her parents. She just got back to the beach house around 7:30 a.m. She’s pissed. For weeks now, it’s been obvious from the edema in his legs that her dad needed to go to the doctor or hospital, but he simply refused. I told Barbara before they left that I thought it was a big mistake to go to the beach with her dad in CHF. She agreed that it was an accident waiting to happen, but she allowed him to push her into taking them down. But this is the final straw. She said that from now on her dad is going to do what she and her sister decide he’s going to do.

Read the comments: 36 Comments

Wednesday, 24 October 2012

07:57 – Reuters is reporting that the Greek government has struck a tentative deal with the Troika to release the long overdue €31.5 billion tranche and allow Greece to avoid default a month from now.

As usual, the terms are a joke. No one, including Greece, knows exactly how many people are employed by the Greek government, but it must be more than a million. That’s 10% of the Greek population. Not the working-age population, you understand. The entire population. If Reuters has it right, Greece will announce that 2,000 of these people, about 0.2% of state employees, will be put on notice that their jobs are to be eliminated a year from now. That’s 2,000. Not 200,000, which would have been a more reasonable first step toward reducing the size of government. And the layoffs will be a year from not, not right now. Then, Greece will serve one-year notices on a further 6,250 state employees every three months through 2013. So, Greece is going to lay off, eventually, about 25,000 state employees, or something like 2%. Not 250,000 which would have been a reasonable start. Drop, meet bucket.

As usual, it’s really all about Angela Merkel. She’s running for re-election next autumn, and she wants to make sure she’ll be re-elected. She doesn’t want the euro to collapse until she’s safely re-elected. She’s trying to spend as little as possible to ensure that.

13:17 – Barbara is leaving tomorrow to drive down to the beach with her parents. They’ll be back Sunday. Instead of wild-women-and-parties, I think I’ll just continue the Heartland marathon. I’d made it part way through series five the last time Barbara was away, so the question now is whether I should finish series five and then start series one again, or should I finish series five and then watch the first four episodes of series six before starting the cycle again?

When I mentioned to Barbara that Amber Marshall had gotten engaged a couple of months ago, she asked if I was disappointed. Eh? Barbara knows that I adore Amber Marshall, but it never even occurred to me that anyone would believe that I wanted her for myself. She’s an extraordinarily attractive young woman, and not just physically, but she’s young enough to be my daughter. I told Barbara that, to the contrary, I was delighted for Amber and wished her well. Now, it’s true that if I ever found out that Shawn Turner wasn’t treating Amber well, I’d have at least a passing thought of driving up there and pounding him into the ground head-first until only the soles of his feet showed, but that’s as far as it goes. I am protective of young women, not covetous.

17:29 – One of Barbara’s friends picked her up a little while ago to go out to dinner. Before she left, Barbara made me an early dinner. So, I fired up Heartland S5E13 and sat there watching it while I was eating dinner, with Colin begging the whole time. After I finished eating, I lit my pipe, intending to smoke it for a few minutes before I fed Colin. He let me know verbally that he wanted his dinner. I ignored him. He asked again. I told him to give me just a couple minutes. He then walked over to the DVD player, snouted the eject button, turned around, and looked at me. People who haven’t lived with Border Collies would pass this off as a coincidence. Those who have lived with BCs would believe it might have been intentional. Colin has certainly watched me closely many times as I ejected and inserted discs. I’m not 100% convinced it was intentional. Only about 99%.

Read the comments: 57 Comments

Friday, 19 October 2012

07:59 – We use 30 mL wide-mouth “pharmaceutical packer” bottles for some of the solid chemicals in our science kits. One of those is dextrose. Back when we filled the first batch of those bottles, I tested them to see how much dextrose would fit in one of the bottles. It turned out that loose-filling the bottles to the rim put about 26 or 26.5 grams, give or take, but always at least 25 grams. So I made the labels to list the contents as 25 grams.

So yesterday I started filling a batch of 60 bottles with dextrose. The first 20 or so were no problem. I was using dextrose from a current batch. Then I opened a new 3 kilo bottle of dextrose, loose-filled a bottle, and found that it contained only about 20 grams. The new batch of dextrose is fluffier than the old batch. I tried tapping the bottle to settle the contents, but even with tapping there was no way to fit 25 grams into that bottle. So now I have to use a thick rod to press down the contents of the bottle, refill it to the rim, press down again, and refill yet again to the rim. I guess they don’t call these “packers” for nothing. I guess I should just re-label the bottles as containing 20 grams rather than 25 grams, but I’m stubborn.

Oh, and I got a call yesterday evening from a USPS rep about my lost Priority Mail packages. It turned out that she wasn’t the proper person to handle the problem, so she said she’d refer it to the proper person, whom I’d hear from in the next 24 hours.

15:05 – I just took Colin for a walk. There are hundreds of squirrels in our immediate neighborhood, and Colin is a Mighty Squirrel Hunter. Or he would be, if he didn’t have me along. I honestly believe he could keep himself fed just on squirrels, if it weren’t for me holding the leash. Colin, on the other hand, probably wonders why I didn’t starve to death long ago. Here is Colin’s evaluation of my hunting skills:

Spotting prey: D-

Stalking prey: F

Chasing prey: F

Pouncing prey: F

Sharing prey: B+

That last one is the only reason he tolerates me. Not only do I share with Colin the prey that Barbara brings home from the supermarket, but I have access to tasty prey that’s hard to find in the yards around the neighborhood, things like Cheesoritos and beef-flavored chews.

Read the comments: 20 Comments

Monday, 8 October 2012

08:47 – I switched over this morning from air conditioning to heating. It was under 68F (20C) in the house, and the high today is to be only 50F (10C), with lows tonight in the low 40’s (~ 5C). This cool snap is to last only a few days. We’ll soon be back to needing neither heating nor air conditioning.

Barbara was stunned when she read in the newspaper this morning that one of her co-workers died in a house fire over the weekend. She said today would be tough at work. The woman who died was well-known and well-liked throughout the firm.

Today is a federal holiday, so USPS won’t be delivering. I’ll batch up the kits ordered yesterday, today, and tomorrow morning, and ship them all tomorrow. Today, I’ll spend some time in the lab making up solutions for the biology kits. As I’ve mentioned before, my natural tendency is to use the oh-my-god-we’re-out inventory method. So yesterday I checked inventory against the chemical makeup instructions and found I was out of Eosin Y and Crystal Violet. I just ordered enough of both to make up two liters of each stain.

Fortunately, our filling method means we always have a few left over. For example, the kits include 15 mL each of the Hucker’s Crystal Violet stain and the Eosin Y stain. I make up one liter of each of those at a time, and label 60 bottles for each. We actually get about 66 bottles from a liter, so we typically have six bottles left unlabeled. After we’ve filled bottles, I print the extra labels we need and label the extra bottles. So as of now I have half a dozen bottles of each of those stains still in stock. That means I can make up half a dozen biology kits pretty quickly if we run out before the next batch of 30 is ready.

10:57 – That worked out well. As Barbara and her sister clear out their parents’ old home, Barbara is bringing home stuff her parents don’t want but that she wants or thinks I might want. Saturday, she brought me something I didn’t know existed: a 2-liter polypropylene measuring cup. I’m using that today to make up stuff I need two liters of, including Benedict’s reagent, Barfoed’s reagent, biuret reagent, and so on.

Ordinarily, I just make up stuff that I need in 2-liter quantities in 2-liter soda bottles. (I’ve established where the 2-liter index line falls on soda bottles, so they function as pretty accurate 2-liter “volumetric flasks”–easily within 1% accuracy.) But the problem with soda bottles is that they are made of PET, which some of the solutions I make up will damage. Some, like 6 M sodium hydroxide, damage PET instantly, literally. If I pour 6 M NaOH into a PET bottle, the bottle instantly turns from clear to cloudy white, as the strong base solution starts de-polymerizing the plastic. Having a reasonably accurate 2-liter PP measuring container makes things a lot easier. I’d have bought one (or several) long ago if I’d known they existed.

11:46 – Hmmm. Coyotes may soon be hanging out in your backyard

I’m not worried about Colin. At 70 or 75 pounds (32 to 34 kilos), he’d tear even a large male coyote to pieces. And coyotes are afraid of him because his ears make him look wolf-like. And between the two of us, even a pack of coyotes is going to shy away.

Nor do I worry about black bears. They’re smart, essentially super-dogs. Any bear we see around here is much more likely to run for it than attack or stand and fight.

But if I see a mountain lion roaming around this neighborhood, I’ll shoot it. I don’t care what the law says. Mountain lions, like all cats, are stupid. They don’t have enough sense to fear people and their fire-sticks. Coyotes, being Canidae, and bears, being honorary Canidae, do.

13:07 – How smart are Border Collies? Pretty damned smart. I’ve been running up and down the stairs all day today, working in my lab making up solutions for the new batch of biology kits. Colin completely ignores my trips up and down the stairs, lying on the sofa and watching me the whole time.

Until an hour or so ago, when I headed downstairs to drive over and pick up the newspaper for some friends who are out of town. There was absolutely no difference between that and the other trips I’d made downstairs, but somehow Colin knew I was going to leave the house, so he started barking like crazy. I did nothing to indicate that I was leaving the house. I didn’t check the front door to make sure it was locked (it always is during the day), rattle my car keys, or anything else. So how did he know this trip downstairs was different? I wouldn’t have known.

Crap. I just realized how he knew. I wear my glasses when I’m working on the computer and when I drive, but not when I’m working in the lab. When I headed downstairs to leave the house, I was wearing my glasses. Geez. That’s pretty subtle for a human, let alone a dog.

PS. It’s even more subtle than I thought. I just realized that I wear my glasses when I’m going to leave the house. When I’m running up and down stairs to and from the lab, I’m wearing splash goggles. Geez.

16:06 – If my first love is organic chemistry, coordination chemistry isn’t far behind. I was just down in the lab making up two liters of biuret reagent. I started by dissolving 23.6 grams of copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate in a liter of DI water. (Well, actually, I made up 94.5 mL of 1 M copper(II) sulfate to one liter, which amounts to the same thing.) I then added 33.0 grams of potassium sodium tartrate to the copper sulfate solution with stirring. The solution immediately turned from bright blue to greenish blue and became cloudy. Oops. That was insoluble copper(II) tartrate precipitating out. No worries. I then added 7.0 grams of potassium iodide, which turned the slurry distinctly greenish, but still cloudy. That was insoluble copper(II) iodide making its appearance. What a mess. Then I dissolved 128.4 grams of sodium hydroxide in water, made it up to 600 mL, and added that solution with stirring to the pale greenish slurry. As soon as the hydroxide solution hit the copper solution, the mixture turned an intense deep blue color. When I finished stirring, the precipitate was gone and I had a clear deep blue solution. I love coordination compounds.

Read the comments: 39 Comments
// ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- // end of file archive.php // -------------------------------------------------------------------------------