The Curse of Man-Flu

            Evening all, apologies for the lack of a post over the weekend. I’ve been all over the place this weekend and haven’t had a chance to do much at all blogwise. I had a game yesterday which involved a 6 hour round trip and standing in a field for 3 hours in between. As such, I have been struck down finally with that most terrifying of maladies, the one which strikes fear into the hearts of all it inflicts. That’s right folks, I’ve got man-flu. To the female readership, none of you can possibly imagine the minor flu-like symptoms which constitute man-flu but I can assure you that I am currently at the brink of death and am far more ill than you can possibly contemplate.

            Bearing this in mind, you can imagine my disgust when I walked into the lab this morning to find one of the reactions I had left on over the weekend on its side with no stopper in it nowhere near a stirrer plate and that its contents had congealed into a small green ball on one side of the flask. After voicing my concern at this predicament pretty loudly, everyone in the lab pleaded ignorance and went about their work while I stamped around looking irritated until coffee time. Fortunately, the caffeine boost I so greatly desired had the required effect and my mood gradually improved throughout the morning.

            I worked up the aforementioned green blob which gave me nice colourless oil which was almost pure by NMR. Unfortunately, my yield for said reaction was somewhere in the region of 107%. While this would of course be excellent, several fundamental laws of physics prevent this from being the case and consequently that flask was dried for a few hours under vacuum (at least that’s what the experimental section of my thesis will say, in reality I meant to dry it for an hour and subsequently forgot about it).

            All this work meant I didn’t get round to eating anything until around 4pm. The caffeine buzz had long worn off by this point, and after queuing behind three or four cretins who take 10 minutes each to withdraw money from the cash point (presumably for their quarterly subscription to the lobotomy appreciation society) I was fully irritated. The fact that the coffee shop on campus had run out of their exciting range of borderline edible food meant I had to make do with a “delicious, nutritious, and home-made” sandwich from another of the many campus food outlets. I can assure you my sandwich was precisely none of the above.

            I got back to work, contemplated doing a column, decided that was a terrible idea seeing as man-flu had now taken a firm, chilling grasp upon me, and resorted to looking at the literature for a while before I came home. I found a cracking looking total synthesis which I’ll write about a bit more tomorrow (when I can be bothered with drawing stuff on Chemdraw) so you all have that to look forward to, or not as the case may be.