A Humdrum Day. Except with Bromine.

As one might expect, nothing too unusual has happened to me lately. Well, except for a truly awful explanation of total differentals in thermodyamics, and a surprisingly math-filled, inorganic problem set worth squealing over (the linear algebra helps offset the Lewis dot diagrams). Mostly nothing weird in real analysis yet (still very calculus-3-like), and nothing at all worthy of note in differential equations (except, curse curve sketching!).

Then again, today is organic lab...and there is bromine.

Not that the university needs to know this, but in my first year I made both chlorine and iodine in residence*.

The thing about the halogens is that not only are they extremely corrosive, toxic, and reactive, they are also awesome, each element in its own special way. I say this partially because of the aforementioned properties, but pretty colours have something to do with it, too.

Since fluorine and astatine are obviously impractical for the undergraduate student, I've been wanting bromine, instead. For practical reasons, electrolysis is right out. And I don't have bromide sources, anyway.

Well, today's organic lab involves bromine. Addition across a double bond, nothing spectacular (except when the reaction mysteriously fails, of course, which it did for at least three quarters of the class). Nor did it fail my expectations. Ooh! Intensely orange/brown, volatile as that diethyl ether from last time (but so much more fun!), and with a stench that is uniquely its own, bromine is fascinating. Working with it has more than compensated for the various woes that occurred during the lab itself**.

The only objection I have with bromine arises when people start cleaning glassware that's been contaminated with it. Outside the fume hood. I realize that it is to some extent inevitable, due to the way the lab is set up, but, erk.

Tomorrow will be hard-pressed to be as cool as today. Biochemistry midterm***, and the famously mind-wrenching analytical lab. Oh well. As long as my hands don't start shaking because of analytical lab (this is contagious - I got it from a peer last time), I should be fine.

*My roommate, despite nominally being a science major, doesn't know anything about this. *Whistles airily*
**Some of which include a dead hotplate-stirrer combo, an upside-down spin vane in a conical vial, spending two hours adding a reagent to remove excess bromine (a reagent which, apparently, has about 0.75 probability of turning the reaction mixture from a clear orange to an opaque black), product precipitating in the filtrate after I started washing (there are several reasons why I took it out of the ice bath a bit early)...good times, as they say.
***The memorization of all the 20 standard amino acids and the five nucleotides was done yesterday in essentially a few hours. I hope the structures stick. Still need to memorize the freaking pKa's of the numerous amino acid ionizable groups - terminal COOH about 3.5, terminal NH₃+ about 8.0, aspartic/glutamic acid COOH about 4.0...*sigh*