More a cat person myself rather than a dog person. All that social stuff, yeech! definitely a feline person here.
Although haven't had another cat since the bitch former housemate ended up stealing someone's kitten (I don't know who, got away, thankfully. So she did it again and nicked another one. Bloody psychotic borderline perdition's own whore vile piece of shit that she is)
But with her not around, the lab is back in operation, and while I used to have a garage that I worked in, so there was no risk of feline-violently reactive materials type conflicts happening, when my mom got sicker with her MS before she died, the garage had to be converted into a downstairs bedroom for her. So no more garage. The Bitch slept in what is now my indoor lab space, had to put everything in storage, mothball the lab while she was staying here. Ugh...several YEARS without a lab...no wonder that cunt drove me crazy, even if she wasn't a mentally deficient, deviant, deranged psychotic borderline hellbitch, going even one year with no lab, thats just not meant to happen, it doesn't...it just doesn't work for me. Not one bit. Hell no. But, converted the lab room into a spare bedroom.
(which is the reason for the rather peculiar decor in the lab, which due to her, while it was in use as a bedroom rather than my personal sanctuary and seething den of all iniquity; she went and stuck bloody luminescent glow in the dark stick-on plastic stars all over the walls and ceiling. Looks really out of place now that the room is what it should be again, I.e equipped with a work bench, set of cupboards full of acids, bases, solvents etc. the commonly used ones at least, that have no special storage requirements and used often, on the one side, while the other has a tall rack of shelves, absolutely full to the brim with bottles, jars, tubs, vials, the odd doubly layered, hermetically sealed and provisioned with an inert atmosphere as an outer layered hermetically sealed bag, with greased, vacuum-purged and heatsealed wrappings of things like sodium metal, potassium, some sodium-calcium metal alloy I made a while back, in pellets, via electrolysis of mixed molten salts of sodium and calcium, plus various supplies of alkylating agents, acylating agents, dessicants, specialist solvents (fr.ex 2-pyrrolidone, N-methyl-pyrrolione, methyl cyanide and other polar aprotic solvents, that I don't use often, but keep on hand because they do have their uses in certain situations, particularly methyl cyanide, which is rather handy because it has quite a low boiling point compared with the common options for polar aprotics, 70-something 'C IIRC off the top of my head, whilst the likes of DMSO (dimethyl sulfoxide), DMF (dimethyl formamide), dimethyl carbonate, have really, really high boiling points and need hard vacuum to strip them from a post reaction mixture via vacuum distillation because they have boiling points of a couple of hundred degrees 'C at atmospheric pressure. Same goes for hexamethylphosphoramide (HMPA, aka 'liquid cancer', not the nicest solvent in the world but again, polar aprotics definitely do have their use.
The other main one with a low boiling point is THF (tetrahydrofuran) which is really volatile, being an ether par for the course, but methyl cyanide kind of fits in that sweet spot of not too high boiling, to make it a pain to strip off after things have been done in MeCN, snugly in 'respectable boiling point under 100 'C, not TOO volatile, not too high boiling either' (despite being a cyanide, methyl cyanide, otherwise known as acetonitrile, is actually not a heinous monster to handle
from a toxicological standpoint. Whilst there are exceptions, most organic cyanides are a LOT less toxic than ionic cyanides such as potassium cyanide, and of course, hydrogen cyanide or its aqueous solution, hydrocyanic acid, which are all of course, quite notoriously deadly and fast acting poisons. MeCN isn't, whilst you don't want to bathe in it or drink it, because it can be metabolized, slowly, to liberate some free cyanide ion, it'd take quite a large exposure, from very careless handling of the stuff to actually do anyone in. So methyl cyanide is a welcome addition to my solvent arsenal.
And shelves stacked full of metals, in finely powdered form, as in the lab metals are generally most useful as fine dusts with large surface area to mass ratios (I have: copper, nickel (really, really super-fine, so much so that the surface is black), iron dust, powdered aluminium, magnesium and lead (the lead isn't a fine powder, its fine shavings) and a tub of extremely finely divided metallic zinc dust, and then the inorganic elements that come in most handy-sulfur, both as a fine resublimed powder, called flowers of sulfur, and in the form of rounded solid sticks, known as 'roll sulfur', 4 big tubs of red phosphorus that I got super-lucky in finding a legit source for, that specifically caters for hobby chemists, people who aren't 'in officialdom' in the chemical world in any way, etc., because he's a hobbyist himself, with a connection that can order from sigma-aldrich, one of the BIG name chemical suppliers, expensive for quite a lot of things, but they have a huge selection, that'd make any hobbyist or clandestine chemist drool all over their catalogs as if they were autie girl teen porn
; got money off because I seized the moment, and spent more or less everything I had at the time, to buy in at over the minimum order (for red phos, its a kilogram minimum from them) so I bought two, and got about £20 knocked off the price per kg), and things like iodine, bromine. Although I keep my iodine in the chemicals fridge actually rather than on a shelf, because while I use it plenty, iodine is quite volatile and likes to slowly diffuse through the walls of containers and escape, given half a chance. So I keep my iodine in the fridge to keep a firm hand on its escape artist tendencies.
Plus all the oxidizers (E.g potassium permanganate, sodium chlorate, sodium hypochlorite, concentrated nitric acid, sodium nitrate, sodium dichromate and the likes) and reducing agents (such as lithium aluminium hydride, sodium borohydride, some homemade nickel boride, triphenylphosphine, various hydrogenation catalyst ingredients such as palladium chloride, ready to be made into palladium metal on finely divided carbon, copper metal nanoparticle slurries, platinum, etc.) and the speciality solvents or reactants like nitromethane, nitroethane, nitrobenzene, benzaldehyde, ring-substituted benzaldehydes
What I'm thinking though, is I often get the feeling that like a housewife, a citizen chemist's job is never done, and one can NEVER have too much glassware, and still want more and more and more different pieces and sizes, and never, ever is it possible to have too many chemicals in one's arsenal.
Got to pay for the LiAlH4 I ordered recently, and while I'm at it, I'm kinda hoping I might have enough money left over for: a few liters of dimethyl carbonate, some oxalyl chloride, some more thionyl chloride, my all-time favourite chlorinating reagent, some potassium or sodium cyanide, a few liters of benzene, say 10l or so. More dichloromethane because I've got a little bit left, plus a reaction product dissolved in dichlor, so I can distill it off and recycle a few hundred ml of that too. Chloroform, because I CBF making it from acetone; and I need a refill on my nitromethane supplies, I'm flat out of nitromethane. Got nitroethane, but no nitromethane, and I need both. Oh and some ready-made anhydrous hydrogen bromide as a 33% solution in glacial acetic acid.
Run out of anhydrous undenatured ethanol (I can get it untaxed too, no customs duty, at about 20 euro a liter from russia, medical grade, undenatured stuff, that is clean enough to be fit for drinking, once its heavily diluted of course. No excise tax, its all in russian, never gets looked at lol. It's not anhydrous, but 95% azeotropic EtOH, with the balance being water, which of course can easily be removed. Need more EtOH for a Bouveault-Blanc reduction (dissolve the compound to be reduced in absolutely anhydrous pure ethyl alcohol, then slowly, under an inert gas blanket, add sodium metal, bit by little bit until the sufficient quantity has been added, Useful for reductions such as ketoximes to amines for example.
And last but by no means least, on my currently coveted supplies, a few liters of pyridine, a few hundred grams of piperidine, and say 25-50g of para-dimethylaminopyridine, which when used with pyridine, is a virtuoso catalytic pair for acylations with carboxylic acid anhydrides or their correspondng acyl halides, the pyridine itself is there to act as a base, scrubbing the hydrogen chloride liberated from acid chlorides, or the carboxylic acid half of an acid anhydride so they don't foul up the reaction, whilst 4-dimethylaminopyridine, aka para-DMAP, is incredible stuff for catalyzing esterifications with these reagents, used with pyridine as the bulk HCl scrubber, whilst one might add say 20-50mg or so of 4-DMAP, which works dramatic wonders on esterifications with acid anhydrides or chlorides, turning a reaction that would create a fair lot of byproducts due to being temperature-sensitive, that needs several hours at over 100 'C, down to just ten MINUTES at room temperature, just add the pyridine to the solution of whatever is being esterified, a little tiny wee bit of para-DMAP off the tip of a knife blade (carefully, because its very poisonous stuff, and a lethal quantity could easily be absorbed through skin contact, nasty stuff but very, very very useful, more than enough to make up for its toxic nature) and that temperature sensitivity and several hour reaction time is done in minutes, room temperature or even cooled down! yields skyrocket, its just fucking wonderful stuff. Poisonous but wonderful nevertheless for anyone with their heart set on esterifying say, some complex phenolic compound that is generally available only in small quantities and ones that cannot be wasted at all, that doesn't like heat or extremes of PH; or some recalcitrant alcohol, and 4-DMAP makes the perfect addition to the standard pyridine, just a wee dash and it'll work like magic.
