Chemistry is exhausting
No, this isn't that post I've been supposedly delaying for days. Yes, it will be typed up eventually. No, it probably won't be tomorrow. Happy? Good. Then, if you're sitting comfortably, we can begin.
I spent most of today not sitting comfortably. I spent about 4 hours in the back seat of a car and about 3 hours and 45 minutes standing around titrating things, mixing solutions and generally doing overcomplicated chemistry. This doesn't include the countless minutes spent wandering the halls of Heriot-Watt University trying to figure out where I was, where I was meant to be and where some of my erstwhile companions where. Such is the way of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Analytical Chemistry Competition, Scottish heat.
This whole experience is probably one of those ones that I'll look back fondly on in a few years time despite the fact that we lost and everyone spent the whole day being kind of cranky. I'll remember one of my team mates, while saying he was really starting to get the hang of using this equipment, trying to fix on a pipette sucker thing backwards. It was funnier at the time.
I'll remember the fact that I now have a vendetta against vitamin C and that you know you're in a room full of chemists when you here someone calculating the concentrations of various substances in your Ribena carton.
In all likelihood I won't remember the boredom of the car journeys, the awkwardness of various social bits (actually, I can see the whole socially awkward teenage years haunting me for the whole of my life, but who cares, I'm on a roll here) and that odd feeling in the pit of your stomach when you think you've broken a very expensive looking UV spectrometer.
All this has been a long-winded way of saying that memory is a tricky thing and that I'm very tired. Me go sleep now.
On an unrelated note, I'm currently taking Physics and Chemistry at Higher. I'm going to take Advanced Higher Physics.
I spent most of today not sitting comfortably. I spent about 4 hours in the back seat of a car and about 3 hours and 45 minutes standing around titrating things, mixing solutions and generally doing overcomplicated chemistry. This doesn't include the countless minutes spent wandering the halls of Heriot-Watt University trying to figure out where I was, where I was meant to be and where some of my erstwhile companions where. Such is the way of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Analytical Chemistry Competition, Scottish heat.
This whole experience is probably one of those ones that I'll look back fondly on in a few years time despite the fact that we lost and everyone spent the whole day being kind of cranky. I'll remember one of my team mates, while saying he was really starting to get the hang of using this equipment, trying to fix on a pipette sucker thing backwards. It was funnier at the time.
I'll remember the fact that I now have a vendetta against vitamin C and that you know you're in a room full of chemists when you here someone calculating the concentrations of various substances in your Ribena carton.
In all likelihood I won't remember the boredom of the car journeys, the awkwardness of various social bits (actually, I can see the whole socially awkward teenage years haunting me for the whole of my life, but who cares, I'm on a roll here) and that odd feeling in the pit of your stomach when you think you've broken a very expensive looking UV spectrometer.
All this has been a long-winded way of saying that memory is a tricky thing and that I'm very tired. Me go sleep now.
On an unrelated note, I'm currently taking Physics and Chemistry at Higher. I'm going to take Advanced Higher Physics.
posted by Alasdair Corbett at
11:28 PM
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