Broken glass

Today's the official 2007 glass breaking day!

Not that i intend to, but today so far i've broken 4 sections of glass tubing, a 125ml flask and a 100ml kimax grad cylinder. Wonderful eh? Accidents happen i guess.

The labs are going great. I've done a couple new things over the last few weeks. Not interesting things, but it's been fun setting up the experiements.

In bio we've done chicken wing disections (for elbow joint labs) and cow hearts too. On saturday we're doing rat disections to show mammalian organ arrangement.

Chem's doing thermometric titrations, where you mix precise concentrations of acid and base and measure the heat released in the reaction. Quite fun if you ask me, but i only made the solutions, i didn't get to participate in that one.

The new van der graaff generator's already busted, what a piece of shit. We're looking at buying a wider belt for the old one, but that seems a bit tough right now as imports to the country are sluggish.

I've also been making homemade electromagnets. The mightiest one is made out of some 22m of copper wire coiled around a 50cm steel retort stand rod. It can pick up 21 paperclips! Not much i know, but considering that the powersource is only 12v, it's good.

There's been a few victories this year. My boss managed to talk his way into getting a bottle of 1L of HCl from the other school, and that bottle now rests comfortably in our acids storage. I managed to replace all the alligator clips from the powersources, as the old ones were all depleted from all the electroplating and hydrolysis labs. I've also managed to speed up the cleaning process, i think i'll buy some low foam machine dishawashing soap and actually start periodically using that dishwasher because it cleans well and it's a lot less work.

A few defeats too though. Of the 60 chemicals we tried to order in november, we only got a list of 6. Then the suppliers moved, and now that they've reopened they can only get 3 of those 6 now. Lucky we were to find that acid, because chemicals are running out quickly and the government isn't granting permits for purchase or permits for importing. There's also the matter that a lot of students and teachers are leaving the country, and it's getting harder and harder to find students that are capable of paying the tuition and teachers that want to come to this shithole.

Anyway.


Ah, and one big Hooray! for me, i finished the teacher's cert course i've been doing since september last year. Finally!, i am officially a teacher, probably in biology hehe.
At least now i can fall back on teaching if i don't make it in anythign else.

Oh yeah, i'm also legally married. We don't live together yet, that'll happen as of may 1st. I'll let you know all about it.