Summary of activities, Feb 6th until today.

My office, a.k.a. the preparation room (preproom) is about 200 sq ft. It has a big bench in the center, lots of cabinets, 3 locked hazards storage lockers, and my desk with a computer.

When I got here, this place was like a 3 year old took it, shook it and then put it back down.

So...

Feb 6 - 17: preproom cleanup
This was an.. exciting... phase. I spent 8 hours a day just organizing, inventorizing, cleaning and chucking out garbage. Oh boy the garbage. Last time anybody had cleaned in this room was june 2005. (total 60 hours)

Feb 9: made some copies (15 min)

Feb 14: st valentines, got a friendship rose from the staff. How corporate is that?

Feb 28: Prepared measuring the caloric content of a peanut experiment for biology. (1hr)

Mar 3: cleaned fishtanks, demonstrated DNA extraction and electrophoresis. (that was kinda fun). I also prepared a yeast fermentation lab. Finally! a busy day. (all day)

Mar 6: set up the yeast lab. (20min)

Mar 7: since monday had been boring and cleanup was done, I decided to do a proper inventory of the chemicals in my cupboards. and so it went, taking up about 3 hours a day. Finished Mar 13. (15h)

Mar 8: distilled water was running a bit low, so i distilled 50L. Good thing we have a wall mounted still that works with the sink eh?! I wonder how it would go to distill cheap wine. Nah... imagine the deposits.

Mar 9: prepared an acid base titration lab, first time I braved the concentrated acids bottles.

Mar 8: prepared a halogen experiment using sodium salts of iodine, chlorine, bromine and so on... (0.5h)

Mar 10: cleaned general science guy's fishtank. He had a beatiful, huge cichlid in it. To do this, i had to move his fish into one of the biology woman's tank, which I prepared and conditioned beforehand for the fish's arrival.
Since I started doing that late in the day, I finished cleaning and reassembling the tank and left the fish transfer for monday. (2h)

Mar 11: On saturday I get this email from biology woman who went to look for some stuff in her room, she noticed the cichlid was no longer swimming in the tank where he was supposed to be and couldn't see him anywhere. We thought perhaps someone took him home.

Mar 13: Of course monday came and this wasn't the case, murphy is always on the dot. I found the poor dried up cichlid next to the window behind some books. General science guy took it well but i'm sure he was pissed. Now I know to keep cichlids with a lid on them so they can't jump out and meet their fates. Other than that, on the 13th i made copper sulphate for electrolysis experiments for physics guy, supervised biology extra lab hours because some kids hadn't finished their yeast experiments and took care of some paperwork. (3h)

Mar 14: set up electrolysis in physics guy's room. (10min)

Mar 15: an exciting opportunity! General science guy was to do a demonstration of science experiments for the parents of grade 9. This gave me the opportunity to show him some cool, flashy demos he could do as well (his were kind of boring). I set him up with the invisible ink sign (paper painted with dilute FeK(CN2)3 sprayed with FeCl, the reaction makes blue ink (prussian blue i think)), salt burning flame tests, supersaturated solutions with sodium acetate, making nylon... he set up some spectroscopy stuff which was also neat.

Mar 16: parent demo. (1h)

Mar 17: i cleaned up everybody's labs. (3h)

Mar 20: cleaned up my lab, it was a mess. I also imitated charts from pooly copied journal. They came out alright and the bio students got the point of the exercise. (2h)

Mar 21: got some radioactive pills for the 22nd. Physics guy was doing radioactivity and he felt appropriate to show the students how radioactivity (beta and gamma) worked. So I set up the laptops with their vernier labpros and radioactive probes. (1h)

Mar 22: helped running the radioactivity lab. Although the sources were weak Sr and Co isotopes, you never know how it's going to affect you, so I made sure the lab was safe and clean. (1h)

Mar 24: did some photocopying apparently. (5min?)

Mar 27: since the radioactive pills were borrowed from another school, i was to return them, and so I did. (3h) I prepared solutions of various salts for flame tests for that afternoon. (20min)

Mar 28: did some copying. Prepared a magnesium burning mass change experiment for biology. (30min)

Mar 30: set up the mass burning experiment. (10min)

Mar 31: cleaned my hazards cupboards. I have 1 flammables locker, 1 reactives locker and 1 acids locker. A particularily hazardous job, i was mighty careful to dilute everything in plenty of water and then cleaned everything up. There were drops of acid eating up the pans of the acids cupboard but nothing a little calcium carbonate couldn't handle. (4h)

Apr 3: did some copying, cleaned fishtank filter, and prepared an exothermic/endothermic reactions experiment for physics guy. (3h)

Apr 4: filled spirit burners with all kinds of fun, incredibly flammable alcohols and alkanes for a chemistry practical. (30min) Set up the exo/endo experiment.(10min)

Apr 5: a miracle, chemistry guy assinged me a task. Sadly it was short lived. He felt all labs should have safety manuals, well they do, but GOOD manuals with MSDS sheets and such. The school uses the school science resource company and I got the manual from them. 93 pages. Made 5 manuals. Took me like 2 hours. Then I cleaned up my lab and acquired from general science guy the van de graaff generator for physics guy who was teaching electrostatics. (1h)

Apri 6: easter week was coming. The week after this one the school closed in observance of everybody wanting to go on vacation er... ehem... religious festivites of the lord. I like to make sure my lab is clean and safe before i leave so i cleaned and idiot proofed the whole place. (30min)

Apr 7: finished idiot proofing the lab and did some copying. It was my girlfriends birthday so I had to go buy her a gift (holy mother of all bracelets i gave her... $150... but price is not an issue, she has a feel and taste for everything that is impossible to find. Anyway, the lab was clean and secured, the science laptops were stored in it and the alarm was set (did i mentioned my room is protected by a motion detector burglar alarm system? There's a lot of money in equipment here, plus a cart with 8 laptops which are brand spanking new). (day's work of 2h maybe)

April 8 - 16: proceeded to sleep late, get drunk every night, get together with friends and so on.

Apr 17: noticed my distilled water was running low so i turned on the still and made some 25 L of it. I also prepared a mass/volume concentration lab for physics guy, a copper sulfate burning lab (to find out hydration of CuSO4, which btw is usually 5H2O, industry standard). Oh and I made copious amounts of sodium thiosulfate for a chemistry lab... it's not so much making it, because that's easy. It's the distributing the damn liquid into like 40 little bottles, it's just a pain in the ass. (6 hours!)

Apr 19: national holiday, day off... boohoo. Got drunk.

Apr 20: prepared a weird lab to determine the atomic mass of magnesium. I didn't read it so don't ask, all i know is that it involved an upside down burete, 1.5cm of Mg ribbon and 2M HCl. So that's what I provided. Biology woman set it up. (30min)

Apr 21: did a bit of cleanup. nothing too bad. (30min)

Apr 24: went into town to look for resistors, 5, 10 and 15 ohm ones, for physics class. Of course, the most I could get were 10kohm ones... so no good. Physics guy decided to pass on that experiment due to lack of time anyway. (4h)

Apr 25: my car broke down. one of the radiator hoses popped and all the coolant evaporated. Took the car to the shop, it's getting fixed, hopefully they find and install the hose soon. Otherwise, i cleaned up the thiosulfate lab in the chemistry room and cleaned up my lab, again. Amazing how dirty this place gets. Oh well, keps me busy.

That's that until today. Noticed the time gaps some places? Some are weekends, but the ones that aren't weekends, you guessed it, didn't do anything. I don't have MSN messenger on my computer here, so when i'm bored, i do stuff like this blog. now you know why it exists and what purpose it serves.