Having to go back to school to do my lab practical today =
Lab was really draggy. We were supposed to extract caffeine from tea leaves, and by the time the prof finished giving us an introduction and explaining the procedure, about an hour has already passed. The practical was supposed to last for 3 hours, and that meant that we should finish everything within 2 hours if there were no mistakes.
Today didn’t seem to be a good day for Sherry and I though.
1. The filter papers seemed to have something against us, because it took forever for our tea leaf extract to filter. While others finished filtering in a rather short amount of time, we took 1 whole hour to finish filtering what was about 2 filter funnels of liquid. Even the groups who redid the experiment because they had made mistakes along the way were faster than us!
2. We had to do a separation later after adding an organic solvent to the liquid, and our separation funnel was leaky. Minor liquid spillage + having to get another separation funnel so that we won’t get any more leakages.
3. The air in the lab was really dry, and that and all the chemical really dries up your hair. I can feel the big difference in my hair before I go for my practicals and after I leave. Makes the ends of my hair feel really really dry and rough.
In the end, we only managed to finish around one. When we left, there were other groups still doing their experiments, and I wonder what time did they get to leave the place. If only the filtration went much faster! Until now I still have no idea why ours took so long to filter. But I think that the apparatus are really cute, because the conical flasks and round-bottom flasks are so small! XD I'm sure no one else thinks that way.
2 more weeks of saturday lab sessions... at least I think that they're better than computer labs, especially the last one where I spent about 3 hours measuring torsional angles.