10:15 pm Friday 20th August 1999

Hurrah! Another Friday goes by opening the way for the weekend and for a few days of frivolity. I actually woke up at 9:00 am today so that was nice, and I got into the lab about 10:00 am. It was strange knowing my supervisor wasn't going to be there to hassle for three months. Today was kind of up and down. I worked up my reaction from the previous night, two out of three appear to have worked. Unfortunately due to the strike action I didn't get my much awaited mass spectrum back from the previous few days.
Red called about ~12:00 pm to tell me that she was going to get her hair cut, we chatted and so on. Later in the afternoon, she rang me back to say that she had got it dyed also. I was quite keen to see how it had turned out. She had the fringe died a bright fire red and which looked very snazzy. I walked with her over to John's where we dropped by to see Susan and have coffee and chats. I headed back to the lab at about 3:00 pm.
I'd set up a reaction just after lunch, so I turned the heat off on it. I was hunting around for bits and pieces for a new reaction, a triple Stille reaction. Hopefully it will provide a nice convenient route to my tri-vinyl benzene compounds.
Currently I am worried whether I really have triple substituted systems, or a mixture of triple, double and mono. I will have to ensure I uses a suitable excess of aldehyde which is difficult due to its limited supply.
Set up the reaction and bummed about until ~6:00 pm when I ordered a pizza and came home.
Picked up pizza and it tasted really, really, good. Mmmmmm….. I ate and updated my diary entries at the same time. I finally created a sub-directory for my entries, so hopefully that will stop them from bloating out the main directory.
Went and watched a bit of TV between 7:30 pm and 8:30pm and then went and chatted to Susan and Jules for an hour or so. Then I headed off and here I am.
I got a replies from Szusza, Nikki and Jen today! Wow! I was really reveling in the email. ;)