The Church Bus

A big thank you to all who commented and indulged my request of quantifying my popularity. It feels nice to have groupies. I don't know if I'm brave enough to have Facebook tell me how many friends I have. I would rather live in ignorance. Does anyone else ever feel like a loser when you receive a mass-email and you are one of like two thousand people on the recipient list??? I figure some people sign up for extra email accounts for themselves so that they can send their mass emails to as many addresses as possible to show the rest of us how cool they are. Or maybe everyone else merely has more self esteem than I do.

Self image issues aside It's a good thing that people are reading the blog. It will motivate me to keep writing. I actually am finding that I quite enjoy it. Who knew. Mind you I always thought writing editorials could be a lot of fun.

Since Jonny already posted it on the comments I will further highlight the fact that Joel is getting married on July 14. Dillon can't possibly be happy. He'll still be in the middle of hellhole, BC fighting fires, or digging ditches, or getting high. Wait, those are the tree planters. Sorry.

So the job is going well. I am doing more synthesis on my own now. I have these six step syntheses I have to follow to make the blocks that will become the chains. Once I have made a bunch of different products I have to try and string them together. I will be making the blocks for a month or two I am sure. It seems like it will take about a week or so to complete one six-step synthesis. Sometimes the reactions don't always work out the way you want them to and then you have to try something else. It is kind of neat because next week I will being making compounds nobody else has made before. Go me. Today I forgot to let the garbage from my glovebox air out before I dumped it and I filled half of our lab with a really bad garlic-ish smell. Suffice to say I was not the most popular guy around. I would have been better off farting all morning long at my glovebox instead. I've learned how to use most of the equipment and I think I will be ready to be turned loose when Sharonna (my grad student) goes on vacation at the end of next week.

I'm really enjoying the work. Although the others say that after a couple weeks the novelty wears off and it feels like work again. I guess I am enjoying my chemical honeymoon...so to speak.

Last night I went with three Germans to detroit to see a tigers game. We got a special bus that runs to and from downtown detroit. The bus stops at customs and lets everyone off and then picks everyone up on the other side of the building. This system would have worked fine except that for non-canadians, US entry requires nearly everything shy of a urine sample. The Germans had to fill out forms, pay $6, get their photos taken, give their fingerprints, and have their passports scrutinized as if the officers will somehow find drugs vacuum sealed inside the picture page. If US entry is this hard for Germans, imagine what it's like for the *insert generic middle eastern nationality here*. Our bus left the other side without us.

The game was delayed about two hours by rain but we got the whole thing in. It's a good thing the game was delayed or else we would have missed the First Pitch thanks to our friendly neighbourhood US Customs and Border Protection agents. Something makes me think they get high on hassling people. Yes, I know, they're "just doing their jobs". The Mariners won 9-2. Andreas was quite skeptical about how the M's would do after giving up a homerun on the first pitch of the bottom of the first. But we won. I should have put money on it.

Hey I found Mini Wheats for $2.99 a box today after work. I bought three boxes. It feels like I won the lottery. Speaking of winning the lottery, UVic hasn't posted my co-op fee yet. You think they forgot??? I think I would have better luck driving a load of teenagers across the US border in a church bus undetected.