Progress?

Another day in the lab draws to a close and I'm looking forward to heading home to eat, read and play the piano.

I'm not really sure if I've made any progress today.

The HPLC seems to be playing up and giving me weird step-like plots of random wanderings up and down the scale. I don't think my compound eluted at all, despite having previously shown a retention times of 10-40 minutes. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.

My efforts to crack dicyclopentadiene directly into my reaction yesterday seemed to have worked to some extent - I think 40% of my tosylacetylene underwent Diels-Alder (by NMR) but I think I'll try a bigger scale cracking/distillation of cyclopentadiene tomorrow, to be sure I've got some good stuff.

I found some more of the alkyne in the freezer but it looked really scummy, though recrystallisation from EtOAc/pentane produced a fine crop of fluffy yellow crystals. Waited all day for the NMR to come back because our fast 200 MHz machine is down. Again.

I've tidied my desk - at least I managed that.

I've also been thinking about kinetics of free-radical chain reactions. Last time I thought about this seriously I think I concluded that it was a very hard mathematical problem. My supervisor also thought it was a waste of time. I think, though, some theoretical analyses would look well in my thesis, so I'm adding it to my 'things to do in my copious free time'.