The Birthday Weekend Break

This post has been a little long in the editing (and it's nowhere near beautifully written), but here it is at last ...

Yesterday (16/7) was my mother's 50th birthday. As a surprise, my father had booked us into the Victoria hotel in Sidmouth. I was doing some church PA stuff on Saturday morning, so I took the train afterwards and met them at my Uncle's house in Woking. When we left there my father took the 'wrong' turning - towards the southwest rather than towards London.

3 hours later, we arrived at Sidmouth and swept up the drive of the hotel. My mother was very surprised - my father and sister had executed a perfect conspiracy. The rooms were very well appointed and the hotel was tastefully furnished throughout.Dinner was excellent, as was breakfast.



Having spent the night at the hotel, we set out to make the most of the day, starting with a walk up Salcombe Cliff (on the east side of Sidmouth).

It was very very hot, but there is plenty of shade going up. There were also plenty of ferns. Altogether there were Dryopteris dilatata, D. filix-mas,
D. affinis affinis,
and Asplenium scolopendrium.I looked for D. carthusiana but did not find it. Previous excursions at Branscombe (a little east of Sidmouth) showed mainly with only occassional carthusiana so I wasn't really that hopeful. In addition there was plenty of Pteridium aquilinum
After the walk, we cooled off in the Connaught Gardens and then braved the beach for a few hours, which was quite pleasant. I was even induced to stand with my feet in the water for a little while. At the end of the day we headed back to London and finished the weekend with birthday cake on the patio at home.

We all had a really great weekend - many thanks to Dad for organising it!

Vegetable chemistry

I've been looking at Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry, Vol4, issue 12. The cover has a picture of a bunch of carrots, a blender and a reaction, and refers to the article on p2348 which is entitled "Daucus carota L. mediated bioreduction of prochiral ketones". Basically, these guys have taken some carrots, chopped them up and then put them in a reaction to effect the chemo- and stereo-selective reduction of ketones. The general procedure reads:

Carrots were obtained from a local market. The external layer was removed and the rest was cut into small thin pieces (1 cm long slice). Ketones (100 mg) were added to a suspension of freshly cut carrot root (10 g) in 70 mL of water and the reaction mixtures were incubated in an orbital shaker at room temperature. The suspension was then filtered off and the carrot root was washed three times with water. Filtrates were extracted with ethyl acetate, organic layers were dried on sodium sulfate, filtered and evaporated. The crude products were purified by flash chromatography.

The amazing thing is that they get good yields and high ees!

Why didn't I think of this?

A busy few days

It's been really busy these past few days. The good news is that my finger is healing up well. When I took the steristrips off on Saturday morning it really didn't look pretty, but it has dried out quite well. I thought the doctor did a pretty good job of closing it up, since the original wound was about twice as wide. I was talking to a friend who is a doctor yesterday night and he thought a stitch or two might have helped it, but that it didn't matter much either way.

Saturday was spent playing around with PA stuff at church. We re-organised the equipment at in the control desk cupboard and fitted new patch cabling. We also identified the cable runs for at least 2 older PA installs and checked which sockets worked around the church as well as some supposedly new cable installations. This was all occassioned by the need to install a brand new mixer desk (a Yamaha MG24/14) which is really cool. A long but fun day.

Yesterday was a typical Sunday but with the added panic of 2 deadlines to be met today (Monday): my quarterly progress report and a book proposal review that I had agreed to do for a publisher. I've been working away at both of them for a week or so, but only finished the review at 1.30pm and the report at 4.30pm.

Phew.

Just everything else to catch up on now ... I hope my finger will be sufficiently better than I can do some labwork on Wednesday. One other exiting (if slightly geeky) thing that I've done is to edit a .wav file for my mobile ring tone. Now it plays Noel Coward singing "I'm old fashioned" (my theme song) whenever I get a call. I like the irony of that!