Third Week of July

Monday there was no electricity on campus, so I was only there for a couple of hours and did not get anything accomplished. I took my computer home to try to work on my portfolio, but really all I did was read a non-work-related book. In the evening I played board games with the Dunwoody group.

Tuesday I had the best night of cribbage so far and I earned second place, only 5 spread points behind the week's winner.

Wednesday I played pinball with the Belles & Chimes. I had a couple of great games, but finished sixth out of ten.

I won my match on Avengers.

Thursday and Friday evenings I just went home and relaxed after school. I wrote some letters and read books.

After losing Monday to the power outage, my student and I were back in the lab Tuesday. We did some characterization of the new batch of product #2, and there was evidence of mysterious hydroxide in the NMR and the FTIR spectra. However, we decided to try reaction #3 anyway since we're running out of time.

Reaction #3 started on Wednesday afternoon.

That reaction ran for 48 hours, and on Friday we filtered off the product. I was honestly surprised that it worked, but Yay!

It's shiny and white and there's more than I expected.

Next week we'll do some TLC and try to run a purification column. If we can get that done, it'll be a good place to stop until fall semester.

Saturday I had lunch with my neighbor who continues to try to convert me to his flavor of Christianity. This time he was adamant that I needed to go to church with him. I declined as politely and firmly as possible. He asked me questions about my beliefs but didn't really listen to my answers. His arguments all revolve around his (or his pastor's) interpretation of the Bible, and it doesn't seem to occur to him that if I don't believe the Bible is a reliable source, those arguments are unlikely to work with me. His church sounds like one of those literal ones and several things my neighbor said lead me to think it is also quite intolerant of LBGTQ, immigrants, and Muslims, not to mention women. I wouldn't go to that church for any money.

The community pool opened Saturday! At 9:45 pm on Friday night, someone shoved a notice in my mailbox about the opening celebration scheduled for Saturday 4-6 pm. Maybe I'll get to swim sometime this summer?

In the evening I went to Suwanee for The Spirit of Rush concert at Stillfire Brewing. It was great! The music was good, the setting was good, I checked off another brewery on the Gwinnett County list (no sticker though because they were sold out), and I shared a table with an interesting couple who were fun to talk to.

Enjoying a drink in the beer garden before the music.

The band!

Today I was motivated to do some things around the house. I finally installed my quilt hanger after nearly a year. Finally gave up on finding the original bolts and just bought new ones at Handy Ace yesterday. I made a paper template to mark the hole positions and make sure things were level before drilling the holes. Then I hung the three cross stitch horses while I had the tools out.

The upstairs hall is narrow and not well lit.

That was sweaty work so I had to rest awhile afterwards. After lunch I started cooking because I had decided to make Walking Taco Casserole for the potluck. It was finished just in time (I basically pulled the pan out of the oven wrapped it in a bath towel and loaded it into the car) and everyone said it was good, so I'll call that a win.

Here's a (double) rainbow that appeared over my neighborhood on my way home from school Friday.

My usual Friday evening stop at Kroger.