Week #7- A Little Better

I’d have to admit that this week went by much better than last week. I had great success in the lab and well, I my friend said that he’s getting better.

For lab this week we tried another method to measure the acetaminophen concentration where we added ethyl acetate, sodium sulfate, sodium carbonate and Folin- Ciocalteu to my standards to create a standard curve. Unfortunately, this experiment almost failed. But, I returned to my faithful experiment and for the first time, tried it with the liquid waveguide capillary cell (LWCC) and was very successful. My r2 was 0.9989 which was so cool!! Because of this, we decided to try a sample taken from the Willamette River. We left it over the weekend to filter through the solid phase extraction. I hope that this helps us to get a good concentration of acetaminophen.

On Thursday, a few of us went to see a movie about the water problems that are present in today’s world. I guess that to most people, it was really informative, but I have lived places where you have to stand in line to get water. So to me, it just a reminder of things that I had to go though to get where I am today. On Friday, we had our usually Brown bag with Jim Waddell who is a professional engineer with the US Army Corps of Engineers. He was very funny and explained a lot about sustainability.

On Saturday, we went to Cannon Beach with Vanessa and for the first time, I saw the Pacific Ocean! It was wonderful and cold!!! I actually lost feeling in my legs but it was well worth it. Then later that day, we went to a cheese factory. I swear that I have never seen so much cheese in my life. But coming from a cheese lover, I felt right at home. But that was the highlight of my weekend. It wasn’t much but it was entertaining. See you next week!!!!