Heavy Metal Scientist: Volunteer Edition

Easter break!

I suppose Americans might call this “Spring Break” but I am not American! 

So anyway it was the last day of term today. I had to sign on so I got in a little late, though not nearly as late as I was expecting. I spent most of the day helping to shift these 20kg boards of plywood down to the sports court so the walls could be repaired. My arms feel like jelly now and I am SO TIRED. I was one of the only people that could shift the boards by myself though! So yeah, pretty exhausted now. Happy though! I wish I could work at this school all the time and actually get paid for it. 

Anyway! Thats all for now, peace out dudes!

Colds and chemicals

So I was making up some more stock dilutions of some VERY nasty chemicals yesterday. Fuming hydrochloric acid (so reactive it VAPORISES), concentrated sulphuric acid (it boils water!), glacial acetic acid (super concentrated vinegar… that is flammable), and .880 Ammonia (you think dying your hair is bad…).

So even though I was wearing a reasonably heavy duty face mask, I still kept getting rather powerful wafts of various fumes up my nose. Which is highly unpleasant. The upside is, I think it actually burnt out the cold I was developing!   

MULTICOLOURED LAB COATS!

So we ordered some new lab-coats today! I know it doesn’t SOUND exciting, but I assure you it is. We found a website that sells the coats in different colours, so we decided to colour code the different sizes! The small coats are “Postman” blue, the mediums are royal blue, the larges are burgundy, and the extra larges are bottle green! 

Oh, and the science teacher and I will both be getting black lab coats. They look rather sinister actually. It’s all very cool and exciting!

Half Term

WOOO WEEK OFF SCHOOL etcetera etcetera

Still looking for paid work, but nothing seems to have come up that I’m actually qualified/skilled to do. There is also a tiny little speck of a chance that the school might possibly maybe could perhaps employ me at least part time. It isn’t much, but it’s all I’ve got to hold onto at the moment. 

SO YER

THAT’S WHAT I HAVE BEEN UP TO.

So I haven’t updated this for a bit, so here we go! I have spent the last few weeks tidying up the chemical store. Yes. Weeks. That’s how much of a state it was in. One of my more concerning discoveries (aside from the pure formaldehyde crystals) was a small plastic box containing Radioactive minerals from Norway. Most of them were actually pretty inert. Two of them however, were not. These minerals were Uraninite and Huttonite. Uraninite is uranium ore and huttonite is thorium ore. 

The uraninite is 88% uranium by mass, and the huttonite is 77% thorium by mass. Both of these elements are radioactive. Both of them have half lives in the BILLIONS of years range. Both of these ore samples are now safely inside a lead lined container.  

Snoooooow!

So it has been snowing a bit here in the UK. So yesterday during school we all went up on the Moor. It was AMAZING. The snow was over a foot deep in some places (that’s a lot for the south of England, trust me) and you couldn’t see more than a hundred yards because of the snow and ice filled clouds. The snow was completely untouched as well. Dartmoor is not a place that is easy to get to in weather like that. 

So we stayed up there until everyone was cold and wet (I didn’t get cold and wet. I wore proper cold weather clothing) and then we headed back to school where lessons proceeded to completely fail and just not happen. Which was fine because not even the teachers actually wanted to teach anymore. By the end of the day there were only about eleven people left in the school, because a lot of people went home early. Which was pretty nice. It did kind of feel like the end of term, despite the fact we’ve only been back for two weeks! Still four weeks to go until Half Term!

So yeah. Snow is pretty rad at this school. 

First week back.

Frist week of the new term is over! I must say it was highly enjoyable. Helping the older students revise for exams is particularly rewarding. I don’t think you can really explain the feeling you get when all of the knowledge you have spent years collecting helps someone to understand something. That moment when you see the light of understanding come on behind their eyes is fantastic. 

For a lot of people science is difficult to grasp, and I understand and appreciate that. Especially for younger people (I have to keep reminding myself I’m at least six years older than the oldest student). But MY knowledge of science is helping these young people to learn. During one of my more depressed phases, I thought that my knowledge of science was completely useless. I have spent eight years becoming a “professional” scientist, and I can see that, actually, it is paying off. 

Yet I still don’t know what to do with my life. I keep telling myself that this volunteer work is a placeholder until I find a permanent job… and yet every time I look at the jobs I am qualified to do, I just think “Good lord that sounds so dull!”. Perhaps it is time to start doing something else? Maybe it is time to stop trying to find the job I think I SHOULD be doing, and to start looking (and perhaps training) for the job I WANT to be doing.