Beans on toast

[Three down, twelve to go]

So, I went to school and took two General Studies papers. I took my calculator on the off-chance that one of them was the maths paper, and one of them actually was, which made it a good idea in hindsight. One may have acquired the impression that I'm not taking General exams seriously; well, obviously I don't because they are teh crap, and also I can't be bothered - I made my contribution when I got out of bed and turned up for the exam, you can't expect more.

So, yes... the first paper was Culture and Arts again, with a question on something I can't quite remember (possibly... oh god, I really can't remember) and then the science paper which required me to pick an ethene molecule out of a line-up. I mock you, General Studies! With my monkey pants!

Yes. So that was why I got out of bed today. I went to see Mrs Custard afterwards, as she's complaining that I asked her to send a letter to my prospective university without telling her the address to send it to. Amusingly enough, the address is "Balliol College, Oxford", so I wrote this down and disappeared as unostentatiously as I had arrived, or at least I would have done had I not suddenly noticed eternalwings in the back row whispering kill me now in my general direction. Sorry I couldn't oblige.

So, I was going to make an Interesting And Intelligent Post about Fried Green Tomatoes and the total lack of bisexual characters on television, but I had a fight with my parents and feel suddenly fractious and emo and not in the mood to admit my mental age is higher than, say, eleven. Hence the icon, natch, which makes up in amusing me what it lacks in maturity. Also hence a half-hour of wibbling at hathy_col, who is internetless, still, and eating beans on toast at me to cheer me up. We were going to have our geek day tomorrow, and watch Doctor Who and eat more beans on toast (someone on new_who actually posted to ask what beans on toast is, something I found honestly baffling) but my fight with my parents has put paid to that.

And to add a certain element of the ridiculous to my life, I appear to have gone out on May 23rd, 2005, the first day of the year so far when I purposely didn't take my big stupid duffle coat, and caught a cold. That's all I need, that is. Ficathon entry hates me as well.

[Ammonia can be reacted with a haloalkane when dissolved in ethanol and placed in a sealed flask. The mechanism for the reacion is nucleophilic substitution, but because the primary amine formed is still a nucleophile, further substitution can occur. Excess ammonia will encourage predominantly primary substitution; excess haloalkane will promote the production of the quaternary ammonium salt.]

Oh, everyone's doing it.

By way of yonmei and dougs, a meme of sorts.

If I were the Doctor, who would my companion(s) be?

Teaching maths

For the first time in months, I have a student again. I gave hathy_col's sister, Megan, an hour of maths tution and actually enjoyed myself; I love teaching, even if it has to be maths. Colleen said last night, "Don't you dare end up liking her!" and I had to admit that I have, shamefully, rather liked my students in the past.

Megan and I did tolerably enough tonight in any case - I went through surds, irrational numbers and direct proportion with her, with the promise to do inverse and rearranging formulae next week. I hope it helped her. The only moment of unintentional comedy was at the end, when I asked her to give her sister a Fourth Doctor book, with my compliments. She glanced at the cover and then gave me the look of amused disdain reserved by the ordinary people for sci-fi fen. I was amused, too.

In other news, my summer cold has had some time to incubate and I am now the proud owner of a continuous headache, sore throat and endless sniffling complete with the unnerving sensation that the ground is about to shift below me, but always changes its mind at the last moment. I wouldn't mind, but my A2 Chemistry practical exam is in less than forty-eight hours, and I'd prefer not to be comatose for it.

[Condensation polymers are more reactive than polyalkenes, as they can be broken down with NaOH into their constituent monomers.]