California update day 2

Our second day, in Paso Robles WINE COUNTRY

For those of you who know me, I can be quite the pretentious bastard when it comes to epicurian delights. Not surprisingly enough, going to wine country was one of the main reasons for coming down to California, since Jeff (my brother) and I are of age, and my mother and father are quite the oenophiles. We woke at 10:00, had our complimentary breakfast and headed toward our first winery, Peachy Valley. There we learned that Paso Robles is mainly Zinfandel country. This particular place offered at least 10 Zinfandels for tasting (each tasting cost five dollars, which could be waived if we purchased wine. Interestingly, each wine, even though they were the same grape, had distinct characteristics, depending upon which field the grapes were grown. or when the wine was bottled. We also learned that the wines grown in Paso Robles wine country each had the distinct smell of blueberries and pepper. We tasted 16 wines at this place, and drove off to our next winery, Opolo.

This place had some very interesting wines, however, the zinfandel that they offered was too sweet. However, we tried two of the best tasing wines there. My father and I particularly enjoyed the Sangiovese, a wine with the delicious, yet not overpowering taste of strawberries. Their most famous wine, Fusion, was also very interesting, it had the taste of Caramel. Interestingly, the 2006 vintage was much tastier than the 2007 vintage.

The next winery we went to was Robert Hall. We went on a winery tour, which was interesting, but the tour guide was not very knowledgeable about the process of making wine and merely showed us some of the machines (pictures to come). The fermenting barrels were also very interesting, they held several hundred gallons of wine, (even including units for how many gallons per unit of depth, the biggest barrel had something like 47 gallons per inch). This place had THE best port I have ever tasted, and when paired with chocolate the flavor EXPLODED, we needed to buy a bottle.

Next we went to local restaurant, Taco Bell...

The next winery we went to was Turley winery. At this point, my nose was all burnt out, and we were all getting kind of tipsy, my dad liked some wines and then we left.

To end the day, I treated my family to a teppenyaki restaurant. The chef put on quite the show, flipping his knives, and creating sculptures with our food.The food was also delicious.

Ya... by the end of this post, the pretentious meter broke. However, look these wineries up, try some of their wines. They were delicious, and relatively inexpensive. You had to be there to fully experience the flavors, the smells, and the atmosphere.

I'll have more updates and pictures soon.

Stay Classy,
Matt

CALIFORNIA TRIP (part1)

HEY! I'm back, and I have vacation stories!!

For the past 5 days, (starting from the ninth) I've been in California for a last hurrah family vacation. Since I have time, a reliable computer, and something to talk about, I decided to (finally) update! The first day, we woke up at 4:45am to catch a 7:20 flight to San Francisco. When we came in, we were greeted by my aunt, Carol and my favorite little cousin, Rumela. (oh, and before you ask, will update with pictures when I get back after the 19th. We obtained our rental Ford Expedition (from my uncle Zul), and headed toward our first stop, Hearst Mansion.

We started this trip by heading down Highway 1 along the pacific coast. BEAUTIFUL drive, there were so many views of mountains, rock islands, white beaches. Of course, the drive was on top of a 300ft cliff directly outlining the coast which made things SCARY AS HELL. Beautiful and scary as it was, the most stunning thing about this drive was the how quickly the landscape was changing.

However, we made it to Hearst Mansion just in time for our tour to start. We learned all about who William Hearst was, how he became successful, and how long it took to build his palatial mansion, and legenday village on top of a mountain. Apparently, Hearst's father was a gold miner who struck it rich by hitting a silver vein. Using this money, the young William and his mother went to Europe and he was captivated by the architecture, particularly of the Mediterranean area. Years later, after becoming a successful businessman by starting up the San Francisco Chronicle, he decided to build a small villa on top of the hill where he and his family went camping during the summer. A small villa with a 40 room mansion, 3 guest houses, a zoo, two pools, a movie theatre, and 70 acres of surrounding land. Yeah, I kinda hated the guy near the end of the tour too. However, he began building his mansion when he was 50 years old!

And that was only the FIRST day, there are a lot more adventures to tell you about later, its getting late!

Stay Classy,
Matt

Hey, it's been a while.

Sorry 'bout that guys, hectic week of wrapping everything up... either that or I was lazy. Anywho This last week of research was pretty neat, we actually attempted to measure our samples via resonance raman. Its a neat way to read the vibrational modes of a chemical signal, instead of carefully raising the level of the vibrational quanta from the Highest Occupied state to the Lowest Unoccupied state using an infrared source, we blast it with a laser and record how the molecule relaxes. In short, we fired a high powered laser!!! it was so powerful, that it actually burned holes into our cuvettes (sample chambers). At first we didn't get a signal, but once we fine tuned everything and calibrated the instrument (using acetonitrile) we took saturated solutions of pyrazole, and for some reason, we didn't get a signal. However, when we used a solid sample, we acquired a pretty good spectrum. With our hopes up, we took our salts and attempted to get a spectra... however, the laser burned through our samples, but not the cuvette. We believe that this was because the sample absorbs color quite well (we used the Cu(II) pyrazole salt, the dark-purple one), and since it aborbs light so well, concentrated light actually scorched our sample. CRAZY!

Besides that, we created a poster (and by we, I mean Steve Miller) and we are ready for the Fall semester research symposium. Also, I found out that this research project may actually count toward my ACS Major (WHOO!).

I moved out today as well, and am chilling out with my family at the moment. For dinner my brother Jeff made these AWESOME Philly Cheesesteaks. Tender, well-spiced meat, delicious gooey cheese, and peppers and onions sauteed to perfection. It was to die for. Tomorrow night, I'm hanging out with Kiki and Trevor, watching the Red Bull Fluutag, seeing the Aquatennial and spending the night at the Brooklyn Park Hilton. Good Times.

Stay Classy,

Matt

Science, vacations, corpse flowers?

Now that you are SUPER EXCITED about my research, I must say that things are slowing down 'round here. Basically we are just wrapping everything up, doing data analysis, and cleaning. ALSO, Dr. Miller is actually wrapping up selling his old house, and moving into his new house, so he wasn't in today, nor will he be in tomorrow. So after running some spectra today, my weekend started at noon today :D (also payday tomorrow :DDD). So I'm taking this long (paid) weekend to actually look at graduate schools, with some help from Dr. Science. I'm looking for, like I said, a school with good organometallic programs. So far, I've looked at Stanford and UW Madison and there are a couple of projects that I find interesting so far. For example, one research group from UW Mad (lead by Dr. Berry) is interested in studying methods of adding N and O to relatively unreactive organic molecules using Ruthenium/Nitrogen complexes as a catalyst http://www.chem.wisc.edu/users/berry. The search will continue of course.

That's not to say that my life outside chemistry isn't exciting, Kiki (my GF for people who didn't know that is doing an internship at the Childrens Theatre at Minneapolis!!!!! (http://youwiththewords.blogspot.com/) but I might miss the performances that she is helping to put together. So if you are in the cities in August and you wanna see some musicals at the Children's Theatre, support my GF (cuz I prolly can't :*(

The reason I might miss her performances is that this may be the last summer I get to go on vacations with my family. In early August, I will be going to the Klun Family Reunion in Madison for a couple of days. The next week we will be going to California to see the Monterrey, San Francisco, Sequoia National Forest, and wine country!!

Lastly, the corpse flower at Gustavus is going to flower soon!!!!!!! check it out, on campus or on line, I know I did...

Anyhow, the search for grad school continues, dinner's coming up (DCMcD is making meatballs) and I'm out of stuff to talk about today. Until next time...

Stay Classy,

Matt

PICTURES!!!

All of the solutions in order of periodicity

(V(III), Cr(III), Mn(II), Fe(II), Co(II) Ni(II), Cu(I), Cu(II))

Cobalt-Pyrazole Salt

Nickel Pyrazole Salt

Copper (I) Pyrazole Salt

Copper(II) Pyrazole Salt

On the bandwagon

OKAY, maybe I'm not the most original guy on the planet but I decided to start a blog (I give it about a month, but we'll see)

Anyhow, I'm Matt and I am going to be a senior ACS Chemistry major at Gustavus. At the moment, I'm going through a CRAZY transitional period in my life. As a senior chemistry major, there are three things on my mind, my summer research, grad school, and the inevitable future. In this blog, I just wanna break it down for you guys piece by piece, hopefully telling you guys about myself every once in a while.

Before explaining anything about what is going on with my research, I'd like to tell you how freaking awesome chemistry is!!! (my gf gets jealous sometimes) I love just about everything about chemistry, but I'm especially passionate about inorganic and organometallic systems. The reason I LOVE organometallic chemistry is that it involves the two main parts of chemistry, synthesis and spectroscopic analysis.
Synthesis is awesome because, in my mind, the elements are just building blocks and the slightest chemical change can effect a system DRASTICALLY. My favorite example comes from a lovely book called The Chemistry of Mind-Altering Drugs from a class I took in Jan '09.

On the left is Morphine, on the right is Thebaine. Morphine puts you to sleep, Thebaine causes strychnine-like convulsions. Just take a minute to appreciate how similar these molecules are... how the addition of CH3 and the loss of a hydrogen can kinda mess up your weekend. (both images from sigma-aldrich)
Spectroscopic analysis is awesome because it provides us a way to examine a system. Molecules are TINY. Extremely difficult to photograph too...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1209726/Single-molecule-million-times-smaller-grain-sand-pictured-time.html. HOWEVER, there are more practical ways to determine the structure of a system by using spectroscopic methods. Basically, shining different colors of light to examine different qualities for a chemical system.


My research (led by Dr. Steven Miller, with GS as my lab partner) is purely fundamental, we really have no goal for our research, besides exploration. We are making solutions of pyrazole and transition metals, and seeing how they are coordinating in solution. Pyrazole is very interesting electronically due to its two nitrogens with completely different electronic structures right next to each other. Pyrazole is a common molecule in medicine and natural products, so our research MAY affect catalysis of creating different medicines. At the moment, all we know is that the colors are very pretty (pictures to be posted soon), and the metals react with the pyrazole in very interesting ways. But I won't tell you about that for a little bit, we are still analyzing all of our data. Besides, I don't want to bore you too much.

Anywho, I think it's just about time for me to wrap things up. I'm planning on having dinner soon, and maybe calling Kiki, who inadvertently inspired me to start a blog by creating her own yesterday. Thanks for reading a rant by a guy aspiring to be an aspiring mad scientist. Please post and help me out on this blog, I enjoy criticism.

Stay Classy,
Matt