1. Give the possible symmetries (point groups) for the following four objects, considering all of the possible permutations in which the objects may be assembled. In each case, identify the symmetry elements as well (50 pts).

Hints: (1) Use scratch paper first! (2) Representing the cardboard squares as stereocenter-containing organic compounds may help your thought processes. (3) You should end up with 25-35 unique solutions to this problem.

Because we lead a kinda rock-and-roll lifestyle, my wife and I sat down the following evening to have a go at the question — she’s much better at this symmetry stuff than I am. It took us a good couple of hours (incidentally, that’s the time allotted for the whole midterm — 5 questions in total — not just question 1…), and we had to look up the flowcharts for assigning point groups, but we ended up getting them all right and just missed one pair of enantiomers. So, if you have an hour or two to kill and fancy getting your head around some stereochem/symmetry problems, give it a go. I’ll post up our answers in a few days. If you look hard enough on Twitter, you’ll find them there too.

Fraser pointed out that the question is not his; he took it from the 1966 edition of Introduction to Stereochemistry by Kurt Mislow.

All the best exam questions come from textbooks that the current crop of students haven’t read… and what’s that on the cover, graphene!?

One clue of my own: don’t forget about axes of improper rotation and centres of inversion… and good luck! Let me know how you do in the comments section.

— — — — — — — — — — —

UPDATE — here are the answers

I’m going to tackle the cinematic masterpiece that is Superman III — there really is some fantastic chemistry in there that I want to share with you (you might want to look up all of the definitions of ‘fantastic’…).

Clark Kent (I’m not gonna spoil it for you guys if I tell you that he’s really Superman am I?) is heading back to Smallville to go to his high-school reunion when the bus he’s travelling on is pulled over because there is a fire in a chemical plant close to the road. The cop who pulls over the bus is perhaps exhibiting some mild symptoms of chemophobia when he tells the driver that, “It’s not just a building, it’s a chemical plant. You know what I mean, it’s like, err, it’s like chemicals.” It’s not long before Superman arrives on the scene and he sets about rescuing workers trapped on (and in) the building. In one room he finds a scientist (he must be a scientist, he’s wearing a lab coat) who refuses to leave — the conversation goes like this:

Scientist: I gotta stay and look after those. That’s concentrated beltric acid. If that stuff heats up over 180 degrees we’ve got a crisis on our hands that’ll make this fire look like a Sunday-school picnic.

Superman: What does it do?

Scientist: As long as it remains stable it’s just ordinary acid, no problem. But if it begins to heat up, it’ll turn volatile. If that happens you’ll get a great cloud of smoke that’ll eat through anything, steel, concrete, anything.

Oh my! It’s beltric acid. And that dial, all it seems to measure is ‘DANGER’. What are the SI units for DANGER?

Superman, of course, saves the day, and the beltric acid is safe. For now.

The movie continues, and the villain of the piece — businessman Ross Webster (played by Robert Vaughn) — decides to get rid of Superman after the man of steel thwarts his plans to destroy Colombia’s coffee crop. How do you get rid of Superman? Well, you just need some kryptonite. And what if you can’t get any kryptonite? Simple, just figure out what it is made of and then synthesize some in the lab — yay, chemical synthesis FTW!

After Gus Gorman (played by the genius Richard Pryor) gets caught skimming off the half cents not paid to the employees of Webscoe into his own expenses account, Webster puts Gorman’s computer programming skills to use in his evil schemes — including the plan to make kyrptonite. So, how does it all work? If you haven’t already suspended belief yet, now would be good. Gorman hacks into a weather satellite and uses it scan the region of space where the planet Krypton used to be. It amuses me that the computer can’t spell…

‘i’ before ‘e’, except after ‘c’ when… you know the rest.

Webster describes the rest of the plan in a voice-over:

Then the laser probe simply locks on to a floating chunk of kryptonite, the computer analyses the components, and the boys at the lab duplicate the stuff down here.

‘Simply’?! OK, first off, I know this is a movie, but allow me to point out the flaw in the logic here. You don’t know what kryptonite is, so how do you lock on to a floating chunk of it? How do you know that you haven’t locked on to lump of adamantium, dilithium or vibranium? Anyway, back to the plot. That’s some awesome analytical chemistry going on right there. A laser fired from a satellite hits a lump of kryptonite and the computer back on Earth figures out exactly what it’s made of — here are the results:

Decrypting kryptonite. Dialium anyone? And no krypton? That’s disappointing.

That’s some pretty potent stuff right there. I’m not from Krypton, but you wouldn’t catch me going anywhere near Kryptonite.

Rather than leaving it to the scientists to decide what to do about that small amount of ‘unknown’ — such as just leaving it out — Gorman gets some inspiration from the side of his cigarette packet and decides to swap ‘unknown’ for ‘tar’. The details get sent off to the ‘boys at the lab’ and they set about making synthetic kryptonite — it must have been a fun prep… and just imagine filling in the safety assessment for that one! (They do full safety assessments in the labs housed in the lairs of evil geniuses don’t they?) And look, they even managed to crystallize the product:

PuTaXePmDa(?)HgC — or synthetic kryptonite if you prefer.

The whole synthetic-kryptonite plot-line is discussed in more detail at this website — I’ve tried to avoid directly repeating what is said over there and I recommend that you go and have a read to learn about alternative theories on the composition of kryptonite, including the one put forward in Superman Returns and its similarity to the naturally occurring Earth mineral jadarite. If you really want to delve deeper, apparently there are lots of different forms of kryptonite (polymorphs perhaps?).

To finish off, however, let’s bring this back down to Earth. Did you know that ‘kryptonite’ has been synthesized in a real chemistry lab and the results were reported in JACS? Yes, really! The paper, Isolation and Spectral Properties of Kr@C60, a Stable van der Waals Molecule, was published in 1999 and the kryptonite in question is the compound made up of a krypton atom trapped inside the buckminsterfullerene cage — an example of an endohedral fullerene. Seems like a reasonable name to me, it has krypton in it after all! And here’s the proof from the paper itself:

JACS — the journal of choice for all of your synthetic kryptonite work.

Alas, a search for ‘beltric acid’ in the scientific literature didn’t turn anything up. So, chemists of the world, here’s your challenge. Who will be the first to make a new compound called beltric acid and get it published in a reputable chemistry journal? That would be super, man.

Just for the record, however, here is the full comment that I sent to Sarah in response to her request, noting just what an impact I think Angewandte has had on chemistry publishing:

In many ways, Angewandte has blazed a trail when it comes to the ‘how’ of publishing research in chemistry – but also scientific publishing in general it could be argued. When researching an editorial for Nature Chemistry on the origins of graphical abstracts, it should have come as no surprise when the earliest examples I could find were from Angewandte Chemie. They started as a regular feature in the German edition in 1976 (I think) and then appeared in the International edition the following year. It took many years for other publishers to catch up. Another innovation in chemistry publishing championed by Angewandte were the striking images that graced the front cover of the printed journal (when all there was was the printed journal). In the days when Angewandte were putting nice pictures on the front of each issue, rival publishers still had plain (and somewhat dull) covers that, in some cases, even included the start of the table-of-contents (which was just text); again, many chemistry journals were slow to follow this lead. Finally, if memory serves me correctly, it was Angewandte that first made chemistry publishing colourful. While others were producing issues in black and white (with perhaps some greyscale thrown in for good measure), colour images were regularly gracing the pages of Angewandte Chemie. There is no doubt that many of the publishing innovations pioneered by Angewandte have inspired other journals since. As a graduate student and postdoc it was a journal I aspired to publish in and now as an editor of a competing journal it is one of the first places I look when I’m searching for interesting work to highlight in Nature Chemistry that we didn’t publish ourselves.

[Update — here's a link to the Nature Chemistry Editorial that I mention above]

First up, is Chemists are Like Dodos (you need to be a subscriber — sorry), which looks at a report by Prof. Colin Eaborn entitled, ‘Committee of Enquiry into the Relationship between University Courses in Chemistry and the Needs of Industry’ for the Royal Institute of Chemistry. Here’s a quote from the article:

With touching devotion to the belief that chemistry is not so much a discipline as a virtue, the committee proclaims the advantages of the present system for training chemists at British universities, deplores the way in which students appear to be increasingly unwilling to exploit these advantages, bemoans the difficulties which beset graduates seeking jobs and then hopes—its recommendations are hardly better—that by some magic everything will come right. In much the same spirit, no doubt, the last of the now vanished quill pen manufacturers must have wrung their hands in bewilderment over the falling away in trade. Are not our quill pens as good or even better than ever? Is it not mere fickleness and even fecklessness that has driven the customers away? And will not everything be right again if we hang on (with government subsidies to help) waiting for people to change? This, at least, is what the least adventurous among the quill makers would have said—their more farsighted colleagues would have been investing heavily in the manufacture of steel nibs. The danger now, in British chemistry, is that Professor Eaborn’s report will serve only to undermine the flickering resolution of those who may have considered that the time is right for change.

Ouch!

Following on is a second piece, No Formula for Change (again, subscribers only), which opens as thus:

A SORRY tale of a declining proportion of the most able students being attracted to university chemistry courses and of poor prospects for chemists in the job market is told in a report published this week by the Royal Institute of Chemistry.

Oh dear…

It seems that chemistry has similar issues/problems, whether in 1970 or 2013 — not enough jobs and we’re just not willing to change (enough).

Well, I’m sorry to report that all of those are taken, but there are 114 named elements (we’re ignoring those ununelementium placeholder names) to choose from. Surely some of the more exotic elements must be there for the taking? Well, no. Gone. All of ‘em. Thought you’d sneak in and claim one of the two newest additions to the periodic table @flerovium or @livermorium? Sorry, you’ve been beaten to them.

OK, you’re not going to be defeated. You’re smart. How about a bit of a twist? Perhaps you could be @deuterium or @tritium. Sorry, gone and gone. Ah, but what about elements 13, 16 and 55, with the variations in their spelling? Well, @aluminium and @aluminum are both taken. The same goes for @sulfur and @sulphur (the latter of which is unacceptable anyway). Both @caesium and @cesium have been claimed too. And whether it’s ironic (or you just can’t spell), somebody has even beaten you to @flourine.

Somewhat disappointingly, many of the elemental accounts have very little to do with the element in question — or with chemistry. I’m not going to cover them all (they are linked in the periodic table at the bottom of this post if you care that much…), but thought I would highlight some of them. First up is @nitrogen, simply because his bio states that, “I ponder the universe and eat bacon” — I wish I did that for a living. Another intriguing bio belongs to @neon, who is a “Gangnam style professional dancer” — alas, it is a protected account, otherwise I imagine it would be followed by billions of people by now (rather than the 191 it currently has).

The first account with a pretty strong link to its elemental name is @titanium, which is run by the Titanium Information Group. If you are wondering, they are “an association of titanium suppliers, fabricators, users and researchers, working together to promote the use of titanium”. I’m sure all 62 of their current followers are getting their fill of titanium trivia. The first bio that I happened to notice containing the word ‘chemist’ is that of @gallium — he’s only got 16 followers but says he is a nice guy, so why not give him a follow?

I feel that I must mention @technetium, a Brand Marketing Company, mostly because they only have 225 followers at the moment. Perhaps they need to hire a company to improve their brand. In fact, maybe they should use the services of Promethium Marketing (@promethium) who have a much healthier 5938 followers. Although the first line of their Twitter bio states, “We ignite passion”. Well, I don’t know about you, but that conjures up some weird (and frankly disturbing) mental images for me.

The one other element that sticks out is xenon — for no other reason than the fact that the account has been suspended. Naughty @xenon.

The final word goes to @dysprosium. There is a grand total of 0 tweets from this account, it only follows one other account, and has but 2 followers itself. So why am I pointing out this account? Well, the avatar is a picture of Paul Émile (François) Lecoq de Boisbaudran who was the first person to identify the element dysprosium. De Boisbaudran also discovered a number of other elements, including samarium, europium, gadolinium and gallium — it’s all in the Wikipedia article, which is worth a look.

Edit: OK, I initially limited this to @elementnames, but I won’t be able to sleep tonight if I don’t give @DrRubidium an honourable mention. Follow Ray, she’s awesome. Seriously.

And here’s the periodic table of Twitter, with all the accounts linked:

That sentence appears in the X-ray characterization section of only the second paper I published — an Angewandte from 1998.

First of all, I’m embarrassed that the information that is given is not even close to being adequate to repeat the crystallization (if it’s any excuse at all — and it’s not a good one — this paper was submitted within 6 months of me beginning my PhD and was the first paper I had some involvement in writing; my first paper was from a project I did as an undergrad and the paper was written without me). What concentration of the compound was used, and what was the ratio of those three solvents. But secondly, HOW ON EARTH DID I COME UP WITH THAT WEIRD COMBINATION OF SOLVENTS?!

Well, sit back, put your feet up, and get ready for the #overlyhonestmethods version of the story.

I’d been trying to crystallize this particular compound for months — it was something I had made as part of my final-year undergraduate project; a project I was continuing with for my PhD. You don’t really need to know what the structure of the compound was, other than the fact it was a salt, with a large-ish organic cation (the interesting bit) and pretty much any anion you may choose to associate with it. Most compounds of this type in the research group were prepared using a non-coordinating anion such as hexafluorophosphate (‘non-coordinating’ means that the anion doesn’t form a tight ion pair with the cation, and the cation is free to start forming interesting complexes without the anion getting in the way).

The hexafluorophosphate salt was not particularly soluble in most organic solvents. It would go into acetonitrile (up to a point) and it was also soluble in DMSO, but that was pretty much it. So, it could be characterized by NMR spectroscopy, but I had no luck growing crystals from acetonitrile (and it didn’t even cross my mind to try DMSO). Every crystallization attempt would just produce an amorphous white powder — nothing that was going to give me a nice crystal structure. After many months of frustration, I think a postdoc in the group badgered me into running a 13C NMR to try to get a better picture of what was happening in solution (the molecule was a self-complexing one; the idea was that it would form intermolecular complexes that would resemble interwoven chains, and since the 1H NMR spectrum was very complicated, he suggested 13C might be more revealing).

I wanted to make a concentrated sample to get a good spectrum, and I knew that I couldn’t do that in acetonitrile. DMSO would be able to dissolve a large amount of the compound, but the compound didn’t form complexes in DMSO (no matter how concentrated), so that was no good. Instead of using hexafluorophosphate as the anion, I thought I’d give trifluoroacetate a go — I’m not sure why, but perhaps others in the group had been using this anion too. So I made the trifluoroacetate salt and was pleasantly surprised to find out that it was quite soluble in chloroform. Brilliant. I’d run the 13C NMR in CDCl₃, the solvent I ran most NMR experiments in.

At that time, the NMR spectrometers in the department ran as a service — you weren’t allowed to touch them yourself. The only time you could run a 13C spectrum was overnight, and they had to be queued up on the carousel before the NMR facility was locked and closed for the night at 6 pm (I just heard a collective gasp from all of the US grad students/postdocs reading this — but yes, the NMR suite was locked shut at 6 pm; no way of getting in). So, you couldn’t run your own NMR spectra and if you wanted a 13C spectrum you had to make sure you got one of the 20 overnight slots.

So there I was in the lab (on the 7th floor of the building) and I glanced at the clock to see that it was about 5:50 pm. I quickly grabbed my bottle of CDCl₃ from the shelf on my lab bench and added about 1 mL of it to a sample vial containing about 100 mg of my trifluoroacetate salt. It looked like the stuff wasn’t completely dissolving and because I was in a rush, I just decided to grab my bottle of CD₃CN and add a few drops of that. Hey presto, everything dissolved. I dutifully filtered the solution into the NMR tube through a small amount of glass wool stuffed into a pipette, capped the tube, and raced to the lift to head down to the ground floor to get into the NMR suite before it closed.

I just made it. I got my sample on to the carousel and I think they locked the door behind me as I left and returned back to the lab. I went back to my lab bench to clean up and it was then that the horror hit me. Our bottles of CDCl₃ were very distinct; they were dark brown glass, big blue screw caps and weren’t cyclindrical, but had a square cross-section. Once I’d finished with one, I’d often re-purpose them to hold TLC solvent mixtures. It turned out that the bottle of ‘deuterated chloroform’ on my bench that I had just used wasn’t actually a bottle of CDCl₃ — in my haste, I had grabbed the wrong one off the shelf; one that was clearly labelled, in my own handwriting, as containing a 1:1 mixture of hexane:ethyl acetate. So, my NMR sample had been made up using (non-deuterated) hexane/ethyl acetate and a few drops of deuterated CD₃CN. Bugger.

Had this been any other time of the day, I would have trudged back downstairs, retrieved my NMR tube, evaporated off the solvent, and re-made the sample using CDCl₃ (and not informed anyone of my utter stupidity). As it was, the NMR lab was locked, there was no way in, and I resigned myself to picking up a nice 13C NMR spectrum of hexane/ethyl acetate the following morning (as well as looking like an idiot). The morning came, I picked up my spectrum (which was as useless as you would expect it to be). I think all of the samples had already been cleared off the carousel and were in a rack waiting for collection. I don’t remember for sure, but the guy who ran the NMR machines might have even written something less that complimentary on my spectrum (yes kids, these were the days of paper spectra; no electronic versions available for students…).

I don’t know when I noticed, but at some point between the NMR suite on the ground floor and the lab on the seventh floor, I looked at the NMR tube and saw what I can only describe as BLOODY HUGE CRYSTALS in there. The boss was away, but the senior postdocs booked me on a train the very next day to carry my precious cargo to Imperial College in London, where our crystal structures were all solved. The rest is history, and the crystal structure got me an Angewandte paper — and ended up being the basis for one of the chapters in my thesis.

So, that’s my #overlyhonestmethods story for you.

As a postscript, I should point out that the deuterated solvent, the strong magnetic field of the NMR machine, the spinning at 20 Hz for 30 minutes and the periodic shunting around an NMR-machine carousel were NOT required for the crystallization. In repeat experiments, a mixture of ethyl acetate and regular acetonitrile produced crystals in a vial sitting quite still on the bench top in the absence of a strong magnet…

My current job

I am the Chief Editor of the journal Nature Chemistry.

What I do in a standard work day

In some ways it’s a fairly predictable job — just get one issue of the journal out each month and publish papers online every Sunday as soon as they are ready. Having said that, there is no ‘standard’ work day. As the Chief Editor, a lot of what I do is the same as the Associate/Senior Editors, but there is an additional layer of shit responsibility that comes with the role.

The day-to-day journal business revolves around the manuscripts that are submitted to the journal. Editors spend a lot of time reading manuscripts, reading ‘the literature’, finding referees, chasing referees, making decisions based on referee reports — and explaining them to the authors (and the referees). For the manuscripts that ultimately make it into the journal, editors will have provided a lot of feedback to the authors concerning the text and figures, and the editors also do the ‘final read’ after the authors have returned their proof corrections.

Editors also commission content for the journal such as review articles, book reviews, News & Views articles, Commentaries, and miscellaneous pieces for other journal sections (and all of this involves being up-to-date with the literature as well) — and when that content comes in, we edit it too. Writing is also a core (but small) part of the job. Editors write 300-word research highlight articles and occasionally editorials and press releases too. And in the small amount of time left over, editors sometimes blog (not very often, admittedly) and tweet. And some days involve not being in the office — we give talks at universities and we also go to conferences.

As the Chief Editor, I’m also responsible for the development of the journal, including long-term strategy and planning. Also, if any problems arise — such as accusations of plagiarism or other nefarious publishing acts, they make their way to my desk. I’m also involved in cross-company projects that look at how we present our content online and how we can make it better. And anything that involves our editorial workflow and how we interact with print production and web production is my domain too.

Oh, and e-mail. We get lots of e-mail. Chief Editors in particular. I probably spend 1-2 hours each day writing and answering e-mail.

What kind of schooling / training / experience helped you get me there?

I went through a fairly traditional career path to begin with: undergraduate degree, PhD, postdoc. I then took a teaching-faculty position, but at the same time I started work in the newly founded Organic Letters editorial office at UCLA. The Associate Editor was Fraser Stoddart (my former PhD supervisor). I think Fraser looked at the first half-a-dozen papers that were submitted and each time he asked me what I would do. After that, I just did them without bothering him.

Over the next 2.5 years, I think Fraser got involved on a handful of occasions, typically when there was the odd messy appeal. That was my first experience working in journals — and it was kinda fun. There was no formal training for the job — but I think it helped that during my PhD and postdoc I’d written 50 or so papers and read a lot of literature. After that, I made the leap back across the Atlantic to Nature Nanotechnology as an Associate (and then Senior) Editor. Just over two years later, I started the ball rolling on Nature Chemistry.

How does chemistry inform my work?

Although we don’t really assess manuscripts in a technical sense — that’s the job of the referees — it is very helpful in reading and evaluating a manuscript if we have some level of understanding when it comes to the actual science. You have an idea of whether what is being claimed is significant and whether any claimed implications of the work are outlandish or not. The vast majority of Nature journal editors have a PhD (and many have postdoc experience too). And academic background and expertise are usually major factors in making a job offer to potential candidates. Unlike some publishers, we look for particular types of chemistry expertise and then we make use of that on the job. Someone with a physical chemistry background will evaluate physical chemistry manuscripts, an organic chemist will look at organic chemistry manuscripts and so on…

A working knowledge of chemistry also comes in handy when going to conferences and visiting labs. If you can talk with a researcher about their chemistry without sounding like an idiot, then it obviously helps — and can sometimes encourage submissions. Nobody likes having their manuscript rejected, but if it’s done by someone who seems to know what they’re talking about when it comes to the science, that can reassure the author that the editor at least understands the work they are evaluating. (Of course, that doesn’t apply to everyone — some don’t deal well with rejection, no matter the background of the editor).

We also need to know about chemistry when we write for the journal — we need to identify interesting topics to cover in research highlights and we need to be able to express technical ideas quite simply for a general chemistry audience. Take stereochemistry, for example, which is one of my favourite topics. It is one of the hardest things to write about clearly for a general audience — especially if you don’t have pictures to help illustrate your words, which is sometimes the case.

A unique, interesting, or funny anecdote about my career

When we were setting up Nature Chemistry, we needed a banner graphic for the top of our website. You can still see it now — it’s the purple periodic-table fragment at the top of pages like this one. There I was, planning to just do this myself, but one thing you soon learn about going from academia to the real world, is that many things ARE NOT YOUR JOB. We have graphic designers to do this sort of stuff. So, I asked our designer to make a nice slanted periodic table with funky lighting effects. I even provided a sketch. What I got was a lovely and quite stunning periodic table. But it was based on some sort of stock image that had made-up elements in it (and even the real ones were in the wrong order!). I then had to explain why that might be a problem… it took 3 or 4 more iterations before we got to the banner image that is there now… Sometimes the subtleties of chemistry are very easily lost on non-chemists.

After that, we saw the final of the men’s doubles, followed by the semi-final of the women’s doubles (with the Williams sisters triumphant once again). Then, on the last day of the Olympics, we headed off to the Olympic park to see some batshit-crazy people flinging themselves around an indoor court trying to injure one another handball.

When we were applying for Olympic tickets, handball wasn’t at the top of the list, in fact, it wasn’t on my list. But as my last chance to see an event in the Olympic park, when a friend asked if we wanted last-minute tickets to the bronze-medal match in the men’s handball (between Hungary and Croatia), I said yes. Before the game, the fairly lame efforts of the chap wearing the jean shorts/jacket/shirt/tie combo to get the crowd excited didn’t do much, but the music did the trick. A theme that continued in the game.

I’m not going to try and describe the rules of handball, in fact, I’m still not convinced there are all that many, even though they ran through them before the game began. If you want to know more, the Wikipedia page is here, but it does little justice to what actually happens in one of these games — the article does include the phrase ‘player sandwich’, but unfortunately it’s nowhere near as exciting as it sounds… Anyway, one of the best bits about the matches at the Olympics was the music (I don’t know if this is normal).

When a player is awarded a 7-meter throw (think penalty — or, for my US readers, penalty kick), ‘Under Pressure’ is pumped out of the auditorium’s speakers — brilliant. When a player gets a 2-minute suspension, you hear ‘Sit Down’ by James. When a player gets wiped out and doesn’t get up after hitting the floor, they even have music for this — Clocks, by Coldplay… “…the lights go out…”. When they finally get up (assuming they are not carried off on a stretcher), we hear Tubthumping, by Chumbawumba… “…I get knocked down, but I get up again…”. If only the Premier League did this!

Anyway, here’s one of the less blurry photos of the action… this breakaway resulted in a goal.

And to finish off, here are a couple of photos from around the park. Here is The Orbit, it’s quite photogenic.

And a much better photo than the ones I took of The Orbit and the stadium — taken by my lovely wife on an earlier trip to the park to see a game of handball during the heats (she’s a bit of a handball nut to be fair…).

So, it’s all over now. There wasn’t any travel chaos during my commute to work. TeamGB were amazing. The opening ceremony was utterly awesome, and I’ve not seen the closing ceremony yet, but it’s waiting for me, a quiet evening, and a nice glass of red. I kinda miss the Olympics.

 
And apologies for not blogging for a very looooooooong time… normal service not quite ready to resume, but this is a start!