Smelting...

After yesterday's perfect frost, today dawned foggy and damp and then progressed to continuous heavy rain. Give me cold weather any day, so much more enervating! Chris and I headed into town to do some Christmas shopping, something neither of us relish. However, we were moderately successful and managed to escape before the crowds had built up. The most interesting part of our visit was a quick stroll round a historical market being held in the Cathedral precincts. I nearly bought Alex a battle-ready dagger (designed for historical re-enactments) but the price was a bit steep...

After some cleaning and tidying, it was time for the last chemistry session before the Christmas break. Our topic of study was the reactivity series. Earlier in the week our new camping gas bunsen burner had arrived, and we used this to smelt our own copper using a mix of copper oxide and charcoal. The intense heat almost melted the testube, which had to be smashed to extract the tiny amount of metal we produced. But it was still very exciting to see the black powder converted into this reddish-brown metal.

I uploaded yesterday's image of a female reed bunting eating nettle seeds this morning, and have now added other images from yesterday into the Blipfolio folder titled 'Frosty Day'.