soxhlet?

This post (in a much more interesting blog than mine) reminded me a little of my past summer. A soxhlet extractor, for the uninitiated, looks like this:

(From Ohio University, Chillicothe.)
It's a very useful little piece of glassware when you're extracting petroleum hydrocarbons from the soil around an underground storage tank. It's also entertainment. Watching the siphon arm fill up and drain over and over again is probably the best way to spend a day in an environmental lab when you have no samples coming in. Added bonus: If you keep the condenser hooked up for long enough, the algae turns it a beautiful bright green color. (And we all like pretty colors, right? That's why we're chemists.)