Pool-Time and a Chemistry Lesson

Timo and I were invited to stay at our friends' place for about a week. Seeing their home in summer was lovely. I spent large portions of the day in their pool — swimming, snorkelling (yes, you read that right), and generally chilling.

Now’s the time for a short chemistry lesson. Did you know that many pools contain copper ions (Cu²⁺), originating from copper-based algaecides, copper plumbing, or heat exchangers? Add chlorine to the mix, which is excellent at oxidising metals, and things get interesting.

But wait — there’s more.

Hair is made of keratin, rich in sulfur-containing amino acids as well as carboxyl and amine groups. These act as ligands, meaning they can bind metal ions.

We’re getting there. So close!

Bleached, damaged, or porous hair (I’m blaming the Aussie sun) is particularly attractive to metal ions. And now for the grand finale: once the copper ions attach to the hair, they form copper–protein coordination complexes — which is just a very fancy way of saying: my hair turned green.

(Writing this about a month later, I can confirm it’s still there — though thankfully more faded.)

We also flew our little drone over their house and the surrounding area, and only flew it into trees twice. Mea culpa for 50% of the crashes. The rotor blades are a little worse for wear… but it still flies. I wouldn’t push it, though.

During our days and nights at our friends' place, there was an abundance of animals to observe.
Apart from their cat Milo, the most entertaining was probably the mud-dauber wasp, which we watched build several nests out of — you guessed it — mud.

At night, we toured the garden and found a variety of spiders and toads. One particularly cool spider Timo spotted during the daytime was the dew-drop spider — a real beauty, with its silver, drop-shaped cone body.Read more