I just felt like showing off a little here tonight. These are the before and after pictures:

Upon work-up, many grams of a viscous oil were obtained, contaning a mixture of diastereomers (whose exact composition I cannot go into). My God, did I struggle to get the one isomer I so highly desired out of this soup. Chromatography was a nightmare and I had been struggling so hard for such a long time with this one. Suddenly, lo and behold, I stumbled upon a recrystallization method that actually worked. Not only did I get white crystals, a wet dream itself for many among our kind, but the single diastereomer that precipitated out was – once in a lifetime – the desired one. With the correct absolute stereochemistry in place. The first crop gave 70% yield of perfectly pure material. This was a good day, indeed.