Roto-Vap Woes and Amazing Colors

The roto-vaps in the undergraduate lab suck. No, wait. They don't suck. That is, their vacuum simply is non existent. That means if you have a lot of solvent to get rid of, expect to take several hours. unless you're ingenious like me and ice the mofo down.

The multi-colored bowls on the side are acting as awesome molding for the ice.

But when push came to shove, I just went to another lab that had a REAL vacuum pump for their roto-vaps and stayed there. I even had a little friend while I did several filtrations to remove the DCU from the oil. [1] S/he ran several laps around the lip of the water bath before disappearing.
So with as much of the DCU filltered out as I am willing to fight for, onward to step two.
Thus, for the past two hours I have been adding the obtained oil from the first reaction into a D-Lysine and sodium bicarbonate solution in a THF:water mixture. Now, we have some pretty colors. Before adding dropwise:

Notice the cloudiness. Now, add some oil in a THF solution (~140 ppm oil):

The cloudiness is gone. Sort of. It's definitely a lot less cloudy. Once all the oil has been added, you get this: [2]

Let this stir for about two hours and then bring the pH down to 2 by adding 0.5 M HCl dropwise to the reaction vessel. That's my next step before synthesis class begins at 7:30am. Woohoo!

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[1] The best technique to remove the greatest quantity was to wait a couple of hours to allow the DCU to crystallize and crash to the bottom of the flask. Apparently DCU makes pretty spindly white crystals when allowed to.
[2] Sorry for the blurry images. My brother was the photography major, so all the steady handedness I could have inherited went to him.