Those of you who've known me for some time will know of my fear and loathing of the second day of the working week. For those that haven't a clue what I'm on about, it all stems back to my early PhD days in Leeds where I once overheard two of my more senior lab mates in the McGowan group pantheon having a conversation which ended with the exchange "oh, it's Tuesday, I wouldn't bother, it'll go wrong".
This wisdom apparently came from the lab of a very distinguished research group in organometallic chemistry next door where apparently several major accidents/fires happened on said day. When that group left for Naaaaarwich, one of them joined us as a postdoctoral fellow. Almost straight away, we started having bad days on Tuesdays. As scientists, we weren't/aren't supposed to be superstitious, but I can confess to occasionally putting off large reactions and potentially tricky manipulations. This followed me to both London and Warwick. I do believe my first attempt at making the ketone of doom at the latter ended up with a very loud outburst for trying to do said reaction on the day-that-doth-not-speak-its-name, turning three days of laborious effort into viscous black crud.
So I have been puzzled to note that of late, here in Calgary, for some odd reason that Tuesdays are suddenly turning into good days. Capped today by several odd occurrences: 1) a win for BCFC at the football, turning a 0-2 deficit into a win for the second time in about a month, something I have only seen in the flesh once in nearly 20 years of watching; 2) an easy win for the Flames; 3) finally locating a peak in my carbon NMR that I have been trying to find for weeks...finally having managed to bag an overnight spot on a spectrometer (this is like trying to nail jelly to a wall), 30,000 scans managed to find it. Hussar!
Hockey pool watch: +5 tonight, all from the Flames-Kings game. Up to the vertiginious heights of 6th
This wisdom apparently came from the lab of a very distinguished research group in organometallic chemistry next door where apparently several major accidents/fires happened on said day. When that group left for Naaaaarwich, one of them joined us as a postdoctoral fellow. Almost straight away, we started having bad days on Tuesdays. As scientists, we weren't/aren't supposed to be superstitious, but I can confess to occasionally putting off large reactions and potentially tricky manipulations. This followed me to both London and Warwick. I do believe my first attempt at making the ketone of doom at the latter ended up with a very loud outburst for trying to do said reaction on the day-that-doth-not-speak-its-name, turning three days of laborious effort into viscous black crud.
So I have been puzzled to note that of late, here in Calgary, for some odd reason that Tuesdays are suddenly turning into good days. Capped today by several odd occurrences: 1) a win for BCFC at the football, turning a 0-2 deficit into a win for the second time in about a month, something I have only seen in the flesh once in nearly 20 years of watching; 2) an easy win for the Flames; 3) finally locating a peak in my carbon NMR that I have been trying to find for weeks...finally having managed to bag an overnight spot on a spectrometer (this is like trying to nail jelly to a wall), 30,000 scans managed to find it. Hussar!
Hockey pool watch: +5 tonight, all from the Flames-Kings game. Up to the vertiginious heights of 6th
2 comments:
We are not talking about Tuesday nights game. Weds night however... :-)
I wondered whether you were keen to avoid the score from a watching-later-on-tape point of view so didn't go any further.
I saw Wednesdays game, they were much better :-) Oilers suck!
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