I don’t like that title sentence, not because all we do is talk about the weather, because that’s quite true, but because of the use of “anymore” at the end of it. I have heard people speak this way, and it always annoys me and wants me to rewind the Tape of Life and get them to say the sentence correctly.
Sadly, there is no rewind button, otherwise I might have corrected a few other things.
Last weekend we got wacked by snow, and even though it’s been four days since it all fell, it wasn’t the first or the last storm of the season, and today it was supposed to snow and rain and that just makes your skin crawl, you know? There might be more snow. Or if it rains, then the eight foot (2.4384m) snowbanks at the end of the driveways might slither off down the storm drains….if the storm drains aren’t covered by eight foot snowbanks. If they are then we’ll just have a nice flood and comment that maybe we should grab the children on their way by. Good thing they’re strong swimmers.
It’s March Break and today I’m home with the Darlings. Hub has been home with them the rest of the week, but today he’s got a course in project management to take, so I’m home instead. Just as well because work is beginning to make my head explode. I realize that I said that I would do a lot of the things that people normally don’t want to do, but I couldn’t have predicted the mind-numbing boredom that awaited me. Let’s just say that by about 3:00 every afternoon I start to pray that the clocks stop their evil tricks and start to move a little more quickly, lest I end up face-planted on the keyboard, snoring. Naturally I would wake up with the alphabet in qwerty all imprinted on my pretty face and then I’d have to stop all the raging nerds I work (and live) with from plugging my head into their computers because really, wouldn’t it be so totally cool to have a human keyboard? Really? While this might make for more exciting times in my temporary job, I’d be happier with maybe getting to puzzle out some data once in a while, or hey, maybe it would be good if I just got to actually collect some data. Or maybe if I was allowed to finish a calibration, and figure out why it went the way it did without having some NMR jockster hang over me and say, “Oh, use the Magic Shim file that D- wrote, because it always works for him,” even though he knows full well it doesn’t. And if I show up in the X-ray lab one more time and get told, “The structure is finished, you just have to clean up the disorder and the solvent and the……..” in other words, the crap part. I don’t get to tell the student/prof what the structure is because they already know that. I get to make it pretty and number the atoms and deconvolute the messy bits. While this is important, it isn’t the part of the story that gets the pat on the back.
Here, look at Katie in the snow. It's a nice diversion.
On the other hand, yesterday I did have an interesting conversation about a Pd(0)-catalyzed reaction that resulted in a Zwitterionic ligand. That was cool.
Okay, you see that? That was the coolest part of the last two weeks. Now I know that Hub reads this thing and that he’s sitting there thinking of things for me to do where I don’t have to interact with/be told what to do by the other boys in the lab. I don’t mind the other boys, and they don’t mind me. We get along fine, as long as they get to do their little things, and I get to do…..well, whatever it is that girls do. Maybe instead of doing anything that has to do with spectrometers tomorrow I can write a manual instead, and hang out in the X-ray lab because that boss is off to get some synchrotron beamtime and I can pretend I run the place, which mostly means that I get to tell everyone who comes in there that no, J- isn’t here and he won’t be here.
I know that I’m blaming work for the ennui. If I figure out the real problem I’ll let you know. Or maybe these guys know what's bugging me:
In an interesting twist of fate, the following is the Dictionary.com word of the day:
rodomontade \rod-uh-muhn-TADE; roh-duh-; -TAHD\, noun: Vain boasting; empty bluster; pretentious, bragging speech; rant.
No comments:
Post a Comment