I had bad news yesterday, with my granddaughter sick and canceling her birthday party, and my mother seriously ill in the hospital. Today, it’s a different story:
- Iliana is fine, COVID tests came back negative, the birthday party is back on!
-
My mother was getting feisty, threatening to call a cab to take her home from the hospital, so obviously she’s feeling much better.
I guess Friday the 13th isn’t so awful, after all.
My students may disagree, since I’m spending the morning cheerfully polishing up an exam they’ll be working on over Fall Break.
Good to hear! Except for your students, but then, they knew what they were signing up for.
Good.
In our institution, we try to avoid giving students extra work over Fall Break — the goal of the time off is to recharge one’s mental batteries, not exhaust them further. Is UMM different?
Hooray!
Welcomed news, PZ. Don’t eat too much cake at the BD party.
Wonderful news! 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽🥂
Double yay!
Going off-topic, but if this is “the opposite of bad news” this tidbit is relevant.
“Officially extinct fish is alive and well, according to DNA”
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-extinct-fish-alive-dna-analyses.html
So far anyhow, Friday 13th has been lucky or at least gone well for the launch of the Psyche spacecraft misison to the eponymous metal asteroid. A lot of ecstatic rocket scientists who have spent years of their lives working to make this happen right now :
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/13/world/psyche-metal-asteroid-nasa-launch-scn/index.html
FWIW the 13th has been good for my parents & family too.
I second all the hoorays! (BTW, 4-, 5-year olds are amazing creatures.)
I was wondering just now when is the next Friday the Thirteenth that is the Thirteenth Friday of the year.
Friday the 13th is always a good day for military and federal employees paid twice a month (there are some federal employees paid biweekly), because if it’s Friday the 13th, it will also be Sunday the 15th… meaning that payday comes two days early on Friday the 13th.
Yesterday the bearing on my car went out and I hate to take it in a week before my vacation to Madison. I was initially told that they might not be able to get to the car until Monday at the earliest, This morning, I just got a call from the shop telling me that they can get to it in this weekend.
That’s money I’d rather not have to spend, but the estimate was A LOT less than what I feared it was going to be and at least I don’t need to sweat my transportation needs.
Glad to hear your mother is apparently getting better and that Illiana can get her party.
Several years ago on Friday the 13th at my old school, I walked under a ladder while opening an umbrella and spilling salt. The next day at yoga class, the fuel pump in my wife’s car failed. True story. Also, no one I knew had a heart attack that day.
13 is the 7th odd number (1,3,5,7,9,11,13), so I count 13 as odd luck.
Kool & The Gang- Celebration
(A lot of cool music from the late 70s and early 80s)
https://youtu.be/3GwjfUFyY6M
Umeå Wrestling Battle started today, with a huge number of contestants, including 150 from Finland – is this good, bad or neutral luck? They haven’t broken anything so far.
I tempted fate today on Friday the 13th by bicycling to Three Mile Island. Their accident was in 1979 but the plant’s nuclear power only fully ceased operating in 2019, and the site won’t be fully decommissioned until 2079.
imback @ 18, well, most of TMI-2 was scrapped out to Idaho.
I do kind of miss the coolant plume, made for a convenient landmark for navigating the area.
Should’ve went out yesterday, probably would’ve lowered how many allergy attacks I ended up having yesterday and last night. Found the trigger, a loaf of rye bread turned moldy and some molds really do a number on me. Irritating, as I only had that loaf for a week. Oh well, I can make another loaf when I want one and I don’t feel like going out in the rain today.
And I still have a loaf of wheat bread, Grissom’s brand has an acceptable texture and flavor.
My mother was born on Friday, 8/13/1920. She was well indoctrinated in all kinds of superstitions growing up, and was convinced that the various hardships of her life (and she did have a difficult life, especially with a toxic origin family and a long history of chronic illness) were somehow linked with the misfortune of her birthdate. Certainly some early ones were linked with the misfortune of her birth year, because she just preceded the Great Depression and her rural farm family suffered from food and general financial insecurity for most of her growing years. Those kinds of pressures aggravate family toxicity considerably. Medicine didn’t have the knowledge base to treat her chronic conditions well during most of her life, either. But it must have made it even more difficult to have felt that she was jinxed by being born on Friday the 13th.