Quit while your ahead mate, because you are damn right, it won't last.
I just personally don't like gambling, it doesn't have attraction to me unless I know the odds are rigged in my favour. Because they are rigged one way or the other, so unless its for me, I'm not going to do it.
I still laugh at my (now dead) mother being quite so dumb as to call me out as being a competent botanist as a little kid. Just because I was little, entering primary school, doesn't mean shit when you throw an autie into the equation. Came off nicely ahead after that. But thats just what I mean, the odds were rigged, and I knew it. Because I knew my own competency of course, and she was daft enough not to even impose a consequence if I DID lose the bet. Win win, or at least win and can't lose anything but a reputation. Not that I wanted to be thought of as an idiot, but I knew full well that wasn't gonna happen. Quite amusing to see her have to fork over what to a little kid with otherwise about enough income a week for a mars bar, plus any money found on the street, was a nice chunk of cash that meant chemical goodies
Although I seem to remember getting quite a few funny looks in garden center/DIY stores as a little kid walking up to the cashier with bottles of ammonia, 98% sulfuric acid, bottles of hydrochloric acid and tubs of caustic soda. They had to have wondered what the FUCK a pre-teen wanted with those. I'm surprised they actually sold me stuff like that. But, no harm done of course.
I've often looked back to when I was that age, and considering I'm autie, thought that I must have quite literally been born to be a chemist. It was just there from the start, I reckon, waiting for the resources to become available in a monetary sense. Shit, what NT kid would be willing to spend hours picking flowers and selling them door to door, playing on the 'aww, ain't that cute, little kid is a entrepreneur' factor being on my side due to my age, and to go slugging truck batteries on his shoulder, after draining the sulfuric acid for purification of lead salts and recycling, filling them back up with concrete and gravel, and buggering off into abandoned buildings to strip lead and copper from the plumbing and wiring and roofing.
I was definitely a weird kid alright. Preteen flower-salesman moonlighting as a scrap metal recycler (and admittedly, not playing the scrap yards straight. The copper pipes were always full of soil, rocks, bits of scrap steel, anything that could be stuffed in there and hammered shut, or lead 'blocks', which were just thick sheets, cast with a blowtorch around more scrap steel and rocks. Admittedly I was a bit of a shit to the scrap yards, but then again, I did have to make as much money as possible on every last bit of copper or lead I could scavenge. It was more or less my only source of income, that and the selling flowers door to door off the back of my bike.
The lab had to have something to grow from though, glassware and chemicals don't grow on trees. Well some interesting chemicals sure do come out of them, given the right persuasion, but sadly not big carboys of solvents. Things even in my childhood days were a lot less tight, regulation-wise, and despite the whole 'kids and solvents' stuff I didn't get ID'ed, I was probably quite a familiar customer in the DIY and hardware stores, after a while, and while some kids might sniff solvents, I don't think there can be many that would buy 50 quid worth of assorted acids, bases and oxidizers, sulfur and paint strippers just to justify a bottle of acetone or isopropyl alcohol. And of course, no intention of huffing the stuff. EW! what a revolting thought. Ether..thats a bit different. Ether is perfectly legitimate for recreational use, and actually, I prefer drinking ether to drinking alcohol. Was quite popular, ether drinking, apparently, during prohibition times, in poland, ireland and a few other places.
And it smells so damn good too. I can't work with ether in the lab without thinking 'that smells tasty'
