It snows here.

Ellesiouville is in the Midwest. You know, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain and all that? So in January and February, most of us, whether we like it or not, expect some snow.

For the Department of Transportation, the Ellesiouville City Schools, LSU and most Ellesiouville drivers, the yearly inundation of snow always comes as an unwelcome surprise. What is this "snow" you speak of? White stuff from the sky? Surely we have no need of these big, smelly plow things, nor salt! Well, okay, maybe one for emergencies, and we'll buy enough salt for the mayor's driveway.

The city schools are canceled when snow accumulation reaches approximately three inches -- this, according to the Ellesiouville sheriff, constitutes a "snow emergency."^* A snow emergency, which we are facing this evening, gives all the KCOW meteorologists a single, continuous orgasm. The station broadcasts all weather all the time, complete with some poor bastard with a microphone under an overpass. "The sky is falling!" they scream, smiling mindlessly. "Save the women and children! Make sure you have enough toilet paper!"

(About the toilet paper... It's the first thing to disappear from the Safeway when there's snow in the forecast. What do folks do with all that toilet paper? Is there some survival benefit to owning large quantities of toilet paper? Do people realize that they don't actually need toilet paper, and that more advanced civilizations don't even use it? (Or not nearly as much of it, anyway.) When next I have a few $10K to spare, I hope to rearrange my life so that I never need to use toilet paper again.)

One good thing about Ellesiouville is that the powers that be wait to start canceling classes and closing down essential services until the snow actually falls. Back south of the Mason-Dixon line, in the large East coast city that is home to ILU, the snow fell reliably in January and February and we could always count on a good quarter-inch of accumulation. Every public and private concern closed and canceled when snow was merely forecast. This was good for a laugh when the snow failed to appear on schedule.

LSU, unfortunately, shuts down almost as frequently as ILU did. So I'm almost 100% certain that I will spend tomorrow entertaining a young child^** rather than giving my statistics students the exam review they so desperately need.

^*I can't help reminiscing... am I the only one to remember the "Blizzard of '77"? My school was out for two solid weeks. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, and it took that long for the plows to come through. After they came down our county road a few times, the snow was piled in the roadside ditch and up approximately 8' over the level of the road. The chicken house was completely buried in drifts and we tunneled through them from the house to feed and water the poor birds. A stranded motorist, hiking through the drifts in his attempt to get home after going out for groceries, slept in the basement for a few days until he felt it was safe to start walking again. Now that was a snow emergency.

^**Yep, Ellesiouville schools just closed for tomorrow.

I'm a bad mommy and a bad feminist.

We went shopping over the weekend at the Mall o' Middle America. (Trust me, there is nothing wrong with the economy, at least here. There was a line of tweeners at the Claire's Boutique cash register that went all the way out the door and into the mall proper.) Now is when all the winter clothes go on sale, so I went into The Children's Place and picked up a stack of tiny blue jeans for 50% off.

Last year the Angry Kid was all about pink frilly dresses. I'm over the moon that now she is more interested in blue jeans. She wants the jeans to have sparkles and pink embroidery, but this is a compromise I can handle.

This morning I helped her put on a pair of her new jeans. They fit perfectly. (My kid wears a size 4/5 vertically and a size 3 horizontally, so fit is always an issue.) I told her how nice they looked on her, and she started to look concerned. She had noticed, but I had not, that the jeans had no sparkles and no surplus of pink embroidery. "These are boys' pants!" she wailed.

Last year I would have said that there's no such thing as boys' pants and girls' pants, but we're into the kindergarten/little girl clique thing now and I know better than to waste my time on gender stereotyping arguments at 6:30 a.m.. Instead I said, "No, they're girls' pants, I promise."

"How can you tell?" She demanded proof.

"See?" I said, "There are little hearts embroidered on the back pockets." That worked. We finished the morning routine and I left for work.

At my desk, thirty minutes later, I got a call from the Angry Baker. "Talk to her," he said. A little voice came over the phone. "Mommy," she whispered, "Are these boys' pants?"

"No, honey," I responded. "Remember, they have little hearts on the back pockets." Struck by inspiration, I lied, "They're Hannah Montana pants!"

Now she's thrilled. And I feel unclean.

Vote for change.

Via Pharygula, I learned of the Citizen's Briefing Book, where you can sign up and vote to prioritize different ideas posted by us, the unwashed masses. I was looking for the "Dump the ISS into the Pacific" idea so that I could vote for it, and serendipitously found this one.

Go. Vote. Because, "THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE FACING MANKIND TODAY IS THE DISCLOSURE OF OUR CONTACT WITH INTELLIGENT SPECIES FROM OTHER WORLDS." Really.

The curious thing about the folks who voted for this idea is that, to a one, they believe that the extraterrestrials (who have been buzzing our back roads, mutilating our cattle, and who gave us the microchip) have benign intent and hold the secrets to a clean, Utopian society -- secrets they are eager to share.

While I, I welcome our new insect overlords.

In which I confront overweening hubris.

I have a disruptive student in my ESP and Aliens class. She sits right in front and, I'm guessing, has deluded herself into thinking that my lectures are a private conversation between me and her. After I try to make some point (e.g., objective reality is more fun than magical thinking), she will go off into a stream-of-consciousness monologue describing her personal views and experiences, and this monologue rarely touches on class material. It frequently begins with the statement, "I could not disagree with you more." When I call on other students to provide their comments or criticisms of the topic, students who have politely raised their hands to indicate they have something to contribute, she talks over them.

This sort of behavior is fairly common in this class, which tends to attract students who believe that their personal experiences with the weird are more important than anything science might have to say about it. In the social sciences especially there are students who do not see the need for learning empirical facts, and who believe instead that the answers to social science questions can be intuited with common sense. While I admit in some cases this may be true, there are many questions that have surprising answers that can only be understood by examining the data; much of the material in ESP and Aliens is of this sort.

So I'm okay when students challenge my materialistic views or provide their personal experiences as counterexamples to the points I'm trying to make. I would like, however, for such challenges to be made respectfully and to incorporate class material (i.e., advance the discussion somehow). But this student? She is not registered in the course. She has not done the readings because she doesn't have to. She has classes in the same lecture hall before and after my class, and she's just keeping her seat warm. Tomorrow I kick her ass into the hall.

Update: She wasn't there today. She made a comment on Tuesday that I slammed her for, and she left the lecture hall shortly after that. Maybe she's done with me and won't come back.

My kid the genius.

I picked the Kid up from school a while back and drove home. We went through our usual evening routine, which culminates in bath and stories in bed.

So I was lying down with a Frannie K. Stein propped on my chest when the Kid sat up on her knees and said, "Mommy! Look!" I looked, and looked, at her torso, her hands, and up into her face, which hovered over me. She was wearing a wicked smile, so I knew I was supposed to look for something gross or inappropriate, but damned if I could see anything out of the ordinary.

"Mommy, look!" She pointed at her nose. It looked like a fine little nose to me, but I studied it carefully. Then I saw that the inside of her right nostril looked shiny and white, while the inside of her left nostril looked pink and snotty.

"What the heck?" I reached up and pinched her left nostril closed. "Blow!" She took a deep breath and blew, and a large, slimy navy bean shot out of her nose with the force of a small-caliber bullet and nearly blinded me. Oh, how she laughed and laughed. She held her little belly and laughed until tears streamed down her face.

Apparently her class had done some sort of project requiring the gluing of navy beans earlier in the day, and she had taken the opportunity to stuff the biggest bean she could find up her nose. Then she couldn't figure out how to get it out again. Having a giant bean up her nose for 10 hours didn't seem to bother her in the least -- no, it was pure entertainment! Firing it into my eye at the end was a totally unexpected bonus.