Wow. I think I'll take my pig in bacon form since I don't have a big sweet tooth. Bet DH would love it.

Scrappy, condolences and peace to your family.

Sparky, that is awesome news on both the nanny front and the car-loan from M&D. I felt like trying to get all our stuff together in that last month was craxy overwhelming with an extra helping of omg-why-isn't-this-over-yet. It doesn't all have to be perfect - but the nanny news is very nice. As is having the backup plan.

d, I am going to try to call today.

There are wee hailstones falling outside my office window.

Babyfras has the hiccups.

That's all I got this a.m.

I am irrationally irritated about a sign this morning. I made a sign for our new fridge that said, "Please remove your items from refrigerator every day.Items still remaining in refrigerator on Fridays at 4:30pm will be removed and thrown away." In the past, people (including me) have been known to leave crap in the fridge until it growing and walking on its own. This (almost) same sign was on the fridge at the old office. I used a nice font, I mounted it on nice colored paper, and put it on the fridge with my boss' permission.

Apparantly, between 3:30 and 5:00 last night she decided she didn't like it and took it down. Fine. Her perogative being the boss and all. She's really picky about these things. She didn't see the language before I put it up. I guess I just didn't think that there would be that much to be picky about a fridge sign. But, as I said, she is really picky about odd things and I get that.

But still? Irritated.

I have to recommend Dahlia Litwick's Supreme Court Dispatch on yesterday's oral argument for the strip-search case [link]

But Breyer just isn't letting go. "In my experience when I was 8 or 10 or 12 years old, you know, we did take our clothes off once a day, we changed for gym, OK? And in my experience, too, people did sometimes stick things in my underwear."

::laughs and laffs and laughs and laffs::

That settles it. I swear, if I ever have kids, I'm home-schooling. No way in hell should a *school* be allowed to conduct strip searches on kids. No fucking way. If the kid's crime is sufficiently serious that a strip search needs to be conducted, obviously it needs to be handed over to law enforcement, who have appropriate procedures in place (and can be sued for wrongful arrest if the case is flimsy and they were being stupid).

I swear that Dahlia's humor is the only thing that gets me through some of the opinions coming out of the Court. I know that I am not alone.

It's parents, I think, who will have to band together and effectively overrule the Court here and push to create policies in the school districts that dictate what happens to their children and when, instead of leaving those decisions in the hands of administrators.

That settles it. I swear, if I ever have kids, I'm home-schooling.

Sure, because the best solution to fixing the problems with our public school system is for all the parents with other options to pull their kids out of it.

t /kneejerk

Math people, I have a statistics/averages type question that's too much for my addled brain. Say you have a contest with five finalists and the method of scoring the finalists is assigning a simple 1-5 ranking.

Nine judges give a contestant a #1 ranking, the other three give a #5. How do I go about figuring out the average for that contestant? I'm probably making this more complicated than it needs to be in my head.

because the best solution to fixing the problems with our public school system is for all the parents with other options to pull their kids out of it

In other arenas, that would be leverage. Shame that with stakes so damned high it's not.