My smarty-pants daughter got accepted to UMM…she’s going to be starting at the university at the way too young age of 16 15^*.

^*She insists she’ll only be 15, which is technically true…but her sixteenth birthday will fall in the first week of classes.

Take a look at the guest list at next January’s ConFusion—there I am! It’s cool that they also mention Chris Clarke’s pulpy turn (maybe they should have invited Chris to attend). This is going to be great fun!

Not so fun is the way I spent my day: grading. I can at least say that one class is completely done, and my physiology students can now look their grades up, if they want to. I’ll be putting in another long day tomorrow to wrap up the second class.

We’re still on the road here—we’ve ducked into a place in Eau Claire for dinner, and it has free Wi-Fi!—and while sucking in the pile of email waiting for me, I see that our prom photos have arrived. Here’s me and Mary at the Geek Prom.

Yeah, she does look better than the octopus woman from yesterday, even with the deficiency of limbs.

You know you’ve got an interesting blog post when one of your sentences begins, “Two of my favourite corpses…” It’s got cute pictures of dead things, too.

My favorites were actually collections rather than individuals. One set was in a barn loft owned by my aunt and uncle; apparently, the previous owner of their ranch had gone nuts and slaughtered all of his chickens before committing suicide himself. The dead birds had just been left there (the dead rancher had been carted away; my cousins and I had grisly speculations about what he’d look like if he’d been left there, too), and their bodies had mummified in the dry Eastern Washington climate. You could track the course of the massacre by examining their sad little bodies.

Another was near an abandoned barn near our home in Western Washington. Every fall, hunters and skeet shooters would gather there, and we’d hear shotguns going off all the time. We wouldn’t go near the place in the fall—those guys were crazy, drunk, and reckless. In the spring, though, we’d walk the fields around the barn and survey the skeletal remains of the carnage. Among the broken skeet (and a lot of fully intact discs), we’d find the bones of seagulls and killdeer and sparrows and once even an owl—anything that flew by was a target.

Those experiences did leave me with a rather low impression of Men With Guns.

I mowed my lawn today.

It’s the first time this year in what will be the coming weekly ritual. I hate it. Every time, I fantasize about never mowing again…let’s rip out this ghastly generic middle-class turf and sow it with wildflowers and the Big Bluestem. This should be prairie, dang it, and it should be flourishing with 8-foot tall grasses. Let it all come back and surround my house with a grassy sea, and bring back the bison to crop it down now and then. We already have a municipal schedule for my part of town—garbage pick up on Monday and Thursday morning, recycling pick up the first Thursday of every month, tornado siren testing the first Wednesday of the month—let’s add another one: bison herd foraging every other Tuesday. We also need a Morris wolf pack (they’d take care of the feral cat problem, and the deer would be put in their place), and I don’t think I’d mind the rabbits digging their warrens in my yard if they were part of a more interesting ecosystem.

No more lawnmowers. No more Roundup (not that I ever use it now), and no more fretting about what the neighbors will think if we don’t go out and shred grass now and then.

Eh, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

I just noticed…I got a favorable link from Susie Bright!

Now I’m going to be insufferably full of myself for a while.

The Drinking Liberally event was packed. I don’t know how many people were there, but I think it was somewhere within a few orders of magnitude of a gazillion. Kos speechified briefly, exhorted us to buy his book because every copy sold makes a conservative cry, and then answered questions from the crowd.

Dr B and The Connoisseur did show up fashionably late, and didn’t even make it in the door before she was intercepted by her fans.

We all had many pleasant conversations, and I think there may be a few new converts to the Drinking Liberally phenomenon. I also learned something very important, and I revealed a sad ignorance on my part: I had forgotten the Molluscs sketch, but Dave Puskala reminded me. How could I? It must have been a repressed memory, because there it is, a complete outline of Pharyngula’s strategy for success, only it’s funny.

Oh, and the drive home was spectacular. There were severe thunderstorms across the middle of the state, and as I was driving it was like fireworks going off before my windshield. And best of all, when I reached them it was nothing but a narrow storm band, and I drove maybe 5 minutes through fierce driving rain and pounding hail before breaking through to the calmness on the other side.

---

The PowerLiberal has more, and Chuck has video (it’s cute how the Wege gets in two words before the camera dies).

… and that one big stack of grades is done. I’m going to Drinking Liberally! I might be a little red-eyed and late, but I need this.

---

I’m here…so is Kos. It’s a mob scene, but there’s still room for more, so come on down.

We’re still waiting on the good Dr B. She must be planning on making an entrance.