Light and Momentary

Submitted

I just sent off a draft of chapter one to my advisor. Lots more work to do, lots and lots and lots and lots, but it's a start.

Progress

Goal for the week: met.

Word count: 6586. That includes my bibliography, though. Hold on -- actual word count for chapter one: 5274.

I am going to tidy up my messy desk and go relax by folding a monster pile of laundry.

Ack!

I found out why my page count didn't increase like I thought it would: Google Documents ate part of what I was writing on Thursday!

Thankfully, the revision history feature allows you to go back through and restore missing pieces. Kind of a pain, but at least I didn't have to recreate it.

Back to work with me -- glad tomorrow is Sunday, when I will not even say the word "dissertation."

Ifs

...If I told God that I was content with a little bit of patience, would he stop sending me all these opportunities to become more patient?

...If I schedule my preliminary exam for the middle of my 39th week, what are the odds that I will deliver precipitously in the middle of it? (And would they pass me or make me reschedule?)

...If I were going to knit a soaker or two for this new little one (in my abundant free time, you know), what pattern should I use?

...If I have put in as many hours as I recall putting in today on my dissertation, why doesn't my page count look like it?

My first chapter is coming together. I'm enjoying it. It's a big job, though. My goal is to finish drafting the sections that explain my independent variables by Saturday evening, and then to draft the sections that explain my dependent variables over the following week. I'll still have gaps to fill in, but I'm planning to submit a draft of chapter one to my advisor by the 15th. Then I am planning to take a little nap before I start chapter two.

Can I really pull this off?

To write a dissertation in my field, you come up with an idea that will fill in a previously unmapped corner of the field, or that will add some useful detail to an existing map. You explain why it matters, and what previous cartographers have sketched out (chapter one, introduction). You write about where you'll be surveying and what you're going to measure (chapter two, methods).

Then you meet with a committee that tells you what's missing from your chapters, and what's inadequately supported in your arguments, and what measurement tools you really must employ that you somehow overlooked. When they agree that you can proceed with your study, you can call yourself a doctoral candidate. (Right now I'm just a doctoral student.)

Since I learned I was pregnant, my goal has been to get to candidacy before the baby comes. I just got an email from a developmental pediatrician whom I asked to be on my committee, saying he'd definitely be interested but he'd need to schedule the committee meeting now. He's already booking up in December.

So it's great that he's interested, but I'm wondering -- can I really be ready by the beginning of December? Am I confident enough to say, "Okay, then, let's set a date"? Also, I've been assuming all along that I would be late again, but what if the unexpected happens and baby is early?

I suppose we can set a date for the first week in December, when I won't quite be 38 weeks along. I will just push aside thoughts of the ice storms we've had in early December in recent years. Global warming, right? And you know, I haven't missed a deadline yet in this program, so I suppose it's reasonable to be sanguine about getting two chapters written by mid-November. I hope. Did I just jinx myself?

Unexpectedly

When I found out I was pregnant, I immediately thought I'd have to give up my fellowship for next year. Both Elwood and my advisor encouraged me not to be hasty, and in the weeks since then my advisor and I have talked a lot about how I could meet the requirements of the fellowship after this baby arrives without losing my mind. I have been gobsmacked (in a good way, a grateful kind of gobsmacked), by her flexibility and willingness to work with me.

But I have been a little worried about talking to the professor who administers the grant. She is very careful about following the rules, which specify that I am supposed to be acquiring teaching experience and putting in a specified number of lab hours, and she is also 15 or so years older than I am. She came up through the ranks when it was much harder to be a woman and an academic than it is today, when it was still acceptable to say things like, "You're pretty smart for a girl," and I think she remains ambivalent about the compromises required of her as a mother who was also a scientist.

This could, it seemed to me, nudge her in either of two directions. She might think that I need to pay my dues, and man up (woman up, it has to be, since this issue is far less painful for men than women), and teach next spring as originally planned. Or she might think that it's about time for the department to make it easier for women to be mothers and scientists at the same time.

I just didn't know. I knew it wouldn't be a disaster, since even if she recommended that I decline funding for this year, we'd figure it out financially. I was dreading the conversation anyway.

Then I got an utterly unexpected email from her. She was talking about rescheduling a meeting, and she said, "Now that I am experiencing life without day care, I realize again what a tremendous effort you make to work on your Ph.D. while raising your boys.  If you ever need to make special arrangements for your involvement on the grant, please know that we will be very willing to accommodate your needs, whatever they might be." She went on to suggest some specifics that could make my life much easier in the spring.

Last fall I kept meaning to post about this fellowship, which was simply providential. I am sitting here tonight and re-reading her email, feeling gobsmacked again. It seemed like a crazy idea to work on a PhD with four young children. I would have guessed it would be impossible with five. But these gifts keep falling into my path: a great fellowship, a fabulous advisor, this email out of the blue. I keep on working, and it keeps on working out. How cool is that?

Defense

This morning I dreamed that I opened my closet and found the perfect outfit to wear for my defense this afternoon. There was a cotton blazer hanging next to a sundress, fitted but with enough give to accommodate my burgeoning belly. "They're so colorful!" I thought in my dream. They certainly were. They were turquoise, lime green, and yellow plaid -- slightly different plaids for the two pieces. I am cracking up at the memory -- I hope the idea of this ensemble amuses you even a quarter as much as it does me.

For my defense I wore a white T-shirt with a knee-length khaki jumper. No one could have accused me of being overly colorful. I got more and more jumpy as 2:30 got closer. My prospectus meeting last summer was tough, two hours of unrelenting questions and then many, many revisions requested in my document.

This meeting was also two hours long, with plenty of tough questions, but it was less stressful -- whether because I was expecting it to be long and hard, or because I have the data in hand confirming my hypothesis, I can't say. (Data! Confirming my hypothesis! I still get a little rush when I say that.) I collected information from mothers on a variable that is a Hot Topic in the mommy wars, and I think for as long as I am talking about these findings to women, I'm going to be dealing with ancillary issues arising from their own experiences. Oh, well. That's part of why I'm choosing a different focus for my dissertation.

Anyway: I passed! I was holding back on feeling gleeful until I looked through their marked-up copies of my document, because I was not going to rejoice if I had a hundred hours' worth of revising to do. But I took myself to dinner at my favorite place in town and looked through their comments, and it seems like the revisions should be very manageable. I passed! Hurray!

Whiplash Warning

I've been thinking about posting all day, but I felt a little silly putting up a happy post after that hand-wringing post. I think periodically, "Maybe I should drop out of school. It is just too crazy to be a mother of four and a full-time doctoral student. With two part-time jobs." But the thing is, I love school. I'm good at school. If I could drop out of bill-paying, or laundry-folding, or or or -- then maybe I'd be on the right track. I had a great day on campus yesterday and my stress level is lower.

Today I have been working away (I started to say slogging but it honestly hasn't felt like a slog) on my results and discussion sections. I have a beautiful sentence to share with you:

The results of this test were significant, χ²(2, N = 46) = 6.3288, p = .042.

Which means I can assert in print that my idea, my baby idea that hatched almost ten years ago and has been waiting to flutter out of the nest, was right. It feels awfully good.

I might see some fluctuation in that p value as the last of my data trickles in, and I might end up back in marginally significant territory again. But I have several marginally significant results, from testing various ramifications of my hypothesis, and collectively they are enough to say, Hey, we should pay attention to this. I am hypothesizing a modest effect size and my sample is not enormous, so the consistent trend toward significance in my results is pretty intriguing. And I'm going to enjoy that .042 while it lasts.

Tonight I wrote a rather emphatic conclusion to my paper; before I submit it to my project director I will have to go back through and sprinkle in some potentiallys and putatives. But here on my blog I can say what I am really thinking, which is, Yes! My idea was right!

News!

I just found out that I won a departmental award that comes with a $1000 prize. It's given in honor of a wonderful professor emerita -- I was lucky enough to work with her as a master's student and I learned so much from her. Award notifications were supposed to happen earlier this week and when I didn't hear anything, I assumed they'd chosen another applicant. Turns out they issued paper notifications in our campus mailboxes (how twentieth century) and only followed up by email today. Hurray!

Marginally Significant

Last week I had enough data for my early research project that I ran a quickie analysis on the results. I got...nothing. Now this is where you sing together "Supergeek, supergeek, she's supergeeky," but I had been looking forward to that for a long time. I had imagined running to high-five my husband, yelling, "p = .01, baby!" Instead I had p = .98.  Eek.

(For anyone unfamiliar with p values, they represent the likelihood that your findings are due to chance alone. If there's no real difference between your study group, you'll still probably see some differences in your outcome variable. If you give an IQ test to blondes and redheads and the redheads have an average score that's two points higher, your p value won't be very impressive. If it's 20 points higher, that's more persuasive. Could still be a weird random thing, but it's much less likely. In the behavioral sciences, you need p < .05 to call your results statistically significant. Smaller is better. p = .98 is comical.)

(It is after midnight and I am feeling foggy. Jump right in if you have a better explanation of p values, because I don't know how that's going to read in the hard cold light of day.)

I have been bracing myself for a null finding all along, but I had so hoped to find something meaningful. I had to be quite stern with myself: PRELIMINARY RESULTS. Don't get ahead of yourself. Don't flip out about whether or not to try to publish a null finding when these are PRELIMINARY RESULTS.

On Monday I met with my project director and was able to classify several more of the responses to make them usable. I played around with some different statistical approaches and got less ridiculous results though still nothing approaching true significance. But! I just remembered an idea from earlier in this process, figured out how to run it in R (the powerful but unfriendly free stats program that's all I've got at home), and wound up with (drum roll please) p = .09! Marginally significant! This makes me much happier.

I do not think my husband would greet my news with joy at this exact moment ("Elwood! Wake up! I have marginally significant results!") so I'm telling  you instead. Marginally significant! I'll take it!

(Still hoping for more conclusive results as I get more data, though...)

Let's Just Get It Over With Already

I have a take-home final due Friday and I have been feeling distinctly grumbly about it. Because misery loves company, I am going to indulge in a little liveblogging here. Instead of stretching it out until Friday I am BY GOLLY going to turn it in tonight. As of this minute, one of the four parts is pretty much finished and three are halfheartedly begun. On my mark! Getting set! Go!

Oiled

1. The principal called me and said she agrees with me: kids need to move, she said, and taking away Joe's entire recess was too harsh. She's going to follow up with the lunch monitor.
2. My project director agreed to meet with me this afternoon. I am hoping to get her stamp of approval on my letter and the final version of the questionnaire so I can send them out (finally!) as soon as the Christmas mail rush is over. We shall see.
3. The semester is almost over! One in-class final (Monday), one big stats project (due the following Monday but I need to finish it early because next weekend is busy with family stuff), one take-home final. Lots of work to do, but one way or another it will all get done.

A Couple of Tips for Newbie Users of R

(Note to the usual crowd: sorry for the boring post. Halloween pix soon.)

In looking for helpful documentation on R, I was surprised by the unwelcoming tone of many of the resources ostensibly intended to help new R users. On one mailing list, for instance, I found a higher incidence of RTFM and STFW than I've ever seen before. Believe me, I wanted to RTFM. Unfortunately, the FM seems to be written in --I don't know, Klingon. Some language that uses an English sound system but is utterly unintelligible to me, some language spoken by a clever but apparently cruel race of beings who scorn the idea of intelligent life outside their demesnes.

To anyone who arrives here via Google, similarly battered by attempts to learn R, I suggest that you start with this friendly tutorial. If you want to copy a graphic from R to another program (like the Word document in which you are chronicling your maiden voyage), do it like this:

> png("file_name_here.png")
> plot(x1,x2) [or hist, or whatever else]
> dev.off()

I hope this saves you the many hours it took me to figure that one out. Oh, bummer, I was going to credit the web page where I finally found the magic sequence but I closed that tab and I have no hope of finding it in the moment. I am being instructed to hop off the computer so that Pete can watch Thomas the Tank Engine videos on YouTube.

Before I do: swimmermom asked me about my results at Freerice.com and I have gone back and forth about whether to reply because was it boasting to put that on the web? And maybe it is, but maybe an admission of weakness (see: the rest of this post) cancels out a boast. So I will say that I can get to level 50 pretty easily: the last time I was there, I missed 2 out of the first 47 words I was given. Then I stopped, because I wasn't sure about the word on the screen, and I have this compulsion about finishing at level 50, AND I have a statistics assignment that is (have I mentioned?) due tomorrow. So in sum: English vocabulary strong, Klingon vocabulary dismal.

Need Some Tea and Sympathy

On Monday I took our aged laptop to campus to give my presentation to the other doc students. The laptop appears to have found this a disagreeable journey, because yesterday it died. Or it mostly died, as Miracle Max might say; my husband has coaxed it into a Linux-driven new life.

The problem is that I have a big stats assignment due on Friday. With the Windows machine, I had a GUI that gave me access to the SAS server. We now have two Linux boxes and I have no access to stats software with friendly little check-box windows saying "make me six histograms, please."

I have a powerful but forbidding stats program on this machine. It makes me want to cry, actually. As I have posted before, the topic most likely to trigger a big argument between Elwood and me is the computer, and that kind of makes me want to cry too.  Oh, UGH, now I am crying. Over the computer. Time to get a grip.

It's also time for me to run and see a family for therapy. Here's hoping the learning curve for R (the scary stats program) seems less precipitous when I get back.

Y oh Y (and more)

For anyone who wants to know more about the /y/ thing, here's a bit from Wikipedia.

What does it say about a person if she sees an article called "Phonological history of English consonant clusters" and responds with an excited "ooooooh!"?

I had such a good day. My advisor has been trying to derive a linguistic measure with a language analysis program that is not very user-friendly, and I have been working for weeks on the "fell swoop" approach. I was assigned to this project in August and it was immediately clear to me that we could obtain the measure far more efficiently. I've been working out the details ever since, and today was Fell Swoop Day: in my lab hours today I generated results that would have taken approximately 125 hours of woman-power to obtain under the old system. I have also learned lots of useful stuff about a program that's very powerful even though its learning curve is steep and its manual is less than helpful. I'm going to use it for my stats project later this semester. On which topic--

My stats prof is earnest but...less than dynamic. I am learning the material mostly from the slides and the book, because I have trouble with his lectures. But today I spent most of class tracking, even though the material wasn't in the book. He was talking about logarithmic transformation, which is extremely useful but not really intuitive for me. It's also not in our book, so it's a good thing I was able to follow today's lecture. Here's hoping for more of the same.

This afternoon I went to a seminar on the impact of No Child Left Behind on kids with disabilities. I was not looking forward to it, because our guest speaker was the author of two articles we read in preparation for the seminar and he seemed astonishingly pro-NCLB. I loathe NCLB. I mean, I really, really despise what it has done to American public schools. The goals are worthy but the execution is a disaster. How was I going to sit in the seminar and be polite to someone who apparently failed to recognize that much of what is valuable in an education is difficult to quantify? How, for instance, does one quantify "qualified"? (I find the criteria for "qualified" teachers" woefully inadequate.) I was happy to discover that virtually everyone besides the speaker shared my reservations, so I was able to participate without frothing at the mouth. Or with the merest modicum of frothing at the mouth.

The midterm for my departmental class was tonight and it went really well. I wasn't sure about taking this class because I'm the only doctoral student in there. But I've learned a ton, and pretty painlessly too.

Oh! And I also spent some time today communing with the file cabinets in the basement, whence I am digging out addresses so I can send out the questionnaires for my early research project. I want to get them mailed off very soon, so they do not arrive with a slew of Christmas cards and charities' year-end pleas for money. But it's been hard to put the time in. (Plus I am a little resistant to putting the time in. What if nobody responds? What if my pet idea is wrong? If I don't send out the questionnaire, my study can't be a disaster. Spot the error!)

All right, if I don't get to bed I am going to be ill-equipped to provide fun and enriching speech therapy in the morning. And that, my friends, would be a bummer. Night, all.

P.S. Are you in need of a way to waste time on the web? Yeah, I know, you need a web time-waster approximately as much as you need a gaping hole in your head. But still: check this out. (Totally addictive for a word person like me.)

Fun with Phonology

No, wait! Wait, come back! Phonology is fun, I promise.

Phonology is the study of sound systems: why many native Spanish speakers say "estudy Espanish" and why Americans aren't sure how to get their mouths around Gstaad.  Phonology offered me an entirely sensible explanation when a little boy on my caseload started saying "bagel" instead of "camel." See?  What fun?

One of the things I noticed when we moved to Scotland was that they used a lot more "y" sounds than I was used to. Styupid. Nyewspaper. Dyuty, to use Mary's example. Because I am a phonology geek, I pondered this. In American English, omitting a "y" where it belongs is quite conspicuous. If someone says "bootiful moosic from the footure," you notice. (You also wonder what, precisely, he thinks he is talking about.) If a wedding usher says "May I show you your poo?" when he means "pew," you really notice. I was suddenly curious: did Americans sound that odd to Britons? I started adding in the occasional "y."

In most dialects of American English we don't use a "y" sound after tongue-tip sounds like /t, d, n/. It also drops out in some less familiar words where it actually belongs even on this side of the ocean. Legoom instead of legyume. Scoot instead of scute. Spur-ious instead of spyur-ious. (Spellcheck is having a cow about this post, waving its little hands and saying, "Will you stop already with the 'y' thing?") If it were sturious instead of spurious, I'd never have mentioned the difference, since we don't pay attention to that in my part of the world. But spur-ious makes me think of someone saying "coo the boogles" when he means "cue the bugles," or "poor" when he means "pure."

Today one of my classmates teased me about saying "spurious," suggesting that I'd confused it with "furious." But really, what native English speaker would say "furry-us" when she meant "furious"? I find her amusement curious. Curry-us, she might prefer me to say.

PSA

In the word "spurious," just in case you were in doubt, there is a "y" sound between the "sp" and the "ur."

Everyone who has said it aloud in my stats class, including the instructor, says "spur" + "ious," as if it ought to mean "full of spurs." Roy Rogers takes on multiple regression. Or something like that.

Perhaps I am sensitive to missing "y" sounds because I spent 23 years telling people my last name had a hidden "y" sound in the middle. My father-in-law still doesn't know how to pronounce it. It's not that weird, I'm telling you.

When I was first contemplating a return to grad school, I thought it would be great to have a dashing and handsome math geek for a husband because he could help me with my stats questions. Alas, it doesn't work like that. If I am wrestling with something he finds trivially easy, it is not a recipe for a helpful conversation. So I will tell you, my pals in the computer, that I am utterly flummoxed by the chapter on curvilinear regression that I set out to read at 2pm and still have not finished.

Random example: "The cross-product vectors represent the interaction. The approach is similar when the design includes continuous and categorical independent vectors. The latter are coded in the usual manner and the former are coded by orthogonal polynomial coefficients." [faint whimper]

None of the stuff we have been doing is really very complicated. Simple linear regression looks at the way that one variable can predict or explain another, like SATs and college GPA. Multiple regression throws other explanatory variables in there: motivation bumps GPA up and weekly alcohol consumption brings it down, and we can figure out how important those effects will be. Curvilinear regression is just the idea that lots of important relationships don't look like straight lines and we need to be able to explain them too. So I went sailing into the chapter with confidence, but there is no wind in my sails at the moment.

Probably I will get more out of tomorrow's lecture if I go to bed than if I stay up blogging, though, you figure? Over and out from a weary moi.

Girls

I am the oldest person in my advisor's lab -- a couple of years older than her, at least 15 years older than the other students. Old. It's a little strange to me when they include me in their greetings: "Hi, girls!"

When I was in college, I was rather emphatic about not being a girl anymore. (Was this just part of getting a liberal arts degree in the late 80s/early 90s? Did you have to wax wrathful about the hegemony of the male gaze while the eyes of those around you glazed over? To anyone reading this who knew me then, I'm sorry for being so strident.)

I am no longer emphatic about it, but I still notice: does the babysitter say "a girl in my dorm"? does the student teacher talk about the girls she lives with? I still think the same thing I did in shriller days: if she's legally an adult, I'll call her a woman.

No one has called me a girl in ages. These days the collective noun is usually ladies, as in, "Ladies, where should we go for our night out?" "Ladies, who's got a recipe for mint brownies?" Twenty years ago I disliked "ladies," too -- viewed it as a relic of the days when women were expected to be meek and well-behaved. I've mellowed on that one, I guess.

I'm not sure what I expect the younger women in the lab to do, really. "Hi, girls, and also CJ, you old crone." (No.) "Hi, women." (I don't think that would fly.) "Hi, everybody." I don't know. Tell me what you think.

Red-Letter Day

Back in March I applied to present at a big conference this fall. They said they'd let us know by the end of July, and when I didn't get a response I assumed I'd been rejected. But the program for the event arrived in my mailbox, and there was my name in the list of speakers.  I am in the middle of finding out why I was never notified, but it looks like I'm giving a talk in one of my favorite cities later this fall. How about that?

Something I didn't know until I started grad school for the second time: any research project involving human subjects requires the approval of a university's Institutional Review Board.  This is intended to ensure that research is conducted ethically and that participants' rights are protected. You can do a study where you stick needles in people's eyes, as long as you make sure that it's really truly okay with them and that the benefits outweigh the risks.  The IRB will ask, Is this needle-sticking for the betterment of humanity? Is there a less invasive way to get the same information? Are these subjects going to sue the university after the needles are pulled out of their eyes and they have a chance to say, ICK that was really awful?

After I met with my committee in June, I began the process of seeking IRB approval for my preliminary research project.  It has been much slower than I anticipated.  I am only asking people to complete a questionnaire -- no needles involved -- but it has dragged on and on.  Today, finally, I got an email: formal approval is on its way! At long last, I can start collecting data.

I am a little, just a little, ambivalent about both of these things, actually.  I have had this little baby idea for a study for years now -- what if I'm wrong?  What if I embarrass myself at the conference, spewing misinformation into the room while both of the people who decided to attend the session roll their eyes at each other?  I suppose I know the answers to those questions: the reason we do research is to see if our pet ideas are right or wrong. And life goes on after embarrassments. Right? I'm trying not to let my anxiety get the better of me. This is what I'm going back to school for: to learn to do research, and to share new ideas with other people. Here goes, I guess.

Hasty thoughts about the first day of school

Classes started today and I am ti-erd. In my college journals I used to write that I was ti-erd, so tired I needed two emphatic syllables for it. Some people might just go to bed instead of writing about how many syllables were required for adequate expression of their experience of tiredness, but not me, apparently, because here I am in 2007 doing the same thing.

I am taking my third stats class this semester, as well as a class in my department. The stats instructor is from another corner of the behavioral sciences, a newly minted PhD with no teaching experience, and I am not sure he is a great fit for this class.  He said, "If you were hoping this would be a laid-back class, you hoped wrong."  He said, "In the past this class has <scorn>focused much of the semester on multiple regression</scorn>, but I plan to cover that quickly and move on to logit regression, binomial regression, ordinal regression, and other things too unfamiliar for CJ Most-Gladly to remember when she blogs about this tonight."

Then he gave us a quiz, on which I might have scored a 50% if the fates were smiling.

I'm laughing as I type this, though as I laugh I am thinking of Lord Byron and "if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep."  Because I am married to a math geek (tomorrow he will say, "who are you calling a geek?" and I will reply, "oh, pardon me, dear, I meant to say, 'a mighty mathematical mind,' of course"), I have a guess about what the instructor is thinking.  After you've had a certain amount of math, you lose perspective.  My husband, for instance, thinks that calculus should be taught in approximately kindergarten.  This week, counting by twos. Next week, the cylindrical shell method of integration. (I am reaching way back for that name, to my freshman year of college -- twenty years ago, when I was too young to get my ears pierced legally but was off on my own in the big city. Eek.) 

Anyway, I expect that grading these quizzes will be a rude reality check for Dr. Newly-Minted, because I compared notes with the other people from my dept. and we were all throwing up our hands in bafflement. And the class is mostly education grad students, who are -- oh, I cannot think of a diplomatic way to say this -- not renowned for their quantitative ability.  There is a reason the course has been narrowly focused in the past, I'm just saying.  It seems likely to me that Dr. N-M will reconsider his enthusiastic plans.  If he doesn't, I guess I'll be learning a lot of stats this semester.  Which is fine, she says with the merest hint of a quaver.

If anyone needed any proof of my husband's geek credentials-- I was telling him about my class and he said, "A semester? mostly on multiple regression? what a snore!" He nodded approvingly at the instructor's plans to cover more ground. Maybe the two of them should get together and compose a lament for a mathematically incompetent world, or revise the kindergarten curriculum to include matrix algebra, or whatever it is that mighty mathematical minds do when they meet up. I wouldn't know.

The boys had a half-day of school today, and all went well. Joe has been alternating superheroes lately -- sometimes he is Shadow Man, who lurks in darkness and leaps out with ferocious ninja kicks. More often he has been Kindergarten Man. I am fuzzy on the Kindergarten Man details (faster than a speeding eraser? more solid than a leftover soy burger?) but the name makes me laugh and laugh.

And that, I think, is it for me. How's by you? Any tales from the first days of school? Anybody want to guess at Kindergarten Man's secret powers? I'm just hoping he's unconnected to that other school superhero, Captain Underpants, because I could get quite the call from the school office if that's Joe's inspiration.