People keep sending me horrible, frustrating news stories — I’ll post some later, but first, I have to restore my center with pleasant contemplation. Deep breaths. Grade some more exams. Watch some fish for a little while.

OK, here’s a pleasant memento: Mrs Janes’ 3rd grade class at O’Brien Elementary School, in Kent, Washington. The year is 1966.

(click for larger image)
Top row: Cindy Burton, Kathleen Sturtz, Nancy Bull, Mary McHugh, Debbie Long, Becky Barnier, Darlene Yamada, Susan Rea, Billie Anderson, Mary McKay, Cathy Jenkins
2nd row: Mrs Janes, Richard Campbell, Richard Nault, Arthur Yabara, Brian Pittenger, Chris Bauer, Loren Deanton, Pat McCart, PZ Myers, Steven Brewer, Tommy Marino, Rob Kimoto
3rd row: Kathy Willkie, Jill Johnson, Mary Gjerness, Linda Bevilaqua, Mike Dixon, Carla Fleming, Patty Spitzer, Cathy Jones, LaJuana Smalley, Bill McDaniel

This is where I met my wife. I’m in the picture somewhere, and so is she. Think you can find us?

I think I’m feeling better now.

Names are added now, you can all stop guessing. I’m fourth from the right, middle row; the Trophy Wife™ is third from the left, front row.

I did not drop off the face of the earth in the last 3/4 of a day — I joined the 47 million Americans who spend the day before Thanksgiving in an annual familial migration. I had to drive Daughter #1 and her sweetie-pie to Buffalo, Minnesota; then drive to Minneapolis to pick up Son #2, who’d had a long day on a bus from Madison, Wisconsin; then back to Buffalo to pick up Daughter #1 sans sweetie-pie; then to St Cloud to pick up Son #1; and finally, back home to Morris. For a time there I had my entire genetic output in a small car with me, in the snow, on a freeway (and I think all 47 million traveling Americans were on I94 between Minneapolis and Monticello for a time), and I was thinking that this whole family get-together thing was an opportunity for a major Darwinian catastrophe.

We made it safely back in the wee hours of the morning, fortunately. Now today I spend preparing mass quanitities of protein and carbohydrate to pack into the gaping, peeping maws of the younglings, which does make Darwinian sense, at least.

I hope you are all out reinforcing the social and familial linkages that enhance your inclusive fitness today, as well.

An article in the NYT on surname frequency settles the most important issue of our time:

Now can everyone please start using the dominant, correct spelling?

This is going to be a big problem. I’m at this gathering of bloggers, which means they’re all going to be posting stuff about our meeting here at Americans United, and I’m outnumbered — I can’t keep up. I had dinner with Blue Gal, BAC, DCup, and One Pissed Off Veteran, and some of them already have pictures up.

And after dinner we had the combined Pharyngula/Bad Astronomy gathering, which seemed to have a majority of BA fans, to my chagrin. I think more failed to show up because they know I shoot laser beams out of my eyes. We also got a surprise visit from Tara and an Evil Monkey. The ScienceBorg Collective was out in force, trying to collect souls for the Empire — we leaned on Phil a bit, but he is stubborn. Clearly, it’s time to deploy the fully operational…but wait, I’ve said too much.

Anyway, anyone who was there should speak up in the comments, and feel free to leave a link — it will simplify my efforts to keep track of everyone.

Oh, one guy it’ll be easy to keep up with is Phil, who is still unconscious up in the room. I guess he needs his beauty sleep.

So I arrived here in Washington D.C. several hours ago, and made the mistake of taking some shuttle service from Dulles…which proceeded to take the passengers direct to their homes, which meant I got a long, long tour of winding narrow suburban roads all over the outlying parts of the city, sitting behind the choked traffic as the wall-to-wall cars parked on both sides meant we were constrained to basically one lane. How do you people live in this chaos? It took me almost as much time to get from Dulles to Capitol Hill as it did to drive all the way across the state of Minnesota this morning! I’m thinking now that I’m going to have to leave awfully early on Monday to make sure I get to the airport in time.

Anyway, I’m going to depressurize here in the hotel for a few hours and then strike out (on foot) for food. There’s some kind of big white marble building near here…there’s probably beer nearby.

My travels are done for a whole week now (according to my calendar, I’m going to have to go to Washington DC next week), and I’m very, very tired. I’ll put up some of my thoughts on the Beyond Belief conference later (short summary: exhilarating!), but for now I’ll acknowledge the wonderful time I had at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. It was a big audience — much bigger than I expected — and they asked really sharp questions and tossed back a few important ideas on communicating science that I appreciated. Special thanks to my host, Miriam Goldstein.

I promised to mention the Three Seas Program, which looks like an excellent opportunity for students interested in marine biology—actually, I wish I could do it—and I’m going to be sure too suggest to my students who think marine biology and oceanography are cool (we get a few of these students from the midwestern prairies every year who dream of the distant seas) that they ought to consider the Scripps for grad school.

Thanks also to Hao Ye, official photographer to the PZ Myers Southern California Tour 2007.

I can’t really thank this guy for showing up, since he missed my entire talk and therefore missed the opportunity to absorb the PZ mojo and have his IQ doubled but some of you may know who he is. If you can’t, here’s a hint.