>One of the things I missed the most about living in Michigan were the paczkis on Fat Tuesday. I don’t remember ever having a Paczki as a kid (Mom, sibs, feel free to set me straight.) but it was an annual thing at the GM proving ground when I worked there in the early 90s. I especially remember the powdered, raspberry-filled kind. Yum!

Well call me a homer but I actually tried to find these things in NYC. There was always Star Deli, in Brooklyn, but that was too far for a stupid donut. So either because of excessive discipline, or laziness, or both, we went paczki-less for about 12 years.

So I was so excited about Fat Tuesday this year that I dragged the girls to Goodrich’s on Monday to get some paczkis (if you ever have trouble spelling it, just remember Frankie’s name is Franciszka! The Z goes before the K!) We got a half dozen, in a variety of flavors to make everyone happy, chocolate-filled glazed for the Frankster (donut!) and plain, custard for Angie. (Bee is just not a donut person, I’m afraid.)

Long story short, I ended up eating four paczkis today, two from home and two from the copious trays of them sitting around work. And we still have three sitting at home looking all forlorn. What should we do with them? Eat them all tonight? Sneak a paczki tomorrow? Feed them to Koompa and Marky? What is a good polack to do?

>A proud papa:

We’re still working on the MSU Fight Song. Really, I like the dogfight the best. But I’m having trouble remembering the words. Like for example, at the very end I can sing

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Walking home from work today was a revelation- I realized just why humans (or some of us anyway) evolved to grow facial hair. I had to walk home into the wind during a snowstorm, and darn it if my chin didn’t get chilly! At that point, I would not have been opposed to looking like this man ->

The clean shaven look just wasn’t working for me. But then I got home and said “Frankie, feel how cold my cheeks are!” and pressed my cheek up against hers. That’s a nice way to warm up.

>I thought I’d elaborate a bit on my theory of weather forecasts.

Call me cynical, but weather reporting is all about fear. The more scared people are, the more they’ll watch the local news and the less likely they’ll be to do dangerous, scary things like, drive, walk, and go outside, all of which potentially remove them from their television. This idea was impressed on me in New York, where an inch of snow seems to send the news media into a tizzy.

In engineering, there is a concept of “factor of safety”, where, if your bridge is expected to carry 100 cars at a time, you build it so it can carry 300 cars at a time, just to be safe. That would be a factor of safety of three.

I think in meteorology school, students are taught to use a factor of scary, with a nominal value of two.