Potty issues

This is a parenting post. If you don't care for TMFI about Epsilon's toilet habits, skip this post. It's a bad sign when I can't let toilet training issues roll off my back. But I can't right now. So you get you read about it.

This last week I finally got to spend several days in a row with Epsilon, and he mastered potty training. We are all very proud of this. Diapers are expensive and annoying and not having to worry about whether he will pee on the floor when we go to the library over the weekend (the only time I've had so far to work on potty training with him) is a huge relief.

He has his quirks. He finds stalls terrifying, is convinced that the toilet at his daycare bites, and thinks it is hilarious to pee on the floor of the bathroom. The last issue is solved by letting him aim at a small beat up skillet that my partner and I refer to as his piss pot. When he wants to pee on the floor of the bathroom, I can always  talk him into using his piss pot instead. As far as I can tell, all of this is perfectly normal behavior for this stage.

What is perhaps less usual is that Epsilon has been pretty good about not having soiled diapers since he was 4 months old. At that point, our in home day care providers would put him on the pot, and he would try his damnedest to hold it. Our daycare provider in Chicago worked with him, and would send the occasional soiled cloth diaper home in a plastic bag. Our local daycare provider found it funny and odd that he poops on the toilet for us, and either never tried very hard to figure out how to work with him, or he just wouldn't work with her. Whatever, kids have different behaviors with different people and that's normal. It means providing disposable diapers, which is annoying, but okay. After a few traumatic messy diapers/baths, and a few attempts to leave him on the toilet and cry it out, Epsilon just decided to hold it at daycare.

When we started working with Epsilon on controlling his pee, she didn't work with us at all. When I told her on Monday that we had successfully toilet trained him at home, explained the options we give him, and handed her the piss pot and Epsilon in underwear, she agreed to try. It seems that trying means taking him to the bathroom when he asks to go. When he refuses to go to use the toilet (because it bites, after all) letting him out of the bathroom, at which point he pees in his pants, and gets put in a diaper.

When we ask her if she offered him the piss pot, she replies "Do I have to?"

Well, no, you don't. If you want to train him to go in the toilet only, more power to you. We haven't gotten that far yet. Personally, I think that training is going to take more than giving him one shot at it a day. On one hand, you do amazing creative things with him to get him to do things that I can't get him to do at home, so maybe it'll work. On the other hand, you seem to have shown a pattern of not wanting to invest any effort/creativity in toilet training Epsilon.

When / if I get a flyout(s) in a couple months, I've made arrangements with my daycare provider to keep him overnight if I can't get family to come out and watch him on short notice. I'm going to come home to a really constipated cranky kid.

Emotionally gearing up

My partner leaves in a little over a month. This fact just hit us. Apparently he's been worrying about how he's going to deal with the goodbye at the airport.

We spent a lot of time talking about coping strategies last night. Things like bringing sufficient volumes of fiction and writing short letters to get over the hardest moments of "I miss you" on the plane. (We have a long history of writing letters from points in our long distance relationship where picking up the phone just wasn't an option).

We talked about when we should talk/skype during the day, and what to do when the time difference makes that difficult. I need to be able to write him 3-4 line e-mails with my thoughts throughout the day, given the limited phone time we may face. I don't know if this would be easier if I had a smart phone, since Epsilon is just as interesting in "MINE!"ing a phone as he is in my computer.

We talked about housing for him. Whether he should get housing near campus, or live with a friend of ours who has a kid a few months younger than Epsilon, but lives over an hour commute away.

We talked about how, even after all these years of long distance, I still have a hard time getting work done on the day he leaves because I'm so sad, and how last year, due to our general lack of friends out here, I'd start loosing focus if I skipped a weekend visit. I'll try to get together with a colleague with a young kid for dinner that night, and hope I can push through the loss of focus at missing my partner/get used to his absence enough to be productive during most of the 3 months. I'm not teaching while he's gone. Which is good because it gives me the flexibility I need to be a single parent, but it also means that I will have fewer interactions with people.

And then we talked stressed about next year, which was useless.

We haven't found any firm solutions that we know will work, but we are trying to find a list of coping strategies. Other suggestions are welcome.

Playing at poverty

The Food Research Action Center has issued a Food Stamp Challenge. The goal is to live on the average food stamp budget (about $3/day) for a week to catch a glimpse of what it might be like to be in poverty. There are some really good diaries on Daily Kos about people musing about poverty, and trying the challenge.

Pretending to be poor is a lot of work. That's both because being poor is a lot of work and because, the more distance between a person and poverty, the less their life is organized in a way that accommodates pretending.
Conducting the thought experiment of poverty, or some selected piece of poverty, is a not uncommon way to try to convey, to oneself or to readers or listeners, the appalling reality behind the statistics—like the 46.2 million people living in poverty in the United States in 2010.

Ten years ago, I spent a couple years living in the country of my parents origin, in a rich girl's dreams to find her roots. I worked in the NGO sector, determined to live, at least superficially, like a single woman making the table scraps offered by small local NGOs. Along the way I met a dear friend, B., who had fled violence in her rural home to come to the city and actually live like a single woman making the table scraps offered by small local NGOs. The lesson in poverty was immense, the food poverty being the least of it.

The main thing I can say about why my life then wasn't hard during this period was that I had set the arbitrary limit of 2 years of living there, and the only thing preventing me from pulling up camp and coming home was my own stubbornness. B. never had that option, nor did she have many of the resources poured into her, including good childhood nutrition, that I had.

The contrast between B's and my life was amazing, and more painful than I would like to share in this post. However, a few stories jumped to my head when reading the above diaries.

• Adjusting for purchasing power parity, I earned about $10 a day. As a single woman in a misogynistic country, I spend half of that on housing, and about $2/weekday on transportation. This put me at about the average food stamp budget of $3/day. When some other large expense came up, I ate less. This is about what B. had for her food budget every day, but for much of her time, she was hosting a sibling at her place who was looking for a job, or getting an education. Sometimes the sibling could contribute to the food budget from their own job. Sometimes not.
• There was a stark difference in B.'s and my health during those 2 years. B. was regularly sick. After adjusting to regional water differences, my only visible effect was a significant weight loss and a couple fainting spells.
• We both were creative in how to extend our budgets. My human capital was greater. Plenty of medium profile activists made friends with me out of my curiosity factor and/or my ability to translate, edit and typeset their pamphlets. These friends were more settled, and spending a weekend day working at someone's house meant that I didn't pay for meals on that day. Going over socially to their house meant that I didn't pay for that meal. B. had access to very cheap grains/tubers from when she went back to her village. I do not pretend that lugging a 20 pound sack of starch through several forms of transportation to eat is the same advantage of the occaissonal meal for typesetting.
• I am a vegetarian by choice. B. was a vegetarian by force during that period of her life. Most days, neither of us could afford milk. When riding on the back of a friend's bike, my driver always commented on how I am much heavier than I look. I once could afford milk. During the last month of my stay, I took a moderate spill and had an bump on my shin that just wouldn't heal. For a month, it was painful and behaved in a way that I've never had a wound from a similar source behave. I left the country for the developed world, took up eating cheese sandwiches again, and within 2 weeks, the wound was gone.
• I think of myself as a relatively disciplined person. One way I keep food discipline in the house by not having foods I shouldn't be eating around. If I have to walk to the store every time I want a chocolate bar, I eat less chocolate. Never before, and never since have I felt such a NEED to splurge on my food budget. I would regularly spend bus fare on a snack, and walk the distance instead. By the end of my time, I would routinely take the money set aside for dinner ingredients and spend it on high sugar, high carb junk food, not only because it was faster and didn't require fuel to cook, but because the carbs looked soooo good, even though I know they will do me harm in the long run. The type of discipline required to eat well in those circumstances is phenomenal.
  

Thoughts for Thanksgiving

A few months ago a family came into our lives, and left. As is the way of these things, the little girl took a piece of our hearts with her.

Epsilon still indicates where she sat next to him in the car as I dropped them off to the shelter and wished them luck.

I had heard from an acquaintance that there was a man with 2 kids who needed a place to stay for Sunday night, shelters weren't open. I started a load of sheets and towels, and invited them in.

Epsilon, who had decided not to nap that day, ran out of his bedroom, looked at the little girl, and christened her Annie. Father and son were both named Robert.

Robert Sr. took a nap, while the three children romped. What followed was an afternoon that both reminded me why having more children would be fun, and a horrible idea.

Annie wanted her own room for the night. I told her we could set up the air mattress in the enclosed porch. The mattress quickly became a trampoline. Robert Jr. saw cinnamon sticks in my pantry. Could he have one?

My partner eventually took them to play outside while I made dinner. When I came out to call them in to wash up, nine year old Robert Jr. had squeezed himself into Epsilon's trike to be pushed around by the other two.

After I'd put Epsilon to bed, Annie wanted me to wash and comb her hair, like her mother used to. She and Robert Jr. and I talked a bit about why their father sometimes says that he wishes he didn't have them around. Its not fair that he yells at them and hits them sometimes, but we all get upset at people we love and don't mean it, don't we?

The next morning, Epsilon woke at his usual before the crack of dawn and found Annie. The bed became a trampoline again, the worries of the previous night and the impending goodbye forgotten for a couple hours.

Robert Sr. and I discussed his situation a bit, and exchanged contact information, in the off chance I know someone who could hire him. Annie sat down next to me and said:

"I like this place. How long are we staying here, a week?"

I drive them to the shelter, and Epsilon to his daycare. The only other thing I can think of to do at this point is to contact some local college students to give the kids after school homework help/watch them while their father seeks work. The school year was about to start, but Robert Sr. doesn't have the time or stability to enroll them, though he would never say that.

Now its Thanksgiving, and cold outside. I'm spending the weekend in the warmth generated by extended family crowding into a kitchen. I wish I knew where those kids were to invite them in.

The big reveal

There's a job at University D my partner didn't accept a fly out to last year because the deadlines for accepting his current job at University E were too pressing. University D, has a few more postdocs slots than usual this year in my department. There are rumors of retirements soon, and thus lots of TT openings in the near future. University D didn't fill the slot they wanted to fly my partner out to, and they are advertising the job again. Furthermore, University D is in a city where many of our friends seem to migrate to. It would be nice to move there.
But given that my partner has accepted a position at University E, we need to convince University D that he is serious about his application.

Which means revealing our 2 body problem.

Which makes me uncomfortable.

The best advice seems to be to notify my partner's prospective department of our situation, and see if there is enough interest in both of us that if I can get into a postdoc, it can be with the understanding that I will be considered for a TT as the positions open up.

To her credit

Okay, I can't resist.

Yes, that is Michele Bachman standing, and the other GOP candidates sitting.

The headline on Daily Kos?

"Republicans Pander to American Taliban"

Which is a bit extreme, but funny. Reminds me of my time with hard core communist comrades who would ask that I serve the food at meetings over a meal because "women are naturally better at these things."

Whatever else I have to say about her (none of which is nice) I have to give her credit for being able to function and put up with this shit at the same time.

Slow day

And a low key weekend with my partner and Epsilon. Combine that with being too disgusted to want to write about police brutality at various Occupies, having a lot of teaching related schtuff to do before traveling for the weekend, and a post I'd like to write that is just being difficult. The end result is that I don't have a lot to say.

Except maybe this:

If you want your children to be academics, for the love of God, don't try to conceive in February/March. The same goes if you are an academic. The end result is a person who associates finals and travel stresses with birthdays and / or stressed out parents during birthday parties. Be kind to your children. 

Eggmus: Epsilon Space

I'm making scrambled eggs with the gallon of milk sitting open on the counter next to me. Epsilon is playing with the cap. Suddenly I hear the sound of plastic falling.

"Damn. I think. He's dropped it in the recycling."

I feed Epsilon breakfast and ask my partner to look for the cap. He upturns the recycling and then practically cleans the kitchen while searching. No milk cap.

"Maybe he can get into spaces that we old folks can't. There's got to be an explanation for this. It must be an alternate universe called Epsilon Space.

-----------------------------------

Okay if you don't understand why this is funny, and think I'm just on a weird, not very good sci-fi riff, you are almost right. For context, read Isis.

Being that woman

I wrote yesterday about how much it makes me feel better about a department where the men have pictures of themselves with kids. And how much I notice that a woman never chooses to picture herself with children.

In the vein of "be the change you want to see in the world" I'm wondering if I should put a picture of Epsilon and myself on my webpage. My pictures need to be updated anyway. I've cut my hair since, and have had experiences of people trying to recognize me from my website and fail.

I don't know that I have the courage to do so, and I don't know if it will help at this point. The job market is a hirer's market now, so pictures on webpages may have less to do with who applies to a place than "do you have a job in my specialty". But since these things are cyclical, it will be a seeker's market again in a few years, and having a picture of Epsilon may be a useful recruitment tool.


The other question to consider is whether or not having a picture of female faculty with kids will add to the recruitment effort of drawing grad students any more than having pictures of female faculty period. It would have for me, but I didn't have a female science professor until I was a junior as an undergrad, and thus keenly aware of the gender imbalance. What say other people?

A picture of a female faculty member with kids would
	Increase my odds of applying to that grad school
	Not effect my odds of applying to the grad school
	Decrease my odds of applying to the grad school
pollcode.com free polls

A picture of a female faculty member with kids would
	Increase my odds of applying for a job at the school
	Not effect my odds of applying for a job at the school
	Decrease my odds of applying for a job at the school
pollcode.com free polls

Update: I just found 1 woman with a prominent link off her faculty page to her personal web page that has artistic pictures of her kids, husband, favorite vacation spot, etc. This just made my weekend. To bad the rest of the department is not as interesting.

Update (Nov 21) : I have been contacted by a female reader that she also has links to her children on her page. Two instances seems to be the critical number for me to get my courage up. Thank you.

Faces from the job hunt

I've been going through university webpages this last week as I've been applying for post-docs and tenure track positions. Just in the US, I've looked at over 80 department websites, looking at professional webpages of faculty in 2 to 3 subgroups per department. Here are a few observations:

1) I have yet to see a single woman put up pictures of herself with her kids. On the other hand, when I do see a school with lots of men pictured playing with their small children, I subconsciously think "maybe I won't be so miserable here." I don't know if it is on purpose, but it's good marketing.

2) Of all the pictures on web pages I've seen, I have seen 5 faces that look like they were of African/African-American origin. Two male, two female, and one that I'm guessing. To be fair, I have not found any traditionally black colleges that with research strengths that match my interests.

3) One department home page had a line about my field separating the power of thought from authority. Who writes this crap? What does that even mean? Do the faculty not read the department web page?

If you asked me to give up my research or my family I would panic

I've been feeling down and overworked a lot recently, with job applications and everything else. I had an on-line pep-talk with a friend of mine, a tenure track mother who spent a stint in the corporate world, that seemed to really get to the point of a lot of issues I've been dealing with. My post today is just excerpt from that conversation. 

Sara:  how are you?

me:  looking at jobs ... feeling a bit down

Sara:  why?  ...

me:  I'm tierd of putting 2-3 hours every night after he goes to sleep

and writing lecture notes over the weekend, and then feeling guilty that I haven't gotten any [research] done

.... 

me:  if I quit academia, could I get a corporate job where I could work 40 hours most weeks?

Sara:  guilt free lunch, guilt free weekend,

yeah but if you're like me you would want to shoot yourself

me:  I want to shoot myself now... for different reasons.

Sara: ... you're also going on the academic job market

and you have a dual academic family ...

and [partner] has been on two searches which is extremely taxing on you as well, and he had that year in chicago

me:  when it was just [partner] and myself, i wouldn't trade this life (all the downsides included) for the world

Sara:  you're under some really unusual stresses all at once

me:  but now... having lost a year of research to [Epsilon], and a dual academic life, some stability somewhere seems very desireable

Sara:  two people on the market at the same time with a baby is crazy

 ...

me:  it's hard to make people at [my university] understand why I am panicking... they are right in that I shouldn't, because it does no good

 ...

but sometimes, it would be nice if I could just go cry in their office because I'm not a superstar ... tenured professor like they are

Sara:  i bet none of them are in the situation you are at

 ...

what kind of job do you want?

me:  I'm in this game for the research. Nothing else is worth the pain (And I'm wondering if the research is).

Sara:  so it has to be an R1 school

me:  yeah

Sara:  ... Will you guys have to be apart for you to do research?

me:  not if we can get two jobs somewhere else

if that's what it takes for more than a year or two, one of us isn't going to do research

Sara:  wow

will the person who has to give it up be resentful about it?

me:  no

we are both so sick of this

Sara:  see, this is why people don't understand your panic. so many couples either:

1. has no kids

2. have one spouse in a regular job

3. are not committed

4. have one spouse who is not into research

if you asked me to give up my research or my family i would panic

And therein lies the crux of the matter. I fear having to choose between these two things I love.

Here's a shout-out to the precious few people I know who are in, or  have gone through similar situations. I don't know how you do (did) it.

And, to be fair, as Sara has pointed out to me, the situation may not be as bleak as I make it sound. My partner's university may be able to come up with office space and a minor affiliation so that I can continue to have an academic home while I look for a job.

What on earth?

I know I've just written about how if I had my way, no one would pay tuition, and I wouldn't be able to draw a salary. But this e-mail just made me rethink the line for allowing audits.

Dear Dr. [Barefoot], 

I love [this field of study], and I would be honored if you would grant me the privilege of auditing your [Course Name] class on Friday November 18. Even though I have a Masters degree in [this field of study], I realize that I cannot keep up with these students. I simply want to experience the environment. 

Thanks for your consideration. 

Sincerely, 

[Stu Dent]

If you want to be audit my class, here's what I would say:

• Dump the flattery, kid. Giving my a big head just makes me want to misuse the power you have bestowed upon me.
• Who are you? I don't have a midterm from you. I don't have you on my current enrollment list. I've never seen you in class. You sent this e-mail from [sxdent@msn.com]. Are affiliated with my university.

Alas, I could not be so explicit in my response to him.

Giggles

Its been a long week, full of revising old papers, job hunting, and a freak "We're organizing a summer school, and would love to have you on as an organize, could you write up a coherent statement of what you would add to our way of looking at things within the next 48 hours?" Fun but exhausted. I need some giggles now.

This one is funny

If you follow the link at the bottom of the page, you get to this, which is cute

Teaching moment

I know that the part of my teaching duties that I am best at is office hours. I also know that office hours is the least attended part of my teaching duties.

I wish I could announce on the first day of any class that I am at my best as a teacher when I'm working on a 1 on 1 basis, or 1 on few basis. Therefore, if you want to get a lot out of this class, come to office hours. Somehow, I don't think that would fly.

Instead, I try every way I can think of (short of handing out food*) to get people to come to my office hours, and I encourage students to give me frequent feedback during the term.

My office hours attendance is still low, but I think I'm making progress. The students of several classes get a chance to meet with the department chair to give feedback on the classes. The students from one of my classes was in the list this term, and I heard from the chair that I am the most approachable professor in the department.

This usually translates to lots of students following me back to my office after lecture on the day the problem set is due to ask questions, but does nothing for official office hour attendance. Yesterday, I finally had a student get it. She announced that she would get most of her homework done over the weekend so she can ask me questions during my office hours, instead of stressing  for the few hours between class and the due time.

* The most blatant example of this I've heard of is a professor in NYC holding office hours in a cafe during dinner, and buying dishes of food for whoever shows up to ask questions/listen. It struck me as a bit extreme, though it was effective.

Auditing

I have a few students enrolled in my class from a local commuter college. One of them was (until recently) under the impression that we grade on a 90%= A, 80% = B, etc. scale here. As a result, his work in my class has amazed me. Beyond that, he comes to my office hours, corner's me after class to ask interesting questions on material that is related to, but often beyond the scope of the class. In short, he's the type of student everyone wants in their class.

He's interested in taking more classes at my university, or at least auditing them, if not taking them for credit. The problem is that the exchange program that got these students into my class is ad hoc, poorly implemented, and seems to have upset a few people in my department. Asking to audit more classes may not go over well, even for a very good student, who clearly benefits from the greater depth of coverage offered in the courses here.

My general suggestion for people who want to seriously sit in on a course is that no professor minds seeing an extra engaged student sitting in their class or in their office hours. Asking the professor or the TA to grade homeworks and/or exams may not be fair, and one should talk to the TA/professor before doing so. I want to advise my student to just come and attend without getting any credit or recognition. The experience of seeing the lectures and doing the homeworks and checking the answers will give him a leg up on coursework in graduate school. I'm just worried about advising this type of guerrilla education in this case because of the politics surrounding these students. Its a stupid thing to stand in the way of knowledge.

Traffic Laws

I know that in the US traffic laws can vary from State to state, even city to city, depending on the issue. However my general understanding of how things work with regards to vehicles injuring pedestrian is that almost always the driver is at fault. It may also be partially the pedestrian's fault, but the pedestrian has right of way.

If a car hits a jay walker, then the jay walker gets cited for jay walking, and the driver gets cited for reckless driving. If a kid is being playing with his skateboard in the middle of a residential street, and gets hit, it is both the kid's and the driver's fault. If I choose to do something truly stupid like park my U-Haul, blocking traffic, in the middle of the street and lug boxes into my new house from the back, and a car hits me, then I get cited for obstruction of traffic, but the driver gets cited as well.

At least that's how I've understood the laws to work everywhere I've lived. And I think those laws are the way they should be. They are written to prevent people from doing stupid things and making life harder for drivers, but since a moving car can do more damage to a pedestrian, than the other way around (generally speaking) the majority of the responsibility is on the driver.

So could someone explain to me what the fuck is happening in DC?

Heidi Sippel says the driver intentionally struck them near the intersection of 7th Street and New York Ave. in Northwest, and they did not throw themselves in front of the car as the police claim.
"Before we had a chance to get out of the way, he stopped about five feet from us, revved his engine, threw up his hands and hit the gas," said Sippel, a protester from Vandalia, Ohio.
But instead of citing the driver, police gave Sippel, her partner, and son citations for obstructing traffic in the roadway.

The article I've linked to says that the driver has been identified but not been charged.

Eggmus: Occupy Thomas the Tank Engine

Thomas the Tank Engine has taken over Chez Barefoot. Epsilon was sick a bit ago, so we let him watch Thomas on Netflix and You Tube. Now he points to the computer every morning, demanding "Thomas Tank!"

We went to Occupy Near Me this weekend. As a courtesy to my train obsessed toddler, we took the subway to the tent village. A plastic Thomas came with.

Our normal weekends of teaching Epsilon to share have gotten boring. It was time to talk about sharing elsewhere.

We hung around the tent village for a while, got to know people. Epsilon is bored. He wants to go back to the subway.

The day's rally starts around naptime. We go anyway. Between identifying that there is a group of drummers in the crowd and finding them, my partner taps me on the shoulder and points to the stroller. Epsilon's asleep.

Oh no! I think. I should stop chanting with the hundreds of people in the street.
What if he wakes up?

At some point Epsilon's sleeping hands finally loose their grip on Thomas, which skitters through the street.  I am left chasing after a plastic blue box on wheels, made in China, that is now an ankle breaking hazard. This isn't what I remember protests marches being. Is it me?

Epsilon woke up after the march, and wants to go back to the subway. I might think he's missed the point of the day. But he'd argue otherwise.

Kerfuffle Unfuffled

Yesterday I learned an important lesson. Always make sure that your coauthors are actually your coauthors.

Regular readers of this blog may remember my coauthor kerfuffle several months ago, at which time I was frustrated with the lack of work a more senior colleague and coauthor was putting into a paper we were working on together. He was slow to turn around drafts, and would complain about parts without making much in the way of constructive suggestions. His emails were sounding increasingly frustrated, and I was getting frustrated with his lack of input.

In person he was much easier to work with, and much progress had been made on the times we got to work together in the same place. Unfortunately we are on different continents so flying to meet was not something either of us could do very regularly.

It recently dawned on me that we had never actually formally discussed the authorship, and the drafts I was sending had no names on them. After a few emails it turns out that he had never seen himself as a coauthor on the paper. I now go from frustrated to in awe of how much time he gave me and how much thought he put into a paper that is not his.

In the future, even the most rough drafts I share will have the authors listed, even if we don't have a title yet.

Angles

During a discussion in an informal seminar, someone asked why the speaker could make certain assumptions. A colleague and I offered two different, correct explanations. His was a more standard explanation that just hadn't occurred to me at the time. Mine was based off of techniques in the class I am teaching (nothing fancy, I'm teaching a required class for juniors and seniors).

Thinking about it later, I realized that if this discussion had occurred last year, I probably would have given a third explanation, motivated by the techniques I was teaching then. I happen to be a bit of a generalist, so I've had an opportunity to teach classes in 3 of the 4 major subfields in this department.

But this got me wondering, does this happen to anyone else?

Eggmus: BLECH!

Epsilon pulled a bottle of wine out of the recycling yesterday.

"Mommy and Daddy juice. BLECH!" Then he thought for a moment and said "Daddy eat?"

Later on in the day, he grabbed a can of soda at a Halloween party and brought it over to my partner. "BLECH! Epsilon eat more?"