Clearance Sales

I wandered over to Dillard's today, and for about $45 I got two very nice pairs of khaki pants, a pair of wool pants (that I shall have to cut the nylon lining out of) and a yellow linen shirt. By way of comparison, each pair of pants was about $60 by itself before it went on clearance. Not sure about the shirt.

I was trying to find something not entirely ratty to wear to the ISU donor appreciation dinner. That's not its actual title, but I'm too lazy to look it up, and the name I gave it is accurate. My mom purchased 4 seats at the symphony this past year, which merited her an invite. She didn't want to go alone (and my dad wouldn't have gone even before he lost his mind), so we pestered the people in charge about getting a gluten-free meal. It was a decent meal. I couldn't eat the roll, the cupcake, or the sauce on the meat (so they brought me a plain one). It was also one of the most ridiculously boring 3.5 hours I have ever spent. And we even left before it was completely over. For all I know, they're still up there yammering away.

We sat at a table with a lawyer, a realtor, two University promoters, the Dean of Graduate studies, and a spouse who probably had a job, but I can't recall it. The lawyer was determined to make small talk through dinner. Decent guy... a bit odd. I happened to bring up statistics and he wanted to know how one would go about showing that the winds in Pocatello have gotten worse in recent years. I mentioned the basic process of gathering data and running a significance test. Problem is... I don't know how much variation is actually normal, or how long the cycles of variation might last. If there's a 100-year cycle, for instance, and we only have good data for the past 50 years, the results will be useless.

Anyway, I need sleep. *wonders how coherent this post actually is and decides she doesn't care*