We're all just sick with anxiety about the elections tomorrow. Will that beetle-browed, knuckle dragging simple minded pile of day old donkey dung win? We definitely hope not. Voters, use your brains, not whatever else it is that you have been using. This is serious business here.

At work this morning, a coworker found a Black Widow on her desk. Possibly Iktomi the trickster god. I carried her around in my little bug house for awhile and showed her to the kids. Then I let her go along the San Andreas fault.

Using Bela Tarr's "Werckmeister Harmonies" as inspiration, I had the kids perform a solar system dance. I was the sun, and the kids were all planets and moons. The planets revolved around me, and the moons revolved around the planets. At the end of it all, the solar system was in chaos. Neptune was closer to the sun than Jupiter. Mars and Earth shared an orbit. Only Pluto and the planetoid Sedna kept their distance.

I used this result as an example of what happens when a system breaks down, then went on to talk about the ecosystem.