Mary Worth, 11/4/25

Sorry to be a "liberal coastal elitist" who "has a basic understanding of how academia works," but a "teachers conference” isn't really a thing that a tenured PhD English prof at a large state university like Ian would go to; there are plenty of academic conferences where he'd make the rounds, of course, but those tend to run the length of a long weekend, not "a few weeks." What I'm trying to say is that Toby has no real idea where her husband actually is right now, maybe because he never told her, or maybe because he did tell her and she forgot. When he does finally get home, in a few days or weeks or months or whatever, he will presumably find her on this park bench, her face having been viciously pecked off after she fought a parrot for control of a bag of sunflower seeds and lost.

Pardon My Planet, 11/4/25