Heteroscedasticity...

It is a given; the day of the week I take the girls grocery shopping is also the crappiest day of the week.

It is a scientific fact.

It does not matter what goes on at the store or what store we visit or the time of day we shop, I am always left crabby.

I was an economics major in college.

One of my professors taught us about heteroscedasticity.

He said, "Remember the term and it's definition and you will always have entertaining material at cocktail parties."

I've never used the term at a cocktail party or any other kind of party for that matter, but I can say the term is applicable to my grocery shopping experiences.

In my example, grocery shopping is the constant. The store visited, food purchased, keys lost, carts chased, blood spilled, bathrooms locked during emergency, tears shed, screams released, headaches resulting would be the random variables. If each of our shopping experiences were plotted as a dot on an X and Y graph you would notice an invisible straight line that can be drawn to show the consistencies in our shopping trips. I therefore have heteroscedastic residuals. There's more to it than that, but I didn't want to bore you with variance-covariance matrices and other stuff.

My memory is not as good as it once was. In fact, I can guarantee any of my former Econ professors would read this blog post and swipe my degree from the wall. 

Heteroscedasticity.

Use it at a party sometime and let me know how it goes.

Maybe if this whole stay-at-home mom thing doesn't work out I could go back into the world of economics, make a million bucks and then hire a sitter while I grocery shop.

And yet, these little ones keep pulling me back home. I like it that way, I guess.

I better go chase my little random variables now.