Yet another week has passed and its now only 2 weeks until I fly home for Christmas! I'm excited to be going home, but I have SOOO much to get done before I leave that its kind of stressing me out. This past week consisted of some really cool stuff and some not so good stuff. So here goes:
Last Sunday night I went out with 2 of my flatmates to Bournemouth to get dinner at a place called Aruba. It was really good food and had a cool atmosphere inside. It was decorated island style, but then also had Christmas decorations up, so it was quite the mishmash of decor. I have pics, but haven't gotten them up yet. I'll do that for next week's entry. Our other flatmates were suppose to come for dinner as well, but backed out at the last minute as usual. It was a fun girl's night out though.
Monday I had human anatomy as usual. We did the pelvic girdle and femur. Again, there was just sooo much to learn about only 2 bones. But on the plus side, because we are one lecture behind we will only be tested on the things from the last 3 weeks, so we don't have to know the lower leg and foot. Woohoo! We have our exam tomorrow so I've spent much of the week studying like crazy. I know a ton of stuff at this point, I just hope its the right stuff...
Tuesday we had animal lab. We were debating the different techniques for differentiating between sheep and goat skeletons. This is a problem in archaeology because people use sheep and goat for very different things, so if you can't tell them apart, you can't necessarily say what was happening at a site. They are also very similar to each other bone-wise, so it is very hard and very debatable to distinguish them from each other. If you would like to know more email me. No need to bore everyone here needlessly :)
Wednesday I was in lab for most of the afternoon. I considered staying into the evening, but just couldn't take it anymore by 5.
Thursday I spent 9.5 hours at school in the lab. At least 8 of those hours were spent studying bones. It was a ridiculously long time, but I really made a breakthrough and learned the muscle attachments of the scapula, pelvis and clavicle pretty well and even made some inroads on the humerus, radius and ulna. So I felt good about the day despite getting home at 9:30 at night :( Who knew that grad school would require this level of commitment and work ;)
Friday was pretty exciting because we got to go to the chiropractor's college to their wet lab to look at cadavers. One of the people on my course has a car, so she drove a few of us over there for it so that we didn't have to take a bus. That was awesome and it was my first time in a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side! The wet lab was really cool. When we first got there the smell was crazy and I thought it might make me sick, but after awhile you got used to it. It was the formeldahyde that they use to preserve the bodies that is so smelly. These cadavers had been dissected so that we could look at all the muscles on the upper body and arms. It was really amazing. The demonstrator there even showed us all the anatomy of the soft tissues like the heart and lungs that we don't generally deal with in class. It was kind of odd that I would do something like this as an archaeologist, but I'm in class with mostly forensic anthropologists who might actually find soft tissue on their murder victims, so it was good for them I guess. But it was really neat to get to see. After finishing there I went, you guessed it, back to the bone lab on campus. I was there for a reasonable amount of time and was home by about 5:30 or so.
Saturday was terrible because I still didn't feel comfortable with the material so me and a friend went to lab again :( But after going through a few boxes of bones of the entire body I feel fairly good about it. We stayed a few hours and then came home. We went and got milkshakes as a reward for all of our studying and did some browsing in the shops. Then we went to the grocery store to get some stuff for dinner. We had turkey curry. It was quite delicious. After that I did a bit more studying then watched tv and went to bed.
Today I don't plan to study much. My flatmates and a few other people are going to the chinese buffet down the road for lunch and then I'm going to try to get a few Christmas things for my secret santa exhanges. When I get back I think I'll read through my notes one last time and put it away until tomorrow morning. My brain can't hold anymore info at this point. Then I think I'll finish addressing Christmas cards and try to get those sent tomorrow. I meant to have that all done by this point, but am behind as usual. Then this evening we are decorating our flat for Christmas. We have garland (which they call tinsel here) and balls and beads, so it should look nice. Well, I suppose that's all I've got. Hope you are doing well. Talk to you soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment