Proposal Week

Well, not a whole lot to report again this week. Our dissertation proposals are due on Monday so everyone has been working on those. Last Monday we didn’t have class because all of the forensic instructors went to a conference in Washington state. I thought that included the prof from our class but he was around, so I’m not really sure why we didn’t have class. But I did manage to get a start on my proposal so it worked out all right. Tuesday we had classes as usual. We are learning to use Microsoft Access to make databases in which to record our bone assemblages. I had never heard of it before, but it’s actually a really useful program. It can make lists like Excel, but then you can sort through them and put things into separate tables, but they are all linked so all the info can be searched and cross-referenced. I’m impressed.

Wednesday I went to campus in the afternoon and got quite a bit of work done. I printed a few of my sources, of which there are very few. No one has really done much work on bone tools. Hopefully that doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time and just means that the sample is small and no one has bothered. Guess I’ll find out soon enough ;) After writing for a few hours I went with Melissa to the international movie that they play every Wednesday for free on campus. It annoys me because they always start it late and can never figure out how to use the computer system in the room. This week after they finally got it started it played for about 10 minutes and then the screen went blank. You could still hear it but couldn’t see it. So we decided to leave. There is only one bus per hour back to our flat and it was about to come so rather than mess around we decided we’d just rent the movie some time.

Thursday I went to lunch with some friends. We tried a new Chinese buffet right on the quay (pronounced key, if I haven’t said that before). It was a dreary and rainy day so the view was a bit bleak, but it would be really nice on a sunny day. The food was really good too. And then we had banana fritters and ice cream for dessert. Yum! After that I had to go looking for a present for my flatmate whose birthday was Friday. I ended up getting her some bracelets. I think she liked them.

Friday we again had class. After that I stuck around and finished my proposal. I had be procrastinating really badly all week so I just needed to finish writing it so that I could later edit it and be done. Another guy from my class was also there and he told me about this place near here called the Ancient Technology Center where they use ancient technology to build stuff. Right now they are building a longhouse and making all of the shingles by hand. I guess it’s mostly for school children, but they have open days sometimes and volunteer days. So I may try it out sometime if I have time and can get there. I don’t know exactly where it is, so I may need a car in order to get there. But I did finish the proposal and get it printed so that I could edit it over the weekend. When I got home we had a quick birthday thing for our flatmate. She was off to have dinner and a party with her friends, but we had gotten her a cake, so we made her eat that and open her presents before she left. Then later that evening one of my friends made dinner for everyone. It was a really good pie of some sort. She makes delicious crust and then filled it with chicken and veg and all kinds of spices and things. It turned out really nice. We then headed up to beer pong for awhile, but everyone was smoking up there so I didn’t stay long.

Saturday I went to body pump class and then made a salad for lunch. My flatmate from India was scandalized that I was going to eat broccoli without cooking it. I made her try some, but if she gets sick now I know she’ll blame me and my broccoli. She said in India they never eat raw food. They would always boil or fry it. So that was interesting because I’ve seen her eat and she does always cook everything, but I didn’t realize it was because she won’t eat it raw. So after lunch I went grocery shopping and then went to wander around the mall. I didn’t buy anything though L In the evening I edited my proposal and wrote the title page, so it is completely finished now. I’m not sure all the rule about titles so it’s pretty boring now (An overview of the Bone Awls on the Iron Age sites of Wessex and Southern Britain). Hopefully I can spice it up a bit for the real report. We shall see.

Today I’m trying pilates for the first time. My friend Stine goes every Thursday and loves it, so I thought I’d give it a try. Hopefully it’s not too hard as I’m still a bit sore from yesterday. Then I don’t have too much planned for the rest of the day. I need to start work on my presentation about sheep in human burials that I’m giving on Friday. Boo to that. At least it isn’t assessed. We get notes on the presentation and then have to write up a paper that will be assessed. So hopefully I can get that started today. No new pics this week, sorry. Well, hope you had a good week and hope to hear from you soon.

Apple Crisp and Disease

Well, not a whole lot to report this week. Sunday I went out with the girls for Valentine's day. We went and saw a dumb movie and then went to Pizza Hut. They had amazingly bad service for Valentine's day evening. And they weren't even very busy. They were also out of a lot of their food. I don't know who orders that stuff, but they did a terrible job. After that we went bowling. That was really fun. I think I got my highest score ever. 143!! The busses stop running really early on Sunday s so we had to walk to a bus stop to take some other bus. The lady at the bowling place told us to walk up this ridiculously huge set of stairs and then follow the fence line. We did, but there were no lights and I'm pretty sure no one was suppose to be up there. We walked along the fence until we got to some brush and couldn't go any further. We then had to turn back and call a cab. But of course we didn't have a cab number. We finally tracked down a number and ordered 2 cabs. Then a cab showed up really quickly and took half the group. When the next cab showed up he said that the next one was behind him. We said, no, it already came, but apparently that guy had scammed us and told us he was there to pick us up when he wasn't. But the other guy was cool and didn't make us pay for two or anything.

Monday I had class. We were learning about paleopathology this week. People with skulls that fuse too soon and are really small, people whose skulls get really big because of increased cranial pressure, cleft palate, scoliosis, osteoarthritis, stuff like that. It was pretty cool to see it. Tuesday we started learning how to make a database to record our animal bone assemblage. Its actually not that hard once you know what you're doing. And it makes recording and retrieving your info way easier than using excel. And to think I had never even heard of access until getting to England. Wednesday Stine and I went to lab. We started in the human lab to review some of the basic identification stuff that we'd forgotten. I don't know what I'll do when looking for a job and not having been in the lab for months. I won't remember anything :s

Thursday I went to a coffee shop to study. I didn't actually get a whole lot of studying done though. Whenever I go with Stine I just end up talking to her and not reading. But I do learn about Norway, which is cool. This week I learned that they have a lot of problems with immigration too. They also have crazy/stupid politicians who don't know how to use their brains. So its nice to know it isn't just America. Then Thursday night I had people over for apple crisp. I'd been wanting some but knew I'd just eat the whole pan if I made it, so I invited people over and we finished it off that night. It was pretty delicious.

Friday I woke up with a bit of a cold. I went to class and was feeling worse after so I came home and went to bed. When I got up I felt even sicker. I fell asleep again and was slightly better when I woke up. Saturday I still didn't feel great, but I got a lot of reading for my dissertation proposal done. There is some interesting stuff out there, but nothing from Britain in the Iron Age so I guess that's good, but it also leaves me without many super relevant references. I'll have to explain why the middle east is appropriate as a reference for Britain. Oh well. Today I just have to go to the grocery store and try to get some writing done on the proposal. Its due a week from Monday, but I'd like to have it in on Friday. Don't know if that will happen though. Well, here are the pics from the week. Talk to you later!

Dorchester Trip Weekend

Well, another week has passed. On Monday we had our human anatomy class as usual. The lab demonstrator was back from New York and was in a bad mood as usual. My group asked her to help us with sexing our skeleton to make sure that we were right and she yelled at us for not doing it earlier even though we had and were just asking for confirmation. Then later in the day the whole class got an email from her yelling at us for someone having put a pair of muddy boots in the lab. She claimed that micro-organisms from the mud could have gotten out and into the boxes of bones, which is weird because we all go in there all the time with our shoes that we wear outside, sometimes in the mud, and there is no protocol for keeping dirt out of the lab. And to top it off, she followed it up with another one the next day saying that if we are in the lab we are suppose to monitor who else is in there and be sure they have permission. Since when do the students have to monitor that kind of thing. There is a lock on the door. If the person in there has the code I assume they are allowed. I'm not going to start questioning everyone who enters the lab. How ridiculous.

Tuesday we had a butchery demonstration in our animal class. A guy who did his master's here in 2002 came in to show us how to butcher a deer. He was a butcher before starting grad school so he was interested in seeing how butchery shows up in archaeology. It was very cool to see because you never really think about someone actually chopping up the animal, we just look at the marks on the bones. But really, a good butcher would leave almost no marks because hitting the bone with the knife just makes it dull. So that was a really cool day. My friend Stine took pics, so I may get some of them from her and put them up next week, but I don't have them for this week. Sorry.

Wednesday I went to lunch at the Thai restaurant in Poole with a couple of friends. As we were walking over there it started to snow. It was crazy! It would snow for awhile then the sun would come out and then it would snow again. Really weird.

Thursday I didn't do a whole lot. A book I ordered was being delivered so I had to stick around my flat waiting for that. The front desk won't accept packages so if we aren't here when things are delivered we have to wait for them the try to deliver it again. This place is really stupid. I don't know what they pay that front desk lady for. She doesn't do anything.

Friday I got one of my papers back. I was a bit disappointed with the score so I think I'm going to try to talk to the teacher this week. It wasn't a bad score, but his comments on what I could do better didn't really make sense. He suggested that I should have covered 4 additional topics, but we only had 4.5 pages to work with so I don't know how I could have fit any more information into the space allowed. Then Friday night I stayed in and painted my nails and watched a movie.

Saturday I went with AWESOME Day Trips to Dorchester, which is a town about an hour northwest of Poole. AWESOME Day Trips was started by some friends from Corfe house so that we could plan places that we want to go. So it ended up that 10 people went. It was a bit cold when we left, but by the time we got there is was a bit warmer and the sun had come out. There are a lot of museums in Dorchester, but it turns out that they are all pretty expensive for the tiny places that they are. So we didn't want to go in any of them. Instead we headed for the path along the river. It was a bit cold, but I think in the summer it would be really nice. Then we headed for the Roman villa. That was pretty cool. It was excavated in the 30's I think it said. The cover over the top isn't original, but was put there to protect the murals that are still on the floor. After looking at the villa we were a bit cold and hungry so we decided to head to a pub for lunch. The one we ended up in was pretty nice and had a really good lunch.

After lunch we decided to head for Maiden Castle, an Iron Age Hillfort outside of town. We didn't have our map anymore, but Kevin, our "guide" (a Canadian who lives down the hall from me) said he had onein his head so we followed him. So we followed a man wearing a red baseball cap over the hood of his sweatshirt and ended up in a new subdivision being built. So I don't think we were anywhere near where we had planned to go, but we did see a very cool old fountain and a closed chocolate shop. Then we tried again to head to the hillfort. After walking for about an hour though we decided that maybe we didn't want to see it so much afterall :) So we headed back toward town to go to the nearest pub. A few of us stopped at Maumbury Rings as we passed them so that we could say that we'd at least seen one cool thing ;) That was very cool because the way it is built if you stand in the middle and talk in a normal voice people around the outside can hear you. Plus its Neolithic which means it was built using antler and bone tools. Those huge mounds were built without shovels or buckets. Amazing.

Well, I suppose that is about it. We didn't see a whole lot, but it was a fun day. Today some of my friends and I are going to a movie and bowling. So that should be fun. Well, here's the picture link. Enjoy and I hope to hear from you soon.

Week 3: Shower Aaaaahahahahaha!!!

Well, this week wasn't all that exciting, but it had a few fun points. Plus I settled on a dissertation topic, so that's exciting! Monday was class as usual and our statistics paper was finally due. Its nice to have that completely out of my hands now. Tuesday we were suppose to see a butchery demonstration during our applied zooarch class but the demonstrator couldn't make it so we're doing it next week instead. (I'll explain more about it then.) So instead we got our bone assemblages that we'll be working with for the rest of the term. For now we just have to do a preliminary sort and see what we generally have in our box. Then we have to write up a paper about the potential of the assemblage to produce results if further work is done on it. We each only got one box out of an assemblage that our professors worked on a few years ago and is really huge. My box is pretty full and has about 6 or 8 contexts in it. The context is the area of the site that was being dug that the bones came from. For example some of the stuff came from roads, some from areas that were filled in by the people living on the site and some from sandy areas. Sometimes you get different amounts or types of bones in different contexts to its important to look at that kind of stuff. It was pretty exciting to actually get to start a project that's related to real world work.

Wednesday I had to run to the pharmacy for calamine lotion for my flatmate who has come down with chickenpox. Apparently in Indian it isn't endemic so not everyone has had them. I kind of would have thought that the British government would have insisted on a vaccination for it before coming, but I guess not. So she has locked herself in her room and refuses to come out. Everyone else in my flat has had it so she can't infect us, but she doesn't come out anyway. At first she was making us just leave things outside her door, but at least now she'll open the door and take things from me when I'm there. But her parents are freaking out too, so that doesn't help anything. Oh well, hopefully she feels better soon. Then later on Wednesday I went to campus to work on my assemblage. I got almost all of it sorted, so that was good. I also had my first appointment with the National Health Service. And it was great. Actually I had gone in the day before because I needed my prescription refilled and they could have gotten me an appointment 2 hours later. No 3 month crap like everyone is always saying in the states. But because my prescription is from the US they didn't really know what it was so I had to bring in the info packet about it so they could look it up. They didn't have it, so they gave me something else instead. But when I was there I was talking to the nurse and she was asking me about American health care. She told me that after they started the NHS people in Britain actually got healthier because they started going to the doctor. They still have problems with obesity and smoking, but overall they are healthier than they were. I don't know when the NHS started, but she was an older lady so I guess she has probably seen some of that happen over the years. I was telling her that my prescription is $200 for 3 months with no insurance and she was shocked. Here prescriptions are either free or about 7 pounds a month depending on what it is. So there is my rant. I realize taxes here are crazy high, but at least they go to something useful.

Thursday I didn't do much of anything. I read some stuff to clarify what I wanted to do for my dissertation and then went shopping. I mostly wanted some new tights but ended up with a really cool necklace too. Then on Friday I met with my adviser and hashed out my topic. I'm going to do a survey of the sheep metapodial awl/gouges from sites from the Iron Age in Southwest Britain. One report that I read categorized the ones from their site into 5 categories so I'm going to use those categories and find all the similar tools from other sites and try to fit them in to their system. It will be mostly a literature based project, but hopefully I'll get to go and see some of the actual tools in some of the museums around the area. Mark knows some of the museum people and I think Ellie does too so hopefully they'll let me in. I would like to actually get to touch some of them after all the research about them I'll be doing. So yeah, it should be cool and Mark said he thinks its a good topic and not just a waste of time as most people don't do overall surveys they just talk about what is at one particular site. So it will be interesting to see if similarities and differences can be seen across sites. Friday night a few of us went to see Nine. The show numbers were awesome, but the movie as a whole was a bit confusing and weird. At least it was something to do though.

Saturday I went with Melissa to Westbourne, another little subcity in the area. We go by it on the bus when we go into Bournemouth and always see some cute looking shops. There actually weren't as many shops there as I imagined, but there were a lot of restaurants and cafes. We went into one that was called chocol8. They only had 4 tables, but we got one and got some delicious hot chocolates and really good cake. They make those fancy cakes that you see on tv that look like handbags and shoes and stuff like that and they also make chocolates. Our cake wasn't the fancy kind, but it was very tasty. And on the foam of the hot chocolates they made a heart out of hot chocolate mix. It was really cute. We want to take all the girls back there sometime so they told us that if we called ahead we could reserve a table for all of us. So that should be a fun trip some weekend. Then Saturday night Sytske and I went to the Lighthouse for a concert of John Williams songs by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. It was really good. But it was really weird at the end because I think we applauded for about 10 or 15 minutes. But this was just seated applause, no standing ovation. But we clapped and the orchestra stood up and then the director left, then he came back and each individual section stood up and we clapped some more and then he left and then he came back again and they all stood up again and we just kept clapping. I thought for sure there would be an encore with all his coming back but there wasn't and finally we all stopped clapping and left. Me and Sytske gave up clapping eventually because our hands hurt. It was really weird.

Today I'm going to buy a swimsuit so that I can start using the pool at the gym. They have some water workout classes so I might try out one of those, but mostly I just want to swim laps I think. Running is good, but it gets boring after awhile. So I guess that's all I have for this week. Here's a link the the couple pics I took in Ashley Cross last week that I didn't get up then. Have a good week and I hope to hear from you soon.