Well, I was really late last week, so this week I'm going to be really early. It's technically Sunday here already, despite what the time-stamp on this is going to tell you. So Monday was officially my birthday. We didn't start class until late because we were having a guest lecturer come in. So I got to sleep in and have a leisurely morning of eating breakfast and opening presents. I got some new ranch dressing from mom and a really pretty bracelet and I got a book from my godmother. Then as I was sitting at my desk my phone rang and it was the front desk ringing me to tell me that the mailman was there with a package for me. This was a miracle in itself because they never call us to tell us when we have a package. They always just tell the mail person to leave a card and then we have to go to the post office to pick it up. So anyway, I got a package from Grandma on my actual birthday, which was really exciting. And she got me a really pretty pair of silver earrings. Eventually I headed off to class and we had our guest lecture on infectious disease. Pretty interesting. But after that I had to start working on the assignment that was due on Friday. Luckily a good portion of it was done as we had been working on it in class, but since I hadn't done anything the week before I was a bit stressed about it. So I worked for most of the afternoon and evening and then my flatmates made me a chicken dinner and got me a cake, so all in all I had a really nice birthday. So thanks everybody :)
Tuesday we had class as usual. Nothing particularly interesting there. Wednesday I went to school and spent a few hours working on my assignment again. Then I had it pretty much finished by Wednesday evening I think. I just had to go back to school and edit and burn a CD on Thursday to be able to turn it in.
But that didn't end the stress because we have another assignment due on Monday that none of us had really started as of Friday. So at least we were all in the same boat, but that didn't make any less shitty of a boat. To be fair, we had given a presentation a couple weeks ago and this is just a paper based on that, so a lot of the research was already done, but there was more to do and a lot of collating to do. So after class on Friday I spent the rest of the day on campus and then worked for a little while when I got home.
Saturday was very cool. I went to a conference in Weymouth, which is a town about an hour to the west. They are putting in a road for use during the 2012 Olympics and while they were digging it they found a burial pit of 55 bodies that had been beheaded and 51 heads. They also excavated some sites from other time periods before the road went through, but their main draw was the burial pit. I actually thought that the Iron Age site they talked about was more interesting, as they had structures there as well as burials, but everyone else mostly just wanted to hear about the pit. So they just got the isotope and dating info back and it turns out that the people in the pit were probably viking raiders during the Saxon period. They also seem to have been thrown into the pit naked after having their heads chopped off with a sword. Some heads are missing so they speculate that they were probably taken away as trophies or put up on spikes or something. It was funny how everyone in the audience was suddenly an expert archaeologist when the question/answer session started. All kinds of suggestions about who they were and how/why they were killed. One man was also quite insistent that they try to perform DNA analysis on them despite that fact that the researchers told him that it would serve no real purpose at this point because the isotope analysis has already told us that they are from all over Scandinavia and therefore, unlikely to be related to each other.
We walked around Weymouth a bit during our lunch break. It's a really cute seaside town, but it was kind of rainy today, so it wasn't at its best. I'll be going back sometime when it's nice to see it in a better light. We got home about 6 and I worked on my paper all night. It is in a very rough draft right now, but it's technically finished. So I'm off to bed now. No new pictures this week, but here's the link to the ones that I got up late last week. Hope to hear from you all soon!
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