Forensic Anthropology
1 December 2003, 3:32 PM

As my semester is drawing to a close (Yay! Since June I've had back-to-back classe, with only one week off. I'm looking forward to a break.) I'm thinking about just how much I've learned.

In six months I've gone from knowing only a handful of Spanish words to being able to (mostly) read the Spanish-language newspapers I come across. Fantastic! If only I were so confident about my speaking skills. And my listening skills will still need to improve. I can listen to the telenovelas playing on the Spanish channel at the local Mexican eatery, but my brain doesn't process it fast enough. My brain reacts like this: "Oh wow, I heard a word I know. Hey, I know that word. Cool! Now what is that word? Oh! Oh! I know! That word translates as [something]. Nifty"

Of course, by that time several more minutes of dialog have raced by and I'm trying to piece together the soap opera by only the dramatic acting and a single word every few minutes.

The knowledge I've gained from the forensic anthropology course has it's own down sides. I took the class because it was called "osteology" - I wanted to learn more about bones since paleo-human remains are fascinating to me. I learned a lot more than I expected, since - besides just the bones - we learned a lot about forensic techniques and how forensic anthropology helps in modern identification cases. (As a result of crimes.)

Wonderful Vacation
1 December 2003, 3:03 PM

I feel rested, refreshed and renewed. You couldn't ask for better results from a week off. The first four days were simply "work-free", which meant that we rested, relaxed, cleaned up the house, did fix-it projects, read and watched movies. (Which included "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" extended DVD.) We even had our first non-family guest stop by for a few minutes.

By Tuesday we were on the road to visit my folks. That evening was a special Eid-related Indian dinner: chicken curry with basmati rice, beef pulao and dahi, spicy potatoes and plenty of rasmali, gulab jamuns, and chum-chums. It was a fun and relaxed evening, and both my parents were doing the, "have some more, have some more" thing. In fact, the whole visit was very yummy. We went from Indian food on Tuesday, to Thai food on Wednesday and traditional American Thanksgiving on Thursday. We drove around the entire west side of Houston on Wednesday (weird backups on the roads and trying to avoid them while getting to a few shops) and just generally had a good time hanging out with my folks.

Thursday was the day of two Thanksgivings. First we had Thanksgiving at my folks house: Roasted turkey, the family-recipe gravy, "yams", roasted potatoes, green beans, stuffing (as a side, never in the turkey) and two kinds of pie (pumpkin and pecan). Yum. We hung around for a little while, then drove down to the coast to visit with Jeff's folks who were vacationing there. Luckily there was about 6 hours between meals, since we had another Thanksgiving meal there. This time it was a smoked turkey, cornbread, green beans, mashed potatoes, brown gravy, and two kinds of pies (sugar-free apple and pecan). Jeff and I ate WELL this week, let-me-tell-you....

I'd brought my fishing pole and tackle, but decided to stay inside (where it was warm) and read and stitch on this visit. My stitching project? Well, I bought a GORGEOUS cross-stitch sampler to do, but since it's also on 32 count linen (the first time I'll work with that fine a weave of linen) I opted to get "back into the cross-stitching groove" with an old unfinished, but appropriate project. It was a round-robin project that I'd sent through the mail to a bunch of fellow cross-stitchers I'd met on a discussion listserv. We'd chosen a "seaside" theme and my project was an image of a fisherman in the surf of a very Gulf-coast like scene. I decided to pull that one out and finish up the details and patches that hadn't been stitched during the round-robin. It's been nearly TWO YEARS since I picked up any kind of project like this, and it felt good to get back into it. I may drag out my knitting too, if I can *find* it in all the boxes...

Besides stitching, I went shopping for trinkets and souvenirs with my sister-in-law and her husband while everybody else watched the Texas A&M/UT foot ball game. We found a small but *excellent* bookshop next to a coffee/tea shop. I'm definitely going to be headed back there each time we visit. By Saturday late-morning we were headed on back to San Marcos.

The kitty did give us a few dirty looks (where the heck have you people been!) but she did just fine while we were away. We still had some time to ourselves, so we did a little hunting for Christmas/New Years presents and watched DVDs and did yard work.

All-in-all, a most excellent vacation. I didn't even mind coming in to work again, though part of that may be due to the fact that we'll be off again for the Holiday break. We get two weeks off as official holiday, and I may even take some vacation time to stretch it out to three weeks.