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Yay for picture Tuesday!

A whole lot of not much

So I signed up for Google's AdSense thingy. You may have noticed the ads on the bottom of the page. I figured they would be a little more inconspicuous there and not too much in the way. I'm just not quite sure if I like it yet. We'll see, they are on probation and I can get rid of them whenever.

Tomorrow I'm going to go to the Arizona Science Museum and check out the Body Worlds exhibit. If you haven't read about it in the papers or heard about it yet, it's a pretty cool thing that these people have done. Dead human bodies are dissected and preserved and then posed to show different activities like playing soccer or praying. According to their website, the idea of the exhibit is to help people understand more about their own bodies by showing them in real life situations that they can relate to. I'm pretty excited to be going, and I will have a full run down on the exhibit on Wednesday.

Sometimes you just have to face the music

So I just took a "How much of a nerd are you?" test. It was a pretty fun little test and if you click on the nerd score above, you can see for yourself. I heard about the test from my father-in-law, who is a self proclaimed nerd. I scored higher than he did. This is not good news to me.

On to other news, I promised to keep up the food analogies for the inside of the human body which I'm disecting for class. Today's two analogies are corn and chicken. These are two good foods that most people I know seem to enjoy. I'm going to do my best to ruin them for you. As the disection has progressed up the leg, the fat globules have grown larger. Now they resemble large, squishy yellow corn kernels. Yummy. While digging down below the skin, I stumbled upon the muscle layer in the arm. It definitely looks a lot like chicken. 'Nuff said.

As I look at my post, I can see that maybe my fascination with the internal working of the human body may contribute to my nerdiness. Oh well. At least I don't wear glasses... oh...never mind.

I think this means my keyboard is an unassembled book

Today Picture Tuesday returns. Next week, Picture Tuesday will again be on Tuesday. This is a fairly simple system and it should help me keep things under control here at the Base of Operations. Have a great rest of the day, and hopefully I will be back tomorrow.

A little like peeling an orange...

This blog should have been called "Broken Record." I know, I know, I promise to blog and then I don't. I'm sorry. Sometimes life happens. I think I may have set my sights too high for the beginning of the semester. So here's my new "commitment", and I do use that word very lightly, I'm going to do my best to post every Monday for sure. Also, I should be able to post on most Tuesdays. And that's it. The other three weekdays are up in the air for now. Sorry. They may happen, they may not.

I do however have some exciting news that should cheer up even the most glum of you dedicated few. I started skinning my first person today. I am in a human dissection class this semester at school and I have to say, it was the coolest thing I have ever done. Not to compare it to spending time with Jamie, but it was just like when we go out on a date - time flew by without me even noticing it!

There are six of us to a body and my group got a very old female who has very thin skin. I have been assigned the task of working on the upper right side, so I have the right arm and chest. It is a crazy feeling making that first cut into the skin, but once you do, there's no turning back and you just have to keep going. I got a pretty good chunk of the forearm done today. It's going to take a lot of time, but I have all semester.

For those of you who are wondering, it feels a lot like peeling an orange with a really sharp knife. If you were to try and remove just the peel using a knife and forceps (pinchers) that's the general idea of what I'm doing. There are plenty of other food analogies (like how the subcutaneous layer looks a lot like string cheese and the fat globules under the skin look like little yellow, jello balls...) but I don't want to ruin all food for you. If you keep reading, I may post some more about all this stuff and I'll try to keep the food analogies going.

Hopefully, there'll be more tomorrow.

Ho Ho Ho, Married Christmas

Christmas as a child is fun, being married at Christmas time: wonderful! This is my first Christmas with my new bride and it was the best one ever.

This may sound corny, but remember to give God thanks for the best Christmas present ever. He is the reason for the season after all (I'm sorry, even though it's true, I feel like that saying is so trite...). Anyway, merry Christmas.

I don't have much else to say for now, so I will leave you with this little jewel of wisdom: when it is Christmas time, and a polar bear stops by the house and invites you to dance, let the bear lead.

Eat your heart out neverland

I don't have much time before class, but I promised a picture today. This one isn't so much funny as it is really cool. This is a real live picture of a baby mermaid born in Asia (yes, I realize that Asia is by far the biggest continent. No, I can't be more precise, I can't remember the exact country, maybe China...). The baby was born with her feet and legs joined together, but doctors were planning to separate them when I first read this story. The good news is that now when people ask you if you have ever seen a mermaid in that condescending voice that ridicules and shames, you can proudly raise your chin and declare, "Yes, I have."

You're welcome.