We got to dissect sheep hearts for the first Anatomy and Physiology (A & P) lab, yesterday. How cool is that?!

It's not quite as intimidating as it might sound for a first lab, partly because it wasn't a true dissection, in the sense that no one critiqued how well we cut into the heart. Mostly it's not intimidating because for everyone else in the class this wasn't actually their first lab. This is the second semester of a two semester course, so yesterday's lab was more a continuation for most students than an introduction. But since I had the first semester about twelve years ago and I don't remember doing any dissections at all for it, getting to poke at a sheep's heart on the first day seemed really exciting and slightly nerve wracking.

I'm disappointed, though, that I missed out on dissecting a brain last semester. That must have been really interesting.

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President Obama and I have something in common: we both started new jobs yesterday. Of course, his job is much cooler (and much, much more difficult) than mine, and technically his job is new to him and I've been at my job for most of my life. But still, I get to say I started school the same day he became president, which makes me giddy (his being president, that is).

School makes me not quite giddy, unless you count the butterflies in my tummy. Is it weird to say I'm more nervous now than when I started grad school? Because I think I am. Other than the three science classes I had to take to satisfy core requirements as an undergrad the first time, I haven't had a science class since high school. And now I have two, and they're hard ones! And they have labs! But they should be a lot of fun, too, and the professors seem both nice and engaging, which is an enormous plus.

The only down side to starting a completely different program, is probably the down side Obama is facing: it's going to be a lot of work. And here I am, finally comfortable with having "nothing" to do, too.

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As Simona pointed out in her comment, it's been awhile since we've posted. Part of that is because I have developed an aversion to sitting at the computer. I really can't think why, but I'm hard pressed to even check email on a bi-weekly basis sometimes. Sorry about that.

Perhaps more applicable, though, is that part of the reason for not posting is because I feel we haven't been doing anything terribly interesting about which to write. Writing from Madagascar can't fail to be interesting, and even babbling about hiking in New Zealand sounds faintly exotic, so has a guaranteed interest factor, but writing about what we do, or don't do, in Boise seems much less interesting. Which is too bad, because actually we've been doing some pretty neat things.

We've had lots of fun hanging out with friends, snowshoeing, knitting and baking (me), building bat and bird houses (David), and planning our futures. Which are also vaguely interesting, at least to us. David's starting his PhD in electrical engineering at BSU (apparently it finally dawned on someone that the BS in BSU was ripe for all sorts of jokes so they're trying to re-brand the school as Boise State. Whatever.) on the 20th. And I've decided that nope, indeed I have no interest in being a manager, which is what my masters degrees have trained me for, so I got my old job back at the library and I too, am going back to school, this time as an undergraduate in nursing with the goal of becoming a Nurse Practitioner. Oooh, and we get to learn Spanish!

And then we became an aunt and uncle on Thursday, to Quinn, a healthy baby girl born at 10:23 am, who has lots of black, curly hair, weighs 7 lbs 15 oz and is 20 1/2 inches long. We leave on the 15th for a quick trip to Portland to meet her and check in on her parents.

So there has been some neat stuff going on. It just hasn't seemed like it at the time. Except the baby. Babies always seem exciting at the time.

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