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.

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.

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.

With Mama and Papa, we went to the local protest against California's Prop 8, organized by Join the Impact. We also met most of our friends there, since civil rights are something we're all proponents of. The protest was pleasant, though the mic system was not quite adequate for the crowd, so I spent a lot of time cooing over Ben, Alisha's youngest, or talking to Alisha and Amy, while we all enjoyed the sun. David took pictures, naturally, the best of which you can see here:

Prop H8 Protest

And then we all went to lunch, which was fun (though may I say that Bittercreek was a little stingy with its tzatziki sauce on the pita David and I shared).

In the evening, after walking home via Boise State's library, we went bowling, something we always enjoy, but don't do nearly often enough. We were going to meet our friend Ed, but he stood us up, having thought that we were meeting Sunday evening, instead. So he missed my rather nifty game of 145, and the two less nifty games that followed of 86 and 89. Seriously, when you haven't been bowling in awhile, your hand starts to hurt! In fact, David would claim that more than just your hand hurts, since he woke up Sunday morning with a sore backside, but I maintain it was because of the walking, something we haven't done nearly enough of since moving back. Life is just so hard, isn't it?

The good. Obama won in an electoral landslide and his tide of dreams swept clean many Congressional seats, which promises hope that the US can pull out of the dark ages of the last eight years. Or maybe the dark ages have been going on much longer. Thomas Friedman pointed out that the American Civil War began in Virginia 174 years ago and, in many ways, ended there on Tuesday. Overstated, but inspiring. Notably for the record turnout, especially among minorities.

The bad. Idaho politics didn't shake the narrow-minded conservatism that bogs down political life here, except in two cases. 1) Voters from four districts that form the core of Boise (including the district in which I live) enabled a sweep for their democratic state legislators. 2) Idaho will be sending one democrat to the House in Washington. He's a true "Idaho democrat," which means he'd be a republican in almost any other state, but still, Idahoans did actually elect a democrat.

The ugly. California, Florida and Arizona approved anti-marriage ballot measures, which undermines the concept of marriage (and the legal protection it provides) by limiting who can and can't be married. According to exit polls (which Nate Silver tells me to distrust) the bulk of racial minorities voted for these hateful measures. If so, it is baffling how, in one day, progress can be made for racial minorities and those same minorities can simultaneously beat up on another minority. But, by far, the ugliest result on Tuesday was the Arkansas' anti-child ballot measure, which hurt orphans by reducing the number of loving homes to which they could otherwise belong.

In the end, maybe Benjamin Franklin said it best, "Democracy is two wolves and one sheep deciding on what to have for dinner."

But until all of that happens, David created another time-lapse movie of our Day 2 work, which you can watch below. You know, just to prove that we do, in fact, work. At least on occasion.

From Geekery

Does anyone else think it looks a bit too much like a hammer and sickle?

What took the wind from the sails of victory last week started with an abdominal pain I had after breakfast Thursday. (In truth, I had had a mild intermittent pain for the previous few weeks.) I spent all Thursday in bed moaning while waves of pain broke over me. By evening the pain localized in my lower right side. (If you're a doctor, or interested in medicine, you can probably guess what happened next.) The pain had not subsided by Friday morning, when I went to a local emergency room. An exam, confirmed with a CT scan, indicated a bad appendix. The surgery was later that day.

But then, after spending about four days in Boise, I realized how much I really do like it: there's so little traffic, and people are so nice. Plus, Idaho has everything we love to do in the out of doors. The politics leave a lot to be desired, but really, other than that, Boise is perfect. So we've decided to stay for a couple of years while we figure out a way of getting to Africa without having to spend a few years back East.

Naturally, however, all of this means we need to be seeking employment. Or at least one of us does, anyway. So as all good decision makers do when making important, potentially life-changing decisions, we played rock paper scissors to determine which one of us has to actually get a job. And sadly, I lost. David wouldn't even go for my best-out-of-three ploy! Can you believe it?

So now, whenever we get around to making the old house presentable to sell, I'll be looking for a job. Sigh. But until then, I won't have one, which is just so much better.

I've seen quite a few movies over the summer and have enjoyed the majority of them. Some of them were even quite good. I'm not going to mention any of them right now. Instead, I have a suggestion for the next time in the near-ish future when you're wanting to marvel at things that are so horrible but you can't quite turn away from the screen. Because they have been immortalized on celluloid (or 1s and 0s in the case of DVDs), you can be in horrified awe of them over and over again. Did I mention that neither of them are actual horror films?

So, after a year of not knitting while on the trip, I came back and started my first sweater. It looks like a first sweater (not all of the stitches are perfectly even), but I'm still rather pleased with it. It's actually a combination of two patterns, because half way through the first pattern, I realized the yarn I was using was too heavy (the pattern is for a short-sleeved summer sweater), so I turned the top and sleeves into a different pattern. (The pattern names are "Temptation" and "Bluebell Boatneck," hence the title of this post. If you have a ravelry account, it's listed under the same name.)

And since I have to show it off, David took some very nice pictures, including this one:

From Knitting on Ravelry

Naturally I find it more palatable because I agree with many more of his policy stances, but I also really just really liked the positiveness of the messages. A message in this ad of which I'm particularly fond: "I don't want a nation just for me. I want a nation for everybody."