My quiet night of the week

Since I have no class on Friday I've started keeping Thursday as my quiet night in. Plus, there's Project Runway at 9 pm which I love watching.

Today was such a long day...got up at 6:45 am, dragged my butt out of bed and went into the kitchen to make a brown bag lunch, since one of my profs wanted a bunch of us to get together, have lunch, and discuss anthropological theory. I found that the roll I'd been saving for today was moldy so I tossed it and decided to just get fast food instead.

I made it to class ten minutes early and proceeded to put my feet up and read the paper. There are two papers published on campus - The Daily 49er (CSULB was established in 1949) and The Union. The Union is CRAZY...last week the headline on the front page was: "Get Laid - A Girls' Guide for Guys" Practically the whole thing was about sexcapades! What kind of crazy bacchanalian school am I going to??
But yeah...I read The Daily 49er...much less scary...

Class was a struggle because I was so sleepy - I had nightmares about having a stalker last night and kept checking the lock on the door - but I did learn one thing: a sinuous river has no clay and continually alters its own track and sandbeds, while a meandering river's track is determined by the lay of the land around it because there is a lot of clay bedding. Yay!

After the lectures were over the whole class ran up to the IIRMES lab (http://www.iirmes.org/) and Dr. Behl ran one of the scanning electron microscopes so we could examine some diatomite we'd picked up on our field trip. It was SO cool - we found some beautiful whole diatoms and it was so rad seeing how the SEM worked...I was itching to play with it! (The guys were too - as we left three of them were conferring on the possibilities of shooting some blood samples with gold and examining it...and fingernails...and hair...and teeth...boys!)

We got out at 11 am so I curled up under a tree with a textbook, but the day was so pretty I didn't get much studying done. I grabbed some fast food at 11:40, and I was pretty unhappy because a) I had to use my credit card since they charged a full dollar to use a debit card (???) and b) it was expensive and HUGE. I got home and looked up the calories and the sandwich and fries were 710 calories EACH!! And I was so proud this morning when I weighed myself and discovered I'd lost 6 pounds since moving here!!
So when I go to Sam's Club this weekend I'm buying salad stuff and having salad for lunch on campus. No more expensive fatty foods!

The group discussion was interesting - there were only four of us, and my exhaustion hit pretty hard, so I had trouble focusing during parts, but Dr. Lipo is a good lecturer. He wants the archaeology students to get together again so we can discuss more.

After the discussion Dr. Lipo took me to the NAGPRA lab I'll be working in and showed me what I need to do...basically inventory five storerooms' worth of boxes of Native American artifacts ranging from potsherds, to stone tools to the bones from burials. I'm going to have to get in touch with the National Park Service (since they run NAGPRA compliance) and figure out EXACTLY what the latest requirements are (they seem to change regularly) so I can write the inventories and summaries correctly. This stuff MUST be done by December (dear God, help me!) so I need to do it right the first time.
Also I have to be very careful to follow protocol so I won't upset any of the tribal members. The door to the hallway must be closed at all times (so people can't curiously peer at the deceased), I must keep the burnt sage where they left it, and there's probably some other stuff I've forgotten.
It's really intense, and I hope I don't offend anyone.

After that it was 3 pm and I came home and passed out. I think I'll send out my emails tomorrow and I need to hop on over to campus to scan this book for myself and Jake (another 1st year archaeology student). He's got a book to scan for both of us too...we're going to send them to Dr. Lipo and he'll send PDF copies to us. So that's two MORE books required reading this semester. When Project Runway is over I need to settle down and read some more. I have 8 chapters I MUST read by Monday night, a paper due Monday morning (although I haven't gotten Dr. Behl's comments yet so I'm not revising it till then), and now 7 books of "background" reading to do ASAP, plus a paper for my Theory class Monday night. Oh, and a laboratory exam on Thursday that I have to have memorized the geological time scale for.

It's going to be a long weekend.