Originally posted on Saturday, July 26, 2014
Trauma analysis. The morning lectures are getting closer to the practical, working our way into pathologies. I see more and more of the members leering, their morbid curiosity obviously fuelling their desire to be here. There are worse reasons to be here, but neck craning hardly seems a foundation for a career in this field. That’s just me, of course, my own biases spilling over into my work. Jon’s entire lecture was like an annotated bibliography for the paper on kerfing I wrote for Forensics in 2013, illuminating the work of Symes, Haglund, in conjunction with the already heavily discussed Scheuer, Black, and Lewis. Sidenote, I am pro-Oxford comma.
The penultimate bone quiz was difficult. Non human bones (although I got it right it was marked wrong. I corrected then recorrected, my answer wasnt clear enough…no matter), I think it was definitely a wake up call. Folllowing that we went further into bone healing and interpretation, coupled with the previous days trauma lecture it was a fascinating combination of engineering and material stress that drew me back to my short lived time in mechanical engineering. Intent on recovering from the lowest bone quiz score since the pre-quiz. Due to partial skeletons, Jill and I managed to inventory and photograph two more burials before the end of the day. Quality over quantity at all times, but given the expectation of 2-5 burials total, and the achievement of 5 burials in the first week of analysis, I can’t help but feel proud.
Drama at the hostel in the form of new arrivals. Apparently tomorrow a large group will arrive, and the staff is banning us from the kitchen entirely for the weekend. Unless they want to pay for my kebabs, this will not work, but no reason to join in the dread until we have discussed this with Jon. Evening study took our minds off the issues at hand, although several glasses of wine meant it was difficult to keep everyone on track. Several of us stayed up quite late, finishing off cheap Romanian merlot and sharing tales of previous debauchery and insolence.