Obama rally yesterday was awesome. He made some really good points about the economy and came off really strong about defense and taking care of our troops. His ideas about encouraging people to enlist or otherwise volunteer for some sort of national service are important. I especially liked his emphasis on making college affordable, as a broke college student I am all ears. He ties this in with national service - he wants higher education to be attainable for everyone, but those that join the military or the peacecorp should have their college paid for and college work study should be used as a way to volunteer in the community. This is all well and good and I support it, but I need a little help paying for grad school.

It was really cool to be part of one of the largest crowds in NC that he has had so far - 20 to 30,000 people showed up. It feels like all the stories you hear about the '60s - its like a movement...like something different and exciting and good is just around the corner. I have never been so emotionally invested in a campaign and if he loses...ugh, I'm going to be dissappointed and heartbroken. But no matter who wins, everybody has got to suck it up and come together because its going to be a tough job getting this country back on track.

Anyway, Christmas is just around the corner and I have already started watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas - makes me feel warm and fuzzy and I can't wait for the season to start (which happens right after Halloween is over).

Civic Duty

I voted today, am very excited because it's my first national election and, aside from this year's primaries, my first election in general. Doing it early was pretty easy and there was only a small line - which was actually kind of exciting because there you are getting ready to exercise your right to vote and your surrounded by 20 or so of your countrymen getting ready to do the same thing.

So, I'm feeling very connected and part of the process right now. Yay, for being an American : )

Remember to go vote!

Wednesday can't get here fast enough

I have purposefully kept politics out of my posts becuase its a polarizing subject and I think that we need to have more unity now a days....also, I don't want to lose the little viewership that I have based on different points of view..yeah, I'm being a tool, whatever.

BUT! This I have to share and will hopefully be posting video of later...I am going to see Barack Obama on Wednesday!! I know some people don't like him and even I disagree with some of his ideas (not a huge fan of his Iraq pull out plan, though his idea to encourage more community involvement is good)...but I have never felt so energized and hopeful (though that's really cliche now) than I have during this campaign. It feels like we are on the edge of huge change in this country - and I feel like he can take us in an amazing and positive direction.

Plus, his mom was an anthropologist (cultural) who did her fieldwork in the Philippines on blacksmiths..crazy specific. So he's an anthropology baby...which doesn't have anything to do with running the country, but I think is a neat connection.


Can't wait till Wednesday!!

Beautiful campus...some dumb kids...

Apparently, Western Carolina needs to start assigning more homework and explain to these kids how pranks are supposed to be funny, not disturbing.

Really? Really, Car? Really?

So here's a ridiculous story:

Background: One of the guys in my cohort is out of town and the other guy in my group and I are helping to take care of his cats and dog while he and his fiance are away. Went there last night, no big deal...played with the dog, cuddled the kitten. Perfect.

This morning: Ended up staying up All Freakin' Night working on a paper for today that I FINALLY finished at 7:30 am. Ugh. Lay down for a bit and then headed back over to let the puppy out and check on things. Everything is fine except my car window on the driver side seems to not be up all the way. No big deal right? It's electric and I'm resourceful so I play with it as I pull up to the apartment. Doesn't seem to be going up...huh, I think to myself....well, of course I can figure this out, I like to fix things. So I make the horrible horrible decision to roll the window down.

My car door eats the window and makes some really bad 'breaking of something probably really important' sounds. So now my window won't roll up and I can't just park the car with a rolled down window for the rest of the day while I am in class - I live in a nice part of town, but its still a city and while I don't have crazy expensive things the last thing I need is someone to have easy access to steal the radio or even the car itself.

SO...I figure not a big deal, probably just came off the track - not that expensive. I know this because apparently I am also a mechanic. This positive outlook lasts about as long as it takes for the really young and adorable mechanic to take my door apart - which is actually pretty cool looking, by the way. I had already told him my diagnosis and he kind of laughs and make some joke about how I thought it was a simple fix. Yeah, freakin' HILAR-ious.

Turns out...all of that awful crunching and breaking heard earlier? Yup that was the regulator deciding to shatter into a half dozen pieces. This is not hyperbole, I counted those sad little pieces that fell to the ground as the door came apart - a handful of broken white pieces of plastic that means I can't roll down my window and have to get a replacement part - a $200 piece of plastic. Perfect.

So they drill a bolt through my door to keep the window up - which works - and now, $75 later - I am trying to find a cheap regulator to fix my window (which I am told is not likely, but I am research girl - I will find it even if I have to check ebay).

*Sigh* Yeah, so good times this morning. Thank God! I got my paper (due this afternoon) done this morning before I left. Now just two more papers to go before I am taking a day off - I get to watch a Beatles tribute band with a friend of mine this weekend which should be a good time.

Any ideas of where to search for parts other than the junkyard and e-bay would be awesome.

Good Times at the Fair

State Fair was awesome last night! What could be more great than going to a place where just about everything you buy is some sort of fried thing on a stick. The new additions this year? Fried mac and cheese - which I couldn't find - and fried pecan pie - which I saw. My friend tried the deep fried twinkie - she said it was actually pretty good. I was boring and unadventurous and stuck with the normal funnel cake. Funnel cakes at a fair remind me of growing up in WV and going to all the fair and festivals my little town held with my grandmother and getting a funnel cake with her. Sternwheeler Festival and the Parkersburg Homecoming - for being a small area - had some pretty good music come in. Dixie Chicks before they got famous, Diamond Rio, Molly Hatchet Band (who knew they were still touring).

Tomorrow (Monday) would be a good time to go back to the fair - if I had time, what with four papers due this week - because Bobby Flay of Food Network fame will be there...what he's going to do I have no idea, hopefully it will involve making a delicious Southwestern style corn dog with a mango salsa ..yum! (my friend Jo came up with a great recipe he should follow)

Got to see some of the baked and canned goods that won prizes, makes me want to enter a contest sometime with my pepperoni rolls. I'm sure there were larger animals, but we did get to see the champion bunnies - some of those things are huge. I don't know what you are going to do with a 20lb rabbit...maybe eat it?

Anyway, good times at the fair and now its back to environmental archaeology articles.

Coming up for air

Wow, so I just realized that I haven't updated the blog since August. Sorry for the lack of attention, I have been working on keeping my head above water with papers and midterms. On the bright side, my relationship with grad school is a lot less abusive now and according to my mid-term grades, I am not altogether horrible at this - it seems I am actually kind of good. Which has been a nice surprise. Literally, just got out of my second osteology exam. This time it was the bones of the skull plus any of the leg bones from the last section he wanted to throw in. Feel like I did a lot better this time, but I don't like to build myself up and feel cocky just in case things don't turn out so well.

Fall break was last week. Used the time to get a little bit of work done, but mostly just hung out and breathed. It was nice to relax and catch up on sleep...spend some time away from school...after all of the stress and all-nighters from September. Half of my first semester is officially over and for the most part (aside from the usual readings and papers) my attention is turning toward the big semester papers that will come due for two classes in about a month and a half. The nice thing about it is that my profs. have split it up a bit and have deadlines throughout the term to make sure we are progressing correctly. It's a little bit of hand holding that I wasn't expecting and kind of appreciate since I am a notorious procrastinator and will focus too much on all the short-term work (of which there is plenty) and lose site of the long term stuff.

On the thesis front, things are coming along. Hopefully I will be doing something with the Town Creek collection. I have been looking for other settlement sites of the same culture, South Appalachian Mississippian, but so far have not found much in the literature. Apparently the Tennessee Valley Authority talks about them in one of their Environmental Impact Survey, but I haven't found where they were doing their survey work. But there are plenty of mounds in the western part of North Carolina, at least one of them is bound to be from the culture I am studying. Sometime this summer I will need to head out that way and check some of them out if I can, at the least it's a good reason to go get some good barbecue. This part of the state has too much of the Eastern Carolina influence which is way too thin and mustard/vinegary for my taste. And I am still looking for a good Chinese food establishment - found one that is ok (mostly it's just really convenient and cheap), which makes up for the sub-par orange chicken.

It's definitely Fall now. The fact that I lived in Florida for the past two years is now really apparent, because I am ready to break out the heavy coat and everyone else is still walking around in t-shirts. I'm going to have to buy a space heater soon.

Got two books in the past few weeks, one I've read before - the excellent Clea Koff's The Bone Woman...if you want to read about what its like to work as a forensic anthropologist in the '90s Rwanda and Bosnia, this is the book you should be reading. I already knew what I wanted to be before reading this book and after, it has only validated my choice.

The other book is the Forever War by Dexter Filkins. He's an embed journalist who was in Iraq and Afghanistan..though it seems to be more of an Afghanistan emphasis. It reads like stream of conscience and he jumps from one story to the next, current war to one ten years ago, from one country to another...which is slightly disjointed, but the more you read it the easier it is to understand. The thing I like about it so far is that Filkins spent a good bit of time in Afghanistan back in the '90s...and so can contexctualize the current stories he has of the people there with history on the Taliban's rise, what Kandahar was like when the warlords were fighting for power, and the influence of foreign money and fighters in the support and shoring up of Taliban power.

Afghanistan is a place many people in the US don't know much about outside of our current involvment. It's been through a hell of a time for the past couple of decades and lost a lot - the oppressive laws women were subjected to and the loss of important archaeological and cultural history when the Taliban destroyed the statues of Buddha are just a few examples. I'm glad there has been a shift in increased awareness and focus on our military and civil efforts there - the Pentagon has even started employing cultural anthropologists to help provide some insight in what can be done to help the population. You hear so much about America's war fatigue and it has been going on for a long time, but we can make a difference and have been making a difference - we just need to stick it out. But that's the end of my soapbox, I'm going to go start on the copious amounts of homework that I have and look forward to my break tomorrow when I get to have a funnel cake at the fair. Whoohoo fair : )