A good day for a murder

I love Autumn. Blustery days full of dark gray clouds and rain just make you want to stay inside and read a good mystery. Speaking of mystery, they just announced the results of the DNA testing from that case I wrote about a month or two ago. Just as a quick reminder, a body was discovered in the basement of a man's house in England at the end of the 19th century. The body had been buried there with the removal of anything that would help aid in it's identification. A few weeks earlier the woman of the house had gone missing so when the police got wind of Crippen suddenly leaving the country they apprehended him, tried him, and executed him for murder all within a couple of months. Just recently researchers have been able to get their hands on some DNA evidence from the recovered body and compare it to living relatives of Crippen's wife. And guess what...the body didn't belong to his wife! So now the question is who's body was it and how did it get there...hmmmm......here is the press release info if you are interested

http://www.special.newsroom.msu.edu/crippen/

I guess this has already received a huge amount of press in England.

Here and back again

Alas, Noel's short trip to Michigan has come and gone and it's just the two of us again. Well three if you count the little dude residing in my tummy. We had a great time with Noel shopping, going to a pumpkin patch and watching movies. I regret to say that I probably did a total of an hour or two of homework the entire time she was here...oops! Time goes by quickly when you are having fun. I think the corn maze was one of the highlights of the week. We went in thinking it would be easy and ended up spending an hour going in circles. Close to the end Noel and I cheated by going through the corn. Nobody was looking...

Now it is back to the world of statistics and murder. At the moment I'm in the middle of writing two papers. The first is a statistical analysis of a whole bunch of craniometric data collected from a population in Borneo at the end of the 19th century. The researches picked their subjects in order to show how cranial capacity could be used to prove Europeans were by far superior to pretty much everyone else by their big heads. Interestingly they usually had to manipulate the data in order to get at the results they wanted. My job here is to take the data and use it for a not so racial purpose. My second paper is on the Black Dahlia murder. If gruesome unsolved crimes are your thing then this is the murder case for you. My goodness. This poor woman was the victim of one of the most brutal crimes of the 20th century. Oh yeah, I watched the movie too...don't bother. It's bad. There is very little, if any truth in it.

Okay, I promised that I would not subject myself to the embarrassment of putting pictures of me pregnant up on the blog. I have been begged several times by different people, however, so here you go....

Circus Fillet

My sister is here! She came all the way from the great state of Washington to spend 11 days with us! Our very small apartment has just gotten smaller! Last night the three of us went to see Cirque du Soleil's Saltimbanco which Tom so lovingly refers to as Circus Fillet. It was really amazing to see what people can do with their bodies with lots of training. I don't think I could ever be that flexible even if I worked at it! I even had a hard time sitting in the stadium chairs for two hours. That might have had something to do with the pregnancy though.

It think today we are going to a pumpkin patch and then to an Irish pub tonight for some live music. I love four day weekends!

Baby Update

So far everything is going great with our energetic baby boy. He continues his dancing every time I sit down which you actually see by the slight movements my tummy makes. He's about 25 weeks now and looks something like this...

Honestly it's hard for me to believe that he's already that developed! Hopefully we will be getting another ultrasound soon so we can see what he really looks like. We were finally approved for the state's health insurance program and are hoping for all of our important material to show up early next week. Yay...finally! It has been a really long and drawn out process. My next vote for president will be for anyone who is in support of a drastic reform of this stupid industry. I found it really interesting that the bill that President Bush just vetoed is one that was going to expand a federally funded health insurance program for pregnant women and children who don't qualify for their own state's program...boy am I glad I'm poor enough to get the state's help since my country doesn't seem to want to help me.

I thought I'd also throw in some pictures of our apartment. It may be small but we've tried to make it feel like home.

Here's the living room...

and the kitchen (oh! and an apple pie that I baked from scratch! Can you believe it? I actually made something from scratch!)...

Leaf Peepers

This last weekend Tom and I took a three day trip up into Northern Michigan to celebrate our anniversary. We stayed two nights in Mackinaw City which is the last city you come to before crossing the bridge into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or U.P. The city itself is rather small but has a diverse range of fudge shops, local restaurant dives and tee-shirt shops. On Saturday we drove up into the U.P. in search of the beautiful color change that is so unique to this area. This weekend and next weekend were supposed to be the peak times to see color change in the U.P. and guess what? Global warming has stuck once again. Because of the uncharacteristically hot and dry summer, the leaves are falling off of the trees while still green! We talked to a guy who worked at one of the light houses out on the Peninsula and he told us that last year they didn't get snow until after New Years and Lake Superior hasn't frozen over completely in something like six years. Hmmm...how frustrating. We did, however, get to see some color, lots of lighthouses, beaches, really neat homes and we finally found out what a pastie was. Oh, by the way, the Yoopers of Northern Michigan have a name for people like us...leaf peepers =)

On Sunday we took a short ferry ride over to the island of Mackinac which was very reminiscent of a foot ferry traveling across the Puget Sound. Mackinac Island is found in the straight between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. They don't let any motor vehicles on the roads so the main source of transportation there is bicycles and horses. It took Tom and I about 1.5 hours to ride the 8 miles around the island. It was so beautiful, not to mention peaceful. One thing we don't have in East Lansing is peace and quiet so it was a welcomed relief. The town itself is very reminiscent of a turn of the century town with it's historic buildings and horse drawn carriages. We were surprised to find that the island is a city unto itself and has its own mayor, police dept, fire dept, library and school. Tom and I decided that we will live there when we are millionaires. Hehe...a rich forensic anthropologist...that's funny.

Overall I didn't want the weekend to end. It's supposed to get up into the 80's again this week and I have way too much homework. I need to find a Master's Degree that requires lots of travel and very little studying. =)