I really did shop until I dropped yesterday and I have a reinjured ankle to show for it. Instead of feeling sorry for myself I plan to PRETEND to feel sorry for myself all next week so I can have an actual vacation :-) Despite this, I bet I did a few things today that very few other people did :-)

Very recently a private excavation company was turnover over the earth in a nearby bog for a county road construction project. In the process, they hit a bone and upon further investigation discovered that it was no ordinary bone. It was a fossilized bone of a mastodon! It was a slow news day so you might have heard about it on CNN or Yahoo News. The local science museum was given about 12 hours to excavate the site (time is money, people!!!) and they worked hard and collected about 30% of the
complete mastodon which they were "allowed" to take back to the science museum to clean and prepare for 4 days before returning to it's owner (whether the private excavation company who found the bone or the county road commission who commissioned the road project is the owner is still up for debate - politics!!) who will do who-knows-what with it. Since it will only be on display for the 4 days they are actively working on it, I decided to take all interested children up for a look-see. It was interesting and exciting but the lines were very very long and it was in the 90's and blazing. I can't even imagine what the lines will be like tomorrow on the weekend! Thanks to sunscreen and complimentary water, we survived. They had some amazing anthropologists on hand and also the original excavation team working on the bones and answering questions. The kids all agree it was worth the wait. I want to be an anthropologist when I grow up. Or maybe a paleontologist.

Life is sometimes stranger than fiction.Also recently we had some areas of our garden that looked as if a dog puked on them. Very strange. But upon further research my hubby sent me some info this morning via email that he had discovered online proving that our puke-spots were actually multi-nucleus single-cell plasmodial slime mold called Physarum polycephalum. It is not all that slimy (at least not for long) and it isn't a mold or even a fungus. They actually move and grow and then die of starvation and thirst. They are harmless but amazing because they are single-cells that are gigantic (a foot in diameter) and actually move and eat and resemble amoebas. I decided it is our new family pet but no sooner did I make this proclamation than it up and died on us, just like all the plasmodial slime molds that have come before it. We had wanted to collect a sample and feed it and watch it under a microscope but it was dead by the time we returned from the mastodon viewing. But good news! We have a brand new Physarum polycephalum that sprouted up just tonight!!! So if it is still alive by morning we'll grab a culture and try to feed it oatmeal and water it and see if we can grow it ourselves. Apparently, we humor easily :-)



In adoption news: of course there is very little news. We did hear from our agency with some additional measurements (head circ) we had requested but no new pictures to date. We are still awaiting our IA doctor's review of this new info but based on our preliminary research of the data, we are pretty satisfied with it. At first I panicked because it seemed, on an American chart, that the %tile was rather low compared with her weight and length %tile. But we dug around a bit and found a few chinese charts that showed her to be closer to 50%tile. But then we read a few places that the head circ should be fairly universal and not culturally determined. So we are anxious to hear what the IA doctor thinks about her numbers and whether she is concerned about them at all. I feel much better since finding the chinese charts and wonder why there is such a discrepancy if head circs are truly universal. And of course this info comes in Friday night. No clue if our IA doctor will check email or respond during the weekend and then we are leaving on Monday morning. I truly hope we don't have to wait too long to find out her determination. And by "find out her determination", of course what I mean is "get reassurance that all is fine". Because if she comes back with bad news it will be very upsetting and likely come with more wait-and-see instructions (like check her head circ in another month and compare or remeasure her length and weight for accuracy). I am just hoping she is close enough to "normal" that the doc isn't concerned. So cross fingers.