Alright.  It's been almost one year since I have been home from the Philippines!  It seems incredible that it was only one year ago, while also seeming very inaccurate that I have only been home that long.  Time to update.

I am not even sure where to start.  Hmm.  Well, since I got back, because the lab space we were in was located in a wing slated for remodel, it was time to clean, which meant more specifically that it was time to get rid of a whole bunch of gnarled-looking old animal specimens from the 50s someone gave to (my boss) Dr. Julienne Rutherford. 

Some were way cooler than others.

                    

Ew.  Callitrichid?

Trendy sea monster.

And, low and behold, I found this as a parting gift under some giant filing cabinet.  It must have followed me back from my apartment in Cebu in my luggage, just as I predicted in my last post from the Philippines.

So, I traded my spacious office with a view of the city for this one:

Yes.  There are more work stations (3) and fewer windows (0), but all the supplies I could need are within reach (because there is no further distance to go than 5 feet in any direction from my desk).  And why do I need supplies, you ask?

BECAUSE WE HAVE GOTTEN 8 HUMAN PLACENTA SAMPLES SENT FROM THE PHILIPPINES!!! And, an email late last week revealed that a 9th is making its way to Chicago right now!  This means that the awesome ladies that I trained in the procedure of taking samples, the presentations I gave to the hospitals, and the system we all came up with for notifying the hospitals that one of the women involved in the study was delivering all worked out!  The samples are exactly what we needed them to look like and all appear usable so far.  Cue successful trumpet blasts. 

Getting these boxes in the mail is pretty incredible.  They are all covered in tons of packing tape and say "EXEMPT HUMAN SPECIMEN ON THE SIDE;" inside they are packed in newspaper in Cebuano with partially completed word searches and articles I understand about every 10th English word in.  My favorite packing material was this:

Man do they love Chicago basketball over there, or what?  (I wonder how the country at large took it when Derrick Rose went down with his ankle injury last month.  Most likely, there was rioting.)

So, now I have processed the samples from the eight placentas we have received to be made into slides. 

They look so much different than one would expect, having started like this:

In more news, Dr. Rutherford and I just got back from the American Association of Physical Anthropology conference in Portland, OR, a few weeks ago, which was a wonderful experience.  There were so many interesting talks that got my wheels turning on how I might want to approach some things I have been thinking about as potential research projects.  I presented a poster on some of the data from the vervet monkey slides I have been working on.

Fun read for the whole family!  The little ones love learning about the gross characteristics and microscopic architecture of the vervet monkey placenta.  This will be a kids' book soon. 

That's my name!  Right there on the poster!  Public speaking is still not my favorite, but Dr. Rutherford is working towards breaking that.  I really appreciate it!

Portland was a good time.  I was reading in an old post that I hadn't finished a single episode of Portlandia.  Well, I studied hard before I got there.  Somehow it seems no one else did.  How do you miss Julienne's joke of putting a bird on every slide of her presentation?

Disappointing to say the least.  And these people consider themselves scholars.  Geez.  Anyway, this was the view from the windows of the planes that took me there:

Seattle, I didn't even know these planes were legal.    They have you actually go outside and walk up a staircase onto the plane.  Who  besides presidents and members of the pop culture elite of the 60s gets to do that?

Don't worry.  My phone was in airplane mode.  

These are the views from my 11th floor hotel room:

And my friend Mathias was kind enough to take me around to fancy bars and ridiculous parties and other things Portland that had nothing to do with the conference whatsoever.  Sort of necessary when the meeting is 5 days long.  

Oh oh!  And, I have my first published paper!!  "Comparison of fresh to fixed weights of the vervet monkey (Chlorocebus sabaeus) placenta and its relation to gestational age" in the Journal of Medical Primatology.  You can see it here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0684.2011.00534.x/abstract

Yes!  

I am very happy to be back home in Chicago, but I miss travelling.  I am hoping to return to Cebu at some point, and in the meantime I am going to try my best to convince someone to fly me somewhere new for an equally as fulfilling project.  My passport needs stamps.