Fearfully and Wonderfully Made

And the Tragic End of an Orange Named Howard....

It's September and school is back in session. Summer is over and it is time to hit the books again. This semester I am taking Speech and a class called Health and Human Function, where I will be learning the basics of anatomy and physiology. This class also comes with a lab, and Friday I set in to perform my first lab assignment.

Enter Howard, the very worried orange.

My job was to learn the various terms for dissection planes---fun words like sagittal, coronal, median, and transverse. And to help me learn them, I had to dissect poor Howard.

My first cut was along the sagittal plane, cleaving Howard right through the middle of his noble proboscis. I was pretty sure Howard was terminal at this point, but he wasn't allowed to rest in peace.

Pieces, yes. But not peace.

After that, I had to cut his left side along the transverse plane, separating his ear top from bottom, and his right side along the coronal plane, separating the front of his ear from the back.

 Gruesome stuff.

I had a somewhat horrified audience in the little homeschooling girlies whose house I've been staying at this week. Perhaps one of them will trace their future career in the medical field to this very occasion.

Perhaps not.

 
 Now that I have read a whole two chapters in my anatomy and physiology book, I feel I am qualified to speak on the topic of human health and function. The human body is an amazingly complex organism, dependent on such a wide variety of interconnecting systems, each one requiring the cooperation of the others in order to function.

It boggles my mind that anyone manages to survive without a PhD, let alone thrive! There are so many potential ways to mess things up! We don't think about it, but when we eat, we are actually performing chemistry experiments---adding elements to our body's chemical reactions---and hoping it somehow all ends well. 

And it boggles my mind that people devote their life study to learning about the amazing and complicated creatures we call "humans" and still take the premise that it all developed by chance with no input or organization from an outside source.

The human body amazes me. 

But people who deny the existence of a Creator amaze me even more!

A Few Random Pictures From a Random Trip

I am currently enjoying a wonderful vacation in California. So far, it has mostly consisted of sitting on my butt talking or taking naps.

So nice.

I did manage to change out of my pajamas briefly yesterday and go into Public. And as long as I'd gone to all the trouble of dressing, I took a few pictures here and there.

California is in the middle of another Historic Drought (they've been in the middle of one historic drought or another for approx. the last 200 years...) and I stopped by to see how low the local reservoir had fallen. I do have to say, it is impressively low. Hopefully California will get some rain this winter and end the Historic Drought---just in time for the next one to start!

I love the California foothills---this is truly the Golden State.

As long as I was wearing actual clothes, I thought I'd have a little fun with the self-timer. Sometimes it's difficult for a photographer to prove he or she actually existed, since they are never actually IN any pictures.

Beautiful sunset to end a nice, lazy day. I am not convinced I will manage to find my way back home again when my vacation is over. I am sure my mom would love to fall heir to my various furry felines and cavorting canines.

Yeah. Sure.