School Makes A Comeback

This past week focused pretty heavily for both Jess and I on school. On Wednesday, I had the final exam for my big class that meets for three hours every day. It was, you guessed it, a three hour long exam. While not a lot of fun either to take or to prepare for, I think it went pretty well. While there are still two exams this coming week, much of the work for the semester has come to an end.

For Jessica, it was her first full week of classes for the new semester, along with some extra lectures thrown in for good measure. She has a bit of a crazy schedule with a number of both early morning and late evening classes. Fortunately though, she does not have to attend a class until 9:30 pm at night one evening and then arrive for class the next morning at 8 am as she had thought she would. There is at least one professor she is really excited about, saying that she hasn’t had a professor who was both this knowledgeable about their subject and excited to teach it since her undergrad days.

With all the focus on school, we’ve been something of homebodies. But last weekend, we were able to go visit one of the museums of natural history in Paris that focuses on evolution and speciation. On the lower floors were extensive taxidermy collections you would expect from a flagship French museum. There was even a room dedicated to endangered and extinct species, such as the Tasmanian tiger (extinct), Cape lions (extinct), and mountain gorillas (endangered) along with many others. The upper floors of the museum though were dedicated to exploring how people have shaped evolutionary pressures on animals and plants. The obvious example is in agriculture where there were examples of primitive corn, modern corn and many of the intermediate forms, and examples of domestic farm animals next to their wild ancestors. It was all very impressive, even the building was a gorgeous mid-19^th century exhibition hall.

The real highlight of our week though was going to visit Nick, Monica, and their new baby Victor (we watched their dog Luna during the birth in December). I had not yet met Victor, and Jessica had only seen him immediately after he was born. We ended up spending the whole evening at their apartment and went to dinner at a crepe shop. It was a lot of fun to spend some time with Nick and Monica.