Homicide, Plastination, and Displaying a Torso in Your Home

I bet you're wondering about the Cakewreck icing on the gateau of fail, but do you see a number in the title of this post? No? Well then NO GATEAU FOR YOU.
Mostly I'm busy being insane, studying for anatomy/physio finals (had my lab test this week, lecture test is next week), attempting to research and write a short (8-10pgs) paper for Medical Anthropology that focuses on how the American practice of embalming is a physical manifestation of our cultural obsession with controlling death. The breakthrough on that came yesterday when I realized I can acknowledge all the caveats in one big chunk thus 1. Getting a chunk of writing down on paper and 2. Then I don't have to worry about making them the entire time.  This is a huge relief because despite having read four whole books, sections of two more, and at least five papers I was no closer to a coherent explanation of this practice. Then I realized that this is an 8-10 page paper. Coherent explanation isn't going to happen in that space. I can pick and choose what I want to focus on. I mean, it's not like this shit is going to be peer reviewed, which is essentially what I was thinking of before, so I feel slightly less INSANE about that. Also have a take home exam for that class that involves writing two short essays on questions he's given us. I haven't even looked at those since class on Wednesday. Wait. Wednesday was just yesterday. Maybe he handed them out on Monday. That makes more sense. Either way, the point is I'm not even thinking of that yet.
I've also been going through an epic laundry shuffle that involves washing the great majority of my clothes since I hadn't washed anything in a really really long time (I have a shit-ton of clothes. I'd be embarrassed about how many, except I either wear most of them or they're key parts of costuming).
Mostly what I'm trying to say is I feel a little like I'm only just keeping my brain from leaking out through my auditory meatus. Speaking of which, neural tissue makes water go all cloudy. It's really quite disgusting.
Tomorrow we exhume the raccoon we buried last Spring! Boo for the person whose loose lips keyed Admin onto the existence of this little project, but yay for diggin' it up! Mostly I'm worried we won't really have enough time to properly excavate it. Rest assured I will take photos, and if you're really lucky I might even refrain from posting them!
Be Seeing You.

Boil Update:
I don't have a boil. I DO however have some burns on my forearm from some unfortunate run-ins with the edge of our wood stove. You'd think after like, the third time I'd learn some way to NOT hit my left posterior forearm on the edge of the stove opening, but nooooo. At least my scars are consistent. They're not really bad scars, though the burns look pretty nasty and at the moment the current one hurts like a bitch. It did not help that this time I totally forgot about the existence of aloe and ice. Really what I forgot was that even though it doesn't hurt very much at first and is super easy to ignore, you've got to get shit on there quick to keep the flesh from continuing to cook. Then I made the mistake of covering it fairly early on with a non-breathable bandage. Burns are gross. It's never nice to smell one's own body decaying.  Oh, wait...did I disgust you? Well you should have learned by now that you SHOULDN'T READ THE BOIL UPDATES if you don't want to be horribly disgusted!!!!