So I just found out today that this whole thing with the mine fire in WV has made national news. I haven't even been paying all that much attention to it. In case I'm not the only one, http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/01/20/mine.fire/index.html

Last I heard, they weren't releasing the names of the people who are missing, but as it turns out I'm sort-of-but-not-really related to one of them. He's my sister-in-law's something or other. I've never heard of him personally. We went to the same high school but I'm guessing he's just enough older than me that I didn't know him. Small world, I guess.

In other news, the county medical examiner here in PA, Cyril Wecht (who some of you might have heard of because of his criticisms of the Warren Commission) is in some pretty deep crap. He's been using county resources to do personal business, and apparently he's been taking bodies that weren't claimed by family and trading them with a university for lab space. He was in trouble for similar stuff back in the 80s, when his staff was collecting pituitary glands from corpses without the permission of relatives and selling them to researchers. I remember my first year in college, when I was still a journalism student and we were learning about slander and stuff, one of my professors was talking about the local paper getting in trouble for running a comic of him walking around all Frankenstein-like and saying, "Mmm..pituitary glands..must have pituitary glands."

Anyway, on to the mundane. I think I've finally more or less got the apartment resembling a real place to live. I've still got this weird bruise on my thumb from putting together the TV stand. Somehow I ended up assembling all the furniture, and people in my family are notoriously accident prone. My boyfriend would come home and be like, "So, how did you hurt yourself on the bookcase?" The bookcase in question leans a little to the right, but it hasn't collapsed yet, and it's been a month or so, so I think we're good. I spent today ironing curtains, and let me tell you I'll sell my body to hire a housekeeper before I'll ever do that again. I suck at ironing, and then throw in the clumsiness thing and walking around holding something hot attached to a cord that's just asking to be tripped over. Actually, I didn't hurt myself, but I think the curtains still kinda look like crap. I seriously need to find a hobby. I've been spending all my free time alphabetizing the CDs and rearranging furniture. I am so boring.