5/19/07

Last night marked the 2nd in a row, post midnight slumber and tonight is not shaping up to be any different. It is already 11:00 p.m. and apparently in their Egyptian glory, this is a privy hour upon which to start doing jack hammer construction in the lot right next to the villa. Add that to the gang banging Kitties, and a night breeze which is unsuccessfully trying to compensate for the 105 degree day, and you have 3, of many contributing factors as to why sleep is not soon in sight.

I'm really starting to hit a plateau in terms of my eagerness to be here. It's not as though I'm not having a good time, or that things have become intolerable or anything...just at some point you want off the the ride...the ups, the downs, the loops...eventually you want yourself on familiar ground. While 17 days has certainly gone by fast, I still have 27 to go, and I feel the pace of things slowing down each second. I think a lot of it has to do with numbers. Let's start with hours of work. I have come to realize, that no matter how much you love your job, where you are or who you are with, 10 hours of doing the same thing, for 6 days a week will always get old, it will always lose its gleam. Particular to my 60 hours a week are more numbers...counting bones, weighing bones, measuring bones, aging bones...numbers numbers numbers. For every bag I sort, I write all of these numbers down on their own sheets which are headlined by..you guessed it, more numbers, feature numbers, bag numbers, the date the bones were bagged numbers...and in the right hand corner of this page I write the day's date. I probably write out about 20-30 data sheets every day....this means that in one day, I am reminded 20-30 times what day it is...for 10 hours I keep telling myself, today is May 19th, May 19th, May 19th.....how can I not transition from that to, 31-19= 12 +14= 26 days until I leave....or 19-2=17 days I have been here...and then my stomach starts to grumble, or my eyes start to get heavy and I look at my clock, 4 hours til lunch break, 7 hours until the day is over....and it's the same thing every day.

Well, seeing as though Saturdays are our days back after having Friday off, Saturday is the Egyptian Monday, and perhaps I just had a case of the Mondays and tomorrow will be better. But it cannot be so great unless I fall asleep...but it is still hot and there is still jack hammering outside.

I hope everyone else has a good weekend


Oh yeah and per my list, I have decided to remove coffee and subsitute it for slurpee for when I get home. The coffee really isnt that bad here, but not a slurpee for miles...they should have them though, i bet they would make a fortune!