5/30/07

I was pretty crabby throughout the day and for various reasons. One, I did not sleep well last night since it was so hot. I also managed to break my fan at about 9:30...only I could break my fan on the hottest night of the year in Egypt. Per usual, my professor came to the rescue and made sure i was taken care of. The fan didn't help much though as I laid in bed, heat ridden an sniffley.

Here is the other reason I was irritable today:




I had to sort many of these. These sieves are full of fish bones...thousands of them...literally, i had to count them all.

So I start off with those messes. Organize them by type:






And then I look to our comparative collection, this being one single fish, and actually this is only the skull bones in this picture:




If you can get any sort of idea from these pictures, it is just a lot of very teeny tiny pieces to work with..and like I said, I had to count them all...but I couldn't just count mindlessly because, as you can see in the sieve, there are also plenty of rocks and nonfish elements. These are not to be counted and so, I must count bone, see rock, throw rocks, count more bone. Throw in some hot weather and 7 flies buzzing in and out your ears and you have the perfect formula for a kelly the grouch. I took periodic breaks to make a dent in the fly swarms and then I explained to them that if I had to get up again that they all would be very sorry...they did not listen, and true to my word, they all joined their brothers and sisters in insect afterlife. I imagine that if I were in Dante's inferno, one level of hell for myself would be giant flies with Kelly Swatters.


I was actually by myself for a large portion of the time, with the exception of the security guards...it was actually a little unnerving because if something went wrong I had no means of contacting anyone, plus i don't speak arabic. Richard had gone home early because his allergies were so bad and he did not want them to get worse and then later John had to go take care of some other things- so I was completely alone in the lab for a few hours. But it was okay, i just listened to music, killed some bugs, and counted some bones.


I had to take some pictures for National Geographic on behalf of one of the grants I recieved, so here are some of me working quite hard...although a lot of them are me staging working hard, because there's only so many ways that i can measure a bone for a picture...in fact i am pretty sure the one of me laughing is because I felt so silly staging measurements...some of them are authentic though, like me writing things down.

I compare and make a decision:



I Measure:






I "Measure" and chuckle to myself "hehehe":




I look at measurement and write:







I make any additional notes beyond the measurement:










This one was taken the next day. Richard was talking to Mark, the project director for the Giza Plateau Mapping Project and they were discussing some theoretical issues with excavation and interpretation while I was doing some analysis of cattle. Apparently what I was doing was relavent to a point Mark was trying to make, namely I think the size of cattle, and so he had Richard take a picture.






If you have been paying attention you know that I move tomorrow. If you haven't been paying attention...I'm moving tomorrow...to a lovely air conditioned apartment. It's close by though. But this means I need to pack, but not very much because I started packing last friday and really i just don't have that much stuff, at least not much that I actually use or need to take from my suitcase. Anyways, I am going to end on that note. Happy Hump Day Everyone!