Hurray for Holiday Weekends! No I don’t get Easter off, but today is a Muslim holiday and since the site wont have any of the inspectors or security there, we can’t work either. So I get an actual weekend this week! Yesterday on site I threw my first archaeological fit. I’ve been working on this 5x5 meter drawing for the past 3 days now and it is just a lot of detailed stone and pottery debris…also I have to keep adjusting my measurement squares because of the variation in elevation. Normally, you can just use 4 measuring tapes and outline the 5x5 and measure points inward from the tape (this is called offset measuring). However, because I have walls and collapse and just a whole lot of other things going on, I can’t measure from the original outline of the square without the slopes throwing me off…so I have to keep moving inward and setting up smaller units to offset from. Either way…we are talking 30 hours that I have spent drawing this plan, and yesterday, unbeknownst to me, it was already 4:45 and time to start packing up…when I was told what time it was, my reaction was:

“I CANNOT BELIEVE I AM NOT DONE WITH THIS STUPID SQUARE YET!”
Then I threw down my board and chucked my pencil across the site….

I did it moreso for comedic value, I didn’t really snap or anything, and everyone did laugh, but I did feel a single tear of legitimate frustration well up behind my sunglasses. I know this is only my second square ever, and people probably don’t expect me to speed through it, I’m a beginner afterall…but when people around you are stressing about how much needs to get done, and you feel like as the newbie, you aren’t pulling your weight, it definitely has its effect. However earlier when I was standing with my board, plotting points and consistently changing from pencil to eraser to pencil again, Mark walked by and said, “You look like you’ve been doing this for years.” That helps..at least I’m not a neon sign of incompetance to the people in charge. Everyone does reassure me that, things get done when they get done..apparently I am an obvious mass of tension about my work and it reads loud and clear that I am dissatisfied with how long it takes me…but no one wanted to take on the square that I am doing because of the the detail and contouring, so I am at least going to tell myself that it would have taken anyone a while to do…no I am not even going to tell myself that, it doesn’t make me feel any better.


I am kind of hitting that first pivot in my time abroad. It hardly seems that I have already been gone a month (allbeit February was a short month, but it was only short by a day this year). I cannot believe how fast the time has gone, but similarly, there is still so much time to go. This pending that I stay out here until the 15th of May, which I am pretty sure I wont wind up doing. It does depend though, I think depsite the fact that the original plan was to close the site on April 9th (when booking my ticket I told we were closing at the end of April and to arrange to stay 2 weeks past the end)- now it seems like they are going to try and request that we stay open until at least the 15th of April, or probably as late as they can….that gets really tricky with permits and payment etc. But even 6 extra days is 60 extra hours on site so staying until the 15th, especially with the pressure of the close approaching deadline, we would probably get a ton completed. I don’t really know because I have not really worked on sites before, but I imagine it’s much like anything else where a majority of the work just really comes together at the end. The heat could also be a problem though….every morning the past few weeks I’ve been trying to bite my tongue when it came to complaining about how bitter cold and windy the early hours were, knowing full well that I would be missing those cool mornings within a few weeks time…Right now, when I leave my apartment I am wearing pants, long sleeve shirt, short sleeve shirt over it, jacket or sweatshirt, and a vest, and a scarf….I pout about having to take my shoes off because my feet get so cold (and really I leave them on for as long as possible and just don’t walk over the mudbrick walls which are more or less becoming powder before our very eyes…plus Mark never takes his shoes off…). I huddle and hunch over my drawing and wait for the sun to move over the site. As it has been, around 9 oclock the vest comes off, and then right after second breakfast, 10:40, my jacket, and at about 11:15 my sleeves get pushed up and the heat is in full force.

Well summer she is fast approaching and there is no longer the gradual delayering of clothing. True at 5:45 am I am still cold enough on the walk from my apartment to the villa that I still pile on the layers, but it only takes about 20 minutes to a half hour on site before everything is coming off. Yesteday, before 8:00 am I was rockin the cargo pants and a short sleeve shirt with no windy morning to speak of…going off of the other girls on site, I guess short sleeve shirts are becoming more and more “acceptable” at least we haven’t been advised that we are deing disrespectful or anything…so until that happens I guess I will take advantage. Even now, we are talking t-shirts though, so the sleeves still cover all of my shoulders and about midway to my elbows. I cycle between a green Dondero Student Senate shirt and those white fruit of the loom undershirts. Naturally the white ones get pretty dirty pretty fast, but it was just easiest to throw a pack of them in my suitcase than to pick and choose between my other t-shirts.

Anyway, the days are getting hotter, and they are getting hotter earlier. Yesterday I stood up after kneeling for a long time and there were two wet spots behind my knees. Hello sweaty Kelly! I feel bad for my Auntie M who is driven mad with discomfort in the extreme heat…because as much as my family doesn’t think about it now, there will come a time when they have to at least visit me on site for a little while…when I am running my own dig, and have more frequent flyer miles racked up than I know what to do with, you guys are coming and experiencing this too! I don’t care if you like home, and never really aspired to travel across the world, everyone’s family comes and sees it at some point…and I know my dad would come visit me on site in a heartbeat and that he would be VERY ANGRY if no one came to see me when he couldn’t…so one day you will have to at least experience this with me for a week…which is why, Auntie M I feel most bad for you because you hate the heat so much! But you will just have to come early in the season when its still cool. And Aunt Marcia…you just get a lot of valium and Xanax to make it through the flight over water :) I’ll make sure you both get first class seats…haha oh this is laughable, the broke archaeologist making promises with money she does not have…

My roommate did get in a few nights ago. She’s from texas and she does the GIS work (computerized mapping…something I am actually interested in as well). I’m not sure how old she is, but she is older than me and older than the roommate I had last year. It’s weird to adjust to having a roommate after I have not had one this whole time…suddenly I need to be conscious of turning on lights when I enter and leave the room, I need to make less noise when I am looking for all of the things that I am constantly losing….
I was relieved to find out from my roommate that she only washes her hair once a week while out here…so I’m not the only dirtball abstaining. I guess that’s the thing about the drinking water here….it is actually safe to drink, but because of all the chlorine you would never want to drink it from the tap. When you walk out of the shower you smell like a swimming pool.

Lets see what else.

While I was in Luxor I had e-mailed a professor from UCLA that I as interested in talking to and potentially working with. I had not heard back from her, so I was uncertain whether she was in the field, whether she overlooked my e-mail thinking it was spam, or just forgot to respond simply because she’s busy. Either way, I asked Richard, who knows her really well, she got her PhD from Michigan, to e-mail her on my behalf. He sent me a copy of the e-mail and it was really positive, so hopefully I am one step closer to an acceptance letter from there. Now that my geographic interests are broadening I might start considering more seriously some other programs that I was not before really looking into. Michgan and UCLA will definitely be my top two, with me not really counting on Michigan since I am from their undergrad pool. I don’t know though…I’m kind of feeling if for whatever reason I don’t get into my top 2 or 3 that I apply to, that I wont settle for another program, I will just take another year off, keep working in the field and getting more experience, and then reapplying…lots of time to figure it out, we’ll see. Hopefully the response from the professor at UCLA is just as positive as the introduction Richard gave.

Wow I wrote a lot today…that’s what happens when you wake up at 7 am, and there aren’t any other real distractions around you.

I don’t have any big plans for my 2 days off. It’s weird…normally I am used to keeping to myself and therefore not really being aware of the fact that I don’t fit into the groups that form around me…but here I thought I was definitely making more of an effort to be social, but in retrospect I guess that is only relative to how I usually am and perhaps I am still quite reserved…It seems that I have managed to not really fit into any group dynamic that has come together here, which is probably a result of many things like age, experience, job, etc…though probably a little bit of my own doing as well. There are all the older academics who have been working on this project for years and years. They all basically hide out on their own, or tend to administrative things, sponsors or international teams, report writing and whatnot. Most of them are lab specialists this season who have assistants as well who work in the labs. The people who work in the labs, I don’t really know as well, because they spend all day in the labs and not on site, and they aren't the same people that were here last year when I was. And then the people who work on site, have been working together for some time now and already know one other...though there is one brand new girl from the states, but she has been excavating for years, so she kind of relates to them more than I do by way of knowing what she's doing, I guess? Where is this going... The other day, at some point I had overheard some of the lab crew and some of the site crew talking about going out for some drinks for Wednesday night since we had Thursday off. However no one ever mentioned it to me or invited me to go…and it struck me as odd, because I couldn’t really think of why I wouldn’t get invited to go, but at the same time I didn’t really want to go anyway….I suppose I was just surprised because I thought I had been coming across as someone interested in the social outings…but then again, why would I be coming across that way, if the truth was I wasn’t interested?? Does this make sense? Perhaps it makes more sense this way…when I’m on site with other crew members I am laughing and joking and we are all exchanging stories, so it is very much a dialogue and interaction that I am actively participating in….so I would just assume that I would be incorporated into situations where this could take place outside of work…but then the more I thought about it, the more I realized I do really just maintain my indepedence outside of working hours…I walk to and from the villa for breakfast and dinner by myself, I don’t really wait on anyone else at my apartment, I go to the Meridian most days after work and before dinner to unwind, and if I’m not catching up on the internet, I have a book in front of me. So I guess maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that through my own crafted schedule, I am overlooked when plans are made…and I certainly shouldn’t mope about it, because I prefer to be reading and lost in my introvertedness…haha but part of me feels like I am that odd little hermit…but if that’s what everyone thinks and that’s how I am written off as, then oh well, they are missing out…because I am also a very entertaining hermit. They did wind up asking me if I wanted to go just before they were leaving, and I probably would have if I wasn’t all the way at the Villa and in my pajamas.

Okay, that will end my epic for today...that should do you all for a bit in terms of updates on my end. I'm healthy physically, mentally, emotionally etc. Though I am starting to feel intellectually unchallenged...I wonder what kind of thing I can start doing to challenge myself more. I guess I could start that whole GRE studying thing....