I had a dizzying sleep last night…I kept feeling like my body was growing heavier and heavier and that I was sinking into my matress…apparently someone slipped some lsd in my dinner last night…Also, every time I woke up my neck and back would ache, probably from the hours I spend hunched over measuring and drawing…

In general I find that I have very vivid dreams while I am out here. Not really sure why. The other morning I was definitely bummed that I had to wake up and abandon my dream where I was playing Paint it Black on guitar hero… but it was a frustrating dream too because while I was super excited to play guitar hero, the buttons were different and I was stumbling over a song that I normally do okay in! wow the things manifest themselves in your subsconcious….

Today it wasn’t nearly as windy on site as it has been, so I could definitely feel the heat more. Most of the site crew stayed at the Villa in the afternoon to catch up on paper work. My personal paperwork, for my plans is done as much as it can be done for right now. I am probably going to have to stay in tomorrow though to start entering logs into the database. A lot of times it seems that everyone likes having paper work as an excuse to stay at the villa in the afternoons…I personally love being in the field and get disappointed if no one else wants to go back. Today only Mark, me, and the inspector went back to site. I continued planning my second square which is super super detailed so it is taking me a while to get through. I hope I finish it tomorrow.

I’ve come to realize that there is yet another sacrifice I need to make while living here…and it’s kind of gross, and perhaps I should just keep it to myself. The sun and the wind are bad enough on my hair, but it’s the water that is really tearing it apart. The water here has so so much chlorine(among other things I’m sure). I really just cannot wash it in the water everyday. Normally I am one to have really oily hair but you would never know it the looks of me now. My hair is like straw. As someone who plays in the dirt and sand all day, the prospects of not washing it on a daily basis do not thrill me, but neither does having to come home and chop off all of my damaged hair. I’m going to try and avoid washing it every day, and just keep it covered in my bandanas to avoid getting as much sand and dirt in it as possible… however that never seems to accomplish month and my hair always winds up looking much lighter in color by mid day. It’s my inner blonde dying to be rereleased.

In other unsanitary commentary, I’m going to take this time to talk about some girl things, so boys who “wah wah hate it when girls talk about their periods wah wah” avert your eyes. I’m due to start my period any day now and given the bathroom accomodations on site…add this to the list of things that currently don’t thrill me. Last time I was here, I could go seek out my own private spot to use the bathroom, or use the the built one they had next to the store room. I usually opted to find my own clean spot and claim it….it was easy to hide from any potential viewers within the field of mastabas. However at KKT, there is no such hiding place…it is open flat land which means I am forced to use one of the two out houses constructed on site. Why are these outhouses more digusting than the others? Well let me tell you…it is because I have to share them with about 50 Egyptian men who all seem like they need to meet some deuce dropping quota…forget the fact that I have to constantly be waiting for the grunting man to finish ahead of me…more or less there is shit everywhere. I don’t even want to think about what could possibly be richocheting back at me when I’m forced to squat over the hole in the floor. Girls should not have to aim in a hole that is only 3 inches in diameter…it defies logic. For whatever reason also, I’m the only, person, besides the Egyptian men, who ever has to use the bathroom…everyone else just holds it or doesn’t have to go because they don’t drink nearly as much water. I drink more water than anyone else on site and I know for a fact that if you aren’t peeing every 4 hours, you aren’t drinking enough. So for me, there’s no holding it, and having to go and use these horrible bathrooms is just reality…unfortunately I’m the only one that seems to endure it on site. Seriously I don’t think any one else has used the bathroom once. But the bottom line is that I’m just going to feel ten times even more gross when my period hits…there aren’t even waste baskets in these outhouses…

This entry is pretty gross I probably shouldn’t even post it!

I also found out today that the fertilizer used here contains human fecal matter…that’s pretty rancid. I eat a lot of the fruits and vegetables here and never get sick, so my stomach is pretty much tolerant of it, and I can’t just not eat them…people on projects get things like scurvy that way. It is really gross though.

Oh well…let this be your lesson for sure…archaeology is certainly has its down falls. But..I’m still here, and still have no intentions of giving it up any time soon. For a while I was actually unsure about whether or not I would ever want to run my own project…I can only imagine how stressful it can be, but a lot of the times I can’t help but think that I would just be good at it…and there aren’t a lot of things that I take on and say “I know I would kick ass doing this”…usually I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing and just wind up surprising myself and randomly doing okay or not ruining something…but running a project is something that I think I could do….but we will see. Running a project a lot of times means you are tending to far more administrative things and therefore can’t be in the field nearly as much. It is all a lot to consider and someone still has to go get their PhD first….