My first sentence must be devoted to congratulating a Miss Megan Goldenberg for getting accepted to her top choice grad school. I send you many hugs and kisses from afar.



Heh. I know I seem to blame everything on the lack of internet access, but also…just because I am in another country, doesn’t mean that I am on vacation, or that my workload isn’t the equivelent of a full time job back at home…I say this because no one else sits down and writes in a blog every day after work…they especially don’t write about work after getting off of work. I think last time when I came to Egypt, I never really looked at it as living abroad…I think given that I was only here for 5 weeks, and spare time was mainly devoted to tourist like activities, it certainly felt more like an extended vacation. Being in the field was a new endeavor and by the time I adjusted to it, it was time to return home. But it is different now…I am already adjusted, I am someone who helps others adjust…this is my home for right now. I don’t feel like a foriegner any more when I walk down the streets…I know enough arabic to greet all the familiar faces, I always know where I am going, how to get there…I don’t feel like a stranger to this country and that brings me to feeling really weird about keeping a blog this time around…I feel like it would be the same as me writing from Royal Oak everyday for the Egyptians to read…or me writing from Ann Arbor everyday for my family in Royal Oak to read. I guess that kind of brings me to the realization of what “home” means to me…I know a lot of people say home and start talking about family and warmth and blah blah blah…not that I don’t love my family or anything, but for me..I think home is where you feel comfortable on your own…home is where you don’t feel like a stranger...and I think it is a balance between your capacity to be independent and the extent to which you are involved in a community- whether its your actual city, your family, your colleagues, your friends. Meh maybe this isn’t really anything original or insightful….but again I don’t see you writing a blog for my peace of mind!

Aside from that rant (actually that was a fucking tangent…) I was originally going to say that we still don’t have internet in the small apartment, and therefore I think I will be one day behind in all my posts…like now its just after 9 pm…I didn’t want to sit at the villa on my computer really late, so I came back here after dinner and started blogging from microsoft word…which means that I wont post it until I go back to the villa some time tomorrow…hopefully first thing in the morning, but who knows with the wonky internet out here.

ANYWAY

So about today!

Today was a beautiful beautiful day ☺ Yours truly got to excavate her first feature! Now if you don’t retain detail…you might be saying, well…I thought she was going to be excavating this whole time, why is that a big deal…well I’m currently a learner…so I get to watch a lot, and follow up with all the detailed paper work on site…in general though, this season there is not a whole lot of digging going on. They more or less really botched things up last season and we are going through and fixing it….which is definitely an excellent experience, though when they first explained it, I was rather bummed that I would not get to dig as much as I really wanted to…as I have stated my workload as more or less been feature forms feature forms feature forms….today, as I sit in my square recording the dimensions of bricks in the exposed walls Mark Lehner says…”I don’t know…this feature is pretty peculiar…might want to see what’s going on underneathe…how about that Kelly, you think you might want to dig this up…” This being Mark Lehner and everything, perhaps it would have behooved me to play it cool…but I did no such thing….like a dog eager for a road trip, my eagerness was not contained…This was the first thing that was to be excavated on the site…no one has done any excavating yet, we have all been recording recording recording…so for ME to be asked to dig it, was nothing short of amaaaazzzing. Mark showed me some tricks of the trade for how to set up the grid so that I could do my drawings at 1:20 on the single feature sheets. A 1:20 site map, without being able to show you how big the grids are, just means super up close we’ll say. So I cleaned it with a brush, measured it, I mapped it, I photographed it, I took elevation measurements (where the feature sits above sea level), I made a sample bag for flotation, and then I excavated it!!! Sorry I can’t really tell you was “it” was….but it was pretty neat.

On a standard season (techinically this is supposed to be a study season where the crew is more focused on reporting, publishing) I would be able to constantly do this…unfortunately who knows how many other things I will actually get to dig….but, I will be doing a lot of excavation in India and it does look like I have the option of coming back here again next season, with them paying for me to come out here…at least covering the flight cost.

Another reason why I’m not so all about blogging these days is because I have been reading like a fiend…I only brought two books with me here and I’m already finished with one and well over 100 pages into the other…there’s an enligh bookstore downtown, perhaps I will go there some time soon. The villa also has a “library” of books people donate but they are known to be pretty trashy and terrible. I still have a good 500 pages left in Murakami though so that should hold me over a bit.