We finally have internet in the small apartment!

Which means I will be online more, and sleeping less. Some of you may benefit from this. I probably will not! But it’s okay…

It also means I’m not glued to my computer when I am at the villa now, which is actually really nice. Tonight for example, Mark Lehner and I had a good hour long conversation about complexity theory. I wished I could contribute more, it was mainly him just talking at me…but I was just a sponge for the information. He has an essay that he is going to give me to read. I am most excited for this….a challenge that comes in perfect timing as I finished Murakami two days ago. I started this other book that was left in the donated book shelf in the Villa. It’s called “The God of Small Things.” It won the booker prize and I’ve read good things about it….and it also wasn’t something down by Dan Brown and wasn’t some generic gumshoe murder mystery like all the others.

Even last night, pre-internetness I had a very difficult time sleeping. It was very hot and for whatever reason my eyes were wide open. You would think that yesterday would have put me into a coma for how much my body went through. Alas, this was not the case and I did not feel very alert this morning.

Today the winds held off until later, so there was some amount of productivity on site. Temperature reached 103. Miserable. It is slowly supposed to start climbing down from now on with mid week returning right back to 77. Almost sounds like Michigan.

Today I was also given a new assignment. Right now I am in the process of drawing a section of a limestone wall. When drawing my squares, I more or less was drawing everything that occurred within a 5X5 meter square, and from a bird’s eye view (heh this is getting repetitious no?). A section drawing is basically drawing just one thing, at an even larger scale, from profile. So I have started working on a plan of this limestone wall so that we have on record how the wall was coursed. This involves basically drawing the face of the wall and how every stone was arranged. Before I was just drawing the top stones of the wall….now I am detailing all of the internal brickwork (or masonry work rather). This should take me a while as the wall is at least 6 meters long, and so far about 2 and a half meters in height. This is without additional clearing of back fill though. Once more sand is removed I might be dealing with something more like 4 meters. The location of this job is particularly obnoxious given the current weather conditions. You wouldn’t think it though…You would that that me crouched in the corner of two contiguous walls would be safe guarded from the wind and sand…that the walls would protect me. However the thing is, and this may be hard to describe…where the walls end at the top, that’s basically the surface of the rest of the site…The walls I’m working on lead to rooms that drop to a lower level. So basically where I’m sitting…every time the wind blows, it sweeps the sand from above and dumps it right on top of me. When driving home from site today, I could feel a layer of sand over my teeth…It was difficult to move the inside of my lips over there since my mouth was so dry.

What I wouldn’t give to be able to run my fingers through my hair…even fresh out of the shower I can’t do it…it seems I just can never wash all of the sand out. In addition to that it is just so dry. When I try, my hand gets stuck about an inch from my forehead. I feel like the way I wear my hair is both very archaeologist as well as very 1992. Haha, I think it looks cute, but I can’t help but think that I’m one of those girls walking around thinking that it’s okay to stay stuck in a decade that is not my own…maybe I’m just trying to bring it back…its retro! I wear it in a single braided ponytail with a headband. Hey so did Lara Croft right?? And then when it’s time to change it up, remove braid and instant wavy hair! Not that I ever actually do that…I can’t bear to leave my hair down to get even more tassled and tangled by the wind.

Tomorrow I will continue with my wall, and my data entry. It is only supposed to be 98. Only heh. And it’s Monday…which is almost midweek for us. Only 4 more days until the “weekend.” Only one day off this week…Thursday night I think I am going to go see this lecture by Barry Kemp at the SCA. It should be great!