Updates & Pedestaling 101

Hey folks! Sorry for the posting hiatus. I've been SO busy. Which has been nice; the time's passing faster than I thought it would. Hope that keeps up. Today, Chad's been gone for one month and four days. This next Tuesday, he'll only have nine more weeks gone! We're getting through this! On May 24, we've been married for 11 whole months. Congrats to us! Not sure what we're going to do for our 1 year anniversary, seeing as how we won't even been in the same hemisphere, but it'll still be cause for celebration 

Chad update first. He's doing well! He really likes his classes, and he's seeing a definite progress in his proficiency with the language. Lately, he's been a little frustrated with his roommates. I can't imagine having to go back to roommates after being married. But the main problem (from what I understand) is that they're really messy. So really that means it's a good thing he hasn't been around our apartment while I'm in field school. My gosh, when I say I have no time for anything, I mean I have no time. Which translates to: my clothes have not seen drawers or hangers in a very long time. Oh well.

Chad's also been getting better at talking to Egyptians, and he really enjoys talking to one man in particular. Mahmoud, the man that owns the shoe shop next to Chad's apartment building, sounds like a really nice guy, and I'm glad that he and Chad are friends. [In Chad's own words: "he's a  really good guy, very emotionally balanced. I would trust him if I had to leave a few hundred bucks with him for a few days or something (not something I'd trust most people around here with). Anyway, he has his head on straight; he's not some hormone- and steroid-pumped young guy."] So, I'm glad for that. Chad's still tutoring a girl in their program with a few other people on different days during the week, and as far as I know, that's still going well. Their whole group went to Alexandria (!!!) a couple weekends ago, but I haven't gotten any pictures yet. They're going to Luxor soon, but I'm not sure when. All in all, he's had very few sick days (which is really a blessing considering that everyone else has been really sick a number of times--some the whole time--since they've been there) and he's doing really well. Here are a couple of pictures he sent me.


The koshary place Chad eats at everyday. I know... but it hasn't made him sick yet, so I guess it's alright.. :)


I think this is the street Chad lives on, but I'm not sure.


Chad and one of his two roommates with a mosque in the background. Such cool architecture! I love it!

Me update: archaeology ROCKS!!!!!!!! AHHHHH I love what I do! Very few things make me really giddy, but archaeology is definitely one of them. Which is weird considering that I come home absolutely covered in gnat bites, sunburned, and caked in dirt. But really, the gnats are the only thing from that list that I would trade (for almost anything else, in fact). I've got a nice farmers tan (ok, burn) going. Here are some pictures of what we've been doing.


My beams!! I got to take them out all on my own! That was so nerve-racking. Our field school director is big into dendrochronology (tree-ring dating; we can tell when the structure was built by finding out when the trees were cut down), and so wanted us to be really careful and take out as many of the beams as we could. He took out the biggest beam (which was also in the best shape of all of them), and it took him about an hour. These took me much longer, and together they aren't as big as the first beam. Anyways, we do this by pedestaling them, which means that we dig down around them, putting them on a pedestal of dirt. Then we dig under them in sections, sliding pieces of cotton batting under them, and tying them off. We do this in sections, until we can eventually lift the beam off the floor and take it back to the lab. From there, they'll go to the dendro lab at the University of Arizona (!!) to be dated. Cool, huh? The beam on the left broke into two pieces while I was removing it. D'oh :( we weren't expecting that one to do very well though. It was actually a couple of beams resting on top of each other, and they weren't in very good shape.


Lindsay trying to escape the gnats. They were horrible. We've all got plenty of bites, but I seem to be escaping the worst of it (whew).


Andrew sifting. He's about 6'4" or 5" so it's a lot easier for him to sit on a bucket instead of having to lean over the sifter. For the rest of us 5'5"ers, it's not such a big deal.


Sarah working on getting to floor of the structure in her square and being careful around her beams. Today she cleared the floor and started taking out one of the two beams in her square.


Kari doing the same in her square. She got her beam out today and did a beautiful job!


The floor of my square minus one very carefully removed beam!


The finished product. My first beam is in that bundle of batting and flag tape. Hooray! We cradle them like babies when we take them back to the lab :)

And of course, the obligatory picture of my farmer's burn:


I got a good stare from a girl on campus today when I was walking down the hall. I probably would have stared too; I was so dirty today! You can even see the nice dirt-sheen on my glasses:


We had a BYU film crew come out today and document what we're doing. One of the professors is making an online version of one of the intro level classes, and she shot of video of our field school for it. We're celebrities! Ha, actually, I wasn't too thrilled about being filmed, so I pretty much kept my back to the camera while I worked :) Lindsay and Sarah were the only ones to be interviewed from our crew, so I really got off without too much trouble (thank goodness; Kari and I celebrated together in the background).

Anyways, this post is entirely too long. I'll be better about updating regularly so that doesn't happen again :) Hope you're all doing well! Enjoy the beautiful summer weather that FINALLY came! This is what it looked like on Monday for all of those not in Utah:


And at the end of May for goodness sakes! Hopefully that'll be the last of it.

Anyways, later!

Weird and Wonderful

These solitary bees make their nests out of flower petals! How cool is that?


Photos: National Geographic

Read about it here.

Sick day

I woke up with a headache and sore throat, and so decided to stay home. On a nice day, I would have sucked it up and gone out to site with everyone else, but today in Goshen is supposed to be windy, cold, and rainy most of the day, and our director was still planning on going out. So... I opted to stay home. My sore throat pretty much went away, but I spent a good deal of the morning trying not to throw up. I don't know what's going on, but I hope it goes away by tomorrow.

boo :(

Picture Post! -Everything Wolf Village so far

Our crew

The canyon; there's some cool rock art up there, but I haven't seen it yet

F104 in F100

Today was good. I screened all day and took the F100 notes (F100 is the entire site of Wolf Village; the little site our crew is working on is a structure named F104; so the name of our crew's site is F104 in F100. All of the other features sediment layers we find in F104 get their own F numbers, so the layer we were working on taking down in most of the trenches today is called F112 in F104 in F100. I know. Archaeologists.). Screening means I was in a perpetual cloud of dust as I poured everyone's buckets of dirt into the screen and shook it like crazy to get it down to the bigger chunks of stuff in it. It was actually really fun, but now my skin is super dry and sensitive from being caked in dust all day. I've been blowing mud out of my nose since we got back to the lab today. But, it was fun :) I really love archaeology.

Here are some pictures of F104. We're digging down to a shallow pithouse feature that has a really beautiful hearth and some pretty neat lithics. We've also found a bunch of pottery sherds (not shards; there is a difference), one of which was corrugated (woo hoo!) and another of which was a rim (cool too!). My crew's a lot of fun too. We have one of the two boys in the entire field school (of about 21 people, not including the crew chiefs, who happen to all be girls), so that's handy when it comes to killing spiders and screening. He doesn't like screening, but he's good at it.

Pictures!

Our site and crew, with crew chief in the back with the blue hood

The sweet hearth

Pretty cool, huh? I told you. There's a big chunk of adobe in the middle of it, but before Kari mapped and took everything out, there were tons of chunks of adobe. Way cool. Well, not for Kari. She had to kneel them when she was cleaning the hearth for photographing. But anyways...

So yeah. Archaeology rocks. 

Chad's doing well too. He has class everyday Sunday through Thursday, church on Friday, and the day off on Saturday. He's really liking his classes, and he's talking to people more in the city, and understanding more of what they're saying. He's got two years of Arabic under his belt, but that's class Arabic. It's much different when you're in Egypt talking to Egyptians. That's why they're there, and he's learning stuff every day :) He was good before, but he's getting a lot of good experience. 

Anyways, now I need to go to bed. I am soooo tired from today. Sitting down at 9pm to talk to Chad tonight was the first time I've really chilled all day. 

Hope you're all well. Pray that this weather figures out soon that's it May and needs to stop being windy and cold.

428 N 406 E

Field school today rocked!!!! Oh man, it was so great. The weather wasn't so great at first, but by lunchtime I was able to take off my hoodie. There is something about our site... it's always windy. Always. There were a couple of lulls today which were filled instead by a nice breeze, but for the most part, it's windburn windy. Which is great for screening, I'll tell you what.

So today, Andrew and Kari (two crew members of our 4-person crew; Sarah and I make 3 & 4, plus crew chief Lindsay) were working in grid 428 N 406 E, and they found a hearth! This truly was exciting, and I'll tell you why! I went on a dig for about a week last summer, and we found a hearth there too, but it was historic, and the only way we really knew it was there was because it showed up in the trench profile as some bowl-shaped smears of charcoal layered with sand in the stratigraphy. Today's hearth, however, was smack dab (almost) in the center of the grid, and was circled by a clay ring that was kind of mounded up, like a big fat snake coiled around it. So cool!!!!!!!!!! In the middle of the hearth were a bunch of chunks (big ones) of adobe from the structure that housed the hearth, probably a pit structure. We haven't taken the center of the hearth down yet; we need to be able to give it as much attention as it needs (and keep it's contents safe from weathering until we can get it done efficiently and not leave it in the open), so we didn't do that today. We haven't found the edges of the structure yet. That was Sarah's and my job today; we opened up new grids and dug down through the duff layer to get down into the structure's top layer. We'll keep opening up new grids until we find the walls of the structure. Ah! I love archaeology!!

Anyways, this might very well be just about the most boring thing you've ever read (if you've made it this far), but I don't care. Today was so awesome!

I have definitely learned my lesson though: I will no longer underestimate the power of cold as harbinger of absolute misery on site. I hate being cold. Truly. I've neglected to wear the necessary layers for a few days now, and I'm not doing that anymore. Life is no fun when you're shivering uncontrollably in high, frigid winds and trying to do archaeology at the same time.

Anyways, I'm going to take some pictures of the sweet hearth tomorrow, and I'll post them on here for you all to be just as excited about as I am. Ah!

Go do something fun :)

First week down

I've learned a couple of things in this first week of Chad being gone. Firstly, I am a lousy spider-squisher. Spider-smushing (now) usually goes as follows: Spot spider. Grab tissue. Stalk spider and formulate plan to squish. STRIKE. Look at tissue to confirm hit. See spider running frantically across tissue. Shriek and throw tissue and spider in the air. Spider runs away (undoubtedly plotting its revenge for when I'm asleep).

Seriously. It's happened a couple of times now.

Another thing I've learned since Chad left: the garbage does not take itself out.
#3 on the list: night-time sounds can be very creepy. Now, most nights I fall asleep with the bedside lamp on.
#4: life kinda sucks sometimes without your husband. But one thing I'm really grateful for--much more so now than a week ago--is the Relief Society. I am so blessed with so many good and caring sisters in our ward. They've really been a great support and comfort to me. And Mitch and Jade (bro.- and sis.-in-law) have really been great. I've been very taken care of :)

So Chad's doing well. He and two of his friends found an apartment in Maadi for a little over $200 a month, which is a lot better than you can do in the states most of the time. He started class on Sunday (sabbath = Friday in Egypt) and is really enjoying it. And he sent pictures!

The Nile in the downtown Cairo area

Giza Pyramids

Giza Sphinx

Church in Coptic Cairo

If Chad looks a little tired in those pictures, it's because he was. I think he had been up for 32ish hours at that point. Gotta love jet lag. Anyways, we're both doing well. Field school's going alright; it'll be better when the weather clears up and we can actually work on site. I'll put pictures up on here when I have good ones. 

Hope you're all doing well! Have a good week!