The Pedestal, These Words

On Violent Video Games

2012-02-07T07:39:00.004-06:00

No, not like that.

I was talking to someone the other day and I mentioned that I play first-person shooters. I mean, not in the most technical sense; a lot of them are actually third-person over-the-shoulder shooters, but "FPS" has become a well-understood genre. A genre that I really like, one that I get a thrill out of, one that is decidedly more exciting for me than real-time strategy or even than RPGs, although I enjoy those too. I like my twitchy trigger-finger reflexes and the satisfying feeling of a headshot (pardon the pun) well-executed.

My interlocutor, sensing common ground, started throwing out the names of several popular war simulation games, but I pretty quickly balked. I hadn't realized it before, but there's a pretty sharp divide in my mind between the sci-fi fluff of space-marine shooters and games based on actual, terrestrial war. I've always espoused the position that video games are fantasy, and that violent games are too quickly demonized when something horrific happens in the real world. But at the same time, there's a pronounced absence of war simulation games in the stacks of cases in my apartment, and even when they were bought for me as a kid, they sat by unplayed. The closest I ever came to a war simulator was an N64 game about plastic soldiers.

I'll be the first to admit that I glory in FPS carnage. I like spattering alien halls with alien blood in alien colors, and I'll shout battle cries upon shotgunning an opponent. But I think I've never picked up war simulators because something about that level of glee disturbs me when it's other human beings that I'm slaughtering. Aliens are easily othered, and I don't think I have a problem with that: they're designed to be mindless and unsympathetic, their evil only minimally complicated, perhaps for a dramatic and regrettable plot twist.

But I think something feels instinctively wrong about directing that killing thrill at other humans, especially since it already happens far too often for comfort in the real world. I'm not saying my moral sense is superior to anyone else's or anything, and I may just be retrofitting my new-found awareness of the kyriarchy to a pattern in my gaming tendencies that I'd never noticed before. I can honestly say it was never a conscious decision to steer away from realistic war games. But I think it just became one. For me, anyway.

Ultimately, I think it was this ad that did me in. I mean, yeah - those guns and explosions are awesome. But then I wondered who the targets were, and I felt a little icky.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I've been thinking, and I realized that I did kill humans (albeit in a science fiction setting) in Star Wars games as a kid, specifically in Shadows of the Empire. I also had a brief fling with Splinter Cell on the Xbox, which, for those of you who aren't familiar, is a sneaky, black-ops type game, with decidedly human military opponents. Neither is a particularly realistic representation of war, but both did involve me having no issue killing other humans. So hmmmmm.

Addendum

2011-07-05T14:14:00.003-05:00

This is a quick addendum to my previous post on Elevatorgate.

It seems that there are really two issues involved in the Elevatorgate kerfuffle, or rather, two things that people are trying to communicate.

1) Don't do that thing because in the current climate, it is likely to make the woman you're doing it to intensely uncomfortable.

2) Don't do that thing AT ALL - just because you've decided that you'd like to have sex with me doesn't mean it's OK for you to now ask me to have sex without any preamble. Give me the same opportunity you've had, of having time to decide whether I'd like to have sex with you. This makes me feel less like a piece of meat, whose only option is to react to your action rather than make my own decisions.

EDIT: Edited for grammar/clarity.

Because Enough Hasn't Been Said Already

2011-07-05T09:18:00.002-05:00

BIG FAT CAVEATS: I DO NOT claim to speak for anyone in this post, and I can't know details I wasn't there to see, and I don't have Elevator Guy's firsthand account. A lot of this is interpreting the situation through my own lens and trying to figure out how I feel about it. I'm very very very new to feminism of this stripe, but I'm finding myself going "...YEAH! Uh, what they said!" with respect to a lot of it.

I'm going to weigh in on the Rebecca Watson-Elevator Guy thing. Mostly to clarify my own thoughts in my own head and figure out what, exactly, I'm thinking, and open myself up to constructive criticism. I want to learn from this, I'm just not sure what I should be learning.

I'm going to go a little light on the links in this post, since if you have any idea at all what I'm talking about, you probably know where to find the context.

The basic facts: Rebecca Watson was speaking at an event about feminism and skepticism, and had spent the day essentially saying "Don't hit on me." She spent the evening at a hotel bar, and when she decided to end her evening, said she was tired and was going to bed. Elevator Guy, albeit without his direct input since we don't know who he is, has apparently been confirmed to have been in earshot of both of these things. He still decided to follow her into the elevator and ask her to his room to continue speaking over a cup of coffee. This is, at best, ill-advised.

I've had my share of unpleasant experiences, but I've never been a victim of violent sexual assault or rape. Perhaps because of that, and because I've grown up around painfully awkward but nevertheless lovely men, I give Elevator Guy the benefit of the doubt on this one. I wasn't there, so I don't know, but regardless of whether he was hoping for intimate conversation or intimiate... intimacy, I'm betting he was well-intentioned. REGARDLESS, his actions were still creepy and could easily be construed as threatening.

First: He heard Rebecca's talks, he heard her say she was headed to bed, and he decided that this was still a good time to approach her for possibly sexual purposes. That shows that he finds his own ends more important than her expressed wishes, which, frankly, he has been socialized to do.

Second: He made his request (as far as I know) without attempting to engage her in a public setting, instead waiting until she was isolated and he was alone with her to ask her. This kind of abrupt escalation with no attempt to communicate interest beforehand shows me that you have made a decision about me LONG before you've given me time to make a decision about you. You've decided that you want to be alone with me, but you haven't given me the opportunity to decide whether I want to be alone with you. That disparity tends to set off alarm bells, because now we're in very different places with respect to our desires, and you've put me in a situation of rejecting you before I even have any idea who you are and what you're about. You might be a very nice person, but suddenly we're on very different pages from one another, and especially for women, that can be a scary place.

Why scary? Because now, literally all I know about you is that you have sexual interest in me. And I'm alone in an elevator with you. I don't know how long you've been interested in me, how deep that interest goes, how far you're willing to go to satisfy it, or how much you know about me already. But you've shown me that you've been thinking about me when I don't even know who you are, and that you're willing/clueless enough to completely ignore the context and my expressed desires and my sense of my own safety to tell me so. That swings the Schrodinger's Rapist pendulum, and I'll bet you can guess which way. Add to it the fact that men in our culture are generally taught that it's okay to press for what they want; and that "no" often means "yes," or even "maybe later;" and that for whatever reason, in sexual situations, normal methods of refusal apparently go deliberately misunderstood; and you've put me in a situation that appears pretty fucking threatening. Speaking as someone who's been in similar scenarios, it's a pleasant surprise when a man just takes "I'd rather not; I'm tired and want to go to sleep" as an answer and leaves me alone. Typically I'm bracing for further attempts at convincing, that I will have to deflect as politely as possible for the duration of this elevator ride.

Now you tell me, folks who are saying that this was just an innocent encounter: is any of the above okay? Should anyone be made to feel that way? Is it possible for men to be a little more context-sensitive, or should we refuse to point these things out to them because they're well-intentioned? Obviously, these are just my thoughts on the situation, and I CANNOT in any way speak to how Rebecca Watson felt in that elevator, but this is how I would feel. I'd love to live in a world where I could take this request at face value and have no expectation that a rejection on my part would mean anything more than "I don't want to come to your room/have sex with you right now" - a world where that wouldn't be taken personally, a world where I wouldn't fear for my safety saying that in a place with no exit, a world where that wouldn't reflect badly on me (both in other people's minds and in my own mind), and a world where this guy and I could even get to know each other further the next day. (In public.) But that is not the world that I, as a woman, live in, and it's become increasingly clear from some of the responses to this situation that a lot of men (and some women) don't see that, and are upset that Rebecca's pointing it out when they don't think it exists. Guys: it's not about you. It's not about how you can ask women out or how you can get laid or how you have the very purest of intentions. It's about how women can feel safer in society. So, um. Shut up and listen, I guess.

MORE BIG FAT CAVEATS: This post is obviously rambly and ill-formed, and is made up mostly of my own feelings on the matter. I don't claim to speak for any of the participants here. I'm just trying to nail down where I stand on it, because I think it's important enough for me to be able to articulate my opinions clearly. The Stef McGraw and Richard Dawkins side of things might be its own post later, or I might not get to it - we'll see.

First Taste: Sweet Miss Giving's

2011-01-08T15:37:00.006-06:00

Remember how I said that those food trucks I so wistfully follow only rarely make it down to Hyde Park?

Yesssssss.

I threw on some clothes, hopped on my bike, and booked it over to Ratner. At first I didn't see anyone in the truck, but through the magic of Twitter, I was able to locate driver Tony, who was incredibly cheerful despite the cold.

I had just started following this bakery on the recommendation of the Gaztro-Wagon folks. Their truck is fairly new, but the bakery has been around for a while. They do good work, too. From their website:

Over 50% of our profits go directly to Chicago House and the bakery doubles as a comprehensive jobs program. At any given time, more than a dozen disabled adults are getting real-world training and experience in our kitchen – as bakers, delivery assistants, packaging specialists and customer service representatives.

Chicago House provides housing and aid to HIV-affected families and individuals, including people struggling with poverty, homelessness, substance abuse, and mental illness.

Well, their motives are certainly pristine and laudable. How do their cupcakes hold up?

I opted for the red velvet, their signature cupcake.

Cute, no?

My first thought was "That is... squat." My second thought was "That means I can fit it in my mouth!!"

And fit it in my mouth I did. Mmmmm.

The crumb was dense and moist, exactly the way I like it. It was an incredibly rich cake, with a solid cocoa flavor that wasn't overly sweet. The tangy cream cheese frosting was probably my favorite part - I was tempted to lick it off the cupcake, but the cake and frosting combined were just too good. The frosting was super light and airy, and didn't overwhelm the cake. I think the ratio of cake to frosting was absolutely perfect, and the texture and flavor balance between the two was very well done.

In summation: Beautiful flavor and texture balance, loved the frosting. A.

P.S.: I also bought a German chocolate brownie, but that one is MINE ALL MINE and you'll just have to buy your own to see how delicious they are. Fortunately:

Yessssssss.

First Taste: more Cupcakes

2010-12-10T11:01:00.009-06:00

I had an appointment downtown at 9am today. Before I went in, I checked Twitter and saw that the more cupcakes truck (website, Twitter) was only a couple blocks away, parked near Christkindlmarket. Since I'm not often downtown, and the food trucks that I so wistfully follow rarely make it out to Hyde Park, I knew I had to jump on this chance. I crossed my fingers and hoped they would still be there in an hour.

I left 25 East Washington and headed west to Clark and Washington. I passed Christkindlmarket, just waking up for the day - nothing was open, unfortunately, but I did stop to look at some of the window displays and to savor the smells of currywurst, baked apples, and fruit fritters. I found a store which sells glass pickle ornaments - a German must for a Christmas tree, for those of you not in the know. I made plans to return when the stores were open and bustling.

Then, there - on the southwest corner of the intersection - a van with a display window in its side, and an awning propped open. Inside stood an attractive, friendly young guy who, based on the tea in my hand, recommended that I go for the salted caramel over the red velvet. There were thirteen flavors in the truck today, and I probably could have tried something more exotic, but I wanted to see how more managed a familiar flavor. I handed over my cash (about $3.50) and he handed me back a green-labelled takeout box, curiously hefty.

I got home and plunked the box on the kitchen table for immediate investigation.

I felt no remorse as I tore into the cute little package, revealing a gorgeous mini cake suspended in the center.

It was taller than I expected when I pulled it out...

...and the cake a lighter color.

Oh, well - nothing left to do but take a bite.

As you can see, there was an oozy pocket of caramel in the center of this gorgeous cupcake. It had soaked slightly into the surrounding cake, as well, adding a creamy texture and that lovely, almost smoky toffee flavor to every bite. The amount and sweetness of the frosting was, to my taste, exactly right. I could still get my mouth around the majority of the cupcake, and the frosting tasted like a lightly sweetened whipped cream. The cake itself was fairly sweet, which is fine, but the texture was a bit stiff and spongy. This may be for purposes of practicality; I love dense, moist, melty cake, which I imagine doesn't travel terribly well. This cake's crumb was airy and open, but strong.

In short: great caramel flavor, not too sweet, spongy crumb. B+

EDIT: It occurred to me that maybe my problems with the cake were just because the cupcake was on the chilly side, having sat out in an open van and then carried around outside and then eaten a mere five minutes after I got home. I'll have to try one at the storefront for comparison (this is my disappointed face).

Latke? But I hardly know 'er!

2010-12-08T23:12:00.002-06:00

I made these.

They were good - a touch bland. I might salt them a little more next time, or include some seasonings. Is that an okay thing to do? I am Not Remotely Jewish, so I have no idea what's appropriate here.

The most important part, though, is the amount of time it took me to grate all the grating-required ingredients with my brand-new Cuisinart. It ended up being 33.2 seconds. I timed it. (Not really.)

Happy Christmahanukwansolsticewhatever!

Leftover Goddess

2010-12-06T09:01:00.002-06:00

Last night, I was on my way home from the north side, looking to get home around 9 pm. I was debating whether to stop off and pick up some groceries - I was, pretty understandably, not enthusiastic to trudge through the cold and the snow. But then I had a brilliant brain flash.

Use Up Your Leftovers Fried Rice (based on this, which is - SURPRISE! - another Bittman recipe)

1/2 cup peas
1/2 cup corn kernels
2 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger (or really, whatever you have lying in your fridge)
1/2 onion, chopped
1 cup cooked white rice
2 eggs
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1/3 cup leftover dipping sauce from Shrimp and Cilantro Shu Mai (or to taste)

This is just what I used. Modify as needed to clean out your fridge.

First, heat some oil in a large skillet or saute pan over medium heat. When hot, cook the onion, stirring occasionally, until soft. Add the peas and corn. If they're frozen, you may want to consider defrosting them first; however, I did not, and they turned out fine. Cook until everything is warmed through and the onions begin to color. Set veggies aside in a small bowl.

Add more oil - maybe 2 tablespoons - to the pan and let it warm up. When hot, add the garlic and ginger and saute for 15-30 seconds - any more and you will start to lose flavor. Add the rice and cook for a minute or two, tossing with the oil. Make a well in the center of the rice and add the eggs. Let them cook for a minute, then scramble them lightly and incorporate them into the rice. Add the vegetables back in and stir to combine.

Season as you see fit. I tossed in my leftover dipping sauce from the previous night's shu mai, which turned out lovely. I've also had success with soy sauce and black pepper, or even beer (pale ales work best). The best part? Plenty for leftovers, and a lot fewer bits and bobs in your fridge. Hooray!

Mark Bittman's Homemade Shu Mai

2010-12-04T20:33:00.012-06:00

Earlier today, when scrolling through the backlog of posts in my Google Reader "Food" folder, I spotted this. It's a recipe for shrimp and cilantro shu mai, courtesy of Mark Bittman. Can you count how many things about that sentence made me happy? Yes? Well, I'll still go ahead and list them for you, in case you missed any.

1) Shrimp. Delicious sea-insects. I don't eat them nearly as often as I used to when I lived on the Gulf Coast, because they're markedly more expensive in Chicago. (Actually, they're probably markedly more expensive back home in Texas now, too. Curse you, BP.)

2) Cilantro. Fairly self-explanatory.

3) Shu mai. Shu mai and I have an unholy bond, the kind of obsessive love that can only result from the satisfying of one's most basic needs in a fashion well above and beyond the call of duty. Essentially, I find them indescribably delicious.

4) Mark Bittman. If you don't know who he is, please see The Minimalist, his books, and his website. His cookbooks and blogs are my go-to resources when I'm looking for a simple, elegant dinner. I owe a great deal of my cooking style to his influence.

Immediately, I determined that a) this was the perfect excuse to finally buy a food processor and b) I must make these for dinner. An hour and a fight with my snow-boots later, I had acquired a Cuisinart:

and the ingredients, or the closest approximation thereof that I could manage:

Ingredients:

1/2 cup soy sauce

1 tablespoon rice wine (I used mirin, a sweet rice wine)

1 tablespoon sesame oil (I used chili sesame oil, because it's what I had)

1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

1/2 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined

1/2 to 3/4 cup fresh cilantro leaves (Seriously, what supermarket runs out of cilantro? I used parsley instead.)

1/4 cup roughly chopped scallions, white parts only

10 to 12 round dumpling skins (Mine were square. It's what they had.)

Juice of 1 lime.

First, whisk together the soy sauce, rice wine/mirin, sesame oil, and ginger.

Then, put half the shrimp, half the cilantro (or parsley), and all of the scallions into the food processor. Pulse until smooth.

Here, you can see me jumping the gun a bit. Add one or two tablespoons of your soy sauce mixture to the filling and pulse until you get a smooth paste. Then, the recipe instructs you to chop the remaining herbs and shrimp and add them to the filling, for textural variety. I just threw the remaining ingredients into the processor and pulsed it a few more times. Tsk tsk, lazy.

I swear I had a picture here of a dumpling wrapper, flat, with filling in the middle, but it seems to have gone missing. In any event, lay a wrapper flat, and brush the edges with water. Spoon some of the filling into the center. The recipe recommends about a teaspoon, but I used closer to two - possibly because my wrappers were square, and therefore larger.

Then gather the edges up around the filling, pinching them together, while leaving some of the filling exposed at the top.

Repeat as necessary. It's recommended that you keep your dumpling wrappers and dumplings under a damp cloth while working, but I neglected to do so and my dumplings (arguably) turned out fine. Just don't let them sit too long.

Set up a steamer in a large pot over about an inch of water. I actually have a steamer basket, but two ramekins and a plate (or something similar) works equally well. Bring the water to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer. Arrange a single layer of dumplings in the steamer and cover the pot. Meanwhile, add the lime juice to your soy sauce mixture.

Cook the shu mai until the filling is opaque and the wrapper is tender, 4-6 minutes. Transfer them to a serving platter, and repeat with the remaining dumplings. Serve them with the dipping sauce, like so:

As you can see, my square dumpling wrappers resulted in floppy little ears at the corners of my shu mai. Inelegant, sure, but no less delicious.

The filling has a variety of textures, but remains light, unlike a lot of Chinese-restaurant shu mai bricks. The greens add a bright, but not overpowering, flavor. I liked the parsley, but I think I would have preferred cilantro. However, I might have cut back on the amount of greens if I were using cilantro - it has a stronger flavor than parsley, and the parsley was pretty prominent. The dipping sauce was a great tangy complement to the dumplings; I love the combination of lime and seafood, though, so it would be hard-pressed to fail. In fact, if I were sure it wouldn't affect the texture of the filling too much, I might add some lime juice or a little extra dipping sauce to the filling before cooking. It certainly warrants experimentation.

The only real piece of advice I have regarding the recipe is this: don't be timid when shaping your dumplings! Squeeze that filling, pinch those corners, and don't be afraid if it squishes out the top a bit. I was a little shy with my first few dumplings, and they tried to fall apart on me in the steamer. Check out the Minimalist video if you need some guidance. They don't need to be origami works of art to be delicious.

Verdict: A+++ WOULD MAKE AGAIN.

Kate Beaton

2010-06-24T09:57:00.005-05:00

I've been reading through Hark! A Vagrant, and I think you should too, because Kate Beaton is wonderful and I'm fairly certain that I want to be her. This particular offering of hers never fails to make me lol.

EDIT: More Kate Beaton, specifically, the Pope comix, because I love JPII also.

One
Two
Three

Hot Doug's

2010-06-21T20:33:00.002-05:00

Tall, Dark and Awkward and I went to Hot Doug's last Friday. He had never been, and I've made it my mission to broaden his palate with gourmet deliciousness of my own making and others'. I particularly wanted to go for the chardonnay and jalapeno rattlesnake sausage, with spicy guava mayonnaise and moody blue cheese. I am proud to say that the mission was successful, and I can now add rattlesnake to the list of animals that are delicious.

The line was surprisingly long for a Friday afternoon, and it was hot outside. I didn't mind too much - the line didn't extend past the end of the building, so we were standing in the shade. TDA had a bit of a hunger headache, though, so the wait was a bit fraught. "Doug," I thought, "whatever he orders had better be outrageously delicious, or he will probably dump me for making him do this." Fortunately, Doug came through for me. TDA had the smoked duck sausage with cherry mustard and goat cheese. He ploughed through it pretty fast, so I didn't get a chance to taste it - maybe I'll get him to do a guest post about it. My rattlesnake sausage was superb. For those who are unfamiliar, rattlesnake is a pinkish meat - it looks kind of like undercooked chicken, and tastes a bit meatier than frog. I didn't really get much of the chardonnay flavor, but the jalapenos did add a pleasant kick to the whole thing. The guava mayonnaise was tangy and sweet, and the blue cheese added a tartness that balanced the other flavors nicely. Moody blue was a good choice, I think, as it's not so strong as to overpower the flavor of the meat. This particular sausage is still on the menu, so I'd highly recommend giving it a shot if you're in the area. I'm headed out to Hot Doug's again this Friday with one Mr. Nick Simmons, so I'll have more to report on soon.

Giza Part 2

2010-04-22T21:44:00.003-05:00

From the Solar Boat Museum, we drove to the Panorama. This spot isn't much in and of itself - it's a crowded patch of dirt, a foot- and tire-flattened, balady-dog-infested promontory that stands off to the side of the Pyramids. What it does have going for it is a peerless view of the three Pyramids (and the very top of the Sphinx's head, but that's less important). Here, let me show you:

Pretty cool, huh?

So we hung out there for a while, and let the sand bite our ankles and our eyes. Then we hopped back in the car and drove down to see the Sphinx. Let me tell you - one of the big advantages to having a curator as your personal tour guide is being able to park anywhere. The guards with their (probably non-functional, but I wouldn't want to test it) machine guns just wave and smile at you.

We threaded our way through the tourists and down into the temple. In one of the first courtyards was a pit, where one of the most famous statues in the Museum of Antiquities was found. Lisy had me pull out a five-pound note so that she could show me which one she meant. The floors in the temple were worn slick, like almost everything in Egypt seems to be, by millions of tourist feet. Hey, Mom and Dad, remember our trip to Spain? And how I wore those blue flip-flops with hard plastic bottoms, and I kept slipping and falling on my ass? Yeah, that's what it was like with me at the Sphinx. As we wound through the temple passageways, I had to shuffle my feet and adjust my weight so that my shoes didn't slide out from under me, all while avoiding other tourists and various kitsch-hawkers. The path slowly rose up toward an outcropping, which stands on the Sphinx's right side, up near its paw. This viewing platform took the lack of safety regulations to a new level. It stood nearly two stories high, and its top was natural bedrock - cracked and pitted and worn, and not a railing in sight. Lisy's hand hovered near my purse strap, ready to yank me back on to solid ground, because at this point I have to say that I wasn't paying much attention to where I was going. It was yet another overwhelming moment: standing before this giant monument, so iconic of the culture that I've loved since I was a child, shaped by the hands of workmen who lived longer ago than I can comprehend. The Sphinx really is magnificent, just as a work of art. The face is smooth and majestic, with the beatifically immobile features of the Old Kingdom perfectly embodied. Lisy finds it hilarious that if you follow the Sphinx's gaze, it stares directly into a Pizza Hut. And that, my friends, tells you just about everything you need to know about Egypt.

Pyramids at Giza

2010-04-02T08:49:00.002-06:00

Heading to the Pyramids required a bit of preparation. Lisy, as the wife of a curator, is supposed to get in for free. At most other sites, she gets a reduced-price ticket as an Egyptian resident and the wife of an Egyptian. But of course, nothing is ever simple, and all of this is complicated by the fact that Lisy's about as white as they come. Since Wahied was guiding a group and couldn't come with us, he called ahead to pull a few strings. At the gate to the pyramid area, we asked for a particular guard by name, whose influence alone turned out to be not enough to let us through. He, however, was able to call Wahied's friend Mahmoud, a curator at the site, who I would learn that day is remarkably talented at opening doors.

With Mahmoud in our car, we pulled through the gate without a problem. He was tall and handsome, the kind of Jonesian figure that lends academia a little romance. We shook hands politely when Lisy introduced us. He pretended to be surprised that she even remembered his name. He apologized for his broken English, which was perfectly intelligible, and directed Lisy to a parking spot between the tourist buses.

There was no question where we would go first, and I trailed after Lisy and Mahmoud, trying not to lose my flip-flops in the sand. The Great Pyramid loomed overhead, crawling like an anthill with tourists speaking a Babel of languages. Mahmoud apologized for being tired; you see, he lives in Tanta, a Delta town three hours away from Cairo by car, and he drives in every day. Incredulous, Lisy asked why he would do that to himself. He loves his work, he explained, as he led us up the worn steps carved into the blocks of the Pyramid.

Uh, yeah. I guess I understand that.

After squeezing past about five gazillion other people on the narrow, guard-rail-less path, we came to a hole in the Pyramid's face. More than anything, it looked like the entrance to a cave. After the stinging brightness of the sands outside, it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the low glow of incandescent bulbs. The tunnel ahead was rough and twisting, hacked into the stone, and smelled cool and humid. Mahmoud led us the few meters to the end of the tunnel, and told us that he would wait for us here at the bottom. Forging onward, Lisy and I climbed a stone staircase. At the top were two iron rods, bent and hammered into the stone, serving as a short ladder to the hole which broke into the Pharaonic entryway.

This passage fits exactly every stereotype that has ever flitted through your head about exploring pyramids. Approximately three feet high, it led upward at an alarming slope. On the floor was a wooden plank, with steel bars at regular intervals providing footholds. (PROTIP: Don't wear flip-flops for this part. Trust me.) On either side were wooden banisters, for clinging - because that's really the only word for what you'll be doing to them. Every surface was worn smooth by millions of visitors. And thus, hunched over and fearing for our skeletal integrity, we began the trudge.

Just about the time you've gotten your heart rate up and settled into a nice cling-step-cling-step rhythm, the passageway opens up into an antechamber (called the Grand Gallery). The high ceilings step inward to create a crude vault, and a passageway to the Queen's Chamber diverges horizontally at this point. The wooden plank/steel crossbar arrangement splits around this passageway, and then continues up the Grand Gallery at the same unrelenting angle. I counted this as my cardio workout for the day. (Look, let's see you do it, alright? [Shut up, Dad.]) Contrary to what you may be thinking, being able to stand upright really doesn't make the climb any easier.

Finally, we reached the top, at which point we had to scuttle under a pair of massive stone blocks to enter the burial chamber. It was here that I learned the Great Truth concerning pyramids, which is universal and unbending: they all, every last one, smell of pee.

Ammonia haze aside, the gravitas of this moment is something I have difficulty conveying. The Great Pyramid, although certainly not the most interesting or elaborate Egyptian remnant, is nevertheless the best-known icon of my particular passion. To be standing in the burial chamber that I'd read about, seen pictures of, and even entered a virtual computer-game simulation of was a milestone. Add to that the sensation of being surrounded by thousands of tons of crushing stone, and you've got yourself a pretty dramatic moment. I whipped out my flashlight, as the chamber was actually quite dark, and investigated the monolithic sarcophagus on the far side of the room. Nothing in the chamber is carved or decorated; it's all plain surfaces of rough, dark stone. It's easy to see why the Pyramids engender such a sense of mystery. Still, with nothing much to see in a warm, stuffy room, we didn't stay terribly long. Out we scuttled, to do the entire process in reverse (it's harder that way!).

When we emerged, rubbery-legged and squinting in the sunlight, Mahmoud led us around the side of the Great Pyramid to the Solar Boat Museum. Built over the pit where the boat was found, the Museum is a top-heavy geometric structure nestled up against the Pyramid's base. Inside, we had to slip linen booties over our shoes to minimize the potential damage from sand and dust tracked in. We shup-shup-shupped through the first floor, examining models of the solar boat, which was found complete and disassembled in a massive rectangular pit. Several of the original limestone blocks still lay over the top of the pit, which took up half of the museum's ground floor. Nearby stood a case containing a tangled pile of the boat's original ropes, several of the knots still intact. The boat was most likely placed there by Khufu's son, approximately 4500 years ago.

We climbed to the second floor, which consists entirely of a viewing gallery for the boat itself, meticulously reassembled and conserved. It hangs above the ground-floor exhibits, lashed together with ropes, its oars propped in position. The four-thousand-year-old wood is in remarkable condition. The stern of the boat curves up and then drops in a graceful arc, the end carved like a lotus blossom. A small, roofed shelter with interior walls rises at the back end of the boat, supported by elegantly shaped poles. The whole structure is an impressive piece of craftsmanship, and a tangible connection to the pharaonic past. It is also a testament to the work of conservators and historians that it could be reconstructed so reliably and kept in such good condition. I spent most of my time at the Solar Boat Museum with my eyes wide and my mouth hanging open.

--Whelp, that's just the first half of the Giza trip, but it's a pretty long post. Soon to follow: Tombs! The Sphinx! More boring descriptions!

Cairo: Traveling

2010-03-31T08:04:00.003-06:00

Hey all! The Cairo posts are long overdue, I know. But it's awfully hard to sit down and write a worthwhile post when you're in the middle of such an amazing city.

To answer the most frequently asked questions, no, I did not line up a job, and no, I did not line up an apartment. But this is not as disastrous as it sounds. Firstly, I did have a meeting with ARCE, who told me that they don't usually take interns. They nevertheless told me that they might be able to offer me a volunteer position doing archival work. It would be GREAT experience, and would give me an opportunity to network in the Egyptian archaeological community. I also have part-time job prospects, at the expat cultural center in Maadi or as a proofreader for an English-language publication. Secondly, the agent - whom Lisy and Wahied informed of my travel schedule - contrived to be out of town while I was in Cairo. So I didn't get to look at any apartments. However, Lisy believes that finding an apartment will be decidedly easy, and the agent has told us that there will be more apartments available when I come back in June (and at better prices). Lisy has offered to let me stay with her until I find a place, which shouldn't take more than a couple of weeks. As you can see, things are falling into place fairly well.

Now, on to the part that you all really want to hear. I left Chicago at 10:30 PM Thursday, March 18 on a Turkish Airlines flight. This plane served to emphasize the fact that Middle Easterners have a special relationship with color; the seats and blankets were turquoise, the overhead lighting was navy blue, and the wall lighting was bright pink. The food on the flight was unexpectedly good, but bear in mind that I hadn't eaten anything for sixteen hours prior. Fasting is supposedly a ward against jetlag, and I'd recommend trying it - I had zero problems with the time difference.

The Istanbul airport is actually a really lovely place - but, like most airports, it's far less enticing when you're there for an hour longer than expected. On the other end, Lisy and Wahied had no way of knowing that my flight was delayed, as you have to pay to enter the Cairo airport if you aren't flying. Still, I arrived without event, and managed to pass through customs without a bag search. This was the subject of much discussion beforehand, with advice from Lisy on "looking clueless" and "authoritatively brandishing an American passport." She had a vested interest in my smooth exit, since I was "smuggling" ten pounds of puppy chow and assorted dog toys into the country for her.

Cairo is a brilliant city full of strange aesthetic juxtapositions, rather like if Daniel Burnham built a mobile home and then left his Christmas lights up year-round. Weird and tacky, classical and arresting, you're never quite sure what you'll see when you turn around. We drove down a brand-new freeway lined with palm trees on our way back to the greenery and classical villas of Lisy and Wahied's neighborhood. Driving in Cairo is like nothing else I've ever seen - it combines the free-for-all vehicular negotiation of Rome with the supremely confident pedestrian behavior of New York City. Cars maintain only centimeters of distance, and in fact most of them have a crushed and dented ring around their widest part. People amble carelessly across six lanes of high-speed traffic, prompting sudden stops and constant honking. And despite all of this, Lisy has managed to keep her two-year-old Honda from ever getting hit. I think she's gone native.

Well, that's a long enough post for now - I promise I'll get to the really cool stuff soon (maybe even this afternoon!). Next post: the Giza Pyramids!

Ongoing Omnibus Autism rulings

2010-03-16T10:44:00.002-06:00

The Omnibus Autism cases are continuing. The Special Masters ruled in favor of reality in Feb 2009, and they're continuing to do so this month. Let's hear it for SCIENCE!

That said, the antivaxxers are complaining that they'll never get a fair ruling in proceedings awash with big gub'mint money. So apparently, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear one of the cases. Now, I'm not sure how to feel about this - part of me is cranky that we're continuing to legitimize these people's complaints when they're so clearly unfounded. But another part of me hopes that all the publicity might convince a few more people who are teetering on the edge, and that would be a victory in and of itself.

What do you think?

ACTA Link Roundup

2010-03-16T08:10:00.005-06:00

This morning, I read this article in the New York Times. In short, it discusses a recent study which has found that the Obama administration's efforts at greater governmental transparency (mostly in the form of FOIA requests) have been erratically implemented with heavily mixed results. The National Security Archive, a private research group affiliated with George Washington University, found that only 13 of the 90 government agencies that it queried had taken "concrete steps" to implement the administration's new policy on FOIA requests. That policy, for those playing the home game, places the burden back on the holders of sensitive information to show why it should not be released (as opposed to John Ashcroft and the Bush administration's policy, which placed the burden on requesters).

Those of you that have listened to me rant over the years know how I feel about transparency and freedom of information. My latest favorite attempt to screw us all over on this issue is the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA. Ten political entities (the US, the E.U., Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Jordan, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates) are discussing this international network of policies for cracking down on copyright infringement. The real kicker? The content of the treaty is secret.

In fact, an official of the European Commission stated that several of its members were "uncomfortable" with the secrecy surrounding ACTA, according to a Computerworld article. And they're not the only ones. However, the treaty's contents cannot be released without the permission of all 10 negotiating parties. So who's stopping them? It turns out, according to a leaked Dutch government memo (Michael Geist's commentary, with links to the translated memo), that the holdouts are Denmark, Korea, Singapore, and - yeah, you guessed it - the US. The Obama administration has refused to release the content of the treaty due to "national security" concerns. (Seriously, what?)

So, what are the problems with the actual content of the trade agreement? I mean, it can't be all that bad - we've had the Digital Millennium Copyright Act since 1998, and it hasn't caused too many problems. (Ed. note - this is SARCASM.) Well, let me outline for you the issues that I have with ACTA:

Third-party liability: Service providers will be held responsible for infringing use of their services. To paraphrase Cory Doctorow's description, this would be like suing Kinko's every time someone used one of their Xerox machines for an infringing purpose.

Three-strikes policy: this is not, as far as I can tell, outlined in detail in ACTA; however, the treaty does require service providers to develop policies of action against infringing customers, potentially including termination of service to repeat offenders. Since France has already implemented such a three-strikes law, it would be easy to model any policies off of this existing one. This could potentially leave not only an infringer but her entire family without Internet access - cutting off their means of making a living, access to information, and civil involvement. Even more importantly, this policy is based solely on accusation by rights-holders, not on actual proof or conviction of infringement.
Restrictions on limited liability for third parties: Exactly what it sounds like. Service providers would have to meet certain requirements of enacting restrictive or punitive policies against their customers in order to be considered "safe" from their customers' infringing actions or content.
Notice and takedown: All participating countries would have to implement a DMCA-style notice and takedown procedure which removes infringing content based on an accusation by the rights-holder. As we've already seen with the DMCA, this kind of policy can be abused to censor criticism (c.f. Scientology).

Criminal penalties for non-commercial infringement: You heard me. You could go to jail for copying music or Camcordering a movie, even if it doesn't make you any money.
Prohibition on circumventing DRM: under ANY circumstances, even if it's for your own use. This fundamentally violates the concept of first sale, and essentially means that we're just leasing our content from the rights-holders, rather than actually trading our money for ownership.

The US and Japan were the main authors of the Internet chapter of ACTA (just so you know where this is all coming from).

This post is meant to be an extremely biased overview of why I feel strongly about this whole affair. For more information, check out the links below:

The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together by Michael Geist, with more ACTA links along the left-hand side of the page
PDF of the leaked ACTA digital chapter

UPDATE: For an extra dose of surrealism, read this. I'm having trouble seeing how the two would play nicely (hint: not without some serious twisty logic).

I have to talk about this.

2010-03-11T09:38:00.003-06:00

Okay, go read this article. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/us/politics/11texas.html

No really, I'll wait. Read it.

Done?

Ok, good. Let's go. Now, did that make you want to punch someone in the kidneys/breathe fire at your computer/dump a glass of water over your head? Yeah, you're not alone. The more I find out about the Texas State Board of Education, the angrier I get, especially about the fact that they have so much pull with textbook publishers. It's almost enough to make me ashamed of my home state. Almost.

As a person who works in the humanities, I can tell you first-hand that it's incredibly difficult to take any kind of absolute stance. Our discipline is all about interpretation. That said, in order to interpret, we need to have some kind of absolute starting point from which to extrapolate, and we also need to have a method for interpretation. In the case of archaeology, for example, the starting point is the collection of material culture from a particular site. These materials exist, can be examined, and their context is heavily documented - they're not up for question (well, okay, some might argue that, but that's a blog post for another day). Various methodologies exist for interpreting this hard data; this interpretation constitutes the practice of archaeological analysis, and ultimately of writing history. Methodologies are argued extensively, refined, reformed, reinvented, scrapped, and rediscovered. Despite what some archaeologists and historians may say, there is no single right way to go about interpreting a piece of archaeological data.

There is, however, a wrong way.

Take, for example, a piece of Persian sculpture, excavated at the exact same depth as a piece of Late Bronze pottery. An inexperienced archaeologist might conclude that hey, Persian culture existed a hell of a lot earlier than we originally thought! And that archaeologist would, most likely, be wrong. A not-wrong interpretation of the data is that the strata are tilted or sloped, based on the topography of the particular site. An even better interpretation is that in antiquity, a well or trench was dug into the Late Bronze and then backfilled with Persian material. Either one of these hypotheses can be confirmed or falsified with more contextual data. Essentially, training produces useful interpretations that can further elucidate a situation. Lack of training produces interpretations that add nothing to our understanding of the materials at hand.

Given this, let's take a look at what the Texas State Board of Education is trying to do by shoehorning a conservative agenda into social studies teaching standards. They've found several pieces of Persian sculpture within the context of American history - namely, conservative-identified politicians and movements. And now they're claiming that these pieces of sculpture are game-changing, and should overturn our current understanding of history. Now, to give credit to that inexperienced archaeologist in the example above, there was a very slim chance that he was not wrong. But the only people qualified to determine that are the people trained in solid methods of interpreting archaeological data. The same holds true for the State BoE. Should we change our understanding of American history to reflect a more prominent role for things like Christianity, Ronald Reagan, and "country and western music"? I don't know for sure, but I'd have to say that a DENTIST probably doesn't have any better idea than I do. You know who does? The historians who write textbooks. They're the ones that can tell us if these things are important, and what the most realistic method is for interpreting their existence.

In short: get your history from historians, not from a bunch of politics-driven armchair philosophizers.

Things to do today

2010-03-11T09:00:00.002-06:00

Clean the litterbox
Clean my kitchen
Clean my room
Send out resumes
Go to the grocery store
And if there's time:
Bake bread
Blog properly

Well, cross your fingers for me. I'll either be much happier by the end of the day, or I will have chewed my own arm off with self-loathing. Hooray!

Writing

2010-02-25T23:42:00.003-06:00

I spent all day thinking about restarting this blog, and writing, and other worthy endeavors, and here I was about to go to bed without having written a single word. Shame and ignominy. That said, there isn't much to say about today, so I'll leave you with a silly little scene I just thought up. It's a drabble (a 100-word piece of fiction), and I'll call it "Everyone Needs a Hero":

Anna leaned forward. Her eyebrow arched in anticipation. She had waited a lifetime to say this.

"No, Mr. Smith. I expect you to die."

The laugh broke through Smith's fear. He doubled over, guffawing so hard his chains jangled. "Really? You finally have me captured, I'm standing helpless in front of you, and all you have for me is a tired old Bond line? Christ, and I thought you were-"

He didn't even scream as he fell. Anna leaned back and puffed her cigar, immensely satisfied.

One of the trapdoor's hinges squeaked. She would have to remember to fix that.

MY CULINARY NEMESIS

2009-09-09T11:01:00.003-05:00

It's true, I have an enemy. There is one dish that I have longed to make, and yet it has defeated me over and over again. Three times, to be precise - and that is far longer than it usually takes me to at least get the basics of a dish down. First, it refused to thicken. Then, I made it too lemony. Then, it refused to thicken again. But THIS TIME... ohh, this time. I think I have it.

Yes, yes it is - it's Avgolemono.

Caddy-corner to our apartment is a Greek diner called Salonica. On the weekends, they serve avgolemono (creamy egg-lemon soup with orzo pasta), and my roommate Brian is more or less addicted to the stuff. Salonica's version is delightful - creamy, warm and bright, and perfect when soaked into a piece of bread. Some people might just accept that and move on, but I... I see it as a challenge.

There are a couple of things that I would change from this slightly rough first batch, which I based on a user recipe at Epicurious, here. I used water as the base, as I had no chicken stock. Definitely go for the chicken stock - it's well worth the added flavor. Or if you're veggie, boil up some garlic broth. Secondly, I think the whipping of the egg whites into soft peaks is unnecessary. I ended up with a soup that was downright foamy - somehow, it managed to be creamy at the same time, but even so, "foamy" isn't really what we're going for here. Just beat the eggs into submission, and you should be fine.

Avgolemono (adapted from a recipe by azzurri at Epicurious)

8 cups chicken stock or garlic broth
1 cup rice or orzo pasta (I like rice, but orzo is traditional)
4 eggs
Juice of 2 lemons, or to taste
1/2 cup heavy cream (optional, but I LOVE the flavor and richness it adds)
Salt and cracked pepper to taste

Throw the rice in the chicken stock, and set it a-simmerin'. Let it go until the grains are completely cooked, and then turn off the heat. Meanwhile, beat together the eggs and the lemon juice until smooth and uniform.

Now comes the slightly tricky part. Scoop out one cup of hot liquid from the pot. We need to temper the eggs, so that they don't scramble, and instead provide a thickening agent for the soup. Slowly pour the hot broth into the egg mixture, beating the mixture constantly and vigorously. Then do it a second time, with another cup. If you did this right, you should have a yellowy-orange, uniform-looking liquid with no floating white bits. If you have floating white bits, congratulations! You've made egg-drop soup, which is not what this recipe is for.

Once you've tempered the eggs, do the whole thing in reverse - pour the egg mixture into the rest of the soup, stirring vigorously all the while. At this point, I added about a half-cup of heavy cream, to up the thickness and the flavor. And voila, you're done!

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a bowl of this stuff to eat for lunch.

Pasta with Potatoes and other things

2009-09-08T15:47:00.003-05:00

Well, well, well! Look who crawled out of the gutter to make a post. There have been a few changes around Pedestal headquarters since I last posted: the Sugar Daddy is gone, replaced by Sugar Roommates (sweet as, and with money to boot!), and I'm living in a new location. Work is still the same, and I'll be heading back to classes in a few weeks, but until then, yours truly will endeavor to post regularly.

So at the nudging of one of my roommates (he's the blog called Brian, below and to your right), I've started cooking him lunch. I am additionally offering lunch to any and all takers, for a small grocery-cost fee. Today was the first day of making lunch for Brian, and I'd call it a qualified success. I made pasta with potatoes, loosely adapted from Deb's recipe here. Now, I woke up at 6am to do this, so I wasn't firing on all cylinders, but bless his cute little heart, Brian said it was "very tasty". So maybe I'll just keep on doing it.

Pasta with Potatoes

1lb whole wheat pasta
1lb fingerling potatoes (I really didn't weigh these. Just use some.)
1/2 bunch bitter greens
1/4 cup olive oil, plus 2 tablespoons
2 cloves garlic
1 1/2 cups freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Salt and cracked black pepper to taste

First things first - set some salted water on to boil, and preheat that oven to 350. Slice your potatoes thinly - maybe 1/4 inch. Dress them with two tablespoons of olive oil, some salt, and some cracked pepper. Spread them in a single layer on a baking sheet and toss them in the oven while you take care of the rest.

If you're lucky, the timing worked out and your pasta-water is now boiling. Throw in the pasta; whole-wheat takes a minute or two longer, but when it's cooked to al-dente, there's nothing more delicious. While that's going, heat up the olive oil in a skillet. This will be your sauce; you don't have to use 1/4 cup, use what you feel comfortable with. Mince the garlic and cook it a bit in the olive oil to give it flavor. Don't scorch the garlic, though! That makes the universe sad.

After a minute or two, turn the heat off. Now sit back and chill for a bit, because you're waiting on the pasta to finish. When it does, keep that water! Throw the bitter greens in and blanch them for a minute or so. (I had meant to use dandelion greens for Brian this morning, but there weren't any left. So I sauteed an onion with the garlic instead, which made for a sweet and tasty alternative.) Then drain the whole mess, throw in the potatoes (they're done now - you timed it perfectly, right?) and the olive oil, and CONSUME. Or, y'know, save. For lunch.

A Western European Makes Pirogi

2009-06-04T10:58:00.004-05:00

So, I've got a lot of catching up to do... I've been busy, and I've been bad about blogging. Well, let's see if we can't fix that, shall we?

(This post written for Monday, 6/1)

Tonight for dinner, I had intended to make cabbage pirogi. Cabbage is in season in my part of the world right now, and I've actually become a big fan of the stuff. It fills out stews and soups nicely, and the Bohemian in me is addicted to the flavor. So I picked up some Napa cabbage, and figured I was ready to go. Unfortunately, when I got home, I realized that my Napa cabbage was covered with small black flecks. Everything that I could find online indicated that this was either a result of a) bad handling and/or storage, as it turns out Napa is kind of fragile, or b) a fungal infection.

I decided not to eat it.

So instead, I figured I'd go for farmer's-cheese-filled pirogi. Farmer's cheese is the somewhat more accurate name for that ricotta that I've been making, with whole milk and something acidic. I didn't have lemons, only limes, but a lot of people argue that limes, with their greater acidity, are the better choice anyway. I used an entire half-gallon of whole milk this time, and came up with a whole lotta delicious ricotta.

While my cheese drained in the sink, I chopped up and sauteed two shallots and two cloves of garlic. I love shallots, more than I can possibly say. They have a darker, milder flavor than onions, and make for an interesting substitution. Between them and leeks, I hardly even buy onions anymore. When they were softened, I mashed the garlic-shallot mixture into the cheese with a fork, and voila: filling for pirogi.

At this point, I needed dough for the wrappers. Thankfully, Deb of SmittenKitchen is pretty into pirogi (and dumplings of all kinds, it would appear). She's got a great recipe for pirogi dough over on her site, which I followed to the letter, and it turned out wonderfully. Well, okay - I did make some changes. But it still turned out great.

Pirogi Dough

1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 eggs
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup water

In a large bowl, mound the flour up and make a well in the center. Add all the other ingredients to the well, and with a fork, begin whisking them together. As you do this, flour should begin to incorporate itself into the mixture. Keep this process going, nice and slow - it will end up taking maybe 20 minutes to incorporate all the flour that the liquid will handle. Once you have a soft dough, dump it out on a floured surface and knead it, adding flour as necessary to keep it from sticking. Keep this up for about 8 minutes, and you'll wind up with a very soft dough. Throw some plastic wrap over it, and let it sit for 30 minutes.

At this point, roll the dough out as thin as you can get it (or, if you're one of those people who likes doing things the easy way, send it through a pasta roller). Cut out circles with a fancy cutting implement - I call mine a "drinking glass". Place about a tablespoon of filling in each circle. Using your finger, wet the edges of the dough circle, and then pinch them together to seal the pirogi in a half-moon shape.

Once you've used up all your filling or all your dough or just got sick of doing this really tedious thing that you could buy at a store instead, set some water on to boil, and set out a skillet. Plop the pierogis in the boiling water. After a minute or two, they'll start to float; once they do, let them cook until tender, say 15 to 18 minutes. In the meantime, splash a little oil into that skillet and cook up some slices of onion (or, y'know, shallots or leeks). Keep it over a low heat and let them caramelize and crisp around the edges. Once the pirogis are done, take them out of the water with a slotted spoon and toss them in the skillet. Stir fry them up with the onions until they're a little bit browned. Then serve them, with a nice fat dollop of sour cream on top.

Man, I'm really hungry.

An Egypt post!

2009-06-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

So there I was, telling my mother the story of my ill-fated Egyptian border crossing, when she realized that hey, this is an Egypt story! And hey, I should convince my crazy-ass daughter to post it on her blog! So here you go, as told to my mother - the story of my border crossing from Israel to Egypt. It starts in Taba, Egypt. The full trip started with a bus ride from Jerusalem, but you might just have to hear me tell that one in person.

Lynn: Well when you're in - let's say Egypt - sometimes you have to pay a little extra

me: oh, well, of course

in egypt that's just how things work

12:27 PM Lynn: But you can't pay anything to influence contract decision, government decisions, etc.

me: i didn't figure they'd be down with that in the states, though

Lynn: They say it's a fine line - thus teh record keeping.

me: gotcha

Lynn: But I think they're also realistic in that you can be put in very difficult positions to conduct legitimate business

12:28 PM me: right, fair enough

i guess i wasn't thinking in terms of international business

haha

'cuz yeah - it's the only way to get anything done in egypt

if i've learned anything, it is that

also, pay close attention to who is a border guard and who is not

but that's a different story

12:29 PM :-P

Lynn: One I porbably haven't heard all the details on...

me: haha yeah

well, it's not all that bad

the border crossing at taba is really confusing

it looks like a damn resort hotel

12:30 PM and there are buildings and roadways and such, and none of this barricaded "you must go this way" business like you've got in most places

Lynn: No that doesn't sound typical

me: so yeah, they don't railroad you anywhere, but there are DEFINITELY tracks

and if you start going somewhere you're not supposed to, all of a sudden fifteen men in white uniforms show up and start yelling at you

i know this from experience

12:31 PM and then when i came out the other side, well, i wasn't sure i was quite out the other side

Lynn: Oh Lord -

me: because, well, resort hotel, right?

so i'm keeping my head down

i'm exhausted

i just spent four hours getting shitty sleep on a bus from jerusalem, and five hours getting shitty sleep in a backwater bus station on top of my bags, and an hour and a half hanging out in the open-air reception area of the egyptian consulate

i do NOT want to be fucked with at this point

12:32 PM so i think i'm out of the border crossing, and i'm walking down the sidewalk when i hear something that sounds an awful lot like a thick Arabic accent saying "Taxi?"

and I ignore it

and keep walking, without looking up

because I'm used to this bullshit by now

"Taxi?"

12:33 PM I shake my head no, and keep walking

more insistently now: "Taxi!"

I lift my head, but don't look at the guy - he's standing maybe 20 feet away

12:34 PM and I roll my eyes, give a half smile while still looking straight ahead, and in an EXTREMELY exasperated voice, I say, "No!" and shake my head

and then I hear, "Taxi! Taxi!"

and I think to myself, wait, that doesn't sound like "Taxi"...

that actually sounds an awful lot like "Passport!", now that I think about it

12:35 PM and I look up, and it's a border guard, shouting at me and demanding my passport

Lynn: OMG

me: at which point I promptly shit myself, turn bright red, and grovel

a lot

while handing him my passport

and trying to explain in English that he will understand why I walked away from him

because he is asking me repeatedly why I did so

12:36 PM even though he doesn't speak English and can't understand my response

so, he hands me back my passport with an undeniably disgusted look on his face, and goes back over to his folding chair with his buddies by the side of the road, where they're all smoking cigarettes

12:37 PM (I don't think I can really be blamed for the confusion, frankly)

Lynn: And then...

12:38 PM Are you in or out?

me: hahahaha

well, that's what I thought to myself

because i had no idea!

12:39 PM so, um, I kept my head up and kept walking, and kept a really close eye out for border guards

and then arrived in an area full of a whole bunch of skeevy taxi drivers

turns out i had underestimated the skeeviness of taxi drivers in the middle of Egyptian nowhere

and they are quite distinguishable from only slightly-skeevy border guards

so yeah

i made it through

hahaha

12:40 PM Lynn: Well going this summer will be a non-event then

me: seriously

the border crossing is NUTS

and is not the way to get to cairo in my book

seriously, just fly from Tel Aviv or Aqaba

/shudder

but it's a story for the grandkids, anyway

hahaha

12:41 PM and that's not even counting the six-hour ride through the desert

Lynn: True - you'll be one adventurous granny someday

me: yup

i really should at least write up the story of GETTING to cairo

because it was outrageous

12:42 PM i mean, i can't even hardly believe i made it there

Lynn: No duh

me: after six hours of driving through the desert, i got dropped off at ramesses station, in the middle of downtown cairo

i had to borrow the cab driver's cell phone to call lisy

and here i am with everything i own in the world slung across my shoulders

12:43 PM and i've got to figure out how to get on the metro and get to her neighborhood

NUTS, i say

Lynn: Were you freaked out?

Cuz' I would be

me: well, at that point i was kind of too tired to be freaked out

and i was a little numb to the fact that i was in totally outrageous situations

12:44 PM Lynn: I guess you get past caring at some point

me: with little to no fallback help

haha

i had basically realized that so long as i keep moving and keep trying, things work out

Lynn: Profound statement that

me: heh yeah

12:45 PM it's when i got scared, sat down, and stalled out that things had any real potential of getting bad

and my backup plan was to tell someone to take me to the museum

and then explain that i was a friend of wahied helmy-shahat

in my broke-ass arabic

12:46 PM Lynn: That's a lot more than some people would have...

me: hehehe

Lynn: So how can I copy what you just wrote and add it to your blog

me: /snicker

tell you what, i'll post this conversation, word for word

12:47 PM hell, i'll do it right now

Lynn: Really?

me: yep

Crispy Onions are as Good as Mark Bittman Says

2009-05-29T13:49:00.002-05:00

Last night, I wanted a quick late lunch before I met up with a friend at the bar. I wanted something that wouldn't require a whole lot of attention, as I was feeling lazy, and I also recalled that I had most of an onion in a plastic bag in the fridge. Then I thought of this.

I have about half a bag of lentils, and a giant bag of rice that I'm slowly using, and I recalled the article by Mark Bittman saying that the finest topping for these two grains was crispy burnt onions. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, it was, and it was delicious. The Bitten post tells you pretty much everything you need to know, but I'll give you my take on it here.

Lentils and Rice with Crispy Onions

1/4 cup lentils
1/4 cup rice
1/2 onion
Salt

Okay, so this really isn't hard. 1:1 ratio of lentils to rice. Boil the lentils, covered mostly or entirely, for about 15 minutes. Then throw in the rice and continue cooking, adding water as needed, for about 20 minutes until the lentils are mushy and the rice is done. While the rice is cooking, make your crispy onions. Mark Bittman recommends a splash of oil; I used butter. I salted them, and cooked them over a slightly-higher-than-I-was-comfortable-with heat. They browned and shriveled, and began to give off an amazing smell. They started to crinkle, and the edges slowly blackened. At this point, they got a touch smoky - not too bad, but I did turn on the hood fan. After about 10 minutes (Mark says 15 to 20; I guess I wussed out), I scooped them on top of my lentils and rice. The edges were crunchy, the outer skin crispy, and the insides sweet and juicy and soft. Their sweet tanginess complimented the soft, cozy, stick-to-your-ribs taste of the grains perfectly. I highly recommend it. Just be sure to LET THEM COOL before you start eating. I have poor self-control.

Mac n' Blue Has Me Green

2009-05-28T13:16:00.002-05:00

Short update: last night I made mac n' blue cheese. It was delicious, but I think I ate too much of it, as I was feeling a little sick until this morning. Perhaps man was not meant to eat that much blue cheese in a single sitting. You are warned.

This dish is so astoundingly easy I'm amazed I don't make it all the time.

Mac n' [Cheese of Choice Here]

1/2 lb pasta
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp flour
1 1/2 - 2 cups milk
1 cup cheese, any kind that melts well will do, crumbled or grated

Set your pasta on to cook in some well-salted water. I'm sure Italian purists will be furious with me, but I don't wait for my water to boil before I throw the pasta in; it seems to take less time this way, but I've never actually pulled out my stopwatch. Just make sure you stir it once in a while until it starts boiling, otherwise the pasta might stick to the pot.

While that's going, make a bechamel sauce. This will keep the cheese nice and melty and creamy, and will keep your mac n' gouda (or whatever) delicious after reheating. (Don't you hate reheated Kraft? I know I do.) To make a bechamel, melt the butter in a non-stick saucepan over medium heat until it gets foamy. Then add the flour, and stir to combine (use a whisk if you're concerned about it being lumpy; I was just making myself a quick snack). Cook the flour for a minute or two. This gets rid of that dry, dusty taste that raw flour has. Once the flour has cooked for a bit, begin adding the milk, slowly. It's best to use slightly warm or room-temperature milk, but if you know me at all, you know I don't have the patience for that sort of thing. I always use cold milk straight out of the fridge, and it just takes a bit longer.

Add the milk a bit at a time, and stir - or better, whisk - together with the flour mixture. Soon, the whole mess should start to thicken up. When it does, add a little more milk, and continue the process until you have a nice thick sauce. I really just eyeball this. Be sure to leave it a little thinner than you'd like, because you'll be adding cheese momentarily, and that will thicken it up.

Once you have a satisfactory sauce, take the pan off the heat. Whisk in your grated or crumbled cheese a handful at a time, waiting for it to completely melt before adding more. The amount you feel like adding may vary - just keep tasting until it seems right. If you need to re-warm the sauce a little bit to get everything to melt, do so over very low heat. Once you have your sauce, add cracked pepper to taste. I find that the cheese is usually salty enough on its own, but if you like Dead Sea cuisine, go for it. Then, drain your pasta, and toss it with the sauce, and you're done!

Makes 2 servings - unless you're really hungry, or really like cheese, or are named Megan.

Asparagus Pizza

2009-05-27T13:16:00.003-05:00

And so, I am back. I made some tasty dishes last week, but nothing too remarkable. There was a strawberry salad that I made for a picnic with the Sugar Daddy, with mint leaves and a honey-lemon vinaigrette dressing, but that's the most spectacular thing.

Last night, however, I was on my own for dinner - we were going to the Pub for trivia night, and sadly my current food policy prohibits my traditional fish and chips. (Not the beer, though, thank God.) I wasn't entirely sure what I would make for dinner, but I saw this as a pretty good opportunity, as I had some asparagus in my fridge that needed to be used. (Asparagus has been in season now for a couple weeks, by the way! If you're interested in eating seasonally, like I am, check out this page at Epicurious.com. It will tell you month-by-month what's in season for your state or any other state you like, and that way, you can find local ingredients at their freshest.)

And then, while I was at work perusing my RSS feed reader, what should arrive but this little gem? ~~Mark Bittman, of~~ Edward Schneider, a frequent contributor to the Bitten blog, frequents farmers' markets and focuses on seasonality; he got a bit tired of all the asparagus, as it's been around for a while now, and wasn't sure what to do with it. And then, he had one of those moments that people like me adore: when you see a few ingredients laid out in front of you, and a flash of inspiration hits and you build the perfect dinner in your head. Asparagus pizza! Brilliant!

I modified his plan slightly - I only used ricotta cheese, and I added thinly-sliced garlic to my pizza toppings (seriously. EVERYTHING.). It turned out extremely well - I'd recommend the garlic, but not my ricotta-only strategy. It doesn't melt as well as, say, mozzarella, and you get a drier pizza with toppings that tend to fall off a little. Still, it turned out quite delicious.

Asparagus Pizza (compiled from Mark Bittman's Bitten blog and www.smittenkitchen.com)

SmittenKitchen's Really Simple Pizza Dough

1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast (I used a whole package. It won't hurt anything.)
1/2 cup warm water
1 tablespoon olive oil

Mix together the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Stir in the water and olive oil, and stir the mixture into ball-like form.

Dump the mixture out onto a surface. (I found that the dough was oily enough not to need flour, but flour the countertop if your dough is sticky.) Knead it for a couple of minutes - just enough to develop a little gluten, but you don't want a super-elastic dough. If you're having trouble getting everything to become, or stay, a homogeneous lump, Deb at SmittenKitchen recommends upending the bowl over the whole mess and walking away for five minutes. When you come back, your dough should be much better-behaved.

Oil the bowl you mixed the dough in. You won't need much, and the bowl should be relatively clean. Turn the dough-ball in the oil to coat it, and then cover it with plastic wrap and let it rise until doubled in bulk, about an hour for me. (While my dough was rising, I made my Ricotta Cheese, recipe below.)

Once the dough is doubled, dump it out on the counter again and, with flat hands, press the gas out of it. Then fold it (don't clump it or knead it) into a sort of ball-ish-shape, throw the plastic wrap back over it, and let it sit for 20 minutes. (I chopped my veggies while the dough was resting.)

Ricotta Cheese (based on Daniel Meyer's efforts over at Bitten)

1 quart whole milk
1/2 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
Juice from 1 lemon

Pour the whole milk and salt into a saucepan over high heat. When the milk begins to simmer, turn the heat down and pour in the lemon juice. Like magic, curds will form and float to the top of the liquid in the pan. Give it three minutes or so, and then scoop the curds out with a slotted spoon. (I had a colander standing ready, lined with paper towels. Once I got toward the end of the curds, I just poured the whole mess through the colander - three layers of paper towels held up ok.) Drain the ricotta in the paper towels, pressing out all of the liquid and letting it dry for about an hour and a half. Voila!

Making the pizza

8 (or so) asparagus stalks, trimmed
3 cloves garlic
1/4 large onion
Ricotta cheese

Cut the asparagus stalks in half lengthwise, and then into 1 to 1 1/2 inch lengths. Slice the garlic cloves as thinly as possible, and do the same with the onion.

Once the pizza dough has rested (see above), preheat your oven to its hottest setting. Roll out the dough - I think pizzas look better when they're blobby and not round, but maybe I'm just sublimating my own inadequacies. Crumble the ricotta cheese all over the pizza. (Mark Bittman leaves the ricotta cheese off during the baking, and uses mozzarella for his base, adding the ricotta at the end - I'll try it his way sometime and let you know how it turns out.) Top the pizza with the vegetables, keeping it light so the crust can puff up. Then bake and serve! The pizza should bake for about 10 minutes, until the crust browns and blisters slightly. Mmm-mmm, good.

A Return and a Reboot

2009-05-19T21:41:00.002-05:00

Hello, everyone! I return!

I know, I know. I never finished my stories about the Middle East. Suffice it to say, I saw many things, I went to Cairo, I slept on buses and in bus stations and in the same clothes for two days, I barely dodged super-sketchy cab drivers, and it was the trip of my dreams. Someday I'll write about how phenomenally stupid of an idea it was to just up and go to Cairo (did you know that from the border crossing to Cairo is six hours by cab through literal wasteland? I do now!), but today is not that day. I'm back to writing, due to popular demand. But now, I'll be talking about something ELSE that you all seem to love hearing me ramble about: food.

Yes, I'm turning this into a food blog, sort of anyway, because I love talking about food, thinking about food, cooking, and bragging about what I've cooked. This will necessitate the acquisition of a camera in the very near future, so that I can post pictures of the deliciousness, but until then you'll have to settle for my loving and perhaps slightly exaggerated descriptions. My plan these days is not to eat anything that I have not made myself. Currently this excludes pasta, even though I know how to make it and have done so in the past, and bread, because bread is a pain (har har har). I do plan to start making more complex artisan breads, but let's save that for when I don't have classes and homework to deal with. The goal here is that when I want something quick and easy, I will turn to raw foods (fruits and veggies) for snacking; also that I will go to the farmers' market for my groceries. I tend to shop very healthy, but I also buy processed foods like chips and ice cream sometimes because they're there, you know? This plan will also mean that I learn how to cook lots more stuff, and that you'll get to hear all about it. Blogging it will help keep me honest, too, because nobody ever lies to anybody on the Internet. That, and I know my mommy reads this.

Anyway, tonight was a bit of an experiment. I like making soups; I'm comfortable with soups, especially stews that contain lots of root vegetables. I also can hack together a stir-fry or fried rice in a few short minutes. I've realized this, and have decided to start pushing my comfort zone. Tonight, Sugar Daddy (the boyfriend, Ben - this new nickname was sarcastically requested by him, and I'm perpetuating it just to get on his nerves) and I came up to his apartment in Logan Square to watch the basketball game. Because I'm not eating processed foods, I decided to whip together something from whatever he had in the fridge. Being as how he lives with another twentysomething (soon-to-be-ex-) bachelor, that turned out to be Not Much.

"Okay," I thought to myself, "I've managed with less."

I checked the freezer and found a gallon bag of frozen beef. (Seriously?) SD started the process of thawing it enough to scrape off a few chunks for me to use. I let the big strong man handle prying it apart with a spoon, and set about dealing with vegetables. I found a big bag of broccoli, and a plan began to take shape: Chinese food. Broccoli beef! It's one of SD's favorite dishes, and I've always loved the way broccoli soaks up sauce. Deee-licious. Matt, SD's roommate, is Korean, and keeps all the basics around: soy sauce, rice. We also had a range of white wine, unopened thank-you gifts from a bunch of party guests a month or so back.

While SD dealt with the beef and hollered at the game, I chopped up an organic leek that I'd left in the fridge a while ago. These organic leeks were particularly filthy and took some very careful cleaning. I also got out a bunch of broccoli and rinsed it down. Finally, I chopped up a couple cloves of garlic. I put garlic in everything - you really can't go wrong.

When I had a few beef chunks separated from the cancerous, rock-solid mass, I sliced them thin (way easier when it's frozen, BTDubs) and threw them in hot oil in a skillet. I kept the heat a little on the low side, since the meat was still fairly frozen. Still, they browned on one side pretty quickly. I flipped them, and dumped in the leeks and the broccoli. The broccoli began to cook down nicely once I stirred it up and coated it with the oil. I let this mess sizzle for a while until the meat looked barely pink, and then I threw in the garlic. It's better to do this later in the process, so that the garlic doesn't burn, and the flavor is stronger.

At this point, I had to freehand a sauce. I had looked up a number of recipes, but for things like this, I don't really have the patience to actually use them. So I poured about a half-cup of soy sauce into the skillet, followed by maybe a cup of white wine (I dunno, I just make this stuff up as I go). I didn't add any salt - soy sauce is PLENTY salty on its own. I also added some cracked black pepper, and then let it simmer for a bit. The mixture smelled fantastic, and tasted a little sweet, but mostly sour - the soy sauce and wine mixed fairly well, but I threw in a pinch of sugar to help it out. I let the sauce reduce down a bit on its own, and then I added a bit of cornstarch to thicken it up. This isn't something that I usually do, but I wanted a quick, thick sauce here - something that would stick to rice and not be too soupy. After a few minutes, things thickened up beautifully, and hey presto, takeout-caliber broccoli beef. Served over white rice, it ended up being pretty tasty - I sit here feeling the satisfaction of a delicious meal, and then periodically remembering that I cooked it. Which makes me smile.

Side note: I'll be food-blogging a lot on here, but for those of you that like to hear about my Middle East adventures, Ben and I will be heading to Cairo at the end of August. I'll certainly be blogging it, and maybe I'll even have pictures for you this time (what with the whole "hopefully getting a camera" thing). If we're lucky, perhaps I can even convince Sugah to do a little joint blogging. That way, you can get a different perspective, from someone who hasn't had fedora-and-whip-and-pyramid fantasies since the age of eight.

See you all tomorrow!

James Nachtwey's TED Prize

2008-09-30T16:04:00.002-05:00

James Nachtwey wants to show the power of news photography in the digital age. He's revealing a story worldwide, all at once, publicly and dramatically, on October 3. If you live in any of the relevant cities, I encourage you to go. Knowing TED, it will be worthwhile.

Nimrod's Fortress

2008-09-18T00:05:00.005-05:00

I realized that in my last post about my travels, I left out my favorite part of Day One of the Northern Excursion: Nimrod's Fortress. We visited it after Caesarea Phillipi and before we went swimming in the Sea of Galilee. Here is the account.

Pulling away from Caesarea Phillipi, we headed northward into the Golan. We wove up steep hills to our next site: a crusader castle perched upon a high crag - Nimrod's Fortress. This site was by far and away one of my favorites. The fortress is enormous, covering the entire hilltop. A secret passageway plummets and twists from within the walls to an exit near a cliff outside the north wall. Its vaulted ceilings echo dramatically, and out its slitted windows are sweeping views of the Hula Valley. The fortifications on the hilltop were massive, and became progressively moreso as we moved eastward toward the citadel. Halfway there, we came across the Octagonal Tower, which - you guessed it - we climbed, to find amazing views. (Incidentally, coming down from the tower, we ran into a family hiking past us. They were speaking in Hebrew, but the mother switched to English just to tell her kids why they were too well-behaved to climb the tower like those delinquents.)

At the citadel itself, we ran into Scott, who had been making some mischief of his own. I took his camera, and photographed him against a broad backdrop of mountains. He was climbing a ruined section of wall, and I was a good hundred meters away, on top of the citadel. When the time came to leave, I threaded my way back where I came; several of teh others, however, found a harrowing snake path down the eastern sde of the hill. Nimrod's Fortress easily provided us with the most rewarding opportunities to flout "No Climbing" signs.

Well, gosh, I bet this looks kinda familiar. (photo courtesy Scott Bierly)

Now You Can Know Too Much About My Life, Part 2

2008-09-18T00:05:00.004-05:00

As some of you know, I now have Twitter.

On Guilt Trips and Procrastination

2008-09-17T09:02:00.002-05:00

Gah! Alright already! There will be a post here by later today. I swear! On the grave of my great-aunt Trudy!

(I'm pretty sure I don't have one of those. And if I do... well, I'm sorry, Aunt Trudy. It's a big family. You never know.)

I still have no Internet in my apartment.

2008-07-17T08:19:00.003-05:00

So, I'm posting from work, and I haven't brought my pre-written blog posts here. I'll get them up here eventually, I promise.

I'm missing the dig already. I like being back in the States; things like "my own apartment" and "seeing my friends" are kinda nice. But I miss the excitement of being abroad. I miss dig folks, I miss hard work every day, I miss never knowing what I'm going to see. I guess I'll have to go back, huh?

The plan for today is to go fence! I haven't fenced in ages upon ages, but I ran into Matthias at the Pub the other night, and he offered to fence epee with me today. He'll have to rescue my gear from the clutches of the Crown, but that shouldn't be too hard. I've missed my blades... they're probably pretty rusty at this point, but then again, so am I. I'll let you all know how it goes, and whether I can still live up to that "D" ranking that I earned once upon a time.

Quick update

2008-07-15T11:25:00.003-05:00

Back in the States, everyone! Alive and well. I don't have Internet at my apartment, so I'll be coming to you LIVE from the nearest Internet cafe whenever possible, until I can get the right wires plugged in at my home. I am going to finish the story, don't worry. I realized that I left out the trip to Nimrod's Fortress on day one, and it's all written and ready to be posted. Day Two is still in the works, but I've got a good chunk of it done. Following that, I just need to write up Jerusalem and Cairo. So, you've got a good chunk of Middle Eastern adventures still to come your way! Also, I'll be posting a lot more pictures.

I've heard from Mom that there have been rumblings that I should publish this account of my trip abroad. Honestly, that sounds like a fun idea, although I don't know if anyone would actually read it or be interested... I'd love to write this up in a much more in-depth fashion. As it is, you guys have gotten the pared-down version, because if I wrote every detail of what I saw, these posts would have taken me all night, every night. Anyway, if I do write more about the trip, particularly about the places I visited, I'll be sure to post it here. Keep reading!

Google is all in Hebrew again.

2008-07-11T06:03:00.002-05:00

I have arrived at Ben Gurion International in Tel Aviv... five and a half hours before my flight starts checking in. Oh, well. Nothing for it but to keep working on the blog, but first I gotta scare off these kids that are surreptitiously checking out my laptop.

BOO!

P.S. - The first "Northern Excursion" post is predated, so it will be below this one. Check it out!

The Northern Excursion: Days Zero and One

2008-07-09T08:12:00.003-05:00

This will be a postdated... predated?... entry. I'm writing it on looseleaf as I sit at the Egyptian consulate in Eilat. My hands are shaking a little - you all know I'm shy at first, although the two men here have been incredibly accommodating. But I will get to my Cairo travel stories later. For now I'll catch you up on the final group excursion.

We said our goodbyes - I may never see Liz again - and left Kibbutz Lahav at 2:30 on Friday. We didn't stop along the way, but made straight for Tiberias (Tveria, in the Hebrew). Watching the landscape change as we moved northward was enthralling. I started out by trying to finish up Warriors of God, but found myself persistently staring out the window. In the Negev, we sat perched on yellow, sun-baked, dusty hills. Straw and chaff swirled up at every movement. As we traveled north, the hills steepened and became greener. The air became wetter. We drove past mountains on both sides, and cut through one of only two passes - used since ancient times - through the Mt. Carmel range. Past the mountains, the land again sank toward the rift valley, and the terrain looked more familiar - albeit far more verdant. The Sea of Galilee, like the Dead Sea, is below sea level. To the west are the same kinds of rolling hills I encountered in the Negev, interspersed with high tells. To the east, clearly visible as a steep cliff across the Sea of Galilee, are the Golan Heights and Jordan.

We reached our hotel in Tiberias at about 5:30. Tiberias is a stunning city. It reminded me a lot of Casares, with red-tiled roofs stairstepping up steep hills. At the bottom, however, Tiberias slopes directly into the glittering Galilee. From our hotel room, we could look out over the town to the steel-blue sea. Directly across from us was an expansive view of the Golan, and the Yarmuk River Valley which separates it from Jordan was visible a little to the south. The first night, there were no particular plans, so we took to the city on our own.

Before dinner, we all set out to explore a little bit and see what could be seen in the city. We all started out heading different directions, but ended up running into eachother near an old Islamic section of the city wall, with a locked-up castle nearby. Anna and I also found an abandoned school building, which we promptly climbed into via a broken window. The walls were covered in graffiti in every language, and we found an old Hebrew school book on the floor. At this point, we had to return to the hotel for dinner; but afterward, the bus brought us to the water's edge for a night out on the town.

Social groups in this particular dig situation have been pretty fluid, so associations drifted a bit as we wandered from bar to bar along the boardwalk. Ultimately, I ended up exploring with a number of people - notable free spirit Anna and ninja Scott among them. We came upon a plaza that looked out over the water, surrounded by a railing and bordered by basalt boulders in a tumble down to the water's edge. We immediately hopped the metal railing and clambered down the boulders in the dark, with the lights of the boardwalk shining out over our heads.

We goofed off for a while by the water, and then headed back up. After making a quick detour at the merry-go-round, we returned to our rendezvous point to discover that we had been left. Unfortunately, Neil appeared to have thought that making a point on the first night was a good idea, and we were the scapegoats. We were a little cheesed, but nobody wanted to give him the satisfaction, so we took a five-shekel ($1.60) cab ride back to the hotel and said very little about it.

The next day began bright and early, on the bus by 7:45. Our first stop was Tel Hazor. This was one of the four Biblical cities fortified by David. The city was originally Canaanite, and they have a cutout figure of a Canaanite defender looking toward the valley approach that Joshua would have taken to sack the city. The view from the top of the tell was impressive - rolling hills on every side. I never think so until I reach the top, but every tell is either the highest or one of the highest points in the surrounding area, and invariably commands an expansive and militarily advantageous view. The city was mud-brick and stone, and as is usually the case, a maze of twisting walls remained. We clambered through, studying the patterns in the architecture and looking at potsherds. The most impressive part of Tel Hazor, however, was the water tunnel.

You all should know by this point how I feel about cisterns and water tunnels. I love ancient civic architecture, because it's a striking sign of strong centralized governance. Hazor's tunnel, much like Beersheva's, descends steeply down a shaft to a massive cistern cut straight into the rock beneath the tell. Water was in the cistern, albeit not much; supposedly, the winter in Israel was bad this year.

Back on the bus, and on to our next stop. The ride was long enough that I could get a bit of a nap, but the place itself also woke me up considerably: Tel Dan. Not only is it a conserved archaeological site, it's a nature preserve filled with freshwater springs. I hadn't realized what a profound effect five weeks in the desert had created, but Tel Dan underscored the relative novelty of being surrounded by water. The environment was a complete shift: shade, greenery, and the sound of rushing streams touched off excitement in the same way that the rivers in Colorado used to do when I was seven. Again, Scott, Anna and I wandered away from the group. We didn't see much of the city of ancient Dan, apart from its massive outer walls, and we missed the shrine to the golden calf. Instead, we walked the rocky stepping-stone paths of the nature preserve through the springs and pools. We climbed gnarled old trees and took our pictures knee-deep next to signs that said "No Wading". Every path was shady and cool, practically swallowed by trees and reeds and ferns. At one point, the path opened out onto an old flour mill. It was locked up tightly, but around back, we found a hidden waterfall, and some excellent views of the interior of the mill. In the path leading away were pieces of broken millstones.

I hated to leave the springs and shade of Tel Dan, but we were on our way to an even more dramatic spot. The Banias Falls are tucked down into a steep valley, at the bottom of a staircase that I'm not convinced hasn't killed anyone. (In fact, someone was hauled off in an ambulance while we were there.) This crack in the ground concealed more of the green and cool of Tel Dan, and further up the path, we found what can only be described as a sickeningly picturesque waterfall. You can probably guess by now that we hopped the railing and climbed out onto the craggy, tree-laden banks. The pool at the bottom of the fall was sky-blue, and a school of trout that made me hungry to look at them was hovering nearby. Above, the classic soft, white pillar of water tumbled over a cliff, throwing up a cool mist and creating rainbows.

We climbed back up the killer staircase and piled on the bus - all, of course, except for one. Scott, with Neil's approval, hiked up the stream trail to meet us at our next location: Caesarea Phillipi, the headwaters of the Jordan River. But first, we all settled in for lunch just outside the park, at a Lebanese restaurant (with very tasty falafel sandwiches).

Caesarea Phillipi, compared to the rest of the sites we had visited so far, had an obvious Greco-Roman bent. Entering the park, the first thing we passed was a series of pools. The brand-new Jordan River waters bubbled straight up from between the rocks. Above the pools was a rusty cliff face bearing the gaping entrance to Pan's Grotto. Into various points in the cliff face were cut altars and niches for statues. The floors were mosaic and cut marble; stables for sacred goats were nearby. The area was littered with elaborately carved marble capitals. Caves in the cliff made for a tempting climb, but I would never have made it, and even Scott looked wary. We found a number of Greek inscriptions, which Margaret and Zac attempted to translate; however, they were too worn to read clearly. This prompted Zac and me to set off for Agrippa's Palace, in search of clearer ones. We missed our mark a little and ended up heading the opposite direction, out of the park, but we quickly turned ourselves around and found a shady path next to the same stream that had led Scott up to the site. Michelle and Kristen joined up with us here, and the four of us set off exploring.

The path led us underneath a Roman bridge and past another old flour mill, much like the one at Tel Dan. Families with kids splashed in the stream nearby. Past the mill, we came upon the mostly-buried entrance to Agrippa's Palace. We could see the outline of the monolithic walls, curving inward to a narrow entryway. We descended into the palace, the inside of which has mostly been excavated. The path led us through a few twisting hallways, and out into the palace complex. At this point - yep, you guessed it - we went exploring out over the ruins. I found a columned room with more of the same gorgeous capitals.

As we moved onward through the palace complex, the structures became less distinct. Zac and I pulled ahead of Kristen and Michelle, and meandered over piles of rubble and ancient walls. Zac knows far more than I do about pottery and lithics, and as we walked along, he would date or talk about sherds or stones that we would pick up. I came away with a chunk of marble from the palace, and Zac managed to find some kind of votive figure or talisman - it clearly had a rho incised into it, which produced much excitement when he showed it to Jimmy back at the bus.

Leaving Caesarea Phillipi, we headed for our big swim in the Sea of Galilee... Unfortunately, I had forgotten my bathing suit. Not that I had ever actually had one, mind you, but I didn't even bring any clothing to change into. I rolled up my jeans and walked along the edge of the water. The sun was setting across the sea from us, and my friends in the water were no more than silhouettes. Scott gave me his camera, so that I could take some pictures of the aquatic antics. I caught a few good action shots of Scott and several of the other boys doing flips over the waves, and the landscapes to either side of us and the hills across the sea were breathtaking. I collected a few shells as well; the beach was littered with tiny spiraling white shells, and deep purple bivalves. Zac was picking up abalone and mother of pearl; his grandfather makes mandolins, and Zac is hoping he can inlay one with shells from the Sea of Galilee. Eventually, however, I just couldn't let my compatriots have all the fun; I put Scott's camera back, took off my glasses, and dove straight in. The water was beautifully warm, and the waves were high enough to tumble us around a bit. It all made for a fairly squishy ride back to the hotel, but I was well satisfied.

That night, I was utterly exhausted (and avoiding the unwanted romantic attentions of a certain creepy Gezer excavator), so I opted to call home and stay in for the evening. I finished Warriors of God at about 9pm, and promptly rolled over and passed out cold - the sign of a good day.

Here ends part 1 of the northern excursion; more to follow soon.

I'm alive!

2008-07-08T13:51:00.002-05:00

And better yet, I'm in Cairo with the wonderful Lisy and Wahied! Their apartment is amazing. I'm sitting in a dining room with a view of mango trees in the Israeli embassy.

While sitting at the Egyptian consulate in Eilat, I started writing blog posts to catch you up on our Northern trip. I'll type them up later; for now, I'm going to spend some time with my hosts.

See you later!

Day... Oh Man, I Totally Can't Remember

2008-07-07T11:27:00.002-05:00

SO MUCH has happened since I last wrote. The dig has wrapped up, we cleaned up the tell and sandbagged our squares. Then we went off to our trip up north.

I stayed for two nights in a hotel in Tiberias, from which we journeyed to various northern sites: Tel Hazor, Tel Dan, Banias Falls, Caesarea Phillipi, Nimrod's fortress, swimming in the Sea of Galilee, Bet She'an, Tel Megiddo, Caesarea Maritima and swimming in the Mediterranean by the Roman aqueducts, and then back to Jerusalem. It was a madcap trip and I have tons to say, especially about Bet She'an, which made my head burst with glee. But now is not the time.

Right now, I'm sitting in Jerusalem's Central Bus Station, where I will be for the next four and a half hours. I'm taking a midnight bus to Eilat, the town down where Israel meets the Mediterranean. There, I'll get a tourist visa to Egypt, cross at the Taba Border Crossing, and catch an East Delta Bus to Cairo.

That's right.

Cairo.

This is my pilgrimage, right here. I'm so excited. I'm going to be staying with Lisy and Wahied, who are being kind enough to give me floor to sleep on last-minute, while they are busy planning their wedding. I'm kind of flinging myself into space on this one - the program is over, everyone else is on their way to the airport. Ted is still in Jerusalem, and will be for the next couple of days, and then will move on to Akko. I said goodbye to him about an hour ago. I have no idea what to expect at the border crossing, and I've heard all kinds of mixed things about where to get a visa and how to get a bus from Taba to Cairo, but I'm told that Taba is tiny and everyone speaks English (this is from Wahied, professional tour guide, who picks people up in Taba all the time). I'm also told that I can get a visa either at the Egyptian consulate in Eilat, or just at the border crossing - we'll find out which, I guess. I'm scared shitless, but I wouldn't trade this experience for the world.

More when I'm in Cairo!

Day Thirty-One: Things Are Slowing Down

2008-07-02T08:54:00.002-05:00

Not a whole lot to tell about yesterday. Sandbag filling was the name of the game. We jumped off the dump a bit more, and I turned my ankle (again) in the hole I was digging. I am injured six ways from Tuesday at this point... It kind of sucks. Still, sandbag-filling is a total slacker job. Ted, Kristen, Michelle, and I just hung out on the dump, chatting and telling jokes. It was pretty fun, ultimately.

Later in the evening, there was a bonfire. The bonfires are always good times, because it gives us all a chance to unwind. My guess is that there is also going to be one tomorrow night, for the Fourth of July. We're traveling on the Fourth proper, but that doesn't mean we can't celebrate with some good ol' American booze and burnin' stuff. :-)

Today was a pretty sweet day, because today was my day to go on the survey. I didn't get to go with Team Extreme, so I didn't have to walk the badlands. I can't decide whether I'm disappointed or grateful. I went with Drake, Billy, Kate, Thomas, and Jeff. I walked between Billy and Thomas. What happens is, we go out to the start of each kilometer square, and we space ourselves out fifty meters apart. We go south, turn around and redistribute ourselves, and come back up the square. We're scanning the ground for pottery, and we tag any that we find with a GPS point. If we come across any sites, we measure them and tag them as well. The constantly changing scenery is wonderful, and you never know what you're going to see that day. We almost had to cross through a Bedouin camp; I was keeping an eye out for rocks. The only way to deter Bedouin dogs is to mime throwing a rock, but if one kept coming at me, there wasn't gonna be no miming about it. We also kept running into chicken houses, and let me tell you, chicken shit is one of the worse smells in the world. Also, I had a hard enough time staying on my line without having to walk all the way around these massive poultry installations. The terrain wasn't bad; it was mostly fields, although we did encounter several wadis that I had to clamber through. I got in my share of climbing today. I had one scary moment, where I was down in a wadi maybe two meters deep, and I was trying to get out the other side and realized I was walking on nothing but a pile of dead bulrushes. Had my foot broken through, I might have been hurting pretty bad. Fortunately, I evaded the consequences of my stupidity and lived to walk a few more transects. It's hard to stay in a straight line; I had no compass or GPS unit. Only the first, third, and fifth people in the line have them, and the other two stay in between and call the GPS folks over when they need a tag. I had no way of knowing what direction I was going, so I had to gauge by sight whether I was fifty meters from Thomas and Billy. When Thomas is lagging and Billy is being speedy, though, or vice-versa, it gets a little difficult. I think I ended up walking six kilometers today. Thomas may have walked more, though; every time he got back on his transect, I'd call him over to tag another sherd. He told me he was going to whup my ass, and do it for science to boot.

We finished up early enough to stop by Casa Phillipi, Pepe's, whatever you want to call it. :-) It's a restaurant stand type thing by the freeway. The surveyors have been going there at least once a day for the past several weeks, because the food is so delicious and they have cold drinks. I had goat cheese, spices, and olive oil wrapped in a pita, and a grapefruit soda. It was wonderful, especially after having walked all day. Surveying definitely feels like an adventure; you see and do new things every day, and you get to walk all over gorgeous landscapes, run into people and dogs, and generally just be badass. We ate breakfast under the infamous tree at Tel Hesi, the central point of our surveying, and Jeff regaled me with stories about it. It made for an excellent, if exhausting, work day. My feet hurt.

When I got back, I wanted nothing more than to nap and rest my feet, especially since I had been up late last night, but we ended up going into Beersheva to visit the ATM so we could pay for our Jerusalem trips. We also stopped off at the grocery store there, and got some popsicles - a rare luxury. :-)

Currently, Oded has all of our best finds from this season on display in the dig lab, so the kibbutzniks can go take a look at what we've found. It's really impressive to see stuff that I pulled out of the ground laid out like it was in a museum. We've found some really beautiful things - the gold earring is just one piece. We also have carnelian and other types of stone beads, juglets, ballista stones, grinders, and much more. It makes me feel so cool. :-) And everything looks stunning now that it has been cleaned and tagged. Other people are taking photos, so I'll post them as soon as I can find them.

For now, though, I am beat to hell from surveying, so methinks it is nappytimes. Hasta luego!

Crap-ton, Part Two!

2008-06-30T09:21:00.002-05:00

The view from inside the first cistern, the one where Tri had to move the "Do Not Pass" sign. These are down on the side of Masada's western cliff. This picture is thanks to the inimitable Ted Allen.

Reaching the top of Masada. The climb up was brutal, but completely worth it. In front of you, you can see Corey on the left and Tiny on the right. (Ted Allen)

View from the top of Masada, looking northward. This picture is thanks to the wonderful Michelle Hilliard.

View from the top of Masada, looking northeast. You can see the Dead Sea, and the hills of Jordan behind it. (Ted Allen)

Masada's Northern Palace. (Michelle Hilliard)

The snake path, by which we climbed down Masada. Yeah, that's right. Note the Roman camps (the squares) situated outside or in line with the siege wall. (Michelle Hilliard)

The first set of waterfalls we came upon at Ein Gedi. (Michelle Hilliard)

Our private, secluded Ein Gedi retreat. In the picture, clockwise from top left: the lower half of Margaret; Zac; Blake (in front of Zac); Kristen; me (not pictured, but to Kristen's left behind the rock); Tim (that pasty spot in all the blue and tan); Ted (splashing down the creek into the pool); Tri; Michelle. (Ted Allen)

On top of the rock by David's Waterfall. From the left: Michelle, Tim, Anna, me, Kristen. (Michelle Hilliard)

David's Waterfall, the uppermost fall at Ein Gedi. (Ted Allen)

The Wadi Qumran. Caves are visible in the foreground on the right, and in the upper left is where Cave 4 is. (Ted Allen)

A view away from Qumran toward the south. The Dead Sea is on the left; its waters used to come up to the cliff faces. (Ted Allen)

Are you ready for a metric crap-ton of pictures?

2008-06-30T08:35:00.004-05:00

This is me, and behind me is Tel Beersheva. Just thought I'd give you a picture of my pretty face.

Damascus Gate, by which we entered Jerusalem every day. It was much quieter than this on the first day, because by the time we got there, everyone was closing up shop.

This is the first sight of the Old City that I had. This is what we saw immediately after walking through Damascus Gate.

Here is the Western Wall, on Shabbat evening. The men's side is on the left, and the women's on the right. The covered walkway on the far right goes up to Temple Mount.

Ted, making a funny face on the ramparts. We were walking along them to dinner at the Armenian restaurant.

The Armenian restaurant where we ate dinner. The place was beautiful. Also, as a side note, check out that tan.

The Garden Tomb. That's the tomb, behind our irritating tour guide. Note the tracks at the bottom for the rolling stone, and the recarved face.

Exterior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The cupola over (alleged) Calvary rock.

Frontal view of the cupola.

Al Aqsa and its courtyard, on Temple Mount.

The Dome of the Rock, again, on Temple Mount.

A view looking out over Jerusalem.

All of these pictures are courtesy of the lovely Kristen Fulton.

Day Twenty-Nine: Covered in Dirt

2008-06-30T07:14:00.003-05:00

Why, you may ask? Well, I'll get there.

Today was a pretty boring day on the tell, although it started with a bit of excitement. I didn't wake up this morning. According to my roommates, they said my name, tried to wake me, talked to me, and I didn't respond in the slightest. Glenda left last, and she decided that she'd come back after breakfast and make sure I wasn't dead.

Well, I wasn't dead, but I woke up in a panic at 5:18. I threw on some jeans and jogged up the tell. It wasn't any big deal, but it certainly made for a rude wake-up. I spent the morning mostly working with Tim, taking measurements. Tiny was drawing the balks all day, and Kristen was working over in K5. About an hour before breakfast, I got put in charge of filling sandbags. We are going to place these around each square to protect the balk edges during the year. Filling them is a shit job, but it has to be done, and I got to feel like a badass hauling heavy sandbags up from the dump area.

I also spent today working a bit with Zac, helping him finish taking down a balk in his square. We exposed a second course of stones in a really nice wall. C8 is a gorgeous square; it has a flagstone road passing two square pillars, a room with a cobbled floor that was full of storage pots; and it has a lower level of architecture, that had previously been levelled out and rebuilt in antiquity.

To answer your question, Dad, yeah, this is the last week of digging. We're taking care of details this week. Over by J5, they are preparing a square for digging next year, so that there will be less intensive clearing to be done at the start of the next season. They're also digging out a few small areas and levelling off floors and such. C8 and company are clearing out a balk and articulating. E6 et. al. are drawing and documenting. We're entirely done digging. Jay is coming tomorrow to draw the architecture in the squares, and we will prepare them for photography later in the week. We set up the photo tower yesterday. Then we'll sandbag the squares and say farewell until next year - for reference, I absolutely plan on coming back.

At the end of the day, after another long stretch of filling sandbags, the steep slope of the dump off the side of the tell was looking mighty inviting... so I took a flying leap off the edge of the dump. I landed in soft dirt and ran the rest of the way down the dump, where I landed on a bunch of rocks. A combination of these shenanigans and being in loose dirt during the windiest part of the day has conspired to leave me dingier than usual. Our plan tomorrow is to take cardboard boxes and slide down the dump pile. :-)

Since we don't have a lecture today, most of the crew decided to wash pottery immediately after lunch, so we could have a long break until dinner. The extra hours of soaking clearly makes washing much easier, but we turned it into a party - I brought my music out and we listened to classic rock. When "American Pie" came on, we had a bit of a sing-along. So now I have the rest of the day free to talk to you, and tell you about Ein Gedi, Qumran, and the Dead Sea.

After Masada, we hopped on the bus and headed for a Dead Sea swimming spot. We found one, and went in to change. Pay changing stalls are deeply irritating... Anyway, I was a little clumsy during this period of the day, for some reason. I mentioned to Kristen as we were walking down the bank that I would probably fall and hurt something at some point - and immediately tripped and fell over. We put our stuff on the beach, and walked toward the water. The sun was incredibly hot, and the sea looked really inviting. I didn't know what to expect, and was really eager to get in the water. Of course, not five feet from the water's edge, I slipped and fell again... and this time, tore all of the skin off my ankle.

I popped straight up and decided that if anyone saw me bleeding profusely, they'd freak out - especially with me about to walk into a solution that was more than 1/3 salt. So I made straight for the Dead Sea and popped right in. My skin felt like it was burning off. Or rather, it would have, if there were any left. I found every cut, scrape, and lost toenail (Masada claimed a few) that I didn't know I had. Still, the Dead Sea was an amazing experience. You couldn't submerge yourself if you wanted to. Lying flat, most of me stuck up out of the water. I could stand up straight and not sink at all - not even have to try to stay afloat. I raised my arms out of the water and sank no further than mid-chest. We flapped our arms and bobbed up and down for a while. It was practically impossible to swim - I had to push against the water completely differently. Meanwhile, Tiny and Tim bobbed nearby, reading books.

We wandered out of the water and showered off, so as not to end up salt-encrusted.
Then we squished, still damp, into the store/restaurant nearby for lunch. I spent most of the day with a wet pair of pants, as there was never really a good time to change out of the swimsuit. After food, we set off for Ein Gedi, a biblically attested freshwater spring. It's a nature preserve as well, full of ibex and rock hiraxes. We took the trail upstream, toward the series of waterfalls. Immediately, we came across boulders, cliffs, and caves. Of course, half of us split off to go clambering around these, rather than staying on marked paths. We climbed between boulders and hopped the stream until we got to the first waterfall.

The place was indescribably beautiful; I'll post pictures soon. It looked like something out of a magazine, or maybe a movie set. Moss and palms and vines grew all over the wet rock walls, and the water fell in white cascades to blue-tinted pools. The water was nice and cool, and the park wasn't too busy, despite it being Shabbat. We walked past the first waterfall and on to the second. We all plunged in and mingled with everyone else, and of course, began throwing pieces of algae at each other. After we all sat under the waterfall for a bit, we found a secluded side pool below the one everyone was in - and it was empty. We all pounced on it and commandeered the place. We sat around in the water and chatted, shielded by giant rocks and surrounded by bright green moss and dancing red dragonflies.

Finally, Neil prompted us to leave our tiny paradise and get moving. We climbed to the highest waterfall, which, unfortunately, you can't swim in anymore for danger of falling rocks. It had the highest rocks nearby, which we again immediately clambered onto. I've missed the rock-climbing that I used to do as a kid, and this was a superb return to it. The boys hoisted themselves on to the highest rock - probably a good ten meters up - and we went up after they came down.

Once we came down from the rock, we headed back to the bus. Three of our number - Tiny, Zac, and Tim - either had already been or didn't want to go see Qumran, so they hiked up the steep and allegedly very difficult trail to the Dodim Cave and the Chalcolithic temple on top of the cliff. I wanted to go with them so badly, but I had no idea they were planning on it. For now, I'll have to live it through Zac's picures. We'd be coming back for them after Qumran.

We piled back into the bus, yet again damp and smelly. Qumran was maybe half an hour away, and I was pretty dissatisfied with our experience. I wanted to hike up to the caves and climb around through the wadi and the cliff faces. I wanted to see where the scrolls were found. Instead, we walked through the settlement there and saw all the cisterns and baths, and looked at the caves and the wadi from a distance. We watched a movie, and hit the gift shop. Of course, by this part of the day I was a bit sick of the sun and feeling a little cranky, but I do want to go back there and see it for real. I desperately want to see the caves. Qumran is a fascinating place; people eked out a living in this waterless cliff, where the wadi only flowed for a few days out of the year. They wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls there, at the furthest reaches of civilization for the time. Liz kept saying that Qumran and the Essenes meant more to her than Jerusalem, and I can see why. I hope I get to go back and do it properly someday.

Anyway, that should get us all caught up... After Qumran, we booked it back home in time for dinner. I'll post pictures of all of this soon. Right now, I'm going to take a shower and resupply myself with beer and snacks. Love you all, especially my family, and I'm back on the 12th - less than two weeks.

Day Twenty-Eight: My Gloriouser Return!

2008-06-29T05:41:00.002-05:00

Alright, I'm here, I've got two hours until pottery washing. Let's do this thing.

First things first: things are great in the square. This last week is mostly going to be final details: cleaning up, drawing balks, putting sandbags around the squares. Our extraction is finished, and we're going to have to wash all that pottery this afternoon. We pulled out five or six intact vessels: a couple of bowl forms we've never seen here before, and several juglets. The juglets ranged in size from about eight inches high to the height of my pinky finger. 250-lb offensive lineman Ted found the tiny one. He proceeded to "drink tea" out of it with pinky extended. We also found a number of nice round pounder stones, a basalt mortar that we had no idea existed, some seashells (!), and a couple of the infamous small, black-glazed opium pots. After pulling all of this, we cleaned the area and scraped it, worked a little more to find the floor in the east end of the square (we can't), and started doing final details. Today, I drew the section of the probe I'd been digging a week or so back. Drawing things to scale is a pain in the butt, but I actually really enjoyed it. I hope I can convince Tim to let me draw one of the balks.

The really exciting thing today was that J5 struck gold! Seung found a gold earring. It's pretty basic, but it's beautiful, and a really startling find when we haven't seen anything like it before. Our other big find lately was in C8. Zac picked up two matching pieces of an oil lamp bowl. These things are apparently really rare, and the expert that Oded knows has only seen them in the Hellenistic period. And for those of you that don't know, it goes Iron 2, Persian, India, Venezuela, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon... Hellenistic. (You see what I did there? That was an Eddie Izzard joke. :-P) Anyway, this thing is a large bowl with tiny oil lamps all around the outside edge. I don't think they've ever found an entire one, but even pieces of one apparently make Oded shout for joy. It was pretty funny. Zac looked mighty chuffed with himself over that one.

Alright, now for the good stuff: Back to Jerusalem! So, we went shopping and then to the Holy Sepulchre. I reread my crappy-ass post last time, and we're restarting that one.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is, as I said, kind of like Rome: it springs up on you out of nowhere. You're winding your way down a narrow, covered street with shops on all sides and four or five languages being screamed all around you and the smells of everything from piss to falafel to perfume assaulting you, and then it all falls away. We walked into a painfully sunny courtyard, with several steps down and the remains of pillars at the top. In front of us was a high facade: four arches, two on top of two, only one of which is open. To the right of the arches is a stairway that leads to a door on a higher level. The church looks off-center, like it is being squeezed out by the buildings beside it.

We walked inside, and the cool and dark was a shock. The first thing we saw was the rock where Jesus was supposedly laid. Above it hang several glass lamps in a row. The church looks almost unfinished; protrusions of the limestone bedrock under Jerusalem jut through the walls. Off to the right is the mazelike multi-level area of the church. We walked upstairs first, where most major Christian denominations have a chapel. Kristin got told off by a bearded Armenian priest for wearing shorts, but she magically pulled a pair of pants out of her backpack, and we escaped without further ado. The upstairs of the church was full of gold and rich wood. Priests were rushing around everywhere, wearing robes from every denomination imaginable. I didn't find it very interesting up there - lots of glitz, but no sense of age or grandeur. We wandered back downstairs.

On the way to the back of the church, we passed altars with lettering in Greek and Armenian. The church was dark, and above us we could see the high dome with a single shaft of light piercing it. Pillars and walls rose all the way up to the distant ceiling. We found the stairs going down to what looked like an Armenian chapel, with paintings on the walls. That's where I slipped and fell on my butt, right after having said that I was going to at some point. From the Armenian chapel, the stairs went down again to a quiet, secluded grotto that was almost entirely natural rock. This, supposedly, was where St. Helen found the True Cross.

Back upstairs, we circled through the back of the Church, which looked almost like ruins. Huge candlesticks eight feet high stood next to giant chunks of pillar and slabs of stone. We came to the supposed site of Jesus' crucifixion. A stone structure stands over it, and the dome is centered above it. Only two people can enter at a time, through a tiny door. I didn't go in at the time, because the line was long and I preferred to see the architecture of the church. The structure's outside was blackened from ages of candles burning against it. There's a tray running around it where you can place them. I can't impress upon you the massiveness of this place. It's not like St. Peter's in Rome, which is actually huge. This just carries the weight of ages, and you can feel the crush of the old city around you, where everything else is so small. The Holy Sepulchre feels so old because it isn't glassed-in and sterilized - it's still being used, the way it has, the way the entirety of Jerusalem has, for its entire existence. It's not a museum. Services are still held there. It was amazing.

After the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, we headed for St. Anne's - which, if you remember, was closed earlier. We sat in the basilica for a long time, listening to Anna sing - she's a professional. The grottoes underneath the basilica are thought to be the birthplace of Mary. The chapel down there is fairly modern-looking, but it's all cut into bedrock. The basilica itself is gorgeous. We had it totally to ourselves for maybe half an hour, and Anna's singing could be heard all the way outside. Everyone sings in the basilica, because the acoustics are stellar. I can only imagine what a choral presentation must sound like in there.

After the basilica, we wandered out behind it and into the Bethesda pools, where Jesus cured the lame man. The place was a maze of Roman and later cisterns and chapels. Excavations cut maybe twenty meters into the ground. I walked down into the Roman levels and into the deep cistern (I'm discovering a fascination with cisterns, by the way). Being so far below the ground with arching Roman architecture rising above you is a decidedly strange feeling.

We all re-congregated after wandering around Bethesda, and headed back to the hotel, foot-sore and brain-tired. We lay down for a bit, and then put on our finery purchased earlier in the day and got ready for a night out. We all met up in Kristen and Michelle's room. Kristen bought a hookah in the market that day, so we decided to try it out on the porch of the hotel room. We laid down blankets and all squeezed onto the tiny floor space, but it was perfect despite the setbacks. There we were, sitting on a hotel balcony in Jerusalem, all on our own, having a smoke with friends! It made for a really pleasant pre-dinner time.

Margaret's friend, Shahar, who lives in Jerusalem, joined us for our evening out. He took us to an Italian restaurant, where I had sweet potato ravioli and a delicious lemonade. We had a bit of trouble, because we set out a little early - Shabbat wasn't quite over, although by the time we were seated in a restaurant, we could see three stars. After dinner, we hit the bars on Ben Yehuda Street. We went to one, tucked in a tiny stone alley, that had really fun music. Gold Star really isn't that great of a beer, but it was in strong supply. We wandered off to another place and drank a bit of araq, and then sat ourselves in Independence Park to chat for a while. Saturday nights in West Jerusalem seem to be one huge party.

The next morning, folks left without me - I guess I was still asleep and they didn't want to wake me. They went up to Temple Mount. I headed for the old city on my own, and decided to do some intrepid exploring. I tested myself as to how well I could get around. I wandered through some shops - a bunch more were open, now that it was no longer Shabbat. I went up to Temple Mount on my own and saw the exterior of the Dome of the Rock - they don't let non-Muslims in any longer. I sat in a restaurant, tucked back inside a low, arched series of rooms, and had a Mirinda soda. I got myself utterly lost in the Armenian quarter, wandering around and looking at things. I stopped by the Citadel and admired the defenses. Also, I decided to go back to the Holy Sepulchre - it is rapidly becoming one of my favorite places in the world. I sat there by the cupola over the Calvary site and watched people's reactions to the holy place. The one thing I noticed was that almost everyone seemed to want to have their pictures taken, but not a single one smiled for the photo. Just outside, within view of the Church, I bought myself a rosary. Finally, I ran into Glenda and we headed back to the hotel.

Once we had gotten everyone together, we made for the bus station. Kristen and I had to take a cab separately from everyone else, but it turned out great in the end - our cab driver was the most insane, amazing person we could have met. He didn't stop talking the entire time we were in his cab. He rolled down the window and meowed - yes, meowed - at women. He told Kristen she was a knockout, except he kept saying "fighter". We talked about her Lebanese heritage (oops). He sang to us and told us stories. It was more or less the perfect way to wrap up the trip.

We bought tickets and ice cream at the bus station, and happily sat on our platform. I slept through a good chunk of the ride home, back over the rolling yellow hills to Lahav. Dylan pointed out our tell from the highway. That night, I slept harder than I have any night here - except for last night.

Why, you may ask? Because yesterday, we went to Masada. And swam in the Dead Sea. And went to Ein Gedi. And paid a visit to Qumran.

Yeah. Whoa.

We had two bonfires during this past week, so I hadn't been sleeping much. One was a Friday bonfire, and the other was for Tiny's birthday. The girls and I ended up making him a banner, which he has asked us all to sign. Anyway, yesterday morning I was pretty beat when I woke up. We set out at 6:30 AM for Masada. The trip took about an hour. We didn't get there early enough to see the sunrise, but it was nice and cool for our climb. The first thing we saw were the cisterns. Facing Masada from the West, the rock looks immense and imposing. The siege ramp stretches above you into the orange stone, and off to the left is a tiny path that leads to four or five immense plastered pits. We edged along the path to the cisterns.

Once we reached them, Neil found a "Do Not Pass" sign and promptly had Tri move it out of the way so that we could all troop down into the cistern. Something about these massive pits in the ground really makes an impression on me. The staircase into the cistern was steep, and the cistern was probably two stories high and square. Small windows cut through the rock at the top were the only light source.

After seeing the cisterns, we climbed the Roman siege ramp to the top. Along the way, we spied 2,000 year old wood sticking out of the rubble of the ramp. The climb took maybe ten or fifteen minutes, but I was puffing hard by the time I got to the top. Masada is a giant rock, whose structures stand above sheer cliff faces. But let me tell you, the view alone was worth the climb.

The zealots that inhabited Masada must have lived like kings. Their rooms contain gorgeous floor and wall mosaics. They had a heated bath - we saw the remains of the raised floor under which hot air was piped. Miqvas, or ritual baths, were everywhere. Supposedly, just to thumb their noses at the Romans, the zealots threw water down on them during the siege. The cisterns and vats at Masada held enough to supply them for the three years that they lasted against the Roman army. The structures themselves were beautiful. The decorations - the plaster, the mosaics, the carvings - are all still there, in varying degrees of preservation. The place must have been immensely colorful.

The views from the top of Masada were incredible. We looked out over salt flats and wadis to the southern tip of the northern chunk of the Dead Sea. Beyond the sea, you could clearly see the hills of Jordan rising through the mist. The sea itself is smooth as glass. Around it stretch away the flat lands that it used to cover, now looking pretty eerie, as it is filled with sinkholes. We heard stories of sinkholes swallowing chunks of freeway - we actually drove past an area where this had happened within the past year. Beyond the flat lands rose sharp, red-brown cliffs. The entire area used to be far more isolated than it is now, because all roads had to go around, well above the sea and beyond the cliffs and wadis that shaped its edges. Around the base of Masada are visible the remains of the Roman siege wall, and the encampments spaced out along it. They really are just lines of jumbled rubble, but the planning and layout are so clear that it's impressive, especially from high in the air on Masada.

We wandered down toward the southern tip of the rock, where we found a dovecote and another cistern. Several of us trooped down into the cistern, where we encountered Tim, his camera on a tripod, looking surprised to see us. This was by far the biggest cistern we had yet been in, and the stairs were twice as steep as the steepest ones we'd yet encountered. By the time we had gotten back up to the top, we had apparently wordlessly agreed on 2 things: 1) that there was absolutely no reason we should have gone down that cistern, and 2) we were going to lie our asses off to everyone else, so that they would go down and we could take pictures of their miserable faces coming back up. Oh, it was sweet. :-)

The top of Masada is 40 feet above sea level. We walked down via the Snake Path on the eastern side of the rock, which took about 45 minutes. It was rough... the only direction we seemed to be going was down. It was switchback after switchback, with steep stairs and lots of loose rock. At one point, Liz and I had Scott take a picture of us crawling on our stomachs up some of the steps, looking miserable. The views, again, were incredible - just as much so on the way down as on top. Near the end, there was a stand selling fresh-squeezed orange juice. I didn't get any there, but as soon as we got to the end of the trail at the visitors' center, I snagged some. Orange juice never tasted so good.

Anyway, that's about that for now... I have to head to pottery-washing. I'll fill in the rest of yesterday's trip, starting with the Dead Sea, either tonight or tomorrow. Catch y'all later!

Day Twenty-Five: In Which I Make My Glorious Return

2008-06-26T11:42:00.003-05:00

Well, well, well. I hope you are all still interested in my humble accounts, seeing as how I'm a little flaky about actually posting. Where did I leave off?

In the trench, things are going well. We took pictures of our assemblage this morning, then gridded out the area and started extracting. I worked with Ted to measure, extract, and MC loom weights. We've got dozens of them. They're essentially hunks of mud with holes through them, that were used to hold yarn taut on the loom. The problem with this is that they're just made out of clay, and aren't fired at all - so they're basically indistinguishable from the stuff you're digging them out of, and have a tendency to fall apart in catastrophic ways. Still, we managed to get a good chunk of them out whole. Also, I turned over a dirt clod and found a scorpion!

I'm sitting out back in the "Internet cafe", so I'm gonna be a little distracted, but let me tell you a little more about Jerusalem. We went shopping in the Christian quarter on Saturday, because almost everything was closed for Shabbat. Neil's friend Shaban has a good store, where we got nice deals, as well as at a few other stores in the area that he owns. I bought a skirt and three head scarves, which you folks back home can fight over when I return. :-) We looked at tons of Roman glass jewelry - that stuff is everywhere - and Glenda took us to a rug shop to meet a friend of hers. She found a good companion in Mazan, who owns the shop; they're both textile experts. We chatted with Mazan, and I bought a purse from him for Katie. He served us sweet mint tea. When we were finished there, several of us trooped off to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The Holy Sepulchre was one of the most powerful experiences I had in Jerusalem. It didn't matter that this probably wasn't actually the site of Jesus' crucifixion. The church was built in the 400's AD. People have been worshipping there for 1500 years. It's cut out of the living rock under Jerusalem, and filled with nooks, crannies and steep staircases. The architecture is immense. I'm honestly too distracted to talk about it now, and the compy is about to die, but more later. I promise I'll be more attentive soon.

Day Twenty-Three: Jerusalem Continued

2008-06-24T06:42:00.002-05:00

I'll be posting today's activities later this evening. For now, let's do another installment of "Megan's Adventures in Jerusalem." But before we do, I'd like to say, I miss you too, Daddy. Luvin' ya back. Also, love to Mom and Katie in Quito.

The second day, we woke up nice and early and had breakfast at the hotel. Then we set out to start our day. Ted was acting as de facto tour guide, and had planned out something of a schedule "that I'm gonna be doing; if you guys wanna follow along, that's cool." Our first stop was the Garden Tomb. I'll be honest; coming here was a bit disconcerting for me. The events of Jesus' life happened so long ago, and were so unimportant to most people at the time, that we have no reliable way of pinpointing the locations of most of the events. Also, an English group with a very clear (and self-interested) agenda manages the location. When we got there, we caught up with a tour that had just begun. The managing association claims that a bus stand just outside their garden is actually Golgotha. The cliff face above it does have the features of a skull, but it's hard to say when these would have taken shape. The location is just outside the city walls, within view of the Damascus gate. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, on the other hand, was probably never outside the city walls, despite the walls' having changed location over the years, and its claim to have been the place where Jesus was crucified.

After the Golgotha speech, we wandered over and saw the garden tomb itself. We were regaled with the association's reasons for believing that this garden was the one that belonged to Joseph of Arimathea. True or not, the facts were, archaeologically, incredibly interesting. The garden contains a massive 1st century cistern, possibly for irrigation. It also contains several wine presses, much like the ones I described during our walk outside the kibbutz the first weekend, suggesting that it might have been a vineyard. The garden sat on a high scarp of limestone bedrock, looking down over the city. Cut into the bedrock is a genuine 1st century Jewish tomb. In front is a track for a giant rolling stone, and a metal pin lodged in the wall, possibly to keep the stone in place. The face of the tomb is heavily recarved; Christians have been worshipping at the location for centuries, and it may have been reshaped into a church at one point. Inside, the tomb has a room on the left for lamentations, and on the right are two carved benches. One has been used, as you can see by the space for the feet having been carved out, and the stone pillow. Opposite me on the wall was a cross with Alpha and Omega carved on either side. Apparently, no remains were found in conjunction with this tomb.

Despite my criticisms, the garden was beautiful. Tall pine trees and palms were everywhere, birds sang, and flowers were in bloom. The place was full of bridges and worship nooks and quiet spaces. And as I said, it was archaeologically fascinating. The tomb format was a lot like the ones we saw around Tell Halif, only this tomb was much nicer and more elaborate. Again, the sense of age was incredible.

We left the Garden Tomb headed toward the Garden of Gethsemane, but we got sidetracked by the Rockefeller Museum, to which Ted had never been. We popped in for a short visit, as it was a) American and b) a museum, two things that seem a bit lame to be doing in the Holy Land. There was an Egyptian wing, so of course I worked on my translation. Michelle asked me if I could read any of it, so I showed off a bit. There was an incredible array of artifacts, all laid out as though they were sitting in your grandmother's attic. I found a couple of my personal favorite: Chalcolithic ossuaries. These guys are great. I can't find any really good pictures, but they look almost like doghouses, but with faces. The large square hole is the mouth, and then, as do most Chalcolithic art pieces, they have wide, staring eyes and a HUGE nose. As yet, we're not sure why the trope exists, but I think it's hilarious. Also, the place had a large central courtyard with a pool, around which were arrayed more artifacts. Although the Rockefeller does not allow pictures, we convinced a guard to snap one of us in the courtyard:
We left the Rockefeller pretty quickly, but only once we managed to drag Big Dylan away from sketching artifacts. From there, we walked toward Gethsemane.

Ted, tour guide that he was, pointed out the sights to us as we walked south along the eastern edge of the old city. He showed us Mount Zion, where the Last Supper was supposed to have been, and traced the route across the Kidron Valley that Jesus would have taken to Gethsemane. He pointed out the mountain upon which Jesus is supposed to return. Across the valley from it is Jerusalem's Golden Gate, by which Jesus will reenter the city. The Jews and Muslims have long since sealed it closed with stones, so that He will have to walk through a wall to make his return to Jerusalem. On the slopes below the mountain where Jesus will return is a massive cemetery. Since walking over graves is taboo, Jesus will have to raise all of these people from the dead in order to get to the Golden Gate - or so the thinking goes. On our right-hand side, not far north of the Golden Gate, was also a large Muslim cemetery.

We unfortunately arrived at Gethsemane five minutes too late, or two hours too early, to enter. We peeked through the gate at all the important bits. Apparently every faith tradition has a slightly different thought as to where the events in the Garden took place. Various churches exist near each site. The garden is beautiful. It's filled, like most of the surrounding slopes, with gnarled old olive trees and rosemary bushes which you can smell from a distance. We decided, in lieu of Gethsemane, to go to St. Anne's, which also turned out to be closed... so we went shopping. :-) Anyway, more on that later... now is time for pottery-washing. More tonight!

Day Twenty-Two: Digging is Easier After a Two-Day Weekend

2008-06-23T11:20:00.002-05:00

Well, let me get the mundane stuff out of the way first. Today's digging was pretty straightforward. We had Thomas, one of the surveyors, up on the tell with us, because diggers are getting the chance to go out with the survey. Andrew went today. I'll probably go sometime next week. I've been told I need to go out with "Team Extreme," namely, McCoy's and Jimmy's team, because they get the coolest areas to walk.

The weather was hot today, but I didn't really notice. I'm getting tan, and I think I've lost weight from all the hoofing it up and down the tell. I dug in my probe until breakfast. I looked for a floor surface based on some sherds sticking out of the balk, but no dice. Then I cut a section across the probe to look at the stratigraphy, and also to get deeper next to the first wall we found in E6. It looks like there is another course of stones deeper under that wall.

After breakfast, I sifted until shade break. It's the bitch job, but I like it okay, because I get to talk to people and hang out, and do a lot of the paperwork. Post-shade break, I traded out with Ted, who was working on leveling out the E6-E7 balk with Kristen. They had uncovered a major assemblage. I kept digging where Ted had been, and I uncovered five or six loom weights, some of which are in really good condition, a round stone - either a weight stone or a pounder, although it was a bit small for the latter - and a clear-cut weight stone. It has a flat top, is perfectly round, and widens as it goes down. I can't see the bottom yet, but it's a really cool find.

We also had a talk today about the survey - what it is, and what it does, and how it does it. I noticed that they're using ArcGIS - the program I learned on a couple years back! I'm going to have to start haunting Billy and Scott and watching them work. I love that stuff. For the uninitiated, this is the computer program I was using to do a lot of my research. It can plot points on maps, incorporate satellite photos, analyze data, synthesize paths from elevations, create water- and viewsheds, all kinds of awesome stuff. I love working with it because there's so much you can do.

Alright - now for what I know you've all been wanting to hear about. Jerusalem. The Holy City. How was it? I can't even explain it. It's more history in one place than I have experienced to date. It was an adventure, a pilgrimage, an epiphany both secular and religious. I loved it. I left it a day ago, and I want to go back.

We left here at 2:30 PM on Friday. Oded drove us to the bus station near the main highway. We didn't even know what bus we were supposed to take, so we stopped each one and asked, "Yerushalaim?" and took the one that answered "Ken". The ride was about an hour and a half. The land slopes up steeply, and my ears popped along the way. The hills were beautiful, and I was glad to see more of the Israeli landscape.

We arrived in Jerusalem around 6:00 pm. We decided to walk to our hotel from the bus stop, to get our feet wet in the modern city. It was a good decision. The streets are narrow and built up, and are a mixture of ancient and modern the like of which I've never seen. Narrow stone alleyways abut glass-and-concrete. The stone of the old buildings seems jumbled and rough-hewn, and it's all of the tannish blocks that give Jerusalem the name of the Golden City. We took Yafo street straight to the Jaffa gate at the northwest corner of the old city, and then turned northward and walked around the outer walls to the Damascus gate. Our hotel was just a few blocks north.

We dropped our things off at the hotel - the idea of sheets never sounded so good - and immediately went looking for the Western Wall. The hills in the city are steep and the pavement is incredibly slick from all the people constantly walking over it. I slipped several times in the old city, and even fell on my ass in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, but that story is coming. Anyway, we walked through the Damascus Gate. Outside, people were selling everything from fresh mint and grape leaves to Rolex knockoffs. All through the gate are vending machines and money-changing stations. The gate is very clearly the gate of a fortress. It is solid and crenellated, and jogs to the left as you enter - to expose the vulnerable side of an attacker carrying a shield. Once we got inside, it was like nothing I had ever seen. It was like nothing I had ever imagined. It looks like it hasn't changed in 3,000 years, and it quite possibly hasn't. It was very easy to imagine Jesus walking those streets - which He did, which had me almost in tears as I walked through the gate. The streets are narrow and crowded with vendors at every turn. It's like walking into a cave; most of the walls arch into a roof overhead, or the vendors have put up awnings. Ted led us to the Western Wall.

Jerusalem was like Rome, only moreso, in that these crowded, cramped, incredibly tiny streets all of a sudden open out into monolithic architecture. We walked through the metal detector and past some very bored-looking guards with M16's. Then, everything was white and open. The wall is huge - you've all seen pictures, but the sense of age that comes from it is immense. The Muslim course of stones, small and square, is clearly seen at the top. The previous course is larger square stones, and down at the bottom - where you see people bowing and touching the stones - is the Solomonic course. Those stones have been in place since before the birth of Christ.

The girls and I walked into the women's section, which was probably half the size of the men's. I found a receipt in my purse, and borrowed a pencil to write a prayer on the back. I walked up to the wall and said a short prayer, and tucked the slip of paper into a crack. The place is plastered with slips of paper tucked into niches between the stones. They are written in every language. We walked backwards away from the wall and out of the prayer section. Since we had arrived when we did, we were there as the sun went down and Shabbat began. Members of the nearby Hasidic temple came out, and danced in a circle and sang. As the sun went down, they marched through the square and into the men's section, where they kept up the singing and joviality until well after the sun went down. The place turned into a downright party. We sat and watched from some stone ledges nearby. From the plaza by the Western Wall, you can see the tops of the buildings on Temple Mount. The last bit of sunlight glittered off of the golden roof of the Dome of the Rock.

We left the Western Wall before long, and walked west, where we caught the city ramparts. We climbed them, and walked along them as far as we could. The views out over the city were amazing. The steps were high and slippery, and the wall was solid. I poked my hand through archers' slits in the battlements. I hopped up on the wall at one point and had Kristen take my picture against the darkening new city. While we were up there, the Call to Prayer went out, and we listened to the chanting as we walked.

Our aim was the Armenian Quarter, where Ted knew a restaurant. We found it quickly. The place was small, and we had to duck beneath an arch and walk down a narrow flight of stairs. The decorations were incredibly lavish. The family that owns the place is an old Armenian family, and they have all of their heirlooms on display. Jewelry of all kinds, with all kinds of stone was visible in glass cases along the walls. Glass and metalwork lamps in every color hung from the vaulted ceiling. The food was astoundingly good. I had something that I will never be able to pronounce, which involved a delicious sauce, and minced meat wrapped in a grape leaf. I also had a great beer called Maccabees.

After that, we ran into the other group on our way home. We were falling-down tired, so we went back and went to sleep. The other folks stayed out much later, getting hammered and hanging out at the hookah bar. And evening came, and morning followed, the first day. ;-)

The next two days of the trip have far longer stories, so I will tell it in installments. I'll post pictures as soon as I can access them. There are already a few up on Facebook, but I'll hold out for some better ones.

Laila tov!

Day Twenty-two: Prologue

2008-06-23T07:35:00.001-05:00

I'm back! I'm alive! Full recount after dinner.

Much love

Day Eighteen: Addendum

2008-06-19T13:43:00.002-05:00

I'm sitting outside my room with Thomas and McCoy, and they are playing some truly hilarious music. I'm pretty sure I'm going to hell by association, God help me. I won't tell you the subject matter... Call it an exercise for the reader.

Day Eighteen: Nothing Special

2008-06-19T13:09:00.002-05:00

Not a whole lot to report today. This morning was beautiful, though. When we went up the tell, the air was wet and cool. When we stopped at the gates, we couldn't see Eshkolot on the hill to the east. On the right, the sun was rising over the ridge, and the sky was soft pink and orange. To the left, the moon was full and bright over the hill to the southwest. When we reached the site, the mist was rolling in - but it was from the south this time. It had crept through the kibbutz and threaded through the trees, and we felt like we were looking down on another world. The tall trees and the hill opposite rose out of the fog eerily, and as we began to dig, the features slowly bleached into the thickest white I've yet seen. Ted, standing across from me in the trench, was fuzzy, and he wasn't but two meters away. Our pine trees faded in and out noncommittally, and the sun didn't really shine until well after breakfast. Apart from that, the day wasn't particularly notable. We finally leveled out the floor of E6006, and we're still finding Byzantine pottery, which suggests a very deep disturbance. I strung and started a probe in the southern portion of the trench, near the intersection of our two walls. Hopefully we can find something useful there, and knowing whether there are more courses of stone under the walls will be good.

Tomorrow we go into Jerusalem for the weekend, so I'll be incommunicado for a few days. I'll be sure to tell you all about it when I get back, but I really don't want to bring my computer into one of the (hate to say it) most touristy cities in the world. Not to mention, I'm not even sure I'll have internet. Anyway, we'll be taking public transit into the city, and staying in a hotel near the Damascus Gate. I'm looking forward to having a little freedom to wander. I'm starting to go stir crazy in the kibbutz.

Laila tov!

Day Seventeen: My Numbering Is Totally Correct, Nick Simmons.

2008-06-18T12:50:00.002-05:00

Today was a fairly uneventful day on the tell. The mist was thick this morning; we couldn't see the kibbutz or the hill across from us until after breakfast. Again, it was that eerie feeling as though we were on a mountaintop in the middle of nowhere. Not a whole lot happened today. We are still taking down the balk between E6 and E7; Kristen started on the other half of the balk today. Ted and I kept working on leveling out the floor of the two halves of E6. It looks a bit of a mess right now, but we should have it sorted out by tomorrow or so. The biggest things to happen today were some neat finds. I pulled out a long, thin chunk of corroded copper. Liz thought it might have been a fitting to some object. Also - and this gave me much faith in our eyes and our sifting methods - Kristen found parts of both the faience bowl and the chunk of iron that I pulled out of the balk at least a week ago. We MCed them and sent them down for analysis.

The trench was a lot more upbeat today. We continued our games of 20 Questions. There were a few really good items today, and several really good guesses. Also, as usual, the 'your mom' and 'that's what she said' jokes were running rampant. Ted, Kristen and I really bond over those. I think the three of us are actually getting pretty comfortable with one another; they're probably the people here to whom I'm closest. Ted is coming with us to Jerusalem this weekend, to show us around, and I'll be traveling with him for the extra week (!!) that I'll be here after the program.

The highlight of the day was the pizza at the end of it. We didn't have to wash pottery today, because we were paying a visit to the Joe Alon Center for Regional Studies. It's across the road from the kibbutz, and you can see its tower from our site. We went up the tower, in fact, and heard a presentation about the region. They explained the importance of our site - you can see our squares from the tower - and a few of the other notable sights. The presentation pointed out the green line, and the Palestinian military installation on the top of the high hill I've talked about to the east. South of that installation is a permanent Bedouin village with houses spread out from one another across the ridge. We could see the edge of the Lahav Forest, which ends right at the green line, and the top of Tell Beit Mirsim. All of the trees in the area are relatively new. The Ottomans cut down almost all of the old trees to use the lumber for their railroad in the early 1900's (I think; my dates might be off).

After the tower presentation, we wandered through the cave exhibits and noted the different types of cave life in the area. Permanent Chalcolithic settlements, hiding caves, Iron Age burial caves; they had everything. Then we walked over to the Bedouin museum. We saw examples of weaving and beadwork, and heard about Bedouin hospitality and marriage ceremonies. Anna and I ducked into a kids' area to sit inside a tent and pretend to read the children's book on the floor there. We also practiced our Arabic on the museum signs.

We wandered back to the dig lab, where Glenda gave a presentation on weaving and textiles. We learned all about those loom weights we've been pulling out of the ground. As it turns out, you can tell a TON from their position and size. The looms don't survive, but the looms on our site were set up ("dressed") for weaving when the destruction came through, so we get to see a freeze-frame of everyday life for these people. No one thus far has knowingly excavated a textile factory in the Levant, which is what we believe we have. Five or six looms had been set up in E7, all dressed and probably in use, and there were oil lamps near to all of them. The lamps signify that the work was being done continually, not moved outside and back in. If these conclusions hold up, it will mean a lot - this city was a producer of textiles, and had already started toward cottage-industry organization. Judean textiles were immensely popular in that period, so that lends a fair amount of significance to our little Tell Halif.

Afterward, Oded arrived with pizza! It was surprisingly good. One pizza had corn and eggplant on it, which was a bit weird. But the pepperoni was actually quite tasty, although I'm certain it wasn't made of pork. We chowed down, and chatted for a bit. Then a bunch of folks got up to kick the hackey sack around. We all suck horribly at it, but I almost fell over laughing so many times that it didn't matter. We have a really good group of people here. Once it got too dark, I went home to drink wine with Glenda and Kate, and here I am.

Now, I told you I would do "a day in the life" today. If you've had enough of me for right now, save this chunk for later, but here goes. This is how a typical day here works for me:

I wake up at 4:30 AM. Kate, one of my roommates, has to meet the rest of the survey crew at 4:45, so she gets up fifteen minutes before I do, which is nice. It means I wake up with her alarm, but I get to roll over and not care for a while. I get up, and I put on my dig clothes: whichever jeans have been washed least recently, and one of maybe three shirts that I set aside as "dig shirts" for the week. I slather on sunscreen, fill up my water bottle, and make sure I have my sunglasses ad work gloves (I'm getting a glove tan, by the way. Not cool.). Then I stagger outside and head for the dig lab, cramming my hat on my head as I go.

It's dark when I leave, and usually almost chilly, but I never bring a sweater or anything because I know it will warm up soon enough. The whole crew meets at the dig lab, and we gather up our things. We have three styrofoam coolers that we fill with water. We grab the transit (for measuring elevation), its stand, and the meter rod. We bring a number of buckets in which to put our pottery. Then we start up the tell.

We walk up a sidewalk past the back of the school, and then take a scary-ass gravel and stone path up a steep incline. At least one person trips every morning. The dogs, usually White Sausage and Fluffy (we've given them English names) meet us at the electric fence that surrounds the kibbutz. There are two gates near the top of the hill. The first is a newer electric fence, and outside that is the old barbed-wire fence. In between them is where we keep all of our things in wheelbarrows since the Bedouin thefts. We grab these. At this point, we're high enough on the tell to see most of the surrounding area, especially the lights of the military installation at Eshkolot. We thread our way in between trenches, bunkers, and barbed wire to the two pines that stand over our field headquarters.

We take a minute to settle in and admire the view, and to talk about what needs to be done today. Then we grab patisheem, trowels, gufas, dustpans, kneepads, and brushes, and we get to work. Tim usually begins making tags for our pottery buckets, so we know which locus they came from. We throw any potsherds we find in our digging into these buckets, so long as they aren't attached to other things. In the buckets are also bags for shells, lithics, and bone, of which we find a lot as well. We dig out our areas with patisheem or pickaxes, and then we scoop the dirt with trowels and dustpans. We dump it into rubber buckets called gufas. Each locus has a sift ratio. Unless we're sure we're on to something important, the sift ratio is usually one in ten. We shout out gufa numbers as we fill them. Our trench is deep enough now that we need a ladder to get in and out of it, so we prop the gufas on the balks, and someone stays outside the trench to do the dumping and sifting.

At eight o'clock, we clean up a bit and head down for breakfast. By this point, I am usually head-to-toe with dust. My tattoo is almost invisible, and I've got a bad case of dig boogers. The mist will be burning off by now as well. We eat, and we usually run into crazy lady, who tells us off for being American. Breakfast is French toast or boiled or fried eggs, salad, and bread. We sit in the dining hall, sticking out like a sore thumb among all the other kibbutzniks. Nobody talks; we're all pretty beat.

After breakfast, we meet up at the dig lab again, to get our shade break snack - usually apples. Then we head back up the tell for more work. At 11:00, we get shade break - by then, you really need it, because it is HOT. We sit in the shade and listen to the donkey across the valley braying. Zac, Ted, and Tim typically start throwing pinecones at one another, and the rest of us participate as we get caught in the crossfire.

At 12:30, we clean up. We take all the loose dirt out of our square, sweep, and take elevations. We hold this giant measuring pole vertically, and take heights with the transit. These are subtracted from the daily datum, determined from a fixed elevational point nearby. I've learned how to read the transit, so I'm usually either doing that or holding the pole. Then we pick everything back up and troop down off the tell. We store some of our things back between the gates, and take the rest down to the dig lab. At the lab, we sort our sample collections - bone, shell, lithic, MCs. We fill the pottery buckets with water to let them soak. Then we head for lunch.

Lunch is the best meal of the day, and we usually get the leftovers thereof for dinner. Lunch is more lively, and we're all also significantly dirtier - in both mind and body. After lunch, we typically make runs to the store to pick up beer, ice cream, and other snacks. We head either back to our rooms to nap, or to the pool. At the pool, so long as the Hasids don't have it gender-segregated, we play basketball or volleyball. We can get pretty rowdy, and it's always a lot of fun. We haven't been in a while, though; everyone has been tired and has been using the time to nap.

At 4:00 pm, we show up at the lab again for pottery-washing. We take toothbrushes and fingernail-brushes, and scrub the muck off of the pottery we brought down that day. At a table nearby, the staff are doing pottery readings, determining the dates of the strata we've been digging based on any diagnostic sherds that show up. Pottery-washing is gossip, song, and story-telling time. We all end up splattering each other with dirty water and we always manage to find a few rocks in the pottery bucket that Ted happily chucks away for us.

After washing, we often have a lecture, given by one of the staff, on some facet of history or archaeological technique. We've had the lectures on trip destinations, time periods, and registrar technique. The lectures are usually great information, but depending on who's giving them, I sometimes have trouble staying awake; it's hot inside the buildings, and that's prime naptime.

Sometimes we have a little time to goof off before dinner, which is when I will either shower or play hackey-sack. Also, this is when we sometimes play soccer, if we can. Then it's dinner, when we're all alone in the dining hall - they don't usually serve dinner, except a couple days a week - and then free time again. I'll often hang out in back of my rooms, or play cards or chat with folks near the dig lab. At 9:00 or maybe 9:30 at the latest, I crash and crash hard. And then the whole process begins again! We're pretty isolated; we don't interact a lot with the kibbutzniks. But the place here is beautiful, and we spend a lot of time outside, playing and laughing. This group gets me laughing so easily; I'm glad there are good people here. Anyway, speaking of bed, I'm exhausted. I hope that's a good picture of dig life here. If there's anything you want to know more about, ask away.

Laila tov (goodnight)!

Day Sixteen: Errata

2008-06-17T12:32:00.002-05:00

1) I have learned that nearby, there is a quarry, where blasting is done. We get a lot of rumbly sounds coming from the east, which were a bit confusing until the surveyors told us that bit of information. "Wait, Gaza isn't that way..."

2) Ted, when stalking the Bedouin, armed himself with the handle of a hoe. I would be pretty intimidated by that, except that I know Ted, and I've seen him do the "I'm really scared of that bug that's on my back" dance.

3) The title of the last post is because I'm tanner than I've been in a LOT of years, despite wearing SPF 50 sunblock. My freckles are coming back!! For serious!

Day Sixteen: I am brown.

2008-06-17T11:35:00.002-05:00

Let's start with yesterday, as I didn't update. I was being sluggish and sociable.

Fairly straightforward dig day, although we were all being a bit pokey. The weather was nice - sunny, but in the shade it couldn't have been but seventy degrees. We played Twenty Questions in our trench, but we had no limit on the number of questions. It actually made for a fair amount of hilarity, like when Ted was trying to get us to guess Mr. Potato Head. I think Tim was a little fed up with us not getting much done, but we always managed to make him laugh regardless. So he can't have been too miserable.

We heard lots of jets flying overhead and a few booms yesterday. The news told us that the Israeli military had killed three militants. On the one hand, we're so in the thick of this; we're within sight of both the West Bank and Gaza. But at the same time, we're so removed from it all. We rarely check the news, we're focused on our digging, and it doesn't affect us here on the kibbutz. I get the feeling that it would take a truly major event for us to actually see any changes.

The Bedouin came back yesterday and stole a bunch of paintbrushes and some gufas. They didn't disturb any of the squares, but we were getting really sick of their antics. After breakfast, we came back up the tell and spontaneously decided to wander northward and look for our stuff. We found a bunch of it, the patisheem, the trowels, and a bunch of the bigger tools hidden in bushes. We collected all of it and went back to digging, but after lunch, Tiny and Ted went back up to the tell. They hid in the bushes and stuck twigs in their hats, and read for a few hours. They told us later that they never would have seen the Bedouin kids if the kids hadn't been talking to one another. They were moving silently through the brush, and had left the donkeys down at the bottom of the tell. Ted and Tiny watched them freak out when they discovered that their booty was no longer hidden in the bushes. Our boys moved around to flank them, and then discovered that the Bedouin had circled toward the inside of the tell and were now back down by the donkeys. "They were like ghosts!" Tiny was saying. He and Ted were both fairly sure that the kids had spotted Ted, and our boys were able to identify the culprits from pictures that Neil took when the Bedouin first came by our site. Oded is going to show the pictures to the sheriff of Lakya, which fills me with deep satisfaction. Bastards won't get away with messing up my dig.

We also found out yesterday that this weekend, we're getting both Saturday and Sunday off! It works out perfectly, because the girls had been planning to go into Jerusalem this weekend. Michelle and Kristen have to leave before the end of the trip up north, so they wouldn't have gotten to see the city otherwise. As it is, we'll be staying two nights in a hostel near the Jaffa Gate, and having a grand old time in the city! I'm so excited I get chills thinking about it... the Holy City... The Dome of the Rock... the Church of the Holy Sepulchre... I'm so excited. It's even better because I'm reading that book about the Third Crusade right now.

In the evening, I sat out back of my room, where everyone hangs out to use the internet, and talked with McCoy, Liz, and Thomas. Nights here are cool and clear, and the moon was bright. It made for a really pleasant evening, and I think it's becoming my nightly habit to head out there at some point and be sociable.

Today was a much quieter day on the tell. It was a pretty terrible day of digging. I found pieces of a taboun, which is a poorly-fired clay oven. They're pretty expendable, but to find the pieces and be able to reconstruct how it broke is always important. We also found a sort of saucer-shaped carnelian bead. Those were the only real finds, though; apart from that, we were just moving dirt. Also, it was really hot today - the sun was beating down. Nobody was talking in our trench. I think we had all just hit a kind of mental block toward digging.

After lunch, we worked on getting the Jerusalem arrangements finalized. I ended up falling asleep, and woke up to pottery-washing. I skipped lecture to go home and take a long shower, because I was feeling incredibly dirty. I had forgotten how black my tattoo was, because it's been covered in dust for the past three days. Ted and Tiny went back up to the tell again today, but I haven't had a chance yet to hear whether they saw anything. I did talk to a bunch of surveyors, though, and they've had some good stories over the past couple days - my new roommate, Kate, being chased by dogs out of a Bedouin camp; Thomas shouting, "I'm Thomas Tolbert, and I'm tougher than a two-dollar steak!" before sliding down a thirty-foot cliff. Eventually, diggers will be allowed to trade out with surveyors for a day or two at a time, and I'd really like to try surveying. You're given a line to walk, and you're fifty meters away from the people on either side. If something crops up in your way, you have to find a way around it. You crawl under barbed-wire fences, get lost in bulrushes, talk to Bedouin, and eat at wayside restaurants. It sounds like it would be right up my alley. I love digging, but I also love exploring; surveying would definitely be worth a shot. Not to mention, I'd get to play with GIS more than I do now.

Anyway, that's all for right now; I figure probably tomorrow, I'll do a little "day in the life" description of how things go for me around the kibbutz. There wasn't much to tell about today, but tomorrow is the trip to the Jolon Center - i.e. the Bedouin museum - and pizza and Indiana Jones in the dig lab, so it'll be a real party.

Laila tov!

Day Fourteen: Pizza!

2008-06-15T12:14:00.002-05:00

Before I launch into a description of the day, here are some more pictures! These are courtesy of Kristen Fulton, a member of E6 with me:

This is a picture from very early on - as you can see, no squares are dug. In the background there is usually an expansive view - on this day, the mist was rolling in. From left to right: Liz, Blake, Jeff's butt, someone else's butt, Tim, Ted, someone bending over, and someone in a blue shirt. Right behind Liz, you can see the sandbags bordering E7, and the area where E6 was soon to be.

This is E7, with the made-up wall that so upset Tim (my area supervisor) last year when he dug here. As it turned out (you may remember me saying this earlier), there was a wall underneath this, but there was still no reason not to dig out this nonsense piece of dirt. Also, underneath that floor you see, there was the actual floor, with immense amounts of pottery and loom weights.

This is the view from the top of the tell, to the northwest, where we can see the farthest. I can't tell who that is by the wheelbarrow, but down that direction is our dump pile, and the structures that you see are Kibbutz Dvir. Just about at the furthest right of the frame, all the way in the distance, is where you can sometimes see the Ashkalon towers.

Today was a fairly typical day on the tell. We dug with the Mississippi boys, who are digging with us every other day until their surveying kicks into full gear. We knocked down the mini-balk between E6 proper and the potato patch, which of course made a mess of all the carefully-swept floor, but it worked out okay in the end, because the potato patch is now less than a foot higher than the rest of E6.

The one thing that really got to me today, though, was that we went up the tell to find that we had been robbed. Presumably by the bedouin that were up there the other day. They had already taken our tarp, but this time they took all our patisheem and trowels. Worst of all - and this infuriated me such that I didn't know what to do with myself - they dug my pottery out of the balk. Remember the pots that I spent hours articulating, that Dylan drew in section, and that were restorable? They dug them out. They looted our square. As far as I can tell, they didn't take anything, but they dug chunks out of our balk and destroyed the carefully-preserved positions of all the pottery. I know it sounds melodramatic, but I just don't understand how someone could do that. I was having a hard time this morning getting past how angry I was in order to dig.

Apart from this, it was a surprisingly good day. The high point was at shade break, when Oded told a story about the Israelites grumbling in the desert, and God sending them manna and quail. Then he revealed to us that we would be having a pizza dinner on Wednesday night. And there was much rejoicing. :-)

We extracted the pottery from E7 today; I had nothing to do with it, as I was working in the potato patch, but it was still kind of exciting. It made pottery-washing a bitch this afternoon, but the lecture we had afterward completely made up for it. Dylan gave a lecture on technical archaeological drawing. I don't think I could ever do it, but I think it's really incredible. I find the whole procedure fascinating. He is a superb artist in his own right, and his technical drawings are also excellent. We got to see examples from both this site, now and in years past, and other sites. The day that Dylan was up on the tell doing drawings, I spent most of my time watching him.

Anyway, this post has been a bit disjointed, as I'm tired and distracted by the six people in my room right now. We got a new roommate today, and a bunch of the girls are over to use the Internet and to meet her. So I'll head off to be sociable for a bit and then read my book, and I'll tell you more later. Much love.

Laila tov!

Day Thirteen, Part Deux: Pictures as Promised

2008-06-14T13:37:00.002-05:00

One of the Mississippi State guys, Thomas Tolbert, was kind enough to upload to Facebook some pictures from the day's travels.

This is us trooping down into the water works in Beersheva.

This is the bulk of Tel Beersheva, from a viewing tower in the center. Anna is the figure you see in the middle. Directly left of her is the governor's house that I mentioned, and the long, thin rooms above and to the right of that are the storerooms.

This is the fortress at Tel Arad.

These are camels we saw by the side of the road along the way. We kept seeing bedouin with herds of goats, kicking up dust. While we were standing on the tower at Tel Beersheva, we saw two kids riding a donkey at top speed up the wadi.

Day Thirteen: Ouch, ouch ouch!

2008-06-14T08:19:00.002-05:00

So, you remember me saying how I kept bashing my knee on pointy rocks? Well, now I've done it royally.

We had the bonfire last night, which was incredible. We all hung out and drank beer and threw palm on the fire. It was a ton of fun. We were down by the south gate, by which we left to go on our hike last Saturday. There's a pile of rubble down there maybe two stories high, and it forms a little enclave where we hung out. We could see millions of stars at night; we're really in the middle of nowhere. At one point, I was teasing Zac, who was feelin' pretty good by then. I snagged his water bottle away from him, and he fought with me over it, and then we both hit the dirt. I tore a hole through my jeans and a chunk of flesh out of my knee, not to mention bruising the other one while I was at it. Zac faceplanted, and laid there for a bit, but got up and dusted himself off. He was bleeding from the face a little, but ultimately was okay. Before I knew it, the story going around was that I body-checked him into the ground and beat the crap out of him. This morning, he didn't show up for breakfast, and Jimmy was joking that he wouldn't show his face either if he'd been beaten up by a girl the night before. Zac did show up for the trip, looking sufficiently pitiful. It sounds like I've earned myself a bit of a reputation as a scrapper. :-P I can't really say that I mind; it makes for good comedy.

Anyway, today we hopped on a tour bus and went to Beersheva in the morning, and Arad in the afternoon. Both are fortified cities on tells. Beersheva wasn't very big, but its features were amazing. It sits right near the wadi that supplies the area with water, and the view from the top is spectacular. Rolling yellow hills in all directions. The rooms and structures of the city are well-articulated. I particularly liked the storerooms, with the governor's house standing right nearby watching over it.

My favorite part about Beersheva is the water system. An artificial one was built in the time of Hezekiah, to supply the city with water in case of siege. We walked down through it. This thing is massive. A huge pit was dug and lined with cobbles, and a number of rooms underground were presumably the well. I love ancient civic architecture, because it belies the lack of organization that so many people seem to assume. Humans are good at organizing themselves, and have been doing it for a very long time. I'll post pictures of us walking down the giant well as soon as I can get ahold of them.

I probably preferred Arad to Beersheva, as cool as the water works were. Arad had a fortress city on top of the tell, from the Israelite period, and a walled Canaanite city nearby. The first thing we did was to walk around the back of the fortress, where Neil showed us the entry to the water works. A channel was dug under the fortress, and water was brought up from the well and poured into the channel. In years past, apparently this was how Neil sneaked into the fortress. We sent one of the new boys, Thomas, in to investigate, but sadly, iron bars had since been installed.

Neil spent the entire day encouraging us to climb around, poke about the structures, leave the beaten paths and hop the guardrails, which we merrily did. The fortress at Arad contained a temple with an altar and a holy of holies; we clambered up on the altar and pretended to sacrifice Kristen (we did this with Michelle on a replica altar at Beersheva). The altar was huge, 9x9x5 or so, and contained a single flat field stone on top. We climbed over the walls and poked about in the ancient rooms nearby. We walked into the Holy of Holies to see the incense burners and standing stones. My favorite part was the flagstone floors of the temple.

Then we walked down to the Canaanite village. Anna and I climbed the city walls and walked along them, hopping over the spaces that provided access to the protruding guard towers. We left the beaten path and saw the giant well of the village, with houses or storerooms crowded around it. I walked through ancient doorways and over millennia-old thresholds. I walked down streets and through courtyards and into houses, picturing myself bringing up water, pushing past men on donkeys and children playing naked. It was easy to picture the high, pale limestone walls and cobbled floors playing host to hustle and bustle. Being down in the daily lives of these ancient people made them seem that much more immediate. I walked their streets and sat in their houses. It's all piles of stone now, but the echoes are there. I wandered off to explore more of the city, and was told later that a couple dramatic pictures of me sitting on ancient stone walls and looking pensive were taken.

After all of this, we came back and jumped in the pool for a bit. Not much was happening, though, so I laid out for a while, and then came home to blog and read more of the Crusades, which I will now do. You might not recognize me when I come home; I'm getting quite tan.

Day Twelve: My laundry is still wet.

2008-06-13T05:49:00.003-05:00

I forgot to mention yesterday that I did bucket laundry for the first time, and it was a monstrous pain in the ass. My clothes aren't so wet that I won't wear them, but hang-drying is just not the same as using a clothes dryer.

Anyway, today was another slightly unusual day on the tell. We had to get some rapid cleaning in when we first went up, because Oded wanted to take some good pictures, and the light is best before the sun comes up. We brushed everything, and placed the yardsticks and the call board to give scale and indicate locus numbers, respectively. Then we brushed ourselves out of the square, so no footprints would remain. It's tricky business. Anyway, we got some very good pictures, and then the time came to ::gasp:: REMOVE THE POTTERY.

We had to lay out a grid, and then string the whole grid, to cut the area with the pottery into squares. Each tiny 25cm by 25cm square went into its own bucket. Kristen and I worked on extracting the pottery. How cool is that?? We used brushes and trowels and tiny bamboo skewers as picks. I was handling pottery that had not been moved in 3000 years. I got to pull out the big, flat grinding stone that we found. Crushed partially underneath it was a rim that I had been interested in for several days. I got to take it out as well, and found that five other large pieces of it were there. It turns out we can reconstruct the whole thing!

We brought down buckets upon buckets of pottery at lunchtime. We had enormous jug handles and small, mostly intact juglets. There was a wholly intact small bowl or cup, and we're taking samples from inside it to see if any residues are left. We had a couple of clay loom weights, which always fall apart when you extract them - except that one of them was on a potsherd, which made it much easier. We even found soup bones inside a pot. When we were finished, the area looked just like any other - cleaned and swept at right angles to the balk, except for a few assemblages that are too far inside the balk to pull right now. We'll be taking down the balk between E6 and E7 next week, so we should be finding much more stuff then. Throughout the removal process, Dylan would stop us, so that he could sketch items as they had been found underneath other items. The way they were found helps in the reconstruction process. When we were done, he sketched the balk in section, including the assemblage that I articulated and left in. Without most of the pottery, the wall is even easier to see. It only runs through the middle portion of the trench, so our guess is that at either end were disturbances from later periods, which were either pits, or saw people robbing out the stones for other uses.

Apart from excavations, today was a good day. It was warm, but the breeze was from the coast and the weather was clear as a bell. I could see all the way to Ashkelon, but mostly by virtue of the fact that one of the power plant towers was steaming. At the end of the dig day, we could see a four-story dust devil making its way through one of the towns down the slope. I admit that I was getting a bit cranky during the dig, mostly because I couldn't manage to keep things cleaned to my satisfaction (and wanted everyone else to leave so I could do it), but I got over it quickly. Yay OCD!

Not all that much else to say, as I've just finished lunch. I went to the store and picked up a supply of beer, and will be going to the pool soon. After dinner, there will be a bonfire near the kibbutz gates (of our making), where all the cool kids will be hanging out. So of course, I'll be there with bells on. :-)

Tomorrow is Beersheva and Arad! I'll tell you all about it!

P.S. - Shout out to my daddy, who works hard so that I can be here. I love you.

Day Eleven: I'm engrossed in a book

2008-06-12T13:19:00.002-05:00

So this might be short. Wow, I'm hooked on Warriors of God, by James Reston. Anyway, today was a little unusual. Climbed the tell, but then we got to work cleaning our site. I spent hours today articulating pottery. Tiny told me that it was a great skill to have, and if I was good at it, they'd make me do it often. He said I did a really good job. We were working on this because we had an architectural artist here to draw the walls and such today, and because Oded wanted to take pictures. Also, Dylan was up on the tell to do drawings of balks and assemblages. He sort of hijacked my assemblage and did a whole bunch of further articulation; he said I did it right, but he just needed a few extra things. He explained to me exactly what he was doing, and asked whether he was on my turf. I later found out that to take someone's find and start digging it is pretty rude, which I guess is why he was being so... deferential? But I didn't mind, and I learned a lot from watching him. In the future, though, I may try and keep closer hold of my finds, because I really enjoy articulating.

In the end, as I didn't have much to do, I helped in the potato patch for a bit. I then wandered over to Liz's square to sift for them, which was fun. After digging, not a whole lot happened. I tried to bring music to pottery-washing, but the computer crashed on me. We had a lecture about the trip we'll be taking this weekend: Beersheva and Arad. After hearing about what's there, I'm incredibly excited. You will of course be hearing all about it afterward.

After pottery-washing, we kicked around the homemade hackey-sack that Tiny sewed, and then wandered off to dinner. Twilight saw me kicking around a soccer ball with the boys in front of the dining hall. They were supposed to play the Israelis tonight, and we all went down to watch, but the kibbutzniks never showed up. They just played on their own, and I had a good conversation with Tim on the sidelines. I have a bum ankle from the other day - I fell hauling gufas on the tell - so I sat out. We all packed it in a few minutes ago, and now I'm beat to hell, but I have to stay up a little longer and read more about Richard the Lionheart and Saladin.

Erev tov!

Day Ten: Wow, that's cool.

2008-06-11T12:00:00.002-05:00

Today was more of the usual: wake up at 4:30, climb the tell, complain about having to climb the tell, do a lot of digging.

Okay, so that's not entirely true. Today, we began articulating the finds we've had in the bottom of E6 so far. I guess I technically ought to be giving locus numbers... :-) [Ed. note: hereafter follows a long description of the basics of the Gezer method of archaeology.] We have a 5 meter by 5 meter square that we're digging. We have, however, only been digging half of it. We began it as a probe, to see if we would find anything interesting, which - as you know - we ultimately did. Currently, we have three different loci (plural of locus) in E6. The locus is the smallest organizational unit within an archaeological dig. A locus essentially describes a relatively homogeneous chunk of dirt. So our first locus, E6001, was all of the stuff we dug up before our first pottery layer. Once we hit that layer, we switched to a different locus, so that anything that went with those pots could all be together, and separate from the crap that we had already pulled out. Thus began locus E6002. Most of our square is still in that locus. However, as soon as we found the assemblages that I described yesterday, we put those in their own locus. So the middle of the pit, towards the west balk, is locus E6004. E6003 is the probe at the southern end that I mentioned; the one where the jar rim and bone are.

Anywho, today we tried to level everything off to the floor, and articulate the pottery - i.e. dig it out a bit, so that its shape can be seen. We may have an intact pot - a small one, a cup or a bowl. Near it, we appear to have a wall. Large stones form a line, and inside them appears to be rubble fill. At the southern end of our trench is an obvious disturbance - those damn Persians were digging the place up, and probably stealing the rocks from Iron Age houses.

It was downright cold on the tell today, and the wind was brutal. I kept getting dust in my eyes. I helped in the "potato patch" today - we're digging up the other half of our square, and we call it this because we have to squat and fish out all the rocks after pickaxing. I also helped articulate pottery, but the thing I'm proudest of is being administrative early on. I was assigned to sifting, but I ended up running around cataloguing MCs and writing tags for buckets. I was proud of myself for knowing what I was doing, and for making sure everyone else could dig effectively while I took care of paperwork. Also, I only got asked for coffee once. :-)

Later in the day, we hung out with the boys at their tarp, and then went up to the pool to splash around and play water basketball. Generally, we just goofed off like we usually do. We had a couple of new people show up today, and we introduced them to the joys of pottery-washing. I've been so tired, though, that I haven't even had a chance to start the book I borrowed from Ted, about the Crusades. I'll let you know how it is once I get into it.

Day Nine: Sunburn

2008-06-10T11:46:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I suppose I should start with the end of yesterday. The Shavuot festival was awesome. After pottery-washing, I came back to my room. The girls came by to get beers out of our fridge, and the five of us (yes, there are only five of us) found a spot to sit, drink, and chat. Eventually we wandered up the hill to chat more with the guys, who were hanging out on someone's second-story front porch. The view was southeast (I think; I'm still a little turned around), and we could see the hills rolling away. At five thirty, we walked over to the dig house to meet everyone. We walked out of the kibbutz gate and down to a park area. Bales of hay had been set up to make a stage. Music was playing, and chairs were set out. We were in a small valley, between the hill that the kibbutz is on and the next (which we walked on Saturday). The view was the same direction as from the guys' porch: the hills rolling away to the south. However, there was something about being down in that valley and seeing it open up into sunlit hills at the end that was beautiful. First, there was a tractor parade; each was decorated, and carried goods produced by a local kibbutz. Apparently there are three in the area: Lahav, Golov, and Dvir, the last of which can be seen from the tell. They produce plastic containers there, large ones for industrial shipping. One of these was given to us and co-opted for use as the stand on top of our photo tower.

After the tractors came a number of acts. Our girls from the other night got up and performed a dance. The crop-dusting plane flew several passes overhead, waggled its wings at us, and dropped loads over the field right nearby. There was music, and everyone seemed to be having a great time. Lots of very cute children. A number of them seem pretty infatuated with Tiny; they kept coming over and stealing his hat. The show didn't last very long, and afterward we wandered back to the dig lab to eat dinner, which was followed by several games of mafia. Some of the girls aren't really into it, but I think it's catching on around here.

Today, the tell was absurdly windy. As we walked up, I asked Tim about himself. He has a law degree, and until recently, worked as a port supervisor in New Zealand. He resigned to come here to Lahav, but has another job lined up as a government advisor on shipping policy. Tim is an incredibly interesting guy. He's fairly retiring, and doesn't tend to volunteer information, but we really managed to get him talking today.

The day started out cool; the mist was already in when we went up the tell. It didn't burn off until we went down for breakfast. It was almost chilly for most of the day. The wind kept kicking up, and I got dust in my eyes and mouth. We all had, as Jimmy put it, a terrible case of "dig boogers". We were inches from giving up on our square today; when we took elevations early on, we realized that in our small E6 probe, we were already lower than what was supposedly the floor in E7. Either we had gone straight through the floor, which was unlikely, or there wasn't one. So a four-foot-deep, eight meter square excavation was for nothing. Tim decided to close our probe, and even out the bottom of our square, and then we'd have to come up with a different plan. However, as Kristin and I worked towards each other from either end of the square, we found something against the western balk (the one that borders E7). All of a sudden, we had a huge, elaborate pottery assemblage. It started with a nice piece of rim from a hole-mouthed jar, found in the middle of the former probe area. Next to it, presumably in the jar at some point, we found a large bone in situ. Then, against the western balk, I found a large handle. And then a big sherd. And then a handle under that sherd, and two more sherds sticking out of the balk. And then Kristin found several sherds that were large panes of a cracked vessel. Then she found a few more. Then I found the rim of what is probably a bowl. Then I found a chunk of iron! That was a big deal, actually; I had to MC that one myself. (Editor's Note: MC means Material Culture. "To MC" means to pack an MC away properly and catalogue it.) So all of a sudden, just when we were giving up hope, we found our missing floor! We're working on following it as far as we can, but it's tricky when you know how much stuff you could potentially run into. Next to it, we may have the foundations of a wall; it's hard to tell with so many piles of rocks lying around.

On the subject of rocks, I almost joined smartass Tim in the gimp club today. I kept bashing my knee open on pointy rocks. I have a nasty bruise there, and I wouldn't be surprised if it went all the way to the bone. My poor injured patella.

After digging, we all went to the pool, which is finally open. We played pool volleyball for a good solid hour and a half. I elected not to wear sunscreen, in the hopes of picking up some color; I'm a little pinker than I'd like, but I think it'll turn to tan. I didn't actually bring a bathing suit, but Glenda's fits me well, and I'm not really picky. Volleyball was spectacular fun; I actually managed a good save or two. After the pool was pottery washing and lecture. The lecture was about the Bronze Age, so I was all ears; the speaker, whose name I can't remember but who is prominent in ASOR (look it up), focused a great deal on the Egypto-Levantine trade routes. He is working with Jimmy on the survey, so I'll have to snag him at dinner sometime and pick his brain.

Anyhow, I'm falling asleep, so I'm going to go rest up before tomorrow's dig. I'll catch you all later!

Day Eight: Addendum

2008-06-09T06:45:00.002-05:00

Food for the past day or so has been incredible. No cheese blintzes, Mom, but quichey-lasagna-stuff, and the best hummus I've ever tasted. Lots of cucumber tomato salad, and some tomato-basil salad. Baked sweet potatoes, and flaky delicious pita. Yum.

As for the status of our trench: we are working in two areas, E6 and E7. E7 has Dylan, digging through the mud "wall" that doesn't actually represent anything, and finding loom weights and mud bricks. E6 is down about three and a half feet, to the point at which we need to use a small ladder to get in and out of the trench. At the southeastern end, we've started a new probe within the trench, that's perpetually about eight inches lower than the rest of the area we're digging. It's one meter by two, so it cross-sections the trench as a whole. The probe may have hit floor today, actually - they've got several nice pieces of pottery lying in situ, as far as we can tell. It's been a little mixed-up: we found a gorgeous, well-made piece of Persian period (yes, there was a native Persian period, which does not indicate trade with Persia, although I'm sure there was some) pottery. It had a line design on it, and a sharply cut lip. Beautifully painted. We also found ballista stones in there, either from the Assyrian invasion in the iron age, or from the defense of said invasion, or from a later period, we're not sure yet. So hopefully, we're actually getting to the floor this time, instead of some strange intermediary floating trash layer.

Okay, going to shower now. For realz this time.

Day Eight: Dust Sucks

2008-06-09T06:13:00.002-05:00

Today was another rough day on the tell. When I left the room this morning, I knew it would be bad, because it was already warm. Typically, when we leave in the morning, it's a little on the chilly side. Even worse, when we got up to the tell, we could see for miles upon miles. No mist today - it was clear as a bell, so we caught the sun full-force.

All that said, the morning was really beautiful, before it got hot. There wasn't much wind to start the day, and for whatever reason, I was really noticing the landscape on the walk up the tell. We have a hill close to us on one side, the side on which we do our excavations. You can see an Air Force radio tower there, and the hill curves around to the kibbutz towards the south. To the north is Tell Beit Mirsim, which I've talked about before. The hills are a little sparser there, and you can see more of the rolling landscape. To the east is the path by which we climb the tell, and across the broad valley there is a settlement atop the highest hill in the area. This is the hill that they traded for TBM in 1949. To the northwest is the real view, however. Here, stretching away from our dig site, you can see all the way down the coastal plain: another kibbutz, farmland in rusty bronze patches, all the way to the towers of the power station at Ashkalon. On very clear days, you can just make out the sea past the towers. The land in Israel can only be described as sun-baked. The winter is the rainy season, and I'm sure it's much more lush then. Now, though, everything is straw and scrub and thorns. The land is yellowish and dusty, and the skies are bluer than I thought possible. Sometimes, as I've mentioned, we work in the fog, and many mornings the mist rolls in off the sea - then the light is clear and piercing, but not sweltering. It's always bright in Israel, it seems.

The tell is a beautiful place - it doesn't look like much at first, but as you get to know it, it becomes really appealing. It's a high hill that puts you up in the middle of nowhere, and the wind blows hard across it most days. The top is very flat - it's an artificial hill, after all. It's been carved up by military installations, and we walk past old bunkers and listening posts on our way to the site every morning. Clumps of barbed wire sit in patches of tall grass. The ground is very rocky, and the climb up can be tricky sometimes. I lose my footing every now and then. Frequently, on the walk up, we'll spot a jackal or a snake. Over by the trenches, there are two large pine trees that give us our shade, and provide our headquarters. This morning, the sky was just lightening as we came up the path, and the views were so clear that it felt like we were alone on top of the world.

That sensation vanished pretty quickly, though, when the sun came up and the wind started blowing. The wind was off the desert today, and it was easy to tell. The breeze was actually hotter than the still air, and when we dumped dirt, it blew the dust back into our faces. At the end of the dig day, the wind kicked up hard and we had a small dust storm. Ted and I hunkered down in the trench and pulled our shirts over our noses and mouths; we had been in the process of sweeping the trench, and of course that was pretty much entirely undone. My mouth tasted like mud until I could get down to lunch.

Apart from that, the day was pretty fun. Our trench got goofy today. I opened up some - I think it was the sun addling my brains - and started acting like my crazy self, telling dirty jokes and talking the ears off anyone nearby. We laughed a lot today. Our trench has been so quiet up until now that it was a welcome change.

No pottery-washing today, because of Shavuot. I will let you all know what the feast and revelry is like. We'll be having dinner in the dig lab after partying, and then the plan is to play some more Mafia. I also am going to be borrowing a book on the Crusades from Ted. He and Jimmy both recommended it highly, and I figure that being in the area will add to the reading of it considerably.

Time to go shower and clean the mud out of my nose. Again.

Day Seven: Part Trois

2008-06-08T13:11:00.002-05:00

I'm really glad you guys are enjoying the commentary. I'm often really tired when I post, so I worry that I don't give enough detail.

The rest of the day went beautifully. Pottery-washing was a bitch, as always; we grumble about it constantly. Because we had two full days' worth of pottery to wash, we didn't have a lecture this afternoon. We finished it all, though! When we come down from the tell for lunch, we bring all of our pottery with us, and we put it out to soak in buckets. Then, at 4, we come back and scrub it with brushes and clean water, and every day we read the previous day's pottery. Even the smallest potsherd can tell you what type of vessel it was, how it was made, what it contained, and when it is from. And because pottery breaks constantly and undergoes subtle changes all the time, it's an excellent dating method. Imagine dating 20th century strata by the design of Coke containers. People's trash is the best way to learn their day-to-day lives. We had a brief moment the other day, when Dylan reminded us that this is what we were doing: meticulously and scientifically digging through and cataloguing ancient people's trash. It's a bit of a reality check when you realize that.

After pottery, we hung around the dig lab. The Dylans made a hackey-sack out of a glove with three of the fingers cut off and some wheat from a nearby granary. It was totally uneven, but the boys had a great time kicking it around anyway. The girls sat by and watched and chatted in the shade. We went into dinner, which was big and elaborate, but not as much so as it will be tomorrow. It's the Jewish harvest festival, Shavuot, which translates to Christian Pentecost.

We had been talking about needing a pack of cards desperately, for the sake of something social to do. Digging through my backpack today, I realized I had some - I should have known; I always carry cards, Barta that I am. So we gathered up at the dig lab and played a round of BS, and then several rounds of Mafia. I'm glad it caught on - hopefully we'll keep playing it. It's a great game for getting to know people. One round was narrated by Zac, who decided - largely for my benefit, as far as I can tell - that God sounds like Harry Caray. This man has the best Harry impression that I've ever heard. It's amazing. I couldn't stop laughing the whole game through.

So now I am here, pleasantly exhausted but still awake. I'll go to sleep in a minute, but I was thinking about it and realized that I hadn't given y'all the cast of characters. So here, in order of prominence, are the people with whom I live and work, organized as they are in the field:

Oded Borowski: Dig director, "that professor guy" that I corresponded with, kind of a stuffed-shirt but also really amusing at times

Glenda: My roommate - the only one since Liz moved out to escape her snoring. She runs the dig lab and catalogues all the samples that we bring back. She is a professor at a community college on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico.

Big Dylan: the dig's artist. Dylan draws what we dig out of the ground: the artifacts, the sites themselves, et cetera. It's all very precise, so that we can have a clear-cut reference - photos can get confusing and carry less information. Dylan has been digging here at Halif for a long time. He's the one that came down with "cave fever".

Jimmy Harden: Oded's son in law, and a professor at Mississippi State University. He's an outspoken redhead with a comfortable Southern accent, who can get anyone talking. He knows David Schoen, from the U of C. Jimmy used to head one of the groups, J6, which will be taken over by Neil, as Jimmy is taking some students on a survey of the surrounding area.

Neil: A newcomer, taking over J6 for Jimmy. I don't know much about him.

Members of Jimmy's group:
Margaret: Middlebury College student, nineteen years old. Plays Quidditch.
Sung: Korean, graduated from Emory last year, and is studying biblical archaeology as a grad student.
Andrew: Rotund gamer geek who tends to lose the group when he goes off on tangents about comic books or computer games. I've discovered that he doesn't actually know much about the inner workings of a computer. Likes to talk, even when no one is listening. He and I would have much to talk about, if I actually were willing to get sucked into it. Sweet kid, but pretty annoying.
Michelle: Sweet girl, freshman at Emory. Don't know much else about her.

Liz: My ex-roommate. Born in Britain, grew up in Hong Kong. She and I get on very well. Commercial archaeologist by trade, two degrees from a college in Wales. Head of the team next to ours in C8, the ones with the crazy chants.

Members of Liz's team:
Jeff: Weird kid. Possibly has Asperger's. Doesn't appear to know how to relate to people at all. Nice enough, but wow.
Anna: Another young Emory student. Outgoing, plays Ultimate Frisbee; played frisbee with the Israeli girls and me the other night.
Tim: Not my area supervisor, Tim is a forensic accountant. He can get absolutely anyone talking, and has a dry, clever humor that I find very appealing. Very chatty, and a ringleader of this group's chants. Rolled his ankle severely in soccer the other day, and is currently helping Glenda in the lab. Also called "smartass Tim".
Zac: Pittsburgh Theological Seminary student of biblical Hebrew and biblical archaeology. Also apparently a fan of lizards. Does a superb Harry Caray impression. Possibly my favorite person here.

Tim: Tim apparently has a law degree, but claims to work in "shipping," i.e. really big effing ships like oil tankers. Has a German accent overlaid with a Kiwi accent. Joined Glenda, Liz and me for partying yesterday afternoon. Subdued and geeky, but worshipped all the same. Head of team E6, and my area supervisor.

Members of Tim's team:
Blake: Mississippi State student. Doesn't say much, unless Jimmy tells embarrassing stories about Blake's dad (they were at college together). Blake is going on the survey with Jimmy.
Tiny Dylan: AKA Tiny, Short Stack, Baby Dyl, et cetera. Outgoing, but in a different way than Tim. Can have a conversation with anyone. Came here last year, and knows what he's doing. Typically runs around with his shirt off. Is excavating the probe in E7.
Kristen: Another Emory baby. She's quieter, but more sporty and more likely to go embarrass herself with the boys. Very sweet; we enjoy talking in the trench.
Ted: Offensive linebacker at Gettysburg College. Eighteen years old, does a lot of stupid college stuff, but is clearly smart and doesn't take himself too seriously. Respectful. Gets into insult matches with Tim and Zac pretty frequently. Has the television in his room, so we go there to watch soccer.
And of course yours truly! So, that's the dig team, and now you have a reference when I throw names around later. New folks will be joining us before long, but everything will remain essentially the same. Just wanted you to know who you were dealing with.

Anyway, time for me to hit the hay, with the sweet sounds of a kibbutz dance party emanating from the plaza by the dining hall. We get to party with them tomorrow.

Good night, all.

Aside

2008-06-08T07:50:00.001-05:00

My nose is full of mud from all the dust that I breathe in.

That is all.

Day Seven: Well, it looked like something when we got up here.

2008-06-08T06:31:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was the hike. It was exciting to finally get out of the kibbutz and see some of the surrounding countryside. Oded led us up to a nearby ancient village, Umm ar-Rammamin in the Arabic. I don't remember the Hebrew name, but it was essentially the same - it means "mother of pomegranates." There was an ancient synagogue there, recently excavated and restored. Oded explained how the wall at which prayer is directed always faces toward Jerusalem. We walked down into the ruins, and he showed us rosettes carved into the floor, and near them, a menorah. He also pointed out where the treasure room used to be.

Then we wandered around and looked at the village remains. We found a number of house foundations, and storage and living caves. The caves, some of them, are still in use by local Bedouins. We were warned repeatedly, particularly by Dylan (who had firsthand experience) not to go into the caves. Apparently you'll come down with "cave fever" - a fierce infection that lands you in intensive care, and then it took Dylan five years to shake off the resultant blood infection. Didn't have to tell me twice.

The caves were amazing. The entrances were sunk into the hillside, and a court was formed around them with stones. Sometimes circular storage rooms jutted off the court. Also, the remains of agricultural terracing were visible all up and down the hills. We found an ancient wine press, which was also really cool. Originally, it had a treading floor, and the runoff would flow into a channel and then into two separate bins - truly massive storage bins cut straight into the limestone. A circular stone was added to the press later, when the screw press method was invented, in order to hold the center post. The amount of wine pressed there must have been epic. Oded thinks the separate bins were for two households, who would split their take, or something along these lines.

We wandered around a little more, and Oded showed us a number of Iron Age cave burials - for those of you keeping tally, these are the same kinds of burials that Jesus would have had, although the Iron Age ends several hundred years before he shows up on the scene. And yes, Mom, the Iron Age is pretty definitively Israelite. Before then, in the Bronze Age, things were mostly Palestinian. Anyway, these caves would have begun as natural caves, probably cut a little bit further. Some had roll-stones, but most had large rectangular stone plugs, which projected into the opening to seal it off. We saw one, probably from the later Roman period, which had a nicely built wall to seal off the cave. The stones were well cut and sort of yellowish, and fastened together cleanly. The plug stone was missing on all of them; I would have liked to see one. The tradition was to leave the body on its carved bench for one year; after then, if the bench was needed, the bones would be put in an ossuary. Ossuaries are small clay or wood boxes, the dimensions of which are dictated by the femur and the skull.

We walked on for a bit and saw a limestone quarry, which would have been a great place to play as a kid - lots of rock ledges projecting. You can see where they cut channels around the blocks. Then they would insert wood, and pour water on it to swell it and crack the rock out. A little further on, we took a detour to catch a nice vista of the countryside. We could see the hills rolling away to Gaza in the southwest, and directly west you could see almost to the Mediterranean. A bit more walking brought us to the hill across from our tell, where we could point at our sites and admire our handiwork. During the last leg of the trip, we ran across a rosemary bush. I pulled off a sprig and rubbed the leaves. It smelled wonderful, despite being a bit dusty.

The rest of the day was a party, as well. We returned and had lunch, and then Glenda, Liz and I sat around watching Youtube and having computer tutorials in our room. Tim, my area supervisor, came by later in the day to celebrate - today is Shavuot, a Jewish holiday, and we had broken out the wine and cheese. We went down to dinner feeling pretty happy, and afterward I joined the boys to watch soccer. It was generally a raucous evening, and I fell asleep fast and hard.

This morning was the same old routine - 5am, walking up the tell. Tim-not-my-area-supervisor, i.e. smartass Tim, had hurt his ankle in the soccer game the other day, so he wasn't up digging with us. As far as I know, he stayed in the dig house to help Glenda catalogue material culture items. When we got up to our trench, it actually looked like something was going on in there. We had a few rocks that looked like an installation, and some pieces of pottery sticking out of the ground. But by the end of the day, we had dug it all up. We are trying to find the floor that we think is nearby, but we haven't made it yet. Beyond what we had, there was just more of the same - tiny bits of pottery and lithics. We're finding a lot more bone than we had been, though. Also, Tim decided to open a probe in the square next to ours - E7. He and Oded didn't think we had actually reached the floor in there, so Dylan began digging a half-meter square hole. Almost immediately, he hit heavily burned ash. He found an oil lamp, which is a good sign - it means the burn was hot, and that items would thus be well-preserved. Ultimately, he uncovered pieces of charcoal - i.e. burned parts of a loom frame - and a bundle of loom weights and pottery. Glenda actually came up the tell to look at it, and her insights into what was going on were incredible. She could tell by the weight and position of the loom weights what kind of cloth was being spun.

Today's chant from the team next door was Cookie Monster: "Bucket One!" "Omnomnomnomnom!" Without Tim, though, they were a little lackluster. We thought it was the best one so far. Also, a number of Bedouin showed up to collect firewood while we were working. They rode in on donkeys and conversed with Oded. The donkeys seemed rather ill-tempered - they kicked up quite a racket. Additionally, we had some sort of tour group come by and look at the site. Oded and Jimmy both seemed to know them, and showed them around a bit. Jimmy and I had a good conversation while we were both sifting, about Houston. Turns out he's been there a couple of times.

Oh, and most importantly! The find of the day happened early on, but it was tremendously exciting. Kristin dug up a carnelian bead, oval shaped, from the middle of our trench. It was beautiful. We found a bit of the same stuff later on, but we aren't really sure about it - it looks like raw material, partway through being carved.

Anyway, I'm off - there's a festival dinner later today, but first I need to shower up and go to pottery washing. We've got a lot to do - we have to do Friday's as well as today's, and we've got about eight buckets of pottery set aside to do. It'll take a while. ::grouch::

Oh, before I sign off - you guys all know you can leave comments, right? Down below the post, where it says "[#] Comments", if you click on that, you'll be taken to a page where you can write me something. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. I'm sure I'm not saying everything y'all might be interested in hearing, so let me know if there's anything you want to hear more about.

Shalom!

Day Five: Damn, I'm Tired

2008-06-06T15:14:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was hell on earth, which is why I didn't write. It didn't take long, but yesterday was the first time I hated this. The wind was coming off the desert all day, and it was hot beyond hot up on the tell. I haven't been sunburned or had a migraine yet, so the water, hat, sunglasses, and sunscreen are all doing their job, but that doesn't stop it being outrageously hot. I mean, I guess we are in the Israeli desert, and I should have expected it.

The sun was up and bright early yesterday. There was no mist, so we got the full force of it early. We still weren't finding much in our trench - the odd bit of pottery, bone, or shell. At one point, I came down on a bunch of rocks that looked like they might be a wall, which was terribly exciting. It gave us a little extra motivation. Apparently, the group next to ours, composed of my (now ex-) roommate Liz and some of the more outspoken folks on the dig, are taking a different tack on motivation. They've started up bucket chants. When we dig, we pickaxe, and then we remove the dirt with trowels and dustpans. The dirt goes into these big rubber buckets called gufas, and the gufas are dumped into a wheelbarrow which is dumped off the side of the tell. We keep track of how many gufas we've filled, because we sift a certain percentage - usually you start with one out of every ten. So my group, like the reasonable people we are, started calling out gufa numbers. But Liz's group is now doing a different routine every day. Yesterday, it was "One! One bucket!" and the rest of the group would respond, in Count-from-Sesame-Street fashion, "Ha, ha, ha!" Today, it was, "Bucket number one!" "What??" "Bucket number one!" "Oh-kay!" Charming at first, but eventually you want to kill them. In the best possible way, of course.

The most exciting thing to happen yesterday was that while washing pottery, we found an Asherah figurine. It apparently came from our square, but we hadn't noticed when we picked it up. It's a female figure, about three inches high. The head is not intact, but the body shows a woman holding her breasts. It looks like it was pressed into a mold, and in fact, you can see the artist's fingerprints on the back. Which, if you think about it, is incredibly, amazingly, ridiculously cool.

Today was our last day of work before our day off, and we couldn't have asked for a more perfect one. The mist rolled in thicker than it has been the entire time, and when I was sitting down in our square, it looked like the tell was marooned in fog. It kept the sun off of us for a good chunk of the morning; heat was just starting to seep through when we broke for breakfast. My team spent the day digging down a little further. We cleared away some of the dirt by our supposed wall, only to find that there weren't actually any rocks underneath it, so we had to clear it out. However, we did find a Persian figurine head, replete with headdress. And the best part? We may have found a floor.

It's always hard to tell these things when everything is made up of dirt anyway, but as we dug down further, we started finding a bunch of debris at one particular level: a lot of large potsherds from the same pot situated near one another, a lot of small bones, a slight change in consistency of the dirt. The other group has found a floor lined with stones. We've had no such luck this far, but that doesn't make what we have found any less amazing. We found the bottom half of a juglet embedded in the dirt, and then realized we had the little round handle in our pottery bucket. Also, I found an enormous sherd of a crater - a round shallow pot for storing grain - and right next to it were what appeared to be two more sherds. Toward the southern end of the probe, we found a bunch of rocks set up in a curving line, possibly an installation of some kind - a room separation or something. I was geeking out the entire time! It was way exciting actually being able to see these things in their natural contexts.

Digging wasn't all we did today, though. Mom has been asking, and I'm sure some of you have been wondering, what it's like to live on a kibbutz aside from the food. Well, honestly, we haven't had much contact with anyone but each other since we've gotten here. It's a lot like a college campus - dorms, dining hall, shop, sports field. We sit out at the dig lab in our free time, of which there is very little. However, today after digging, we had nothing to do. Tomorrow is our day off, so we didn't even have to wash pottery. After lunch, I joined some of the guys in attempting to watch soccer - as it turns out, we couldn't find it on any of the sports channels, so we watched the History Channel for a while. I came back to my room, where I hung out with Glenda and Liz, and eventually Margaret. We introduced Glenda to Youtube, and she found it hysterical - I think we've created a monster. When the sun went down, Glenda opened a bottle of red wine for Shabbat (she's Jewish) and she, Margaret and I polished it off before dinner.

After dinner, we decided to play soccer. Anna and I thought the boys would be meeting us in front of the dining hall, so after changing our shoes, that's where we hung out and played frisbee. Most of the kibbutzniks were out and about; today's was a big celebratory dinner. A few of the Israeli girls came up and asked Anna and I if they could play with us, so we spent a good half hour playing frisbee with them. The language barrier was pretty impenetrable, but smiles and clapping got across most of the sentiment. When it finally got too dark to keep playing frisbee and the boys hadn't shown up, we decided to walk down to the field. Sure enough, they were playing without us. We jumped right in and had a great game. I threatened Tim, my area supervisor, multiple times; I was playing defender, and he was one of the other team's better forwards, so trash-talking was requisite.

When the soccer game broke up, most everybody wandered over to the sidelines to sit and chat. Anna, Zac, Ted, and I stayed on the court to play frisbee. The others got into an intense political discussion that eventually drew Anna away, but it didn't last long. We all wound up hanging out on the steps by the court, talking like you do when you've been thrust together with strangers - which is to say, about anything that comes up, and at length. Some kibbutz kids showed up to play soccer, and eventually lured Zac and Blake back into a game - which was adorable. The kids were quite good, too - they wore the boys out. The rest of us were watching, until five kibbutz girls came over and started talking to us. They knew English to varying degrees, and one of them was trying to learn, so she was the most vocal. They were all pretty intense, however - they were between nine and eleven, at that age when screaming at everything is great fun. We all ended up laughing hysterically, though - the girls were just too funny, teasing each other when they didn't get their English exactly right, cracking jokes in both English and Hebrew. They asked us our names, where we were from, how old we were, et cetera. We asked them the same, and Dylan, the outspoken charmer of our group, teased them for a bit. When Zac and Blake came back over, they started teaching us how to count to ten in Hebrew - I think I remember most of it. Then they taught us a song, which involved pointing to various body parts. We asked what it meant in English, and it turned out to be a rendition of the three-corner hat song! So we taught it back to them in English. They were immensely pleased every time we said "ken" or "lo" or "to da". I think one of them almost had a heart attack when I recited the numbers in Hebrew.

They followed us back toward our rooms for a bit, until we all broke away. Zac was heading the same direction they were; I'll have to ask him if they talked his ear off on the way. I came back to a sleeping Glenda, and fell asleep while writing this blog post, which is why it's up so late. Anyway, Saturday we'll be going on a hike in the surrounding areas. It will be nice to get off the kibbutz, and to learn a little about the archaeology nearby. I'm just disappointed that I don't have a camera, but I'm planning on finding one when we go into Beersheva in a week. At the very least, I'll tell you all about it. More later!

Day Three: Things I Learned Today

2008-06-04T07:26:00.002-05:00

1) Potsherds can be thrown.
2) It is essentially impossible to distinguish mudbrick from dirt clods.
3) Dumping debris over the side of a cliff is actually really tricky.

Wow, yesterday's blog post was a little disjointed, huh? I don't have long before pottery washing, but let's see if I can do a better job this time.

We went up the tell at 5am. We work in three groups. I don't remember the names of the other squares, the ones run by Jimmy and Liz. Our square is E6, and our area supervisor is Tim, who has an awesome German accent overlaid with an awesome New Zealand accent. Yesterday we started a 1x4 meter probe. Today, we widened it to 2x4. Judging from the square next to ours, which is already excavated, we have a LONG way to go before we get to the Iron Age, and only two people at best would have been able to stand in a five-foot deep trench of that size.

Today, we used pickaxes. Yesterday, we had been very carefully digging the square using patisheen (I have no idea how to spell that). They're like mini hand-pickaxes. But in a 8 sq meter locus, you have to move a little more quickly. We broke up a layer of dirt with pickaxes, and then we would sift through with trowels and dustpans, picking out anything relevant and throwing away the rest of the dirt. We pitched potsherds into buckets, and bagged up shells, lithics, and bone. Lithics are napped pieces of flint, whether finished products themselves or the broken-off waste flint. These can be analyzed to determine how they were worked and what might have been made, so we save them. Yes, this is actually what we did all day. For the entire time we were on the tell. A few items of note happened today - the other teams are both hitting gold. One has a wall and a ton of pottery, and the other has burned mudbricks. Zac, who works on the mudbricks under Liz, was telling me about how they thought it was a classic Iron Age Israeli four-room house. If so, that means there is a street nearby. We found several scorpions and spiders in the course of our digging, and at one point, one team member actually dumped a wheelbarrow off the side of the cliff along with the debris. Oops. While pickaxing, we were trying to think of working songs a la slave singing to keep ourselves entertained. We've been referring to the professor as "Massa Oded" behind his back. I'm pretty sure we're all going to Hell. Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention - at the end of every day, we take elevations in our square, so that we can say exactly where and at what depth every piece of pottery was found. The precision and the meticulousness that goes into this is amazing. We're also constantly watching for contamination, which gets tricky.

In 20 minutes or so, I will go up to the dig lab for lecture and pottery-washing. Yesterday, we learned about pottery-washing from Jimmy, who is fantastic with the stuff. The information he can give you from a piece of pottery is astounding. I want to be able to do that someday. Anyway, we will sit around and wash pottery, and read yesterday's pottery at the same time. I had a few nice finds today - a rim of a jar with a nice lip, and an Iron Age handle. Almost everything is still out-of-context at this point, but we've started getting down into 'real' dirt, so we'll see what happens in the next few days. We're also getting a lecture on material culture, and how it's tagged and categorized and what it can tell us, from Glenda today.

Apart from the work, things here are pretty fun. I just picked up a few beers from the store, and Zac and I are going to get together and chat over a brew later today. The beds are hellishly uncomfortable, but it's hard to notice, since I'm out like a light at the end of every day. Our shower is a) dirty, which sets off my OCD like nothing else, and b) clogged, which we need to have fixed. The food is consistently wonderful. Today's was the best so far; it's a buffet-type-thing, but I had falafel in tahini sauce, cucumber tomato salad, and cauliflower in this amazing white sauce. I'll let you know if anything else exciting happens today - so far, the work is backbreaking, but I love it.

Day Two: Digging!

2008-06-03T11:57:00.002-05:00

Well, today was the first day of digging, and I'm beat. Woke up at four to get ready, and trudged up the tell. We started by clearing away brush - I learned a lot about cleaning today. We had to clear all the obvious obstacles, and then we had to 'fine clean' the digging area using trowels and scraping off all the loose surface material. Then we had to brush it clean. It was not easy work, and took most of the digging day. At topsoil level, I found an Iron Age jar handle. Since it wasn't part of the excavations, I can keep it, so it's sitting happily by my cot in the kibbutz. While we were working in the morning, we saw the mist roll in as Oded had described to us the day before. Off the sea in the west comes this huge swell of clouds, round about 7am. It sweeps in closer and closer, until all you can see is the tell and the tops of a few trees. The effect is surreal.

We stopped for breakfast, and then went back to digging. During the second half of the day, we actually started excavations. We had to string the site, and then mark the 'bulks' - the areas, a half meter in from every side, that we would preserve as walking space. Then we began digging, with tiny little hand-trowel type things that have a Hebrew name I don't know how to spell. We found plenty of potsherds, a sheep tooth, and an artifact or two from the wars the area has seen. We're still in topsoil, so nothing exciting yet. We're doing a probe - a 1x4 meter trench into our dig area, to see if we hit anything worth pursuing. We're on a site right next to a weaving factory, so eventually, things will start turning up. It'll be a while of hard work first, though. Another site already has something - what appears to be an Iron Age house with fire damage. More on that as they work on it.

We packed it in for lunch and the midday break. I spent some time hanging out with folks, and then we had a mini-seminar on cleaning pottery at the dig lab. We scrubbed up the day's finds while Jimmy told us the kinds of things you can learn from pottery - which just renewed my fascination with the stuff. You can tell what it was for, where it was from, what it contained, how it was used - all from the makeup of a tiny sherd. Iron-age potting technology was pretty brilliant, in fact. Cooking vessels were mixed and fired with chunky bits of limestone directly in the clay, to offset the expanding and contracting due to frequent heating.

After dig lab, almost the entire dig crew set off down to the basketball court to play a game of soccer. I got horrible blisters on my feet, but it was well worth it. We had a great time, and worked up an appetite for dinner. This post is a bit terse because I'm running out of battery and I'm more or less exhausted, but that was essentially my day. I came home coated - literally - in dirt, with mud in my nose, and it was perfect.

Day One: Part Deux

2008-06-02T12:10:00.002-05:00

This, as far as I can tell, is around the time I will usually be posting. This is my free time during the day, unless we have a meeting or lecture. I last spoke to you before lunch. Lunch itself was delicious - I had roasted chicken drumsticks, rice, and something pickled that had some olives in it. After that it was naptime, and then up to the dig lab for a lecture. We talked about the history of the site - the original establishment, the first few crews. They lived in tents, and they worked out of buses and trucks. One, nicknamed the "Command Module", was a Syrian mobile dental vehicle (apparently those exist in the Syrian army) that somehow found its way onto an Israeli kibbutz. ::shrug::

Lahav is not far from the original border with Jordan. The kibbutz has seen its share of action in its day; every living space has a bomb shelter nearby, and the kibbutz was shelled in 1967. While we were sitting around outside the dig lab after lecture, Oded told us a story about the negotiation of the border in 1949. A short walking distance from our site, there is another very prominent site, heavily excavated back in the '20s. It's called Tell Beit Mirsim (TBM), and I think I spelled that right. The primary negotiator of the border with Jordan was a prominent Israeli archaeologist. He wanted to ensure that Israel retained TBM, so he traded the hill across the way from us - the highest point in the area, and therefore strategically significant - for TBM. However, right near the border was a Jordanian village, and as the line would be drawn, it would cut the villagers off from their only water supply - a well near TBM. Part of the treaty negotiation was that the villagers were allowed to cross the border two or three times a day to get water. Back when Oded lived on the kibbutz, he and several members would walk down to TBM on Saturday mornings, to "have encounters" with "the enemy". When the border was finally changed, kibbutz members collected the numbered marker-stones. You can still see stacks of them in backyards here.

Dinner was wonderful - something cheesy and potato-y in a puff pastry crust, fries, and more pickled things with some sort of potato salad. Also, I made it to the kibbutz shop, so now I have plenty of Coke and sunflower seeds with Hebrew all over the packaging. I'm amazed so far at how hungry I am for every meal, and it'll only increase once we actually start digging. I'm well and truly excited for it - bright and early at 4:30 tomorrow morning. I'll let you all know how it goes. Miss you!

Day One: The Orientation-ing

2008-06-02T03:07:00.002-05:00

The culture shock started in the Atlanta airport. I was waiting at the gate with more Jewish stereotypes than you could fling a latke at. Old Jewish ladies, hostile Jewish moms, twenty-somethings on heritage trips. To be fair, the Jewish moms seemed to be hostile mostly because our flight had been downgraded from a 777 to a 767, and the seats had been randomly reassigned. Fifty people could no longer fit on the flight, also, so everyone and their dog was waiting in line at the ticket counter to make sure they had a seat. Things were a bit of a mess.

I spent most of the flight sleeping or listening carefully when my flight attendants spoke Hebrew. I can now pick out a few words, like "ladies and gentlemen" and "thank you," and I can recognize some of the letters. The flight was fine - no screaming babies that I noticed, nobody oozing into my personal space. Even the food was okay. Towards the end of the flight, I started peeking out the window to catch glimpses of the Greek islands and Italy. This is the farthest I've ever been from home, so I wanted to see the eastern Mediterranean.

The Tel Aviv airport was kind of spectacular. The whole place is airy and apparently meant to look as ancient as its surroundings. Passport control was hell. I think I landed at the same time as several other flights, at least one clearly from France. One guy asked me something in rapid French, which I later figured out amounted to, "We need to make a flight in another airport - can we cut in front of you?" To which I responded in very good, very rapid French, "Oh, I don't speak French." ::facepalm:: We got it sorted out eventually, though. I spotted a number of Hasids wandering the airport - they tend to stick out. On the ride to Lahav, we also saw quite a few of them on the streets.

Settled in last night, only to be told that I needed to move this morning. The accommodations are fine - pretty spartan, but it doesn't bother me. I didn't bring a proper blanket, but thank God for sarongs - one to sleep on and one to cover me, and I'm all set. I stuffed my jacket in a pillowcase, and it serves admirably. We got up late this morning - 7:30. We met for breakfast, and the food here is fantastic. I mean, it's all pretty straightforward stuff, but very tasty. I've been making friends and chatting. The two girls I was with last night are from Middlebury and Emory, and I've been talking with a guy from a seminary in Pennsylvania as well. He's quick to mention that he's not a seminarian, though - he's just studying biblical archaeology.

After breakfast, we got to see the dig lab, and then we hauled equipment up to the tell. Picture me - I know it's not hard - in my tan safari hat, sunglasses on, water bottle in hand, lugging a pair of pickaxes up a hill. I haven't gotten ahold of a camera yet, but as soon as I do, I'll be posting pictures - the view from the tell is astounding. We're more or less in the middle of nowhere, and right next to us is Lahav Forest, a nature preserve. We're also right near the old Green Line, so you can see bunkers on the tell and observation towers inside the kibbutz. It's hot here, but there's a perfect breeze up on top of the tell. We start digging tomorrow. Today has just been orientation so far - I had to come back down from the tell and move my things to my new room, and now I'm just waiting on lunch.

I'm sharing a room now with Glenda and Liz, two staff members. Glenda runs the lab, and Liz is a commercial archaeologist from England who will be heading one of the teams. She and I have been chatting as I write this. It's kind of nice to be with people who have some experience in the field, and who are in such completely different life situations from myself. Anyway, I'll sign off for now and relax for a bit, but more later!

And so it begins...

2008-05-31T16:12:00.002-05:00

Well, Readers, here we are at the start of my adventure. I'm at the airport, waiting for my flight to Atlanta, followed by my flight to Israel. I have been looking forward to this with a mixture of sheer joy and barely-concealed terror for months. It cost me a lot to get here, by which I mean packed, together, and to the airport - more than I'm going to talk about in this space. But that's irrelevant. What matters now is that I'm on my way, bitches!

I managed to weed through everything I own and get the important items packed away in a corner of my living room. Lovely Sonia was kind enough to let me keep my things there while I'm away. Those of you that know me are familiar with the fact that I'm a light packer; I have only one duffel bag, checked for the trip. My computer and my book of choice both fit in the purse. I'm as ready as it's possible to be, but there's a part of me that is still freaking out.

Which is why I'm currently sitting in the Delta Crown Room sipping a glass of white wine and eating an apple. I was going to try not eating for sixteen hours, in order to avoid jetlag, but the smell of food was just too much. Mom opines, and I concur, that they do it on purpose - the same way the Med bakery must be piping the air from their ovens straight out onto the sidewalk. Dad claimed that there would be free wireless in the Crown Room. There wasn't, but he'll be the one paying for it anyway... I need to catch up on BoingBoing and Digg before I head out. I don't actually need to check the Cubs scores; the cabbie had it on the radio during my ride here. I was getting out just as Marmol struck out his third in the top of the ninth, with the Cubs ahead 5-3. I think this is an auspicious beginning, both for the Cubs season and for my trip. I think I'm back before the All-Star break... Can someone check that for me?

Half an hour until the place closes... I'm going to use the wireless while I've got it. My flight to Atlanta is at 5:30, and my flight to Tel Aviv leaves at 10:00. Pray to Cedric the God of Airline Travel that I don't crash and die, and you'll hear from me once I'm on the other side of the pond.

::wub::
Megan

Victory!

2008-05-22T12:17:00.001-05:00

Moral victory at work today. It's amazing how far that will go toward making a person feel better about life. :-)

Scav, Part Deux, and other items

2008-05-22T10:08:00.003-05:00

Notably epic Scav items:

A zeusaphone (300 points): We built one. I don't know if you're aware of what a zeusaphone is. Wikipedia will be able to tell you in greater detail, but it involves tesla coils that vibrate at various frequencies to produce monophonic sound. Ours was the only one to win full credit. We weren't even sure that it would work. Corrigan, an experienced scavvie, and Bryce, a brand-new firstie, collaborated on it and produced something so perfect that the judges were astounded. Not only did it play the Super Mario Brothers World 1.2 theme music, but one of our team members plugged her electric cello into it and played Jupiter, Bringer of Joy. Seriously.

A monowheel (200 points): My pet project, if I could have been considered to have one. Ross, Veronica and I hacked this one together. A monowheel is a type of cycle, with an interior seat and pedals or a motor that runs an exterior wheel, which revolves around the rider. Modern ones are kind of like motorcycles. Older ones looked like unicycles inside a larger wheel, and that's essentially what we built. We stuck together two circles made of plywood, and covered the space between with sheet metal. Then we had Noah the Amazing ride a unicycle in the center. It worked perfectly.

A Bedouin wedding (point total variable): I didn't have a whole lot to do with this one, but I did help build the spit for the roasted lamb. We built a firepit in the middle of our quad, and roasted an entire lamb on a spit overnight. People slept out beside it so that it could be turned every five minutes. The judges said it was delicious.

With that kind of awesomeness, Scav victory was certain. As it turns out, we beat Max Palevsky by something in the vicinity of 750 points. I know quite a few more judges this year than I did last year, and having spoken to them, it sounds like the judgeship was pretty impressed with Snell-Hitchcock. In the words of Judge Jonathan, Army Dillo was "on fire," and did everything right. We had a stellar year this time around. Let's see if we can keep up the good work in the face of some up-and-coming powerhouses - BJ, MacPierce, I'm looking at you.

In other news, I think Scav euphoria is beginning to wear off. My mood seems to be hitting a backslide - a perverse reaction to spring if ever there was one. By all accounts, things are going well: the weather is warming up, I'm slowly but surely packing for Israel, I'm going home this weekend, the Cubs are winning. But small cracks seem to find a way to penetrate all of this warm-and-fuzzy complacency. I can feel the same old stress chewing at the corners of my mind. I can pin down a few things that are causing me to worry - I haven't reserved a storage unit yet, I'm paranoid that I won't finish packing - but nothing is bad enough to merit the life-or-death panic that I tend to feel. I know this is only the start of it, and that a few days from now I'll feel like I'm drowning. It's hard to face that inevitability, especially when I desperately need to be functional over the next week and a half. My flight to Tel Aviv is on Saturday, May 31. I don't even have this weekend to pack and plan, because I'm going home for my sister's graduation. It will be a nice escape, and a way to force myself not to think about the bad things for a few days, but I'm afraid it will only be worse when I come back. I need to develop a plan to kill these things off one by one. Alright, here goes:

- I will call up and reserve a storage unit before I go home tomorrow.

- I will use this afternoon and every afternoon next week to pack.

- I will ask Brian if he and his magical "automobile" device will help me move next Friday.

Hopefully, that will take care of it, and I can feel better about my trip, my relationships, and my life.

Who's gonna win Scav Hunt?

2008-05-14T09:08:00.002-05:00

We are, we are!!

That's right, bitches. Team Army Dillo takes home the victory. Thanks, in part, to yours truly and Team USA (Manly Con). It was epic. It was about as epic as these things come. I'm still running on Scav euphoria.

Alright, enough rambling - now for a real account.

Initially, I didn't think I was going to scav this year. I didn't really scav last year, which was very hard for me. I'm pretty dedicated to Manly Con - for my first two years, I hardly spent any time inside at all during the Hunt. I was consistently in the quad in front of the dorm, hammering, drilling, getting sawdust in my eyes. It was my favorite time of year. But when my third year rolled around, the men who had made Manly Con what it was for me were gone - Alex, Duff, and Ryan had all graduated, and wouldn't be participating. Duff was off at Carnegie Mellon, Ryan at Yale, and Alex was working. Aside from this, those of you that knew me then know that my life had hit something of a bump in the road. I was too busy trying to juggle it all back into place and not kill myself to really do Scav. I couldn't stay away entirely, so I did run out and do some Hunt-related photography - surprisingly relevant that year. In the end, it was best that I wasn't deeply involved. I scraped things together enough to finish out the year, and I felt better about having my priorities in order.

That meant, however, that when this year rolled around, I didn't feel like I had a place on the team. I just assumed that I would avoid Scav and focus on my real life. One doesn't have to be faced with Scav if one doesn't want to be - despite what people say, if you stay out of the quads, you won't typically encounter the madness. I hadn't carved out a place for myself in the new Manly Con hierarchy, and I didn't want to risk being marginalized within something that had meant so much to me before. I wasn't even living in the dorm anymore; I couldn't reasonably expect these new, enthusiastic people to know or care who I was, or to understand why I should be welcomed into the fold.

But then Scavengers happened.

Last year, the year I was out of commission, Dave Franklin - RA for my dorm - filmed a documentary about Scav Hunt. Titled Scavengers, it followed the three main teams: Snell Hitchcock, Max Palevsky, and the FIST. It showcased the enthusiasm of the Hunt, and spent a good percentage of its time on the Manly Con/Big Projects aspect of the competition. Dave had an opportunity to show his film at Doc, our on-campus movie theater. The hall was filled with riotous Scavvies. I wasn't sure I wanted to go - seeing what I missed out on last year would make my decision not to scav much more painful. I knew I would feel out of place and excluded. I would feel unmissed and unimportant. Nick convinced me to go anyway, and as it turns out, all those things were true. But at the same time, I realized how much I loved the Hunt. Even if I can't be a part of it, I love watching the Hunt and participating vicariously. I was proud of my team. I got caught up in the pathos of Dave's movie. Although it sounds like an exaggeration, believe me when I say that going to that movie turned me into a bit of a wreck.

We got back to Millikan that night, Nick and I, and went up to his room. I was mopey as hell. I wouldn't talk much to anyone; I was too distracted. I was working hard to sort out my feelings about Scav. It hurt to know that my team, that I loved so dearly, didn't have a place for me anymore, and it hurt to be reminded just how much I wanted to help that team. All the negatives of dorm life - feeling out of place and on the fringes of the "cool kids," wanting to be a core part of Hitchcock life but never really managing - were mixed up in my feelings about Scav as well. Nick noticed. Well, he couldn't help but notice; I'm not exactly subtle about my feelings.

Immediately, he pulled me over to the computer. He sat me on his lap and said, "Write to Ross. Tell him you want to be on Manly Con this year." I raised protests, about not fitting in with the team anymore, about my parents being in town, about not being able to get the time off work. He wasn't having any of it. Nick tugged the keyboard closer and looked at me expectantly - his raised eyebrows said if you don't do it, I will. And because I couldn't stay away from Manly Con, and because Nick knows that taking what I want into his own hands is probably the most effective threat he could make, I tapped out a terse email to Ross Kelly. I wasn't expecting much - the requisite, cursory, "Of course you can participate" kind of response - and it showed in the subdued wording of my message.

Within minutes, I received a reply that clinched it for me, and started a trek back to Hitchcock that I thought would be far longer than it was. Ross was thrilled to have the extra hands, and mentioned specifically that it would be great to see me around Hitchcock again. That was all it took - they missed me! Well, I was on the job. Fear not, Hitchcock - Megan is returning.

And that's exactly how it felt. I had forgotten just how welcoming my dorm was. Every step I took back toward the place was encouraged by several different people along the way. Showing up on Wednesday night before list release, I ran into people whom I thought would not have said hi to me on the street, and I received warm welcomes and "We're glad to have you!". At the captains' speeches that night, returning upperclassmen were recognized: "This is the reason we have such a great team. These people come back year after year, because Snitchcock has something special." They're right. Once you've lived there, it's hard to leave. The culture is infectious. The welcome and acceptance I received made it easy to throw myself completely into the Hunt.

This post is long enough, so I'll continue my Hunt stories later - real stories, about lightning machines and double-belled euphoniums and giant plywood wheels. But, although it doesn't seem like much, I wanted to impress upon Readerland out there how much Scav did for me this year. It reminded me that I still have a place in my dorm, with my old friends there and the new ones I met over the four days of the Hunt. And that acceptance means a lot. Rock on, Army Dillo! FUCKIN' YEAH!

Tech Support

2008-02-20T14:12:00.002-06:00

Me: How's your computer holding up? No more random shutdowns? Did you end up moving it so it gets better airflow?

Lady at work: No, it seems to be okay. I didn't move it, though. Well, I may have shoved it back in a bit. It was out all yesterday, it's fine.

::shoves computer back into unventilated corner::

For those of you at a loss, a computer is neither a child nor a dog. It does, in fact, need fresh air constantly, and cannot be kept in a small box. Wait, what?

Yay Friday

2008-02-15T08:53:00.002-06:00

Alright, I'm off my political soapbox, I promise. Today, actually, I want to talk about movies.

Last night I went out to see In Bruges before going to dinner at a contemporary pizza kitchen (something I will get to later). Now, Nick makes me a little crazy when it comes to movies, as he well knows... he's just so much more experienced with the medium that he's got a lot of interesting and well-thought-out things to say, and I certainly felt like my comments were a little lost. Not to mention, he always knows a guy who knows a guy in the business - or really, not even, because his entire family are editors and sound techs and award-winning costume designers. Oh, those crazy LA Jews. To his credit, he doesn't at all blow off the things I have to say - he's good conversation, or more often, good debate.

Anyway, In Bruges. The movie started out on a single, decidedly poignant track. Two hit men are exiled to the fairy-tale town of Bruges, in Belgium. The younger of the two has made a serious mistake that obviously upsets him deeply, which is why they were sent to an out of the way "shithole", as Ray keeps calling it. His conflict is the really interesting and moving part of the beginning of the movie, and watching him try to deal with it while forced to interact with unfamiliar and often outlandish surroundings was, for me, the most interesting part. Then all of a sudden the movie hits a bump in the road, and the story seems to become a lot less coherent. It fragments into a few different narratives and it's hard to see how they affect one another at all. Everything comes together rather neatly at the end, though. Looking back on it, I had insisted that it was an incoherent and inconsistent narrative that I thought could have been done better. But I think now that after a second watching, I would be just as in love with it as I was the first time through, and on top of that, would find the storytelling brilliant. I think the thing that caught me off-guard seeing it for the first time was that the movie led me to expect one thing from it, and then it clicked over to a completely different kind of story just when I thought it should have ended.

In summary, I love this movie. I loved it when I saw it and I still adore it. The story was complex and unpredictable enough that it took a day of mulling over to pull itself together in my head. This is what usually happens when a movie does something I wasn't expecting, and tends to make them all the better on second, third, fourth, nth watching. Go see it. It's an artistic movie, but supremely accessible and fundamentally moving. Ray (Colin Farrell's character) is such a child that you can't help but love him. The sense of humor in the movie is very dry and not overdone, and it never plays for laughs. I think what impressed me most was the balance of the film. It walked between black comedy, drama, art, and self-indulgence, without ever tipping too far. It was something else entirely - a mostly-new animal in film. Go. Just go see it now and save me from sounding any more like a pretentious ass than I already do.

After that, we went to La Madia? I think that was the name of the place. Anyway, it's down Grand, past State. Looks like a swanky little place, and really, it is a swanky little place, but very relaxed. I had a $24 glass of Chateau Montelena Chardonnay with an arugula, chicken, walnut and apple salad and a white clam and tomato pizza. Chocolate cake gelato with a touch of Sambuca for dessert. The food was excellent and, continuing the evening's theme, not overdone at all. It was very simple - the flavors were all fresh and blended well, and there weren't large amounts of unidentifiable spice or sauce involved. I wore a t-shirt and jeans and didn't feel out of place. That in and of itself would get the place high marks in my book. :-)

Anyway, yes, I recommend both In Bruges and La Madia (spelling?). Thinking about it, these picks both make a lot of sense coming from Nick - they seem to embody his tastes pretty well. Good show, Mr. Simmons, and Readerland, I expect your reports when I next see you.

Dammit!

2008-02-11T13:39:00.001-06:00

A few more things. I told you about Scientology and the power of the 'Net to actually get stuff done. Well, keep it up kids, because the Pirate Bay are being prosecuted under trumped-up charges that don't even really exist under Swedish law. Friday was 'wear yellow to free the Pirate Bay' day. Keep awareness up. Let's demonstrate that the old system isn't working anymore. We've had some serious victories lately, with the Big Four turning DRM-free. Keep up the momentum.

The administrators of the Pirate Bay (Brokep, Anakata, and TiAMO) were interrogated about the site and their views on its legality several days back - Ars Technica has some of the transcripts. The argument seems to be that since they are hosting links to copyrighted content, they are "promoting copyright infringement".

I am a stereotype

2008-02-11T13:06:00.001-06:00

Here I am, blogging from a college coffee shop. It would be better if the shop were one of those independent, student-run jobbies, but I couldn't find a seat.

I haven't blogged in a while, and I feel like there's some catching up that needs to be done.

My social circle has shaken up a bit. I think it's partly because of my OCD and partly just the way I am, but when something painful happens, I have to abandon the familiar. I go looking for new friends, new locations. Jim and I split up 2 Fridays back. Asking me why is a pointless question, I feel. Anyone that knows me knows I don't get into knock-down drag-out fights, and if I do, they don't end the relationship. I don't make heated decisions, I just say stupid things. So if he and I split up, just understand that there was a fundamental problem in the relationship, and move on. It's what I'm doing.

I haven't slept at my apartment in days - actually, since last Tuesday night. I've been sleeping at Millikan, and I went down to Dad's townhome in Austin this weekend. I needed a change of scenery, and for whatever reason I felt like I needed to reinforce connections with new people. The only way I have of describing things right now is that the scene seems to have changed, and I like that. Where I had settled had gotten a bit too uncomfortable, and with change comes opportunity. So I'm happier now. Those of you that know me know that I like having every chance in the world in front of me and not knowing what I'm going to do with it. So I'm enjoying that for the moment.

Now, on to business. I know, I haven't posted pictures yet. I don't have digital copies of the ones I've mentioned previously; I should remember to get a CD next time. Since then, I haven't been out and about too much. The weather got cold, and it's very hard to feel okay about toting around a 22-year-old camera in the snow, when you can't feel your hands. I have visions of it tumbling onto the concrete in slow-motion. It's horrifying.

In the meantime, I have been focusing on bolstering my l33t computer skilz. Working in tech support will teach you a lot. I spent my time setting up a wireless network, learning about WEP encryption, etc. This, of course, prompted a lot of private research, which then led to getting a lot more active in the politics of technology. I decided, with my roommates' approval, to open access to our wireless network (for those of you for whom this might be relevant, the SSID is 2WIRE746). Now, I have some slight concerns with this. I don't want people exploiting our bandwidth; I don't want BitTorrent going down over our humble network (unless it's me). So I've been studying up on bandwidth throttling and router firmware. I'm going to try and download some new firmware for the router that will allow me to filter for MAC addresses and choke the bandwith for non-residents. That's really my main concern. Legal issues aren't so much a problem - if you look at the law, we won't be liable for anything that happens on that network, for the same reason that telco's aren't responsible for anything that happens over their wires. Also, that worry is a small price to pay for knowing that I am a tangible step closer to free information. It sounds idealistic, but free wireless is just _so_ nice. I ran into a friend who had been in my building, and one way or another we found out that he had been using our free wireless, and he thanked me for it. It's become such a central part of the culture that it seems just basic hospitality to offer wireless. Unless you hit the bandwidth cap, it isn't really a limited resource, either. I paid for it, so I get to use it. Other people using it (so long as they don't interfere with my use) is completely situation-neutral. No cost, high benefit. The answer is clear.

My other computer concern is finally getting my network set up. I'm not sure what the role of each beast on the wires will be... I'd like Pixel (my Dell workstation) to be a headless media server, but I'll need to boost her storage for that. I'd like her to run linux, also, but I don't know if storing protected files in Linux will allow me to retrieve them from a Windows box without trouble. I can't imagine that there would be a problem with that, but I have vast amounts of DRM-infected iTunes music, so it is a concern. The other solution is just to Tunebite all that shit - but the system isn't perfect. Sometimes it damages the files. I'd have to set up the computer to run it dedicated for a good couple days at real-time speed, so that I'd know for sure the files would turn out okay. Before March rolls around, I'm going to ask Dad if we can transfer my monthly music allowance over to Amazon, if possible - DRM-free is the way to go. Pyrrhus will be the gaming machine (that's the server). I need a new motherboard for him. I was in the process of transferring media files over to him, but I think I'm going to consolidate them back on Pixel. Pyrrhus will run Windows, dedicated. I know, I know, but the fact remains that for some things, you need a Windows machine. For Ping (the laptop), I think I'm going to pull all media files back over to Pixel, and maybe - maybe - go full Linux on it. I was thinking it would act as a wireless router for the two desktops, but now I don't know. I might just go ahead and get another router for personal use that I can hook the desktops into. That way I can keep using my laptop out and about, and maybe even serve media through Pyrrhus. The Asus, newly named Pepe, is, of course, Linux, and I think it'll stay that way. I've got a nice transFlash in it that adds a good chunk of storage, so it's becoming my new main portable. I doubt it will play any major role in the network. It's mostly my "I'm going to need wireless when I'm out and about" machine.

Phew. You can see I've got a lot of work to do. I will be so happy when I get this set up and clean, though. My data is scattered everywhere - I want it consolidated on Pixel, so that Pyrrhus can be my processing power, Ping my data portability, and Pepe my wireless portability.

Anyway - sorry for the scatterbrained post, I'm a little sick, I think, and I've got Manau blasting in my ears. If you're still reading, I'll catch up with y'all a little further down the road, when I've accomplished some of this shit. Perhaps with pictures.

$cientology Part II

2008-02-11T10:02:00.000-06:00

http://forums.enturbulation.org/viewtopic.php?p=27999

Rundown from the higher-ups at Anonymous about the Feb 10 protests, and plans for the future.

$cientology

2008-02-11T09:10:00.000-06:00

I deeply, deeply regret that I was unable to attend the protest against Scientology in Austin yesterday. But I just want to let everyone out there know that I firmly believe it is a cult, and a scam, and as an institution it is doing monumental harm to the lives of thousands of people. As a sufferer of OCD, I do believe in psychiatric treatment, or at least the right to choose it. As a Catholic, I believe in the institutions of men, guided by God - but truth should not have to be paid for. I believe in family, I believe in common sense, I believe in hope regardless of one's circumstances. These are all things that the church of Scientology, given the evidence, fundamentally opposes.

For more information, google or Wiki

Elli Perkins
Lisa MacPherson
Operation Snow White
Operation Freakout

Spread the word.

Bedridden 2: Electric Booga - wait, what?

2008-01-20T17:45:00.001-06:00

B-Fest was this weekend. B-Fest was awesome.

I fell in love with the movie "Dracula's Daughter," for some strange reason. I can't really put my finger on why I liked it so much, but it wasn't just a stereotypical second-rate monster movie. Dracula's daughter actually had some interesting stuff going on, the leading man was pretty cool, and his secretary was sassy and prank-called him a time or two.

We also watched Lone Wolf McQuade, with lots of Chuck Norris being a Texas ranger. It was, naturally, deeply gratifying. I wanted to go home, drink beer, and eat something that had recently been moo-ing.

As for the 'bedridden' part, post-'Fest, I was struck down rapidly with something strange and unpleasant. My cough never really went away after the flu, and out of nowhere, it got wetter, my sinuses filled up again, my head feels like it's going to explode, I have a fever, and standing up = feeling like I'm going to revisit my lunch. I probably just have an opportunistic cold or a sinus infection, but of course I'm imagining viral pneumonia or the consumption, and slowly fading out of existence wishing I could have only finished and published my brilliant research.

Speaking of, I received my application packet to the Tell Halif dig. It's full of warnings about 100 degree weather, hard work with little reward, minimal living space, having to do laundry in the sink, and poisonous snakes. This is, in fact, awesome. I can't wait. It's exactly the sort of thing that I have wanted to do for my entire life. The only problem that I have is that it sounds like the community is heavily structured - by which I mean, they list a lights-out time. That is not so cool, but I can live with it. Being in the desert = limited resources, so that kind of thing happens sometimes. They will have all manner of side-trips and such to other sites, which I'm not yet sure I will attend. They sound interesting, but I'm there to work, and I don't doubt that I will want my weekend (ONE DAY! ONE!) to relax.

The head of the dig sounds really enthusiastic to have me along. He keeps emailing to make sure I got the packet, and talks about how eager he is to receive it. Et cetera. I guess being associated with the University of Chicago will help a person out. That, and I imagine they really just need money and free labor. Which is also understandable. Still, it's nice to feel wanted, and as I can't think of any glaring problems with my academic history or current status, I get the feeling I'll be going.

That said, I am newly inspired to continue with my personal research. I had just tracked down that Oren study on the nature of the predynastic Sinai sites when things sorta dropped off. I need to pick it back up again and really do some heavy analysis. I'll have to work a lot more in the library now, because my student copy of ArcGIS has expired, but that's okay - their computers are faster than mine anyway. Although, most of the heavy data processing is done. I doubt I'll be adding too much more in the way of SRTM maps or anything like that, and those are the real processor-rapers. What I really need to be able to do is establish a connection between those Sinai sites and the trade route (not too hard, and probably been done before), but then I need to postulate a theory on the spacing. Elise and I had our thoughts, but whatever I come up with will need to be consistent with her interpretations and data as well. As of right now, there are a few common-sense things I can think of, with respect to travel time and reasonable distances, but those are just assumptions. There's no proof, there's nothing hard to tie it down. Also, I really want to look more closely at my projected paths and the sites, and any deviations that exist. I have to imagine that the trail ducked off to the side to visit a well or a wadi, and I want to see if there are any anomalies that will bear this out. Additionally, I REALLY want to figure out what was going on near the Wadi El-Arish. Two sites, six miles apart, when everything else is so regularly spaced. W. T. F. I mean, seriously. I have a theory or two, but I know there is more information out there; I know there is something I am missing, something that will give me even a _little_ direction. This is why I need to get back in the library. I may start spending my afternoons there after work. We shall see.

Oh, and I baked "Brother's Bread" today, out of the delightful book on Jesuit breadmaking that David gave me for Christmas. It's probably my favorite bread recipe so far. It makes 2 big, round, crusty loaves with a nice salty flavor. It's thick and chewy like ciabatta, rather than light and fluffy, or even and soft. Perfect with a big smudge of butter and a mug of tea.

Archaeologist, academic, bread-baker, tea-drinker, Texan... Damn, I'm sexy. Jim, I hope you know what a lucky man you are.

Drudgery

2008-01-15T21:16:00.000-06:00

So, I am back on my feet and back at work. I am actually enjoying the world of tech support... It's always been pretty satisfying to fix a computer problem for someone. And now they pay me $17 an hour to do it. Cool.

Mood has been all over the place lately. Confluence of hormones and change in medication = MADNESS INCARNATE. Ah, well. I am working on it. Unfortunately, it did result in a few life crises: am I going to graduate college? Am I going to do what I want with my life? etc... but good folks talked me through it.

On the 'school' note, although this isn't strictly school-related, I may be spending a month in Israel this summer. Those of you that know anything about my research know why this is cool. Those of you that don't: I study predynastic Lower Egypt, specifically, a civilization just south of modern-day Cairo called Ma'adi. The most interesting facet of this interesting culture is that, despite the fact that we're talking 3000 BC, despite the fact that Israel is really fucking far away in that context, and despite the fact that the Sinai is a useless inhospitable wasteland, Ma'adi had a very extensive overland trade relationship with several southern Levantine sites. One of these sites, a noted Egypto-Levantine site with the remains of an Egyptian residence, is called Tell Halif. Emory University has, for the past couple seasons, been doing digs at Tell Halif. This season, they are doing a dig there again. I am applying.

I MAY GET TO GO DIG IN ISRAEL. AT TELL FUCKING HALIF. That's so cool that I think a little piece of my brain just exploded. Whoop, yeah, there come the pieces.

So, keep your fingers crossed for me. In the next couple days I should get the application information in the mail, and they have rolling admissions, so I should know not too long thereafter whether I'm in. Woo! Dig! They aren't focusing on the Egyptian residence; in fact, they're focusing on the residential quarter of the site's Iron Age settlement. But that's close enough for me. My area of interest lies in the Early Bronze Age, so that's not too far off, and to get to visit the site at all is a privilege.

On a completely different note, I am in the process of writing a really fun, if horribly erudite, poem. Its literary reference makes me giggle. I will post it here as soon as it is done (quite possibly later tonight), and the first person to guess the subject gets a cookie. But since nobody reads this blog, I expect I shall just eat the cookie myself as I snicker over my sheer cleverness.

Bedridden

2008-01-09T18:00:00.001-06:00

I appear to be on the mend from a truly disgusting bout of the flu that had me down for the past few days. My fever spiked above 103 at one point... that was a rough day. But it's way down today, and despite the fact that I don't really feel equipped to handle much beyond tea, I'm feeling more or less alright. Met up with Himself for tea when he got off work - oh, and there was much teasing, you can be sure. From him. To poor little still-addlepated me. Oh, woe.

I have decided - and I'm not quite sure how this came about - that my next project will be to conquer the Gaelic languages. Specifically, the Goidelic ones: Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx. This notion is rooted in the strange sort of interest I've always held for the Isle of Man. I can't remember where I first heard it mentioned. I do, however, recall finding its circumstances pleasantly odd: stuck in the middle between England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but still its own animal. I remember flying from London to Dublin several years back, and thinking that I would keep watch out the window in hopes of seeing it. What I didn't know is that our flight path was a bit far south for that, not to mention the fact that I very quickly got bored. So, no such luck; but Manx is a fun-sounding language. Rather like "a drunken Australian with a mouth full of food," to paraphrase Jim. It's lilting and less hard-sounding than Irish. Of course, it's closely related to both Irish and Scots Gaelic, so if I'm going to learn one, I might as well learn all three. And then I intend to travel to the Isle of Man and see the mysterious place for myself. Also Scotland. Because truly, it's a crime that I've never been there, and that's a fact.

The other thing I'd been working on today is a new short story. The inspiration hit while I was sitting in Istria, and I just started scribbling. It will need a lot of work and a lot more structure, but the basic ideas are down. It's about a person whose body is slowly being taken over by an unknown, apparently evil, agent. The trick is that she's conscious of it the whole time - her body is just doing someone else's bidding. Played-out? Maybe. Creepy? Absolutely. We'll see what I can make of it.

Signing off.

Guilt trip

2008-01-06T10:11:00.000-06:00

I have been shamed into returning to you, my loyal readership, by a New York Times blogger. Virginia Heffernan is the author of a weekly blog called The Medium, about living life in the digital age. Today, while perusing the New York Times magazine (as is my wont on Sunday mornings), I came across her most recent article: a review of MS Word alternatives for writers. Sadly, I discovered that she is a Mac user, and that none of her suggestions would actually be relevant to me and my PC-exclusive ways. However, her talk of accommodating interfaces that allow note-taking, outlines, and full-screen distraction-proof mode sent pangs through that little soft spot in my heart that always wants to be a great and productive writer. I am torn between two stereotypes, in that sense... On the one hand, yours truly is an undeniable overachiever, one who skated through a hefty first year at the University of Chicago without hardly cracking a book. On the other, I am a tortured knot of profound anxiety, unproductive in most things, but with hundreds of good ideas. I should either be sitting at a computer, merrily churning out research while earning a 4.0, or slouched over a bottle of gin penning the Great American Novel in ink made from my blackened, burned-out soul. Either one has its romantic charm, but much as I am a creature of extremes, only one of those outcomes is possible right now, and I don't think I like gin that much.

Speaking of the hooch, I am finally, gloriously, 21. This will add a whole new dimension to my blog posts about food, as I will probably also talk about the drink with which I pair it. To finally be legitimized in my understanding of the expression of high culture and the 'finer things' in life is bizarrely liberating. I fail to understand how between Dec 10th, 2007 and Dec 11th, 2007 I gained the knowledge to properly appreciate a 10-year tawny port with my smoked gouda, but who am I to argue with convention?

In that vein, last night was something of a paragon of 'high culture.' My good friend David, a Jesuit seminarian, was in town, and a couple of friends from the apartment across the way joined us for cigars and hot buttered rum. We sat on the back porch to smoke, hands curled around toasty mugs, and listened to Johnny Cash and David's stories. It made for an all-but-perfect evening - had my toes not been numb, I could not have been happier.

Hot Buttered Rum (adapted from a recipe found on Cooks.com)

2 cups vanilla ice cream
2 sticks butter
approximately 1/2 lb. brown sugar
approximately 1/2 lb. granulated sugar
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. cinnamon

Cream together the butter and ice cream. Mix in the sugars and spices. Store in the freezer as long as you like.

To prepare: drop a heaping tablespoon (or to taste) in a mug. Add a shot of rum (I prefer dark rum), and top off with hot water.

Return 2: Electric Boogaloo

2007-12-10T17:33:00.001-06:00

We-he-hell, kids. Here I am again. Almost a month, but at least I'm back.

Things to catch up on:

Trip to Texas
Jonathan Coulton concert
Shooting
Job interview

...I think that's everything. Just so you can call me on it when I don't actually manage to get around to it.

Token

2007-11-17T00:19:00.000-06:00

Woo, another token post!

Tomorrow you will hear about fencing and Texas.

back

2007-11-15T18:04:00.000-06:00

Back from Texas. More when I am not sleep-deprived.

Word Count

2007-11-05T23:33:00.000-06:00

Exhausted. 7,197 words. More than 1000 words behind where I should be; was lazy today. Hope to finish before bed - shooting for 8,337. Writing in half-sleep state; metaphors are strange and imagery is deep and viscous enough to drown. Probably not a good thing.

More on that later.

Results

2007-11-05T14:09:00.001-06:00

HOLY CRAP. SWEET GLORIOUS SUCCESS.

I can die happy. I have made the most delicious thing known to man. This bread... my whole apartment smells of yeast and cinnamon... it's cooked perfectly all the way through... I just can't take the deliciousness. Holy crap. Just... holy crap. I win at everything.

More bread

2007-11-05T13:48:00.000-06:00

I got kind of adventurous with bread today. I used a base recipe that was sort of an amalgam of Homesick Texan and another bread-making site that I found, and substituted whole wheat flour. Also, when I rolled it into a loaf, I sprinkled cinnamon all over it first. We'll see how it turns out... it's in the oven now.

Additionally, bread dough, when it's being mixed, is really pretty evocative of some kind of diseased internal organ. As you add flour to it and stir, you develop these flattened lobes that don't mix because they're floured, but press together, kind of like the lobes of a liver or a lung. And the pasty color and yeasty smell (otherwise pleasant when you aren't thinking about organs) really add to the effect. That said, I wish my liver smelled like fresh bread. I can't imagine it would change any facet of my life at all, or even be noticeable, but it would be a cool thing to know.

Current word count is 6,264, but it's early yet.

Update

2007-11-05T04:04:00.000-06:00

I am not asleep. This is patently unacceptable. Also, no matter what this blog post gives as its time, it is in fact 4:04 AM.

The latest word count is 6,072. I'm only 600 words behind now, and that's pie. I can take care of that tomorrow, and then I'll be "sitting pretty," as Cary Grant said so many times today when we watched His Girl Friday. The wind has kicked up outside, and I can't tell whether it's raining, or just the rustling of dry leaves. The patterns on the binary clock that sits on the bookshelf are mesmerizing; it still says 5:08, because we haven't changed it yet. We didn't know what time it was until after 11:30 this morning.

The living room looks much messier in the dark than it actually is. Lots of things on the floor and on low shelves have little LEDs, and show up brightly. The streetlight comes in through the window, filtered by the tree outside, and makes shadows where there shouldn't be. Wires on the floor show up thick and tangled, and you have to be especially careful not to trip.

I just finished reading John Steinbeck's The Pearl, and I can't get the ending scene out of my head. Might be why I can't sleep. It wasn't a happy ending.

The tree branches are tapping on the windows in the living room, and the red lights of the binary clock are reflected in the glass. It's like something out of a horror movie, all red glowing eyes and ominous sounds, come to eat you. The banging radiators aren't helping. I never knew about radiators, because we don't have them at home. I had never seen one until I came to college. They're nice, in a feline kind of way, in that there's a discrete source of warmth that you can cozy up to if you like. But I'll never be used to the way they gurgle and clank. Nothing that resides in a room where I sleep should make me believe that it's going to blow up someday. As a general rule, I don't like things blowing up in my bedroom, but that hasn't stopped them in the past.

I'm really pretty tired... my brain is shutting down and my eyelids feel heavy, but I know that as soon as I close my eyes, my mind will start running around in circles. I'm using the metaphor of a roulette wheel for this kind of thing in my NaNoWriMo novel. I have yet to decide whether it's a good or a bad thing, but I think that's more in the way I use it than anything. So far it's been working well, even if it is kind of a stupid idea.

I want to make bread again soon. I don't know if I have the yeast, though... I'll need to buy more. I made jalapeno cheese bread for the Texas dinner, and it turned out perfect - except that it wasn't cooked all the way through the middle. It was almost my greatest cooking achievement, and it finally taught me what I'm looking for when I knead dough. Always good experience to have. Ah, well. Try, try again. It's probably the most balanced bread recipe I've found, in that it makes one loaf with not-unreasonable quantities of flour. I might leave out the jalapenos this time, for the sake of simplicity, and just put in cheese.

Anyway, I've been typing now for... 18 minutes. I'm going to venture back to bed and see if I'm any sleepier. Madcap ramblings are good for the psyche, I guess.

Oop, 19 minutes.

Update

2007-11-04T22:53:00.000-06:00

4,703 words! Also, a new site to visit: Westlawn Cemetery. Quite a few famous people are buried there, but the one that caught my attention was Jack Ruby. Awesome.

Update

2007-11-04T18:23:00.000-06:00

I am less than two days' worth of writing behind! I have just surpassed 4,000 words - 4,032 to be exact. 2,635 words to go to catch up... if I can do it before the end of the day, I won't have another 1,667 on top of it tomorrow. Go me!

I am writing lots, HOORAY

2007-11-04T17:04:00.000-06:00

NaNoWriMo is hard work. I'm way behind. Today's goal is 6,667 words, and I'm at 3,603. I've got a lot of time left in the day to catch up, but I don't know if I'll make it all the way. Here's hoping.

The Texas dinner turned out brilliantly. The chili was delicious, the pie was tasty, and I've even got a bunch of leftover tortillas and refried beans (yay!). The attendees enjoyed themselves, and we all sat around drinking Mexican beer and chatting away. That kind of community, just having a mass of people around enjoying each other's company, is something I love. Good food always provides that opportunity, though - people will flock to a free meal. I'm really pleased with how it turned out... I just wish that there had been more chili left. :-) I'll have to make it again sometime. Perhaps in a smaller quantity; I won't be making a huge group dinner again anytime soon. I cooked for several hours the night before, making things that didn't need to be fresh, and woke up at 9am to cook the following day. I finally finished at around 4:30 pm. It was intense, but I really enjoyed the work. Cooking, just for the sake of cooking, provides a surprising sense of satisfaction.

I'm afraid I may be making shortish posts in the near future, due to potential writing fatigue or time constraints. I am, after all, trying to write a novel. But there will be pictures of my travels up in due course, and more travels to come soon, as I visit the Union Stock Yards and head down to Austin to be with my dad for a week. Until tomorrow, dear readership... And wish me luck!

Insomnia

2007-11-02T03:01:00.000-06:00

And so, our heroine lay awake in bed, unable to reach sleep's sweet embrace for the past four f***ing hours.

Ah, well. I guess I can tell you what I've been skimping on lately.

Firstly, my Taste of Texas dinner is coming up this Saturday evening. I'm going to be serving homemade tortillas, cheese biscuits, jalapeno cheese bread (hopefully!), and perhaps cornbread. For the main course is a bowl of Texas chili, along with some sides of refried beans and Spanish rice for the tortillas - and perhaps some homemade salsa, if I can find tomatillos. Finally, the whole thing will be rounded out with homemade pecan pie, that ends up being pretty damn tasty, if I do say so myself. Nowhere near as good as Goode Co.'s, but that goes without saying.

Secondly, in my last post, I mentioned a couple of potentially dicey excursions that Jim is insisting on accompanying me for. I figure I'll give y'all some more details about those.

Union Stock Yards - there's a previous post on here that mostly explains my fascination with this.

South Campus Chilling Plant - I haven't mentioned this one yet. I developed a fascination with it when I would watch the steam rise from it every morning out my dorm room window. Lit by the sunrise from behind, and framing the Seminary tower, it's actually a pretty dramatic sight. I've been down there once before, but didn't photograph. It isn't far, and it won't be an extensive shoot, but it'll be fun.

U.S. Steel South Works - South Chicago and its surrounding neighborhoods near the Calumet river are a fascinating industrial center. The U.S. Steel plant used to be located right down here, but has been razed in favor of new industry and a lakefront park. Before it gets all prettified, I'd like to take some pictures of the industrial remains.

Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal - another new addition that I hadn't mentioned yet. It's a fairly recent canal, built in 1900 to replace the old Illinois and Michigan canal, which is now a national park. I'd like to take a look at that too, but truth be told, I have little interest in prettified history - I like seeing the dirty side.

The Beverly/Morgan Railroad District - Also in South Chicago are a number of historic rail stations along the current Metra line. The place is also a tangle of old and abandoned industrial rail lines. You should be getting a feel by now for what I like to go check out, so let's just say I'll be wandering some roundhouses.

Pullman District - Pullman created a model town outside of Chicago that would be a production center for his luxury rail cars. It's a historic district now, and a lot of the buildings have been preserved. I'm hoping some of the industrial feel and factory style will be left; even if they aren't, it will still be fascinating to see the remains of a major Chicago industry and the source of the riots that may have burned down the White City.

Gary - A booming steel town, it has deflated a bit, leaving a lot of empty buildings for the photographin'. Also, Gary had its own Nike missile base, which is still intact. Chicago grew so fast and has so many concerned denizens that history gets cleaned up pretty well around these parts, and you have to look carefully to find what you want. But in Indiana, much like in Texas, there's a lot of open space, and people are less concerned about cleaning up abandoned sites. So my feeling is that I will find more interesting things here. Also, I have seen pictures of the Nike site, and it looks really cool.

Michigan City - there's a cooling tower here. No, it's not radioactive, it's just a water cooling tower, but it still looks pretty awesome, and I'd like to explore a bit. Also, I trust that Jim can probably guide me to some good old industrial sites, seeing as how it sounds like he has played paintball at most of them.

Well, that's all for this evening, I'm going to see if I can't get some shuteye. Wish me luck.

NaNoWriMo

2007-11-01T19:27:00.001-06:00

Aaaaand, they're off! National Novel-Writing Month has begun, and I am 490 words closer to my 50,000 word goal. I have plenty of time to do this, so if I don't finish, shame on me. I may post pieces, and I'll definitely post word counts as I get closer. This story is semi-autobiographical... they say write what you know; well, we'll see where it gets me.

Jim, worried about my safety, "graciously" "volunteered", by which I mean largely felt obliged, to go with me to some of my more southerly historical-photo-documentation sites - so those will be coming up when he and I have a free weekend together.

And finally, I shall be attempting homemade pumpkin pie, with the little gourd that has been inhabiting our windowsill for the past week. We'll see how this goes!

Awesome - all three of my current pursuits in one post.

Late, sorry!

2007-10-31T23:52:00.000-06:00

Late, I know, I know... There was... stuff. Yeah. Stuff. Not much happened today apart from research, anyway - so, you know, you didn't miss much.

Upcoming trips, based on more research:

Union Stock Yards
Pullman town
U.S. Steel South Works/South Chicago

Exploring

2007-10-30T18:24:00.001-06:00

After yesterday's enthusiasm for history, I decided to go exploring today, with my trusty Minolta SLR. I'm still not entirely sure how I came across it, but I discovered that the Hyde Park area used to be home to a Nike missile installation from about 1955 to the early seventies. These installations ringed major cities during the Cold War, in case the Russians decided to get uppity and launch bombers, or missiles of their own, our way.

The Chicago lakefront had two of these installations, C-40 and C-41. C-40 was located in Burnham Park, but C-41's radar towers and missile magazines were right in my backyard. The radar towers, i.e. the locating equipment, were situated out at Promontory Point. In pictures from the era, this looks really impressive. University students are playing Frisbee on what is recognizably the Point's central field, with the fieldhouse barely visible, and in the background are looming white flying saucers on sticks. I know the Point well and have clambered all over it, and as far as I can tell, little to nothing remains of this installation.

I had never, however, seen the area which used to host the launch sites and missiles themselves. After a lot of research - frantic tabbed browsing and Google Earth scrutiny - I sussed out exactly where the site was. As it turns out, it was on the shore of my lovely Jackson Park Lagoon, right across from the Wooded Island of World's Columbian Exposition fame. Now, this worked out surprisingly well, as there were a couple other items of interest that I had wanted to investigate out that way, so I grabbed the only roll of film I had and set out with my camera slung over my shoulder.

After meeting Jim for a quick lunch at the Florian, I took a walk east, and ducked south around the back of the Museum of Science and Industry. This building used to be the Palace of Fine Arts during the Expo, and was made permanent thereafter. It originally housed the Field Museum, which later moved to its downtown campus. Walking the back side of the museum really immerses you in the history of the location, as it's largely unchanged from what one would have seen in 1893. The boat landing still exists, although populated by a gaggle of geese today. The view toward the south, across North Lagoon and its bridge to the Wooded Isle, hasn't changed either. It isn't difficult to picture this spot surrounded by towering, bright-white Beaux-Arts buildings.

Past the MSI, after a little finagling at the water's edge while trying to find a way off the boat landing, I hit the path that would take me south to the military site. Along this path is a bridge over a small inlet. Not only did this bridge provide me with some nice views of the Lagoon and the Osaka Garden on the Wooded Island, it also happens to be the bridge on which the Blues Brothers confronted the Illinois Nazis. Now there's a valuable piece of history.

Anyway... past the bridge, I found the marked path through the Bobolink Meadow, the Parks District name for the area I was seeking. Perfect. The trail made for a pretty walk, and I ducked off to visit the water's edge several times. As I got towards the southern end of the meadow, I was keeping a closer lookout for signs of civilization. I wasn't expecting much, and not much is exactly what I got. The Parks District has been complaining to the Army Corps of Engineers for a while now that the underground magazines and fuel tanks are causing ecological problems in the lagoon - meaning the Army has done a bang-up job of making sure things look nice and neat up there. Most of the really cool stuff is belowground, and very few signs of a military installation remain. I did, however, locate the pipes that JPAC authorities complained were leaking into the lagoon - sandard corrugated metal, nothing special, but the knowledge that they connected to underground concrete magazines makes them much cooler. A wet shoe and a leaf down my pants later, I had taken a few good snaps, reloaded the camera, and was on my way again.

I followed the path along the shore a bit further, and came to a fairly well-beaten path heading toward the water. Following it, I came across one of the sampling wells that my research had mentioned. Three of them were drilled by the Corps, in the interest of monitoring the water in the magazines. I had managed to stumble across the cover of one of them. This was probably the high point of my expedition.

Other finds included - upon traipsing inland over untracked land - a drainage grate in the middle of a field, old chain-link and barbed wire fencing, and patches of bare concrete. Now, as I said before, these don't really qualify as anything impressive, but to my little archaeologist's heart, they might as well have been Tutankhamun's treasure. I was pleased to find anything at all, mostly because it meant that my researching skills had served me well, and I was looking in the right places. That, and the pure fact that I was looking at history.

On my way home, I made a pilgrimage through the Wooded Island, one of my favorite spots in all Chicago, and stopped off near the north end. In the western half of the lagoon is a funny-shaped tripartite island. I learned recently that this island is actually the replica of the Santa Maria, constructed for the World's Fair and sailed into the lagoon at the opening ceremony, where it was left even after the Fair's end. In the 1930's it burned and sank, and was left to rot, forming the island that is there now. You have no idea how exciting I found this piece of information, dear Reader, so I was compelled to at least take a look.

After my World's Exposition pilgrimage - one that must be completed at least once a quarter, usually just because I get the itch - I plunked myself down at Istria with Of Mice and Men until I got cold, where I actually received a phone call from Jim to make sure I hadn't fallen in a concrete hole and broken my neck. The faith that my public has in my coordination is astounding.

I'll post pictures when I have them, which should be soon. I have five rolls to develop, and need to go to Walgreens anyway for more film. Stock Yards excursion should be coming up this week!