Guys, today was AWESOME! The biggest reason was probably because I got 7 completely uninterrupted hours of sleep last night. Tasha actually had to shake me awake because I didn’t hear the alarm clock. I’m so glad I brought ear plugs to help drown out the noises of the city (prayer calls, dogs barking, random yelling, etc).
It was another fairly lazy day on site. I spent the morning writing up labels for Tasha’s “pottery town”. All of the labels from last year were eaten by dogs, so we needed to re-label all of the pottery mounds with their excavation position information. The great thing was that as we were writing labels, Susan whispers, “Turn around” and lo and behold, the same Edfu kitty that I got to pet at the temple last year had come to visit! I was able to coax her over and give her a handful of cat food, which she gladly inhaled. Of course, she wanted more, so cried and cried and cried, but I didn’t want to make her sick. Plus, there’s only 1 bag of cat food for the whole season. Because I gave her food, she eventually let me pet her. Well, I should say that she let me let her pet herself against me, if that makes any sense. I held out my hand and she rubbed against it for a while, which made me very happy.
After lunch Greg showed us around the site a little more. This was the best part. We have a place in the Old Kingdom area that has a whole door outline preserved! This may not sound very interesting, but you almost never get this kind of thing, and the fact that it’s Old Kingdom and in an area that’s easy to excavate means they might let me do it! We then went into the silo area and he showed us all of the stratigraphy layers in all the different places and where Susan would be excavating. The whole time we were standing on the ancient mud flooring. So cool. Plus, we got dirty! I’m sure I won’t be so excited about this fact in a few weeks, but the fact that I came home yesterday and only needed a shower because I was sweaty was a little disappointing.
I ended the day having Tasha show me the differences in some of the pottery I’ll be drawing. I’m not sure I completely understand it all yet, but I’ll get there.
Now that I’m clean, I’m going to do some laundry (by hand- this will also be another blog post in the future). I’ll probably skip the usual afternoon nap today since I want to be able to sleep tonight again. Last night we discovered the roof is actually pretty nice (aside from the owner’s dogs that live up there- I don’t want to talk about how depressing that is), so we might go up once the sun goes down.
We found out that Skype does work on our stick, though since the internet still isn’t great, Dan and I were kicked off after only about 10 mins. Sorry, babe. It was so nice to talk to him, but after no sleep and a long, tiring day on site, I got really home sick and started crying a bit. After today, I’m much better. I still miss Dan and the kitties a lot, but I am really loving it here... which appears to be a good thing, as Nadine mentioned today that I was now roped into coming back for the next few years... Interesting.
Well, that was today. Tomorrow is our free day, so I’ll probably post a theme blog. I’m thinking food. We start excavation for real on Saturday, so I’ll really be able to comment about excavations then.
- “Sleep makes a lot of things better” discoverer
PS. Since I spend most of my internet allotment checking email and posting blog posts, I don’t really get to keep up with the world, so PLEASE say hello occasionally on here or via email so that I know what you all are up to and what’s going on in the US (are the Cardinals winning?!?). Facebook and twitter posts are usually just quickly skimmed. And if there’s a theme blog you want me to do, let me know!
