The Real Final Countdown

I can add anything thing to my count- Number of Arabic words I know: 126 (and growing). Also, since we are speed demons, Tasha added a few more sherds for us to draw, which means we have 10 left.

Today we boxed like crazy people. Our awesome worker Ahmed was on hand to help us tie up the boxes. We're at almost 200 boxes of pottery (we've only boxed about half that number this year). So yeah, there's some pottery in that there tell.

Sorry this is such a lame post, but I'm running out of things to talk about! I can't wait to come home and upload all of my pictures for you all, but that day is not today. Instead, how about a really gross picture. I'm warning you, it's not pretty. Look away now if you're squeamish. Everyone good? Okay. This is our fan right above the fridge. I wish I could say that it was only this fan that looked like this, and I wish I could say this was a particularly heavy day. In fact, it's all the fans and this is a particularly LIGHT day.

Yeah, those are flies. And nothing kills them.

 How about we wash that down with an adorable kitten in a libation basin?

Much better.

- Fly Hater, Kitten Lover

I've Got Cats in High Places

I’ve told you about the kitties here before: every morning we feed Patches and the two cats that were her kittens last year, Afrit and Kiri. Patches is clearly taken care of by the guards, as she doesn’t mind getting picked up or petted and has a bit of a belly. She doesn’t stick around long after we feed her in the morning, preferring to see what she can force out of tourists in the temple. Afrit is pretty skittish and will only let me touch him if he’s eating (and even that spooks him a bit). He seems to understand we aren’t there to hurt him, but he still doesn’t trust us enough to do anything more than feed him.

Then there’s Kiri, the excavation favorite. She’s very tiny and comes early in the morning for breakfast. After breakfast, she usually hangs out with us for a while, playing in the pottery boxes or demanding to be petted. She leaves us for a bit, but has learned that we take a break to eat around 10 and has started joining us for that, too (since there’s always spare pita that we give her).

Kiri really seems to enjoy her post-breakfast playtime. Sometimes, she stalks Afrit; sometimes she plays with the gigantic ants that are all over site; sometimes she bats at our bags. And then there are the times she plays on the roofs of the little benches we work next to. The roofs are probably 8 feet off of the ground, yet she’s able to jump and climb up to them with ease. See?

Somehow, even though I’m on the other side of the world, my cats at home must have heard about Kiri and her love of high places. My cat Avery has decided that clearly, the only way to get Mommy back is to show her that Kiri is no better than they are. She, too, can get up to high places.

She doesn’t have claws to hoist herself up, so even though she’s jumping off of the back of the couch, she’s still jumping something like 3 feet in one bound. And she apparently does it with no running head start. At least my husband was able to take all of the knick-knacks off of the bookshelf before she broke anything!

- Cat Wrangler

PS. I kind of really love this picture: