Wind, Wind, Go Away

The biggest enemy to a rasama is not the blinding sun; it’s not the cold temperatures that freeze your fingers; it’s not the adorable kitten distractions. No, because you see, there’s always shade somewhere, you can throw on another layer of clothes, and what can be bad about kitten distractions?

No, the greatest enemy is, in fact, the wind. The damn wind gets under your papers, no matter how many things you have holding it down; it flings pottery sherds off of your table; it blows sand and dirt into your eyes. And there’s nothing that can be done about it but to go home! Going behind the little wall we have only creates dust devils. Twice last week, we’ve wanted to stay late, but couldn’t because the wind got too bad. While it normally doesn’t pick up until about noon, today it started almost immediately on getting on site. And dealing with that for 8 hours is a nightmare, let me tell you.

- Wind hater

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:

Extreme Puzzling

Yesterday I gave you a peek of what Uhu glue can do (yes, Ellie, the same stuff you have lying around your house). Today, I got to use it ALL DAY! Lindsey and I got to sit all day with a bunch of sherds and see if anything could go together. Want to see some of what we ended up with?

This is Lindsey with her pot. There's actually one side that I was working on separately, then I looked at her pot and realized I was actually working on the other half. The colors looked completely different.

While I wasn't able to get the whole profile of a pot like she did, I made up for it by going bananas on not 1, not 2, but 3 pots! The one I'm holding in my right hand is the one I'm most proud of.

These were the prettiest things we were able to make, but we found several more joins between 2 or 3 pieces. All of the pots are 18th Dynasty beer jars, which were really crappily made: the rims aren't very circular, there are the potter's fingerprints all over the place, they have a ton of chaff in them, and don't even think about surface decoration. Unfortunately, while the Uhu is a good strong glue, it's not really made for the super porous surfaces that are these beer jars and we usually had to put on 2 or 3 layers of glue before the sherds would stick together. And now that they are beautiful, I'm sure I'm going to have to draw them.

In other news, today was the last day of excavation. Oh, don't worry, I'm not coming home any time soon, we still have 3 weeks of work left! But today was the last day that we are hiring local men to dig in the Old Kingdom area. Starting Saturday, our guys from Luxor, Greg, Aurelie, and Nadine will move to the Old Kingdom Edfu pyramid to clean it and get it protected so they can really excavate next season. Even though we'll have Lindsey joining us to draw, it's still going to be really quite with just Tasha, Lindsey, Valerie and myself on site every day drawing. We've got a lot to get through and not a whole lot of time, so we'll be staying late most days.

Since everyone is starting to feel the effects of little sleep and the temperature changing, we're all getting a little sick. Hopefully, my sore throat and runny nose are the worst of it, but we'll see. Tomorrow is our day off, so I'll get lots of rest and hopefully be recuperated by Saturday. Insha'allah.

- Puzzle solver and pot putter back togetherer

Sticky Situations

Sometimes they let me play with fun things, like glue. Which means I can make this:

look like this:

We use this fancy stuff:

It's made by the Germans, so you'd think they'd have a better designed bottle than one that doesn't allow any to come out when you need it, then starts to overflow all over the place without stopping. Either way, I do like gluing things together.

- Gluer

So chilly

Remember how I said it's getting cold here in the nights/early mornings? I was in 3 long-sleeved shirts today (and one of them was a fleece!) and I was still cold! Want to know the temperature? Very high 60s. Yeah, this does not bode well from winter in Chicago this year.

- Popsicle

PS. I've been drinking a ton of tea to stay warm. Mmmm hibiscus tea.

Arrrrrrabic

Let’s learn some more Arabic today. My dear friend Lindsey thought it would be fun to send me 23 mucktofs (baskets) of fukhar (pottery). Since it’s coming from a bad layer and we can’t possibly keep everything, we have to go through and figure out what we want to keep and what we want to through away. The throw-aways are known as zabella (trash). There were 22 mucktofs of zabella fukhar. I’m not thrilled by this. My fanana (overseer, aka Tasha) was glad I went through them all instead of her. I'm a trooper.

- Zabella-chucker

PS. Having some internet issues again (our brand new stick died!)- if I don’t post for a day, don’t worry!

PPS. I found out yesterday that Rosetta Stone only has Modern Standard Arabic! I need a system that will teach me Egyptian colloquial (it's completely different). Arrrgh. Anyone know of a good language-learning system? I need something that will speak it to me, and not just have me read from a grammar.

Hello, Everyone!

I just took a look at my stats, and I'm amazed! So amazed that I'm giving you a double post today! Here are the page views I've had by country:

United States 788

Egypt 80

Italy 39

United Kingdom 27

Russia 21

Canada 18

Germany 10

France 10

Australia 4

Luxembourg 3

Hello, people from Russia, Luxembourg, Germany, and Canada (well hello to you others, too, but I know who many of you are). I had no idea I had people from so many countries checking in on me (seriously, people from Russia- who are you? how did you find me? welcome!). Hope you're liking it!

For those of you with a technical bent (read: Peter Jerde and my husband), 35% of you use Safari (Firefox if a close 31%, followed by IE at 16% and Chrome at 14%). 47% of you use Windows, and I must express my condolences. 36% of you have seen the light and use Macs, while 11% of my views have been from iPads (hi, Mom!).

So glad you are all staying with me and are enjoying the blog! I can't believe the blog I set up so that I wouldn't have to send "I'm ok" emails to my parents, in-laws and husband has meant over 1000 page views! Thanks everyone!

- Grateful blogger and statistician