Closer to Harrisburg

They sell mate in bottles. I can't believe this stuff is legal.


That shirt was designed by Chris, the same friend who made the hat I'm wearing. It's the logo for her Roller Derby scrimmage team. I finally went to see her play last Friday. Or something...I don't really remember. I was mostly asleep because I'd already been out in the field for two days by that point and I was (and still am) only barely staying ahead of artifact inflow. I was tired. On the plus side, Chris' mom had made popcorn balls to sell & it turned out that they were the PERFECT field food. They use peanut butter as the lipid rather than regular butter, so it's like a punch in the face of quick energy, and it won't spoil if you leave it in your car in the sun. PLUS it has protein!!! I got really excited and ended up purchasing a total of something like 12 of them. Now, I admit that I may have consumed four of those in quick succession....make your own judgement. However, I was not ridiculously stoned as everybody proceeded to think I was. My insane excitement over finding a fab field food was not helping my case.

I don't remember if I mentioned on here that for the month of July I am running the field lab for the Foothill College Local Archaeology field school. Actually, I'm employed as a general factotum for the guy who's subcontracted the dig and my job isn't going to end when the field school does, and it's easiest to just refer to myself as "the lab". It's complicated. My ability to follow a line of reasoning like that is pretty much the reason I have my job.

Be Seeing You

Boil Update:

This weekend at the site, I was off on a jaunt (aka "going out to survey potential datums for the total station") [we will not address the confusing use of "datum" here. In short, when using the laser theodolite (that's the other name for a Total Station) one speaks of data points as "points" and the origin is the "datum."]with two of my students. The hilarity of the  hike is worth another post entirely, but suffice to say that we all learned something. And we did find a beautiful point that has incredible line-of-sight. You know what else is confusing? We're mostly digging up the remains from the production of projectile points, and we tend to refer to the finished pieces as just "points". WHY MUST EVERYTHING HAVE THE SAME NAME, BRUCE?!

Anyway, early on in the adventure we encountered some surprisingly fresh coyote droppings surrounded by distinct tufts of hair and containing chunks of a skull and a mandible.

Student: "That looks like rabbit hair."

My Brain: "If we can see the cheek-bones [that's not what they're called, but I'm not going to use words like "rostrum" here] of this thing, if it IS a bunny, they should be lacy-looking (technical term is "highly fenestrated". "Fenestrated" just means "with lots of little holes,"so highly fenestrated is...well...lacy-looking.)

Me: *Digs into poop with some sticks and extracts the jawbone and skull frag. [Though the poo was fairly fresh, the bones weren't actually covered in shit, so don't go all freaking out here. In fact, they still had little fragments of tissue attached. I bet their high fat content keeps them pretty separate from the other digestive stuffs]* I just so happened to have a collecting bag in my pocket.

My Lips: "ALL TEH PREVIOUS INFORMATION that went through my brain"

Guys, I've turned into my mom. Except without as much Latin. Does this make me a Protestant scientist? DISCUSS.