four teacups

This one, my daughter turned up. It is very practical, as she and I differ in our estimation of the proper amount of milk for a satisfying cuppa. Sadly, the price is breathtaking.

This one is very pretty, though it enshrines a low standard of tea prep (loose tea would look less attractive and also less iconic).

There is also this one, which is 16 oz but is melamine and not microwave-safe, a deal-breaker.

And this one: which seems to be almost the same as this one, except the latter is cheaper and comes with a latex sleeve, albeit one with a coffee bean on it. I could cope with that, and possibly turn the sleeve inside out. It is available at its higher cost at the MFA gift shop in Boston. I wish they made a larger size.

not bad

So Doug decided he needed to move out of Concord. Since Paul was never here, I asked him to consider moving his stuff out. He is, bit by bit. So far it as been AMAZINGLY angst-free. I still have a pet 18-yr old, Katie, but she isn't any trouble and will watch "Castle" with me.

Mind you, all of Paul's stuff is not gone, and there is one strip on the outside of the house I wish he would finish, and Lord only knows who will plow this winter. We'll see.

I am, at least for the moment, employed. All this time I have not done any contract archaeology, which is when you work for an outfit who helps whoever is building something comply with state or federal regulations. The main reason is that I was certain I was in completely inadequate shape for it. This may still be true, but there is a sort of local firm who was desperate for people to help dig test pits before the ground freezes. So for two out of three days last week I was the youngest on a crew of three, which was funny. I may be the youngest on a crew of five or six next week, as Vicky Bunker is persuading as many members of SCRAP as are at loose ends or retired whom she can to come dig for money. I said I hadn't been paid for Archaeology since the Reagan administration, but I think I left Canterbury before he was inaugurated, so it may have been Carter.

We are making sure there is nothing important in places along an existing line of huge power poles where they intend to sink more power poles. Two of the three days last week were idyllic, with some sun and t-shirt weather -- sifting and shovelling into the screen warm one up quite nicely. Yesterday it was more sullen and cloudy, but it was still not too cold and not raining at all. Heaven. There are pictures here.

I am in a position to say there is nothing there important culturally, but the wintergreen and sweet fern smell very nice. As well as the usual birds I have seen a brown creeper, an ominous-looking hawk making an ominous squawk, and a surprised and very lucky red-backed salamander.

You may have heard of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day? Since my daughter mentioned it sometime last year, I have become very spoiled and live on this stuff (a couple of years before that Ellie and I stopped showing signs of gluten intolerance. It's been a very great joy to eat and make bread again). They have a new book out, Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, with recipes for partial whole wheat (about half the flour is whole wheat, okay? not a paradox) and also for gluten-free bread. I wanted to what the GF bread was like, and it was quite tasty and a little strange looking, though I imagine if I practice I'll get more confident messing aoround wiht the recipe. It contains 4 eggs. Even I, with my notorious lightheartedness about refrigerating eggs, feel dubious about having raw egg batter sitting up to two weeks in my refrigerator. But Herzberg and Francois are not careless people and no one seems yet to have been poisoned.

So if you take some of the dough and roll it out (ideally between two sheets of parchment paper or two of those silicon cookie sheets), and spread it with sauteed garlic and lots of chpped parsely, you can roll it up and let it rise and it's delicious. If you have something not unlike a bunch of chickpeas cooked with garlic and onion and whathaveyou, you can dump a spoon of it onto a sheet of the dough and re-invent samosas or calzones or Cornish pasties. Just let it rise half an hour or so first.

It makes great lunch for digging with.

October, really? (food and archaeology)

The wine making continues to go bad ly the latest batch is not too grapey, much, but it has a nice bitter metallic taste that ... well, perhaps the wine to have when you've already had more than one. Or maybe four.


I bought a $40 dehydrator (we will rush past the one I got on Ebay for $15, which worked when I got it and for about 5 minutes afterwards). I bought it because I envied Sarah's dried tomatoes. They taste like a jolt of a really good summer day. I made some, and they were good. The dried apple slices, I am telling you, are very very dangerous. They taste so good.Then you realize you have ate a) half a dehydrator's worth in one sitting (36 hrs depending on how thick you slice them -- I like them about 3/8" raw and dried to bone texture); b) all the fiber you will ever need; c) you need a bathroom. But they taste so good.

Then I made beef jerky. I used Alton Brown's recipe. I did not use the liquid smoke, and I halved the red pepper flakes. It was SUPERB. The next batch I used round steak (I think, something cheaper that looked unfatty) and off-brand Worcestershire sauce, and a large glug of vinegar, and it was pretty darned good. The worst problem s the smell of Worcestershire sauce (TM) makes me drool almost uncontrollably. Jerky tastes really good with dehydrated tomatoes, which is why I have none left. It is not a way to cut down on your sodium. It probably isn't very cheap, unless you were eating a good deal of the packaged stuff (and the homemade has fewer nitrates and you have some idea where the meat has been).

It's delicious. People at Octoberfest ate it up. really.

(What a clever segue to archaeology!)

Octoberfest is a five-day weekend at the beginning of October when, for the past seven years, we have gone to the Potter site and dug up stuff. Last year we mostly dug dry holes (50 x 50 cm shovel test pits), trying to find limits of the site. It was still better than real life, but kind of boring. This year we dug more on the blocks (meter or more rectangles, trowelled in 5 cm. levels over a 50 cm quad) we started this summer. I found hardly anything. This was okay for a couple of reasons. Most saliently, I actually dug for perhaps 20 minutes, all told. I did a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing getting people's names on their timesheets and taking pictures of stuff. It was a good year for stuff. Since I found a fluted almost-finished point last July I am feeling less like I have to find EVERYTHING, and watching the Quebeccoise girl find a point base was pretty soul-satisfying. Pictures are up on Facebook of some of the people.

It was cold. Not really really cold, like the year some of us set fire to our gloves trying to warm our hands over a Coleman lantern, but at times brisk. It was not often sunny. I would have been warmer had I had the brain cells to dig deeper into my duffle bag, but I was fine. The Octoberfest hoodies were one of Dick's best inspirations ever. We were warm (as long as we didn't get too wet) and we looked really scary.

So it's October? (Personal junk)

Okay, I'll try to do better. It is possible unemployment is doing a job on my morale. In fact, it is. The Army sends me spam every morning. I don't think a 53-year old chick not in the best of shape is really their favorite, but perhaps I should take them up on it. They are in portsmouth, an hour and a half away. Monster alternates between sending me jobs for people with three years of banking experience (I have none) or a high school diploma and no police record (actually, I have neither of these either) in towns seventy miles away that will last for a month.

People I respect with actual fresh useful job experience in real fields are also having trouble and I feel bad about a) feeling bad and b)not having solid experience and qualifications (like the Army, perhaps?). And being fat, divorced, 53, and pointlessly verbal. And kinda bitter sometimes.

My health is pretty good, as is that of my family, my cats, and my friends. Except for cats, I wish I had more of all of these (one of the things that worries me about my mental health is that I DON'T want another kitten. This is like, mature. I don't trust it.).

Paul and his daughter are still my tenants. Paul still does not have any construction jobs and is holding things together with his referee gigs. His daughter is counting the days till she can move out, which will unfortunately include getting better jobs. Living with a teenager is somewhat softened by not being related to her. Human beings have a rough time navigating toward adulthood (just look at me). It can be tiring for those around them.

I should be more worried

Okay. Paul can't get a job, so he can't get Katie a car. Or pay rent.

Katie has two jobs, which pay together slightly more than enough to fill the utterly inefficient gas tank of Paul's truck.

On the plus side, it's early autumn. Sarah is in the midst of Putting-By the Harvest.
Here is a vignette from last week:
I was talking to myself when Sarah called and said she was leaving work early and would appreciate company while she made peach butter. I went to Canterbury. Sarah's entire apt REEKED of basil, which was kind of nice. There was raspberry vinegar soaking in a bowl on the table, a bowl of measured pickling spices, several jars of cranberry mustard, a bowl of sliced green tomatoes to become chutney and a counterfull of canning jars (no eye of newt. She likes newts). Oh , and a sinkful of blanched peaches waiting to be peeled.

It was great fun to watch. I finished a sock and made the instep of another sock and spun for a couple of hours. She put a slew of little jars of pesto into the freezer, peeled the peaches, sliced the peaches, figured out the she needed to have weighed the peaches since her recipe was by weight rather than volume (she had 2 and a half recipes of Amaretto Peach Butter), put the peels into a huge pile of to-be-composted (including the bodies of several huge basil plants. She got them from someone who grew it to look nice in big pots but who hated pesto). Measured sugar and water and started the peach butter, got the bread dough out to rise, whipped up some simple pea soup, and asked sadly if I knew how to get the labels off jars. Beer people use bleach and water and she found soaking them in that for awhile and then using steel wool produced a desirable result. I warned her her nails and cuticles would be toast. But she was delighted because she been buying pesto in cute little jars for a year and they were canning weight jars and she had despaired that she would ever get the labels off. She had about 20, which meant she had enough jars to put up the green tomato chutney and the peach butter without begging jars from her mom.

Then we went across the road and scrumped apples. "Scrumped' is the British term for doing to fruits and veg. what you would be doing when you 'poach' a rabbit, and she loves the word. She estimates she and her friends have scrumped about 200 pounds of fruit from one row of peach trees.

We went to one apple tree and she and I had 3 shopping bags full of large cooking apples in about ten minutes. These were only the low-hanging fruit, from a tree that is not pruned or fertilized or sprayed or anything. They are lumpy , some of them, but not all that bad-looking. Another person from the village was there and got about another bag of the same apples because he and his wife have been coming to the same tree for ten yeas and it makes the world's best pies. He believed it was called Wolf River. We met two very old lesbians who were scrumping herbs. The moon rose, huge and very picturesque. Another person with some authority in the village showed up and suggested we would need to weigh the cars to assess how much we owed for the apples, but he was only joking and had been telling people to pick the damn peaches already for weeks. Sarah had been feeling guilty so she felt better, and I explained to everyone that she had bootlegger's springs in her car. Since they were all Very Old, everyone but Sarah agreed this was a great idea for smuggling fruit. Sarah had not heard about bootlegging springs.No appreciation for our nation's heritage.

We went back to her apt and she put most of a jar of aging applesauce on her fruit leather sheet on the dehydrator, and I finished the jar. Then I got to scrape the bottom of the peach butter pot when she transferred it to a smaller pot with a thicker bottom, and told her my secrets for removing burned-on from pans (soak for 12 hours, then scour with lots of table salt and a scrunched up piece of tinfoil. Knowing this means I am very popular at field school, where the pots are cheap and the cooks are doubtful).

She baked the bread and eventually we had pea soup with homebaked bread and home-shaken chive butter and I ate too much and staggered home.

The next day Miranda (I have a new boarder from the same organization as gave me Rob and Bryn last December) and I made a vast amount of pizza, while she made the first from-scratch pie of her life (a thing of perfect beauty) and I put more than 5 pounds of strange-looking apples through the food processor to make apple wine. Today I am hoping to make an apple tart for the official opening of the 2009-10 Archaeology Lab Season, and also to dehydrate some apple slices. I have a gallon bag of dehydrated peach and gave my parents a bag of frozen peaches (I still have one and half bags in the freezer and two gallons of peach wine).

I shall write more about the socks mentioned in passing but I need to go make an apple tart.

Domestic disorder. And hummingbirds.

I still haz it. It's complicated. At the moment it is not only too hot to cook, but also too hot to try to do the kind of 'find a place for everything and put it there' cleaning that is necessary from a) tearing up the kitchen (and the downstairs bathroom, and the dining area) and b) moving out of the kitchenette (and there is plenty of 'normal life wear and tear' in the loom room and the study area and and and...

The previous downstairs bathroom was a small, ill-designed room with a non-functioning showerstall and a toilet placed so that no one ovver a size 8 could feel comfortable there. Because of the way the house is built, the placement of the toilet and the basin was foreordained, so the new version has the toilet and the basin clinging to the left wall. It's now all very white, "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste" (guess what image I can't find on Google?) white, and I think I will put an ancient wall-painting on the wall. Started out thinking dolphins, pondering Ancient Egyptian garden, trying not to make tacky pun and do Minoan Throne Room.

We shall not speak about the garden. But black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's Lace look great, and as an archaeologist-type I like having th house surrounded by luxuriant jungle vegetation.

ONe of the few things I have been faithful about is bird-feeding. I have at least two resident Indigo Buntings, and at least four (probably more) hummingbirds. The hummingbirds are mostly this year's chicks, the size of medium shrimp, and they talk a lot. They chirp when they fight and they mutter themselves afterward. Here was an odd interaction from last week:

The males do a kind of territorial/mating thing wherein they make big (like 12+ feet) arcs back and forth, with aeolian effects from the feathers. It reminds me of watching the big swinging Flying Boats from carnivals. The other day, a male (I am pretty sure he had a red throat) was trash-talking either a young female or a young male at the feeder. But instead of the usual diving and open dogfighting, these two were flying no more than a yard from one another and the feeder. It looked like they were flirting, and even more when the aggressor did a few passes of modified Flying Boat, with an arc only a yard across. Then the one on the feeder, instead of another mildly evasive manuever, lifted up from the feeder perch and sat on the aggressor's beak. Looking smug. She and the sat-upon bird stayed in the air for a moment, falling slowly onto the porch, and after the one on the bottom had flapped a little the one on its beak let go. But they went on sparring for several more minutes.

I love them. I'll miss them when they go south.

Not dead, no, really

Though I will be if the heat doesn't break. If only because I don't want to cook because it's about 85 in here and I have no food. (oo! Granola!)

Actually last week I made Ugly Instant Cobbler: take some so-so peaches and cut them in to a bowl. Add granola to taste or texture. Add date sugar and top with yoghurt. Here's how it becomes ugly: microwave it for a few minutes. The yoghurt curdles. The whey soaks into the granola. The peaches poach a bit. The date sugar enhances whatever peachy goodness they have. No cooking vessel to wash. No fat unless you count whatever they put in the granola.

I went to field school. I got the coughing crud. I had to go to bed at eight pm for most of two weeks and could not join in the beers at night because it seemed to make me relapse. This was boring. My block was the only one on the dig with psychodrama (well, we had the most, anyway). My block went crazy and found enough scrapers to make me almost blase. I found a fluted point, which really does take some of the 'I wish I ever found anything decent' pressure off. I am trying to make a narrative. An illustrated one becomes too large to e-mail almost at once. Flickr, I suppose?

Only before I could make the narrative I wanted to get the photos in some order, since the last year or so Dick has decided it would be fun to have pictures of the relatively important finds as they are found, ideally in situ with a signboard. These take place before the object gets a bag number, and way before the object gets a catalogue number. And even once I became diligent about keeping a photo-log (phlog?), I was apparently on crack. I know this, because I have the pictures and I have a copy of the phlog. And except for the few times I frightened one of the diggers into getting me the bag number it's hard to figure out which picture goes with which object. Even if you have a signboard with all the coordinates, if you don't have the list of bag numbers you're lost.

This became an obsession. Now, of course, I want to alter the very fabric of space and time itself and get the photo numbers into the computerized database. We'll see.

It didn't rain today, but we have only seen a scrap of blue sky in the time we've been here. We're afraid someone stole the mountain across the road from the cottage because we haven't seen it. And the grocery store had a big fight with its landlord, who wanted too much rent, so now it's closed and we get all our food from a SuperWalMart. And the only tortillas they have are wheat. This was particularly poignant since I was making Cheap-Ass Chicken Enchiladas, containing only the finest not-homemade foods (Rotisserie chicken, boughten tortillas, canned enchilada sauce, and pre-shredded cheese. We had salsa, sauteed onions,chopped lettuce and tomatoes, cilantro to garnish and coleslaw (homemade, I suppose, in that I only had a dreg of salad dressing and stirred up the rest. My team (Andrea and Casey) were GREAT and all of us are exhausted.

Other than that things are pretty good. The place we're testing is testing out sterile (two flakes in about 25 shovel test pits) and tomorrow we're supposed to open up some larger (Multiples of square meters) areas. It will be a different kind of hard work. Today I was teamed with a really nice 17-yr old girl (Erin) who worked quite hard. So did I. The first STP had about 20 cm of nasty hard stuff with rocks and the second one is much softer but has a pile of (40 years ago) bulldozed upon topsoil on top. We've gone down 90 cm and keep getting perfectly obvious signs of not being very far below the real surface. We hope we'll finish it early.