Back in this part of town

The field school is over. Like most digs it is changed, not ended, as there is a load of cataloguing and then, God help someone, analyzing to do. A great deal of the (rather small amount of) scholarly analysis I have read seems the way I thought of geometry: they go to a great deal of trouble to state and defend the obvious. I was terrible at geometry and I don't think I have the temperament to enjoy that kind of scholarship. Also as with geometry, however, they can make some fairly solid and impressive edifices I could never begin to build. But I do enjoy walking through, and we need some kind of rationale for me to catalogue the tiny, tiny chert flakes from Maine or the rhyolite flakes from Massachusetts -- all the little points potentially part of a line that leads somewhere interesting.

I like being a non-com: I get to play with the finds and not have to go to graduate school. Unfortunately that lowers the chances of my being paid to do archaeological things even below that of the many anthro majors now working at the Apple Store, for instance.

But apart from the actual scientific/manual/clerical labor side of digging it's a particular social milieu: people who don't mind getting hot and dirty (and the corollary, people who appreciate cool breezes and warm showers and sitting down), people who are self-selected a little weird (sometimes more), and often have a working vocabulary of over 500 words, none of them directly concerned with reality TV. It's another community like fiberarts people, though farther and fewer and certainly grittier between (I imagine the shepherds come close).

So with the end of the dig I am having social withdrawal from the completely unstressful (ha) but rich human interactions of the dig.

There is an oversupply of change in my life at the moment as Sarah is moving to Canterbury, pretty much this weekend. I feel like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz; I knew (and frequently pointed out) that she would be leaving sooner or later, but this is sooner and I feel just awful.

I don't know if Asterix and Mena (the cats) will miss Sarah's kitties or not. Ellie and I will. Local moles, shrews, and frogs will not. The coyote that finally noticed Sarah's chickens will be miffed, but I don't care much about him.

My daughter will be leaving here for sophomore year at college in about three weeks and my son, living in Massachusetts this summer, will be going back to Maryland in about two weeks.

This house is too big. I need a tenant for the self-contained apartment, possibly a new housemate as well -- but that is a much stickier problem, as I don't want to live with someone I don't know and let them have access to my kitchen, my liquor cabinet, or my stash (fiber, of course)(what did you think?) -- and I need a job for the money and the social.

I also need it to stop being so damned hot and humid, and do some honest raining.



This person agrees.