Dog Days and Square Holes

Anti-spam campaign

I am really tired of my fun knitting group being clogged with spam about lingere, face creams, cameras, horoscopes, and porn.  I tried sending a message to our group leader, Kristine, but she apparently isn't even on Vox anymore.  I don't know how to get rid of these people myself, so I just started hitting the "flag as offensive" button on every spam posting on here.  I don't know if that will make a difference, especially if I am the only one doing it, but I thought I might get the rest of you out there to do the same, and maybe Vox can do something for us.  Anyway, that's my campaign -- tell Vox that spammers are offensive, even if it's just an ad for face cream!  *laugh*

An Honest Woman

So, I know it has been a while since I posted a blog, but things have been very busy around here in the last few weeks.  I went to work as normal on Monday, June 21st, but after work T and I picked up my mom and dad at the airport.  A few other friends came into town that day, including H and K with their two little girls.  We all had dinner that night at a tepanyaki restaurant (Japanese steak house where the chefs cook on a large griddle at the table and give a very entertaining show), and had a good time talking and hanging out.  Then I had the rest of the week off work.  My sister came into town on Tuesday and stayed with us all week.  Most of my cousins and some close college friends arrived on Friday, which was my 35th birthday.  They had a surprise party that my sister organized, and while I had started to suspect that something was up, I was genuinely surprised when I walked into a conference room at my parents' hotel and found food, drink, friends and family waiting for me, and dozens of embarassing photos of me all over the walls!  Saturday morning I went and had a manicure and pedicure with my mom, sister, one cousin, and my two favorite college roommates (one from undergrad, one from grad school).  Then we had a huge dinner Saturday night with all kinds of friends, family, and out of town guests.  On Sunday, I had a stylist come over and treat me to a makeover where she did my makeup and styled my hair.  My sister, mom, and girlfriends came over too, along with K and her two girls, and we all had a great time primping and getting dressed up.  Then we went out to a local country club and had a photo shoot, and T and his buddies met us there and had some photos taken too.  Finally, I met T and all our family and friensd outside on the lower lawn.  T and I stood up in front of everyone with a lovely woman who read a very nice speech, and she had T and I participate in some of the speaking, which she coached us through.  When we were done, we stayed on the lawn for a little while taking more pictures with all our friends and family.  Then we went inside the clubhouse, had a really nice catered dinner, and then a party!  There was an ice cream sundae bar, some toasts, lots of music and dancing, and outside we had fun stuff for both the kids and grownups to do, like make beaded necklaces, decorate foam refrigerator frames, and play in a blowup bounce house.  I got to see tons of friends that I haven't seen in ages, and there was a big cake, and we all had a really great time.  When the party was over, T and I took a nice towncar into Salt Lake City, and we stayed in the Phantom of the Opera room at a local inn overnight.  There was a big tub to soak in, romantic candles, a bottle of champagne, and a bunch of Hershey kisses.  The next morning, we discovered that our friends had decorated my car, which they were nice enough to drop off in the parking lot at the inn for us.  Most of our friends and family flew home on Monday morning, and my sister and parents flew out that night, after we all had a final dinner together.  All in all, it was a very busy, fun, tiring, and exciting week!

Yes, all that to say, T and I got married!  And, like most people who have lived together before marriage have told me before, once the wedding is over and everything dies back down, it really doesn't feel that different being husband and wife.  We are back to our old schedule and our normal lives, and it all feels like it went too fast.  I was sure that I was going to cry at the wedding -- I cry at everyone else's, why not cry at my own?  But my dad was in tears, and T was in tears, and for their sakes I stayed cool and calm and smiling.  Our vows went by quickly, and while I wouldn't say that I was in a fog, or that it didn't feel real, promising to spend the rest of my life with the man I loved didn't feel like a huge, momentous moment.  I have been intending to spend the rest of my life with this man for the past 3-plus years, so announcing that fact in front of a crowd wasn't a difficult or scary thing to do.  And I didn't dance as much as I had expected to, simply because the beading at the top edge of my dress was scraping the insides of my arms raw.  I didn't spend a lot of time being romantic with T, because we were both trying to get as much time as we could with all of the friends and family that had come, often from long distances, to share our day with us.  I did bounce in the bounce house, and we got some great photos of that.  I did make a necklace and a photo frame, and I kept one of the coloring books that we had for the kids.  But it just seemed like, after 8 months of planning, 8 hours of celebration went by in the blink of an eye.

Am I disappointed?  Not in the least!  First off, we definitely achieved our main goal: to have a wedding celebration with as many friends and family as possible, and to make sure that everyone ate well and had a really good time.  Everyone told us it was one of the nicest, most fun wedding they had ever been to.  Out of town guests were impressed with the view of Utah Lake and the Wasatch Mountains, which is what I fell in love with as soon as we saw the place.  Local coworkers were impressed by how kid-friendly and fun it was, with the ice cream, crafts, and the bounce house.  And if I think of things that could have gone differently or better -- the cake was pretty but not stunning, the wishing tree didn't get finished the way I'd wanted, the ceremony was set up so that half the guests were in the sun -- I never intended for it to be a "perfect" day.  In addition, there were some surprises that made things better than I had expected -- our groomsmen putting on an elaborate pantomime during the ceremony when it was time to turn over the ring, all the photos that our photographers were willing to take and have fun with, and a great, spontaneous group dnace session to "Shout" that will never be forgotten! -- so I have absolutely no disappointments or regrets about how everything turned out.  It was an amazing, wonderful, fun wedding!

But I guess, now that the excitement has died down, I am a little thrown by the fact that everything really does feel the same as before.  Every once in a while, I have to remind myself that, both legally and morally, our situation really has changed.  I run up against that every time I refer to T as "my husband."  I keep calling him my fiancee, and almost corrected a coworker who asked what my husband did for a living.  Why is learning to call him my husband so much more difficult than making the transition from boyfriend to fiancee?  Maybe because our day-to-day lives haven't really changed.  And now I have a new name!  I have to remember that when I introduce myself, and I am still working on getting a new signature that feels natural to me.  But it's not yet officially my name, since I haven't gone to the Social Security office or DMV yet to make the changes.  So in some circumstances, like this week when I used Worker's Compensation to have the ankle I sprained during survey looked at, I am still the old me.  It's a little confusing, to be honest, and that may help make this transition a little less real, too.

And maybe the main reason that I am having mental trouble with this transition is, marriage was never an end goal for me.  As a little girl, I didn't play marriage, or dream about my wedding.  I am not one of those women who started looking for a husband instead of a boyfriend as soon as I reached a certain age.  Sure, I wanted to be married, and sure, I wanted kids, but I only wanted them with the right person.  And I have always tended towards relationships, over dating and casual sex.  It is easy for me to commit to someone I care about, and I have often assumed a certain level of exclusivity right from the start, even when the guy I was starting with wasn't thinking that way.  *smile*  So what I have always looked for is a partner, someone to share my life with, not someone to put a ring on my finger.  And I found that partner in T a long time ago -- the wedding was just a formal way of announcing to all of our loved ones what we have intended from day one of our relationship.

So what is the point of all this musing on my part?  I'm not really sure.  I guess I am just surprised that now, two weeks after the wedding, I am still a little surprised to realize that I am married, my name starts with Mrs., and that this makes a difference to everyone around me.  Because I'm just continuing down the same path that T and I started out on more than three and a half years ago.  And we are loving every step along the way, even when it gets rocky or steep, because we have each other to help ourselves along.

Now when I become a mom -- that's a transition I don't think I will have any trouble noticing.  *smile*

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Show me your spring?

I know that I am late on this Quest, but I wanted to post these pics anyway.  While it should be summer here already, it still feels like spring -- we had our last snow on May 23rd!  We get a few warm days, followed by rain, but the trees have leafed out and the flowers are blooming.

Here are some photos from a little over a week ago, when I was doing some field work. I was digging an old bottle dump, which extended under a sidewalk.  In order to try and date the construction of the sidewalk, a coworker and I walked the whole street, looking for a stamp or an etched-in date.  No such luck, but I got to see the remains of some beautiful yards, which have been abandoned and overgrown over time.  I only had my cell phone with me (isn't that always my excuse? *smile*), but these were a few decent shots that I got.

One house had this amazing bush, I don't know what it is, but the flowers on it are both red and yellow, and look like they are in the rose family.  I couldn't resist the vibrant colors and took lots of pictures of this one:

red and yellow

one bush

overgrown

Then I passed a house with a huge tree out front, and the back yard had been taken over by these purple globe flowers.  The way the sunlight hit them, they looked like they were glowing.  I loved the sense of a secret, magical space in the back yard, but I couldn't get the shot from the front yard, since the lighting difference was so extreme the back yard was just washed out.  So I went in under the canopy, and tried to use the edge of the leaves to preserve that feeling of secrecy.

the secret

Digging square holes again

So, this Tuesday, I was back at work after the long Memorial Day weekend, just going through my regular routine, adding site data to an Excel table.  I had 30 minutes until lunch and was taking it easy.  Then the owner of the company walked in.

"You don't have any field gear with you, do you?  Probably not.  I really should have told you..."

I opened my desk drawer to reveal my yellow reflective vest (with pencil, Sharpie, toilet paper and compass already in the pockets) and a ball cap, and admitted that I had my second-best pair of boots in my trunk.  And my predecessor had left two hard hats on the bookshelf.  A good archaeologist is always prepared.  And, therefore, I was sent out into the field to dig.

mattock pick

Most people think all archaeologists do is dig.  (I was in Nevada doing nothing but hiking through the desert for about 5 months before I broke T of the habit of telling people I was on a dig.)  But, to be honest, digging is a smaller part of what we get to do.  We spend a lot of time surveying, and a lot of time in the lab or at the computer analyzing and writing up what we find, but it had literally been 3 years since I have put a shovel in the soil.  So I was pretty happy to discover that my dig kit was still in the trunk, and to go out and do one of my favorite kinds of archaeology.

construction site

I followed my coworkers down to the river, and went to see what we would be digging.  The city was rehabilitating a section of the river and the bike path that went along it, so my company had been monitoring that project for several months.  Basically, we wanted to be there while they worked, in case they found anything unusual.  An archaeologist stands and watches the guys with backhoes and excavators and whatnot work, and occasionally has the excavator dig a trench in a particular spot so we can see what is below the surface there before it is completely obliterated.  And what we had been finding all along the river was trash.  Big dumps, little dumps, but lots and lots of old trash that had been buried.  There are tons of little abandoned houses in the area, and before there was trash pickup, people used to just throw things in their yards, or burn it, or bury it.  So that's what we had been finding.

bottle dump

Just outside of the area where the construction was going on, someone else decided to use the long holiday weekend to go bottle hunting.  And did they find the motherload!  There were several test pits, and one huge hole at the end of a sidewalk that was filled with nothing but broken bottles.  And, since it had been disturbed and could be destroyed by more bottle hunters in the future, we needed to salvage what information we could possibly get about it.  So we were going to dig.

Archaeologists like to dig square holes, because it helps us quantify how much we are finding.  Let's say, you have a dump that is 50 feet across.  We are not going to excavate the whole thing.  But if we excavate two holes that measure 1 meter on each side, and count what we find in each of those holes, then we can start talking about the volume of stuff we find within each cubic meter. We also like to dig in layers that are all the same thickness.  That way, if you have multiple layers that were deposited at different times, you will see different artifacts in the 10-20 centimeter layer than you see in the 30-40 centimeter layer, which can help you tell how long a site was used for and by whom.  And everything that we dig out of one of these square holes, called a unit, gets put through a mesh screen so that we can get the dirt out and see what else is there. 

J screening

In this case, we decided to start by digging a trench, 2 meters long but only 50 centimeters wide.  That way we could look at a wide cross-section of the dump, but the narrower trench would be easier to finish quickly.  All good, in theory.  But 50 cm isn't much wider than, say, your average pair of hips.  And when you are digging through a bottle dump, you end up with glass shards sticking out of the sides of your trench.  Not much fun.  Plus, there was very little dirt mixed in with the glass, so there was nothing to hold everything together.  So you are trying to dig straight down, with straight walls, and make sure nothing from layer 10-20 cm ends up in layer 30-40 cm, but every time you brush the side of the trench, the wall caves in and glass showers down to the bottom.  And we didn't hit the bottom until we had dug a meter (over 3 feet) below the surface.  Not very fun.

Digging is hard work, so we worked in pairs and took turns, digging one level and then screening the next.  But even when you are screening it's hard work.  You are lifting large buskets of broken glass up to waist height and running them through a screen with your hands (we all wore gloves).  Even with gloves, I ended up with a few fingers wrapped in bandaids.  Also, one of the goals was to estimate the number of bottles in our units.  Since you can break a single bottle into a million pieces, just counting the pieces of glass wouldn't work.  But each bottle has only one top, and one bottom.  Add to that the fact that there are differences in lip styles and maker's marks to help you identify and date the bottles, and counting these guys was the way to go.  We screened every bucket, pulled out the bases and the tops (aka "finishes"), and when we were done with each level we tallied the number of pieces we had, divided up by glass color, mark, and other distinguishing features.  It took for-freaking-ever.  And there was absolutely no change in the kinds of bottles we found from top to bottom.

M digging in a 1x.75 m unit

Once our first trench was finished, we needed to know more about how the bottles changed as we moved across the dump, as well as where the dump ended.  So we staked out a line that ran perpindicular to the first trench, and started excavating every-other meter along that line.  We extended the width of these units from 50 to 75 centimeters, just so we could move around in them a little as we dug.  Fortunately, these units got shallower the further we got from the first trench.  This is what you would expect, if someone dug a shallow pit to dump all of these bottles into.  The sides taper upwards gently from the center, and so we have to dig a little less each time.  To make things go a little faster, we also decided to dig in 20 cm levels.  But we still saw essentially the exact same bottles all the way to the edge of the dump.

finished unit

Even once we were finished with those units, we only had a sense of where one edge of the dump was, relative to a point somewhere in the middle.  As I said, our first trench was right up against the end of a sidewalk, so we couldn't really keep going straight out the other side.  What we did instead was dig a series of small test pits, basically just a hole big enough around to get your shovel into.  We used these to see how far down the glass started, and how far away from the trench it went.  As it turned out, it was a really big dump, and we had to dig five or six of these little test pits in three different directions to figure it all out.

can you see them on the roof?

All of this work took the better part of four days.  The last few days, we had firefighters sharing the street with us and the construction guys.  They were using the abandoned houses in the area for training, mostly practicing cutting into the roofs (vertical ventilation training), but I also saw them haul a hose into one of the buildings and turn the water on.  The funniest part was, while I was really curious about what they were doing (T used to be a firefighter back in the day and has great stories to tell), I basically couldn't get a word in edgewise, since they were all so curious about what we were doing! 

Not to mention, we were working among abandoned houses that homeless folks use to camp out, and along the bike path, so we constantly had different people coming by and asking what on earth we were doing.  That was ok, since educating the public is kind of part of what we try to do. We had three young teenaged kids come by one day, asking a lot of questions and looking completely mystified about the point of what we were doing.  Finally, one of them asked, somewhat incredulously, "They pay you to do this?"  I tended to emphasize the fact that virtually all of the bottles were broken, in case anyone decided they wanted to try some excavations themselves.  Even so, when we came back the third morning, someone had obviously been doing some exploring of their own overnight, and had been kind enough half-fill one of the smaller units that we weren't finished digging.

By the time we finished this morning, I had definitely learned one thing.  I am old an out of shape!  Just about every muscle in my body hurts, I have cuts all over my hands, bruises all over my legs and arms from bracing the screen and dumping the buckets in, raw spots on my hands from digging with shovels, trowels, and rock hammers, and I have been completely wiped at the end of each day.  But even with the frustration and tedium of digging through a solid meter of glass, I still had a hell of a good time.  *smile*

abandoned house

Who are we fighting against?

I came across a snippet of a speech on NPR at the end of last week that I have not heard again, and can't find now.  The speaker, I think someone from the State Department, essentially said that we are not engaged in a war "on terror" or "on terrorism," we are engaged in a war specifically against Al Qaeda.  And I wish that our nation would focus on this more, because it it a very important distinction to make.

Not that I don't believe all terrorists, no matter what violent group they belong to, deserve to be stopped and brought to justice.  But because I suspect that most Americans see themselves in a war against Islam, and that should not be the case.  Should all of Christianity be painted with the same brush as David Koresh and his followers, or the Hutaree?  None of us would think so.  And if the government of another country started using rhetoric that equated the average Christian American with these people, wouldn't most Christians find themselves in opposition to that country?  I think that is one of the things that is happening between the US and many parts of the Muslim world right now.

Americans are outraged that Muslims in other countries celebrated when the Twin Towers were attacked on September 11th.  And I assume that Muslims are outraged that Americans cannot distinguish Al Qaeda from more peaceful Muslims, and cannot distinguish conservative or fundamentalist movements from radical terror groups.  And because of this ignorance and misunderstanding, everything continues to spin out of control.

If our government and media were better at distinguishing Al Qaeda from peaceful Muslim groups, then would we have had the shooting at Fort Hood last year?  Perhaps Major Hasan would not have done what he did if he did not hear rhetoric on a daily basis that lumped him, as an American Muslim, in with the people he was supposed to be fighting against.  Would other American soldiers be harassed into leaving the army due to their Muslim faith?  Would non-Muslims living in New York City understand the reason why the Muslim community wants to build a mosque and cultural center near Ground Zero?  Would the recent Times Square bomber have been radicalized and used by these terror groups?

Our government, media, and military focus on Islamic radicals, Islamic terrorists, Islamic separatists.  We only hear about Islam and Muslims in a negative and violent context.  But Islam has many different sects and expressions throughout the world, just like Christianity.  I agree, the majority of terrorists these days appear to be Muslim, but the majority of Muslims are not terrorists.  And continuing to think and talk about them that way just encourages more hate, and makes it easier for more peaceful people to be converted to the terrorists' cause.  So I am extremely supportive of a move to be more specific about who we are really fighting against -- and I wish that the media would make that point more often within their own reporting. 

Even now, during our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are not simply trying to win over the Iraqui and Afghani people -- we are trying to win over the Islamic Iraqui and Afghani people.  Because I believe that there are plenty of Muslims in the world who are on our side -- as long as we can recognize them as friends, and not lump them in with our enemies.

Making political connections

I'm not a political junkie, by any means.  I fall on the idealistic and liberal side of the political spectrum, but I am marrying a cynical conservative independent, so we mostly just try not to talk politics at home, and that's fine by me.  But I now listen to 3 hours of NPR a day during my commute, and that means hearing about every detail of the current economic and political process.  And, as an anthropologist, I am trained to analyze people's behavior and seek out patterns.

So I was listening to a piece about Bob Bennet not being re-nominated in Utah's senate race.  And his failure has been blamed partly on the power of the Tea Party at the Utah Republican convention.  So he was discussing the attitudes of the people who refused to renominate him, and he told a story he'd heard from one of his supporters.  Said supporter was apparently talking to a Tea Partier, and asked who she would be voting for.  She named another candidate.  When asked why she was voting that way, her answer was that the person she was supporting "loved the Constitution."  Bennet's supporter stated that Bennet also loved the Constitution, but the Tea Partier countered that her candidate loved it more.  And there was no way to argue against that judgement.

I know that Tea Partiers have started buying and carrying around pocket copies of the Constitution.  And this notion of voting for someone based on their perceived love for and dedication to the text of the Constitution suddenly rang a bell.  Has the Constitution become the political Bible of these activists, with the Founding Fathers as its infallible authors?  Is an attempt at the literal reading of the text akin to a Christian return to a literal reading of the Bible's text?  It seems like a similar way of approaching change in society. 

Really, I think they just want to go back to the way things used to be, when minorities were less vocal, when they could assume that everyone else was just like them, and the goal was to melt into society until our differences were no longer visible.  Now they are forced to acknowledge the rights of atheists and Muslims and homosexuals and other people they don't agree with, and generally deal with a complicated, pluralistic society.  But if they can go back to a text that gives them rules about how to live and how to treat one another, then maybe they can find a way through this minefield, and maybe they can get back to the way things used to be.  Both texts have proven the test of time, and both have authors that they assume supported their current goals and beliefs.

But, to me, that's the problem.  Texts are never straightforward.  The Bible is composed of dozens of different voices from different points in history, and having the messages of the Old Testament makes it even more confusing.  Even if you decided to stick to the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, you have four different reports of what he said and did.  And on top of that, he taught using parables, not straightforward commandments, so you are forced to interpret what he means.  Arguably, the Constitution may be a simpler text to take literally, but it is also open to interpretation.  It was written in a time when society was structured very differently, and it deals with large, abstract concepts, not detailed instructions on how to implement those ideas.  If Confucius had written it, we might be okay, but he didn't.  And if Confucius had written it, there would be rules about livestock but nothing that applied to Internet security, and we would have thrown it out a long time ago.  And those overwhelmingly Christian Founding Fathers they like to talk about?  They are a mythical set of figures.  Some of the founders of this country were Christian, some were Deist, some were atheist, and each individual had their own personal set of beliefs.  But their speeches and writings (texts) are also being cherry-picked and interpreted in a way that supports what the Tea Partiers already believe.  And those same texts can also be cherry-picked and interpreted to support the opposite argument. 

I understand the desire to hold onto something as The Truth, especially when you have always been taught that your beliefs are True and all others are false and you suddenly find yourself in a world that believes in relativity.  But I reserve my political right to respectifully disagree with the Tea Party's agenda.  And that is definitely embodied in the Constitution, no matter how you read it.

Work dog update

Well, there have been a few developments since I last wrote about my work dog.  I have definitely seen him spend more time with his owners, including times when he gets to play in the yard while folks hand out under the overhang.  I also talked with my coworkers and discovered that he escaped from the yard a few months before I started working here, which may be why he is in a kennel now.  But the most important change is, now he has a puppy.

While he certainly has the, uh, parts necessary for making puppies, I don't know that this is one of his offspring.  But earlier this week a little grey puppy joined him in the kennel, and they are adorable together.  I am guessing the puppy is 2-3 months old, just weaned from his mom.  They play together, and just hang out.  The puppy doesn't like being out in the kennel very much, so he started by barking for minutes on end to get someone's attention.  You could see that the big dog would get annoyed with this, but rather than snapping at the puppy when he wants it to be quiet, he goes and tries to play with it and distract it.  Now the puppy seems to get they days are spent hanging out quietly.  It's very sweet.

They seem to share the doghouse and the kennel quite well.  It's cold today, snowing on and off.  When I went to look at them a few minutes ago, the big dog was sitting up in a corner of the kennel, leaning on the dog house.  I didn't see the puppy at first, so I thought he was staying warm in the dog house.  But then I looked closer, and saw the sleeping puppy curled up between the big dog's legs.  Too cute!

Time in a Bottle

This week I got to spend some time working in the lab, cleaning up historic artifacts.  One of the things archaeologists do is monitor construction projects when we think there is a good likelihood that buried artifacts will be encountered during the work.  Most of the time we are just there to monitor and collect anything that is dug up, but sometimes things like human remains are found, forcing the job to shut down while the coroner (in case they are from a recent human) and local Native American groups (if they are older) are called and everyone figures out the best way to deal with the remains.  Those are the stories everyone hears, but most of the time, archaeological monitors don't disrupt projects at all.

In our case, there is some work being done along the Ogden River near an old bottling plant, and old trash piles are being dug up.  You can get a lot of information from trash, so we are always interested in it.  In our case, bottles, ceramics, metal, cut animal bones, and other artifacts are being collected.  Lots of them are broken bits, but some of the bottles are whole.  And, since they were found buried along a riverbank, they are covered in dirt and mud, and I was lucky enough to get to hang out in the lab and start cleaning them up.  I was taking pictures with my cell phone again, so please, don't judge the quality of these shots.

tools of the trade

Some of the bottles were cool because they were so recognizable:

Vaseline

Lysol

Others were interesting for the text printed on them.  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were all kinds of cures and other things on the market, and many companies had their names embossed on the bottles, rather than using paper labels:

Several of the bottles were from a later date and had painted labels on them, but most of these were so worn and faded you could hardly see they were there, much less read them.  This is one of the more complete ones:

Absolutely Pure

Others were interesting to me because of there they came from.  I grew up in Rochester, NY, where the top bottle comes from, which is not too far from Buffalo.  The last bottle is cool because it comes from "HONOLULU, T.H." -- Territory of Hawaii, before it became a state.

Blige Brothers Co., Preservers, Rochester NY

Honolulu, T.H.

Others were interesting because of their size, including this tiny "synthetic porcelain" bottle:

synthetic porcelain

Some still had corks or even residues inside, although it was hard to tell in some cases if empty bottles had been penetrated by river water underground.  (If you look close at the Vaseline bottle above, you can see there was some residue in that bottle, too.)

residue

Some had really cool makers marks on the bottom, including a man with the legend "Pluto", and this very odd-looking cat:

Pluto

E & J Burke

And there were some plain things, like a blank bottle base with heavy patina, or some rusted wrought iron, that I just thought were lovely in their own ways.

wrought iron

bottle patina

Not many archaeologists are into historic artifacts.  I don't know if they see them as less of a challenge, since we know what they are, or if they are just not as interested in figuring out the lives of the people who left them behind, because their histories are written down.  In my case, I love finding the exotic or curious or rare prehistoric artifacts, but I enjoy the historic ones too.  For me, it's all about connecting with a person through the objects they've left behind, and sometimes you can do that more easily with a bottle than with a scatter of obsidian flakes.

Thirtysomething

Today I will be attending a double baby shower for my coworkers, Ja and Jo.  Ja actually just had her baby last night, so it is doubtful that she will be attending, but Jo's wife isn't due for a few more months.  Living in Mormon country, people of course have larger families, so I have met several pregnant women since moving here.  And when you talk with women about their pregnancies, all kinds of stories get shared.  But, for the first time, it feels strange that I am the only one who has to share stories of my mom and my friends, and can't talk about my own kids.  For the first time, I feel really out of sync with the rest of my community.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I had finished college and two years in the Peace Corps, and had moved to the California coast.  I met lots of women my age through kayaking, and joined a book club.  Most of the kayakers were in the same boat as me: in long-term relationships, not married yet, not quite ready to be thinking about kids.  And while the book club ladies were, on the whole, either married or getting married and buying houses, they were also entering their early thirties.  Slowly, they started getting pregnant and having kids.  I felt a little behind, but I was younger than most of them, so it just seemed like my partner and I, 7 years into a relationship and still renting, just needed a couple of years to catch up.  When I turned 28, I started to panic a little, since it didn't look like I would be married with kids at age 30, an unconscious assumption I had always had.  But I looked around, and everyone else was in the same boat, so I calmed down.

I went to my ten-year high school reunion the same fall that I started grad school.  Of the classmates who attended, only one had kids already, and while there were a lot of stories of engagements that had fallen through or were just starting, very few couples were married.  In grad school, I found myself single again, but I was also again surrounded by folks my age or a little older, mostly in long-term relationships or still looking for The One, who started getting married as I graduated.  I thought about how our generation, or at least those of us pursuing academic degrees, were having kids later in life, but I still didn't feel that I was that far outside of the norm.

When I met T, who was just entering his 40s, things were a little different.  His good friends were married with school-age kids, and we would go to birthday parties as the only childless couple.  Suddenly, I was knitting 6, 7, 10 baby gifts a year for friends my age, and when I got onto Facebook a few years back, it seemed that everyone from high school had just gotten married and started families.  We were behind the curve, but again, I only saw myself as slightly behind.  T had married and divorced young without kids, and I had spent years in a relationship that fell through.  Having finally found each other, we were on the right track, and we were going to get there just a little bit behind everyone else.

But now we live in Utah.  I see pregnant women in their mid-twenties who are having their third child in as many years.  People here get married the second they finish college, and start having families while they are pursuing better-paying jobs and higher degrees.  So for the first time, I feel very strange for not having those pregnancy stories to share.  I see a look in people's eyes and wonder, what do they think of me?  Is it surprise, or pity, or questions about what went wrong, or just a simple recognition that I am not like them?  Despite being engaged, with pregnancy plans ahead, I feel very out of the loop.

But I guess I shouldn't worry.  Once I am pregnant, I will be surrounded by tons of moms who have been there and done that, and who will have plenty of stories and advice for this late-bloomer.

My work dog

It seems as though I have acquired a third dog recently.  Sorta.  In my head at least.

At the new job, I have my own office.  It has a window, which looks out on a back yard behind me.  And the people who live there have a dog.  He's a white pitt bull or bull terrier.  He lives in a dog run that's about 10 ft by 6 ft.  He has a plywood dog house in there, and they keep food and water on hand.

I first noticed him one day when I was looking out at the snow.  Our dogs live in the lap of luxury, inside all day, with a pair of dog doors to let them outside whenever they wish, and access to every piece of furniture and several dog beds scattered throughout the house.  I can't tell if he has any blankets in his doghouse, but I assumed he must be cold.  I started kinda looking for him each morning, to see how he was doing.

Now, the relationship (one-sided as it is) has developed to the point where I check on him several times a day.  I look to see where he is, what he's doing.  As the weather has gotten warmer, I see him sunning himself in the mornings, dozing with his back against his doghouse, or sleeping on his side in the sun in the afternoons, one ear flipped up.  I'm a little disappointed if he's inside his dog house and I can't see him at all.

Sometimes his owners come outside and hang out under the overhang that's next to his kennel.  He whines and gives a high-pitched bark, just like Cara, because he wants to be with them, but they don;t let him out.  I suspect that he gets very little time outside of his kennel, and that makes me feel really bad.

I get upset with his owners when they don't let him out, or they time they hadn't cleaned his kennel.  I feel bad when I can see him standing, peeking along the side of the house and staring longingly to where someone is obviously doing something in the front yard, tail wagging a just little in the hopes that someone sees him.  I like when he looks content, stretched out on his side in the sun.

Yesterday, the kennel door was open, and he was loose in the yard all day.  Instead of bare dirt, he got to lay in the grass all day.  I even saw him rolling around, kicking his legs in the air, just like Cara likes to do.  He wandered around and laid in different parts of the yard, eventually heading under the overhang to get out of the afternoon sun.  I don't know if they did it on purpose or not, but it made me really happy for him.

Today, there is a length of two-by-four in his kennel.  He was having a great time playing with it this morning, pushing it around and under him with his front paws, trying to get one end up, the way I've seen pit bulls do with logs at the beach.  It made me smile, knowing he was having such a good time.

The more I watch, the more I think his owners aren't all that bad.  I sometimes see dog prints in the snow, so it looks like they do let him run around the yard some, maybe in the evenings after I've left work.  They recently put shingles on his dog house, which should help keep the rain off this spring.  The kennel is almost always clean, and as the weather has warmed up they've increased the size of his water dish.  When he barks, his owner doesn't yell at him, just tells him kindly to quiet down.  He's obviously well fed and groomed.  I hope that he gets to spend some time walking on a leash or hanging out in the house when I'm not around.

I haven't named him or anything, and I certainly don't interfere in his care.  In fact, one day when I was looking out the window and thought he might be looking back, I actually ducked!  I guess I didn't want him to know I was spying on him.  *laugh*  But even if I don't care for him, I do care about him, in an odd way.  So he's my work dog, even though he probably doesn't even know I'm here.  But I like to think that I look out for him from my office window, just the same.