I suppose I should blog

Hey all. I suppose that I should blog since keeping in touch when travelling was my main goal with all of this. I have to admit that I've had a less than lackluster attitude about blogging of late, but reading all of yours reminded me how much I adore you all and really want to make the effort. Anyhoo,

So I wish I could say that my trip has been all roses and shiny things, and really, it's not been bad, just average. The dig took awhile to get going, I arrived on Wednesday and we didn't start doing anything on site until Monday, and even then the job that I've been allotted to meant that I have had excessively little work to do for the first few days. Today was the first day where I felt I did anything remotely productive. And when you've left home for a month just a few weeks before leaving again for a year, I suppose I just want it to be worth it. I mean, I've travelled before, many times, and I've never felt so homesick so fast.

I feel guilty about being here, and I feel guilty about feeling guilty that I'm here. Enough whining...
So essentially I'm staying in a little taverna right on the water front of Lefkandi. It's not bad, I share a little room with an american who is nice enough, we get along. The rest of the people on the dig are british, or have at least been to school in England and I have fun trying to understand some of the things they say and the terms they use. Usually just the little things... like washing powder for detergent or sun cream when we would usually say sunblock.
THe excavaton is seperated into two main parts:1) being on site supervising and assisting the supervisors as we watch and direct greek workers who get to do all the fun stuff like pick axing and troweling, etc. 2) being in the apotheke where all the finds are washed, processed, and catalogued, etc. Having been the only person the director of the excavation hadn't met before being alllowed on the dig I have been understandabley relegated to a third, more monotonous task, sieving. we get dirt from the trenches and sieve it. Firts dry and then through a wet siever to try and get things like seeds and pits and the likes that can be analysed for dietary information and carbon dating. I don't actually get to find anything, I just sieve it and hand it off to a lab somewhere. Now the good part about this is that I have a bit of freedom in that the job is so easy anyone can do it so other trench assistants are getting trained to do so and I was able to take their place for a bit. I also am getting swapped to the apotheke tommorrow, which means that really, my position is the most flexible and I am able to see at least a little bit of everything that is being done. Which is good.

And I still get ubsurdly excited at the site of anything remotely interesting coming up. It's like "oooooh, look at that rim/handle/base/sherd with a little bit of paint on it!" or, even more exciting there are bone fragments, or teeth, or shells that can come up. No one else seems all that excited so I try and hide it a little, but I think it's so interesting that there's this jawbone or a stone with a hole in it that was used thousands of years ago (right now we're digging at around 800 BCE). It re-assures me that even if I'm feeling tired or grumpy, digging up some little thing like that can still brighten my day and make me nerd-ulously adrenalised - it must mean that I have chosen to go in a good direction.

really hot... funny tan lines... ummm... that's good for now I think... enjoy, my computer access in minimal so I won't post often, but if you email me your mailing adresses I can try and send some post. Do it quick though, or else it will never reach you.

oh, and I'd post a picture, but I'm not that high tech so you'll just have to wait.