Gone to Lake Chemong

Well you won't be hearing from me for a few days because the office is sending me off to a site north of Peterborough near Burleigh Falls. It is an Iroquoian village on Lake Chemong and I hope that things run smoothly. Steve was up there last week and felt that the people were a bit overzealous about this project, mainly because they like to do paperwork and artifact sorting after the work day has ended, although on the other hand, they supply lots of beer. I hope it's nothing too imposing. I don't mind sorting artifacts but I don't want to do so all evening during my spare time. I usually need a good shower and then some time to myself after work. This week is supposed to be killer hot too so I am bringing my bathing suit in hopes that we may be able to swim during lunch. Anyways, as good as it sounds I am sort of reluctant to be shipped off to the house of people I don't know and have to be friendly all week. Sometimes when it's bloody hot and we have to work hard I am just a grump. However, I should keep in mind that it's always good to make connections in archaeology no matter how irrelevant this study is to my own archaeological interests. I'll hopefully be back in good time on Thursday afternoon/early evening so I can start the holiday weekend. I am heading up to Dave's cottage for a good weekend of canoeing, swimming, and relaxation! I cannot wait!!! Until next time... keep fit and have fun.

P.S. I'll try and take some good pics of the site while I am there. On Friday at Walkington we found a pipe bowl with a partial pipe stem, so maybe some equally cool artifacts will be found up at Chemong.

Progress Sucks

Sometimes at work, I look around and despise the capitalistic nation I live in. So much beautiful land is being overtaken by strip malls that offer the same overpriced crap that you can get another 5km down the same road. All the houses look the same -- way too large, with like one tree on the property -- and there are too many damn cars everywhere. It's sad for me to remember childhood Sunday drives with my parents when all the land that I now work on was still farmed or forested. In fact, there are very few landmarks left for me to even recognize the places we used to go to. I am so glad that Ontario implemented the Green Belt legislation last year, even if it seems a bit too late. At least something is going to be preserved. Yesterday, we did a surface collection in this beautiful little meadow in Aurora and the land owner came out to talk to us about what was going on. I seriously wanted to throttle him because he first asked if we had found any money and then asked if we had a native site. I mean come on, get your history straight! And even though artifacts that are 150 years old are young in the history of the world, they are pretty old for Canada, but his dumb, foreign ass came and bought the land so he could make a fucking buck or several million bucks by putting a disgusting crescent of homes into this neighbourhood which is still relatively pastoral. 'Progress' SUCKS! OK, that's my rant for today. Moving on...

Katie is in Ireland this week, so I have been reassigned to KC's crew at a site that I had the 'pleasure' of field walking last year. It consisted of two of the most brutal days I had all last summer. The plough furrows were absolutely huge and very tiring to walk over, and the land happened to slope a million different ways. Most of the walking also occurred going up hill. It really bit the big one.
Anyways, KC's crew is now working on feature excavation at the site, called Walkington II, and I can't say that after all of last year's walking, that it turned out to be a very large site. As far as they know, there is only one long house and some other small random features. It was a pretty relaxed day today but I would still rather do historic stuff. They made me throw away a historic ceramic when I came across one in my screen. It made me feel sad :( I mean, we collect lithics if we find them on our sites. You'd think it would go the same way especially at a place where a historic site was also found. But I guess it doesn't matter that much. It was just some shitty pearlware.

Last week on one of our lunch breaks we went for a drive around Markham and found the Historic Markham Village which consists of a little neighbourhood of historic houses that have been moved from their original sites in Markham and restored for people to live in. It was one of the coolest neighbourhoods I have seen around Toronto. I mean I never thought Markham had such character. I normally think of it as a big sprawling industrial mall extending from Toronto. I guess I was fucking wrong. Even the main street of the town is quite charming. I secretly have a dream of living in a historic house that is remodelled with modern wiring and all the good stuff that is useful to a modern home even though you would never be able to tell, because it would be craftily concealed. However, to make a dream like that reality, you have to have money, and that just won't be happening any time in the next decade. The only problem is that transit from Markham to the city and vice versa would be a nightmare, hence one must own a car to enjoy the pleasures of living in Markham. Maybe the province will hurry up on finalizing that big awesome transit pass that is going to link York, Durham, the GO train, and the TTC together. It's going to be a great day when that pass is issued. Hopefully it won't cost $200 a month to use either.
Anyhow, I have to go make a lunch for work tomorrow so I guess it's time to sign off here. I know I have to get better at updating more frequently but work is still kind of keeping me tired at the end of the day, so it's hard to find the energy to do more than just check my email. I promise I'll try harder. Goodnight Moon.

Slow Down the Pace

It's been almost two weeks since I last wrote but in all honesty I had started a post around the 7th of June to bitch about how badly the job at the AGO/Grange House downtown sucked. Basically we were there for two days, sweltering in the city and dug 3 trenches at least 4ft down and were still getting layers of fill from landscaping and other construction, as noted by the pieces of styrofoam we occasionally pulled out.
Since that time we have moved onto two sites situated on either side of some weirdo's property in Markham. We just finished the Riddle site which I like to refer to as the Griddle site because we were seriously being cooked alive in that field after all the top soil had been scraped away. It was also RIGHTNEXTTOTHEFREAKYHOUSE where at least 15 beat up cars were parked on the front lawn. When Katie was doing Grad-alling at the Riddle site, we would walk behind this house to get to the other site (Stover) and we would marvel at all the junk in the backyard, including a mini-tank. Alarming? EXTREMELY!
Anyways, issues of course arose with Griddle. We found 10 cow burials and uncovered what I think was a goat, maybe a fawn or something. Then we found out that ANTHRAX could be a threat to our health if you have to dig up several barnyard animals in a small vicinity and you don't know why they were all buried there. The last outbreak of anthrax in Ontario occurred in the 1960's which is a bit too recent for my liking. Anyways, we had a good freak out about that and Katie wrote a bitchin' letter to the office for not giving us the heads-up on important facts like this, because we have never come across a site like this and in general it just doesn't happen that often. But apparently some animal-excavation protocol is going to come out of this and we didn't have to excavate the beasts after all. Thank God!

On Friday, I had a special one year anniversary celebration in honour of last year's kidney stone, however this year, it manifested itself in the form of a kidney infection. Regardless of the new diagnosis, it sucked and I was in MAJOR PAIN and I sat on an IV drip of saline and morphine for 10 hours. It rocked. I am now starting to get worried about the old kidneys... I hope this is not the start of some lifelong affliction. The weird thing was that as I was looking at my bottle of T3's from last year I noticed that it had occurred on the exact same date. What the hell is that all about??? Let's hope that June 10th, 2006 is not as eventful.

Michaela comes home this week from her 6 week Bio summer course and then she is leaving on Sunday for Algonquin Park to work at the Taylor Statten Camps as a canoe guide. I hope to be able to use my free passes for us on Friday night at Medieval Times. It looks to be a good time.
Anyways, besides all the events at work and related to my health, not much has happened beyond the usual money hassles and figuring out how to afford paying off debt and buying tickets for summer concerts.
I can say that it has been supremely hot here, to the point where it's just awful to even stand still some days, because you still drip with sweat. I have undertaken a new water drinking regime for myself. I am convinced the kidney problems relate to dehydration and that although I am not a person who perpetually craves water, I need to just drink it out of habit. I'll let you know how that goes. I hope to begin implementing gym time into my schedule soon as well.
Ah, goals! It's good to sort of have something to work towards outside of work.

Playing with Dirt

So I started work yesterday and already have this weird sunburn on the side of my left temple where I apparently forgot to spread sunscreen. It looks dumb and I will probably have a dark patch on my face for the rest of the summer after the redness fades... *sigh*.
The past two days haven't been bad but I wouldn't say they were great either. My crew, Historic 1 (we are actually the only Historic crew for the company but last year there were two...) was sent out with a Prehistoric crew to work on the Hope site in Maple, which had a helluva lot of longhouses. The usual features came up in spades -- loads of posts, walls and actually a pretty decent midden. I found a bone bead, a bone awl, and a burnt corn kernel, amongst other items. It's apparently the first bead of the season for anyone on the Historic crew. Last year I found my forte for finding beads and whenever I find one Katie and Wes kind of groan; I think they are jealous. ;) I am guessing that Aaron and Steve will catch onto this pretty soon as well.
Yes, I know... if you've just realized my crew has 4 guys on it and you are involved in archaeology you are probably amazed. For the past 6 years since I started studying archaeology, both at Laurier and UBC, my peers were 90% women. This year, everything has changed. It's kind of interesting. Everyone on the crew is dating someone or married except for Steve. Steve is from Quebec although he is just graduating from U of T and managed to end up at ASI. He is amusing to have around because we have to sometimes explain English slang to him, for instance, the phrase 'camel toe'. It's good times all around as you can probably imagine. Potty mouths abound!

The only thing I am a bit jealous of at the moment is that Wes and Aaron were trained in April at the office to catalogue our massive backlog of artifacts from last summer. So on days when Katie is off with our Grad-all scraping down topsoil at whatever site, Wes and Aaron get to sit home and catalogue artifacts while Steve and I will be reassigned to some other crew. It's a bit of a bummer especially since I asked Aaron how long it takes to get through a site's artifacts and he said it's currently taking about two weeks to get through all the bags and boxes from one site. I assume that it will take even longer when they are actually out in the field because I cannot imagine that they go home after a day in the field and work on the artifacts.
I am crossing my fingers that the office realizes how slowly the progress really is and that at some point they will ask Steve and I to come in for some similar training. There isn't really any need to have us assigned to the Prehistoric crews since they usually have a full crew of 5-6 people and we are just surplus. I wish they would put us where we were somewhat needed (and doing what I would prefer to be doing). I have also heard that there is not as much Historic work for us this summer, so there could very well be several days when I am reassigned to another crew. Argh! I always feel a bit out of my element being shifted around to other crews and meeting at different places in the morning and going to different drop off points in the afternoons. You have to adjust your typical habits of digging to whatever the custom is on the other crews/sites. It's just weird.

In the past two days I have eased into the digging and mapping again but it's in a prehistoric context. I am excited to get to a historic site and remember the procedures for surface survey and collection as well as excavating features. The forms and protocol are different between Prehistoric and Historic so I could be a little confused, but I am sure it will all come back to me.
Tomorrow, we are heading down to the Grange at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Apparently we will be doing test pits in the backyard trying to locate an old veranda that used to wrap around that part of the house. It's the crew's first foray into urban archaeology! We are usually sent out to the burbs, if you really consider Bowmanville, Newmarket, Richmond Hill and Brampton suburbs of Toronto. I also found out that we have our first road trip this year to the St. Catharine's area. It's gonna be interesting packing 5 people, luggage, and archy gear into the van. Being the only other girl on the crew, Katie and I will be bunking together, whereas I imagine the 3 guys will be jammed into one room together (the thought makes me laugh a bit). We'll see when the time comes.
Anyways, I figure this is enough of an update for now. I am still trying to unpack my four suitcases of stuff so I should try and work on it a bit tonight. Actually, I have two already finished and put away and another two to go. Basically, in order to fit all my current stuff into my room again, I have to go through old clothes and figure out what I just won't ever be wearing again. My grad school weight gain has really fucked up my wardrobe... I hope to alleviate some of this tragic poundage this summer. Which reminds me, I have to sort out the transfer of my gym membership from Vancouver to TO. Another project I have this summer is to sort through the books in the basement and get rid of things I don't want to keep or that I have multiple copies of (yes, it has happened occasionally that I own two copies of one book). There also seem to be a lot of books and games in the computer area that are completely obsolete in relevance now. For example, 'Word 97', 'Office 97 Professional', 'Powerpoint 2002', Idiot's Guide to Excel for Windows 95'... I think that my family suffers from severe Pack Rat Syndrome. We need a good purge cuz the space in this house really cannot accomodate the random and forever expanding possessions of 4 adults. Maybe I should nominate us for TLC's Clean Sweep, but on the other hand I think it would be totally traumatic. I have to learn to come to terms with not keeping stuff that I haven't used in over a year. It's over, therefore, it should be gone. Okay.