Too Busy to Blog?

Well, that's obviously not entirely true, since here I am. But things have been very busy. Nail-bitting, ulcer-inducing, stressed-beyond-belief busy. But you wouldn't know it to look at me. Catch me at any random moment of the day and I'm likely to be sitting still, scribbling on paper. For the last week and a half (or about that) I've been working on drawing literally hundreds of rim profiles. What are those, the laypeople among you might ask? Well, basically I take a piece of pottery that's broken off from the rim of a vessel (a rim sherd) and turn it on its side and draw the contours of that piece. That gives me a pretty good idea of the shape of a vessel as a whole, and if the piece is large enough, the size of it too. So I'm drawing every rim sherd that we found in the deep pit and the trench. Right now I'm on level 14 of 20 for the deep pit. I hope to finish those, and all the other artifacts from the deep pit, by the end of this coming week. That will leave me roughly two weeks to do all the analysis from the trench, which had considerably fewer artifacts, so hopefully it's doable.


What's making this all go at a snail's pace? Well, first my husband had an academic deadline last week, so I was picking up a lot of baby and house slack, which meant that the analysis fell by the wayside. Then, this week, both he and I have been sick - him with strep and me with some type of respiratory infection - both of which seem to be impervious to the strongest antibiotics that we can throw at them. I can only hope that this will all get better soon, otherwise I'll have one of two choices: change our flight and push back our return to the States, or return at some point by myself to finish the analysis so that I can actually get my dissertation done. I'm hoping for neither, but thinking option two might have to happen anyway. Sigh. Such is life.