I'd rather be in London

I’m pretty far behind in this. What I’ll probably do is retrospectively add entries on my last two weeks in Athens and my two-week stay in Houston once I get home again, so look for that in August; I’ll let you know when to look for those entries. Basically, between now and my last entry, I finished my time in Athens with the R-MWC group and flew home to Houston with Tony for a short stay. This stay was sadly plagued with illness for me, as it seems like it often is, and I barely recovered in time for our next international flight back to London Heathrow. Tony and I are back in Europe for a lot of things, but the first thing is to participate in an archaeological dig called Silchester. The site is about 20 minutes outside of Reading, England; it’s a Roman site with Iron Age foundations, which are most of what remain of the site now. So we’re actually digging on a site, and people have made some interesting finds already like iron and the usual bone, sherd, terracotta, etc.

The most exciting find I’ve made, however, is that field archaeology is not my cup of tea. It’s been getting better lately, though; for the past week we’ve been cleaning the site, which is along the same lines as throwing rocks in Michigan except without having a nice cool lake to stand in. It’s tedious, rather dull and mindless, you have to kneel/crouch the entire time, and it’s actually gotten quite warm here. It’s kind of cute to see the Brits freaking out about weather that barely reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit (we’re now in the very first ‘heat wave’ that England has ever declared), but that does get a little uncomfortable when we’re outside in the sun doing manual labour. The whole thing isn’t helped by camping on the site, and while the day time weather is hot and humid to the point where it takes a good amount of strength to will oneself to do anything besides lie in the shade, at night the temperatures get so cold that it’s difficult to sleep through it. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, our day off, and that should hopefully cool down the daytime weather, and we bought an extra blanket today to help with the temperature after dark.

For our day off, we’re in London now and feel so much better after a proper shower and are looking forward to not sleeping in a tent for the night before heading back on Saturday. We have tickets for As You Like It in the Globe tomorrow, but it was only £5 for Groundling tickets and we decided that if it’s raining we’ll go to the British Museum instead. It should be a good day, but next week is going to be a long week. I’m starting to excavate a post hole, and there’s usually some fun stuff in there, so I’m looking forward to that; I just hope it’s cooler weather. I’m trying to get through with the best attitude that I can, and again it’s not that I hate it, just that I like other things a lot more. Here’s hoping it gets a little cooler during the day, warmer at night, and a little more interesting on the field.

I guess my life calling was to match Indiana Jones in movie sales, not archaeological renown. And I think I'm ok with that.