the day after we run out of tomorrows

THERE IS A BLIZZARD OUTSIDE!

But first, have some pictures from Cambridge:

( Cambridge pics )


But the important thing is, THERE IS A BLIZZARD OUTSIDE!

( SNOW )

And now we are watching Doctor Who on BBCA. :D

ARGH WHY

America is also too flashy and dirty and there is too MUCH of everything and I miss the London Underground. London runs smoothly in a way that NYC just does not.

Anyway:

Rainbow on descent to Keflavik:


(Oh, Iceland.)

Sunset over Long Island:



Looks a bit apocalyptic from the ground (or else I haven't seen enough sunsets recently):


Also, megabus has internets. But my battery is very low and I have two Bugles waiting for me on my iPod. I'll catch ya'll later.

I'll be back in MD in a few hours and then real life (ie, BOSTON) starts up again ...

(Mom's had some troubles with the airlines. She's supposed to be back well before I am .. hopefully that still happens!)

[The following was mostly written yesterday evening.]

This morning I clung to the side of a cliff like Spider-Man and troweled away at an exposed tephra sequence. After lunch I sat in a pit that was overrun with tiny, annoyed flies. This afternoon I dug a hole in a bog, and helped take samples from the side wall before the whole thing filled with water.

Iceland is still awesome.

And I've been ill with the Ox Flu, the dread disease that has decimated our entire house over the last week. It is named for the huge (probably not ox) bones that have come out of our main site. Luckily, the Ox presents only as a rather bad head cold. Yesterday I stayed home and learned how to float, and last night the NyQuil Fairy paid me a visit (it works so much better than the Sudafed I brought). In another day or so I should have completely kicked the Ox.

I'm sorry I haven't posted recently; I haven't been to the lab much, and when I have, I've mostly been entering data. Since the last time I posted we've been joined by two more people from UMass - the pollen people, who I'll probably be working with in the fall. So we've switched from systematically coring lots of fields in search of cultural markers, to coring two specific fields in search of good tephra so we can dig 1x1s at the right place for well-dated pollen sample extraction. We should be finished with that by Monday - and then there's only a few more days left till we fly out! I can't believe the summer has gone by so fast.

At one of our sites, our cars are regularly licked by a herd of cows. They bit one of the bumpers. We've had to ask if our insurance covers bovine intervention. One of the cows in the field next door leapt halfway over the barbed-wire fence trying to get to the bull in our field. It was awful. She was just sort of ... hanging there, with the bull licking all over her face, until finally she managed to back off the fence. It was very Pyramus and Thisby. The farm where I was this morning has two wonderful dogs that like to come visit us. The border collie is so desperate to play fetch that he'll bring us rocks, hoping we'll throw them for him. And Buckets the cats has still been visiting regularly - a couple people went to see his family, and they seem nice, so we hope he won't be too sad and lonely when we leave him behind!

I'm not too informed about what's been happening at the other sites. At the main site, they've finally gotten through the medieval barn that's sitting on top of the Viking-age stuff we're more interested in (this involved moving lots of gigantic rocks), and a couple of churchyards have been excavated. There's been some exciting GPR going on at a few places, and at the site with the cows they've found a whole lot of really cool textiles (fairly recent, but still awesome).

I've also had a lot of fun side trips, and there are two more left (well, three, if you count England). This weekend we're going to Reykjavik - I'll do the Golden Circle (Thingvellir, Geysir, Gullfoss, etc) and some museums, and it's also Pride weekend, so I might check out some of that. Also I think Friday we might be taking a field trip to climb to the top of Drengey, the huge, flat island with puffins on that we can see from town. I'm not sure how that will work with Reykjavik, since I'm in the car that's planning to leave Friday evening, so I might have to skip Drengey. That would make me sad, but Reykjavik will be fun too.

The summer's almost over. It's starting to get dark at night now. There are school supplies on display at the KS. The chalkboard says our trip is 77.08% over. It's so sad.

[Written tonight: Today I took the place of someone with worse Ox than mine, and worked on one of our midden excavations. It was the first real down-in-the-dirt trowel-and-screening that I've done all summer, so that was great. Lots of bones and iron slag, one thing that could be a nail, and we exposed a whole lot of turf.

The weather has been pretty crappy for the last few weeks, but yesterday and today it's started to turn nice again. Horribly windy, but warm. So windy that I used my dust goggles for the first time ... and so windy that my plumb bob wouldn't hang straight.]

Now let's catch up with side trips and pictures ...

(Very image heavy, because I can't not.)

( Akureyri, Siglufjodur, Blonduos, and lots of scenery )

There are (or will soon be) even more photos on Facebook, and also I sent out a second batch of postcards on Sunday, so if you haven't got one yet, watch the mail!

That's all for now! I'll be back before you know it! Time to go hang some more laundry! I'll be posting this (and the pictures) tomorrow night! [Which is now tonight. Anyway.]

1. My tooth is fixed! Yay! It was quick and easy, and the dentist is right across from our lab. He came over and looked at our stuff after he fixed my tooth. And it was impressively inexpensive, too!

2. They're filming a movie in Sauðarkrokur! I think they made it snow this afternoon one street over from our dinner place. It might be The Cliff, which sounds awesome, one way or another.

3. You haven't seen Harry Potter till you've seen it with Icelandic subtitles and a 15-minute intermission.

It's cold and rainy and windy and miserable today, but I get to stay in for a while and do data entry! SCORE.

On Monday, a group of us hiked to a farm where they'd previously found a really nice tephra sequence because we wanted to take samples. This hike involved driving down a winding dirt road, taking our boots off to wade through streams four seperate times, sliding under a fence on our backs, and not eating lunch till 3:30. We dug two big holes and made lots of tiny holes, and saw the most beautiful tephra sequence ever, and took samples and refilled the big holes. And saw a completely gorgeous waterfall. We used my cheap GPS as backup to help find the place.

It was awesome.

Because Monday was the most gorgeous day yet in a summer of more gorgeous days than all previous field seasons combined, after dinner went to to Grettir's Pool. Grettir's Pool is two small stone-lined hot springs right next to the Artic Ocean (or the North Atlantic or Skagafjord, depending on who you ask). It features prominently in the Saga of Grettir the Strong. We sat in the pool and drank malt soda and had a dramatic reading of one chapter of the saga, and then we jumped in the Arctic Ocean. And then got back in the spring. And then I jumped in the Arctic Ocean again.

You step onto a rock in the Arctic Ocean, and it's very very cold, and then you step two feet down onto another rock, and it's freezing, and then you duck your head under and when you come back up you just shriek with joy, and I can't explain it, but it's amazing.

Iceland is so cool.

On Tuesday we finished soils core at one of the farms we started last week. I correctly identified a turf wall in a core sample! I'm getting good at this! (I don't know what I'm going to do when I get back to American archaeology and there's no tephra.) I really like reading tephra. I'm starting to vaguely think of ways I could get a thesis out of this stuff.

Today we finished all the coring we need to do on one farm, and dug another big hole. Tomorrow we start a new farm!

I haven't taken and pictures since Monday, because we've been in the same places as before.

We get two days off this weekend. I think I'm going to reserve a car and drive whoever wants to go to Myvotn (where there is awesome geology), and then do something a little bit closer for the second day. Next weekend is a three-day and I think a bunch of us will head to the Rekjavik area. Then for the rest of the summer we only get one-days ... we might also take a day trip either rafting, or to Grimsey, an island that spans the Arctic Circle.

I've put in an order for stamps, so maybe I'll get some postcards sent eventually.

( she's crossing the fjord, her white stallion spits foam like a madman (PICTURES) )

This was our dinner for the Fourth of July:



It was delicious. We also had a dramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence and sang The Star-Spangled Banner. And we took a group picture.

( update and lots of pictures )

melannen, your map from the UMD library is a huge hit! It's Danish, and it's dated 1914 and 1934 - it was also updated in 1964, and we only have a digital version of the 1964 edition. So I think it'll get scanned and added to our GIS library. So thanks for that! *g*

Today we were out coring in the þufurs (thufers: small little tuffets of grassy earth that are formed by the frost in land that isn't artificially drained) and in the cow pastures. Didn't find much, but it's awesome. It is so much more fun than aerospace engineering, omg. The þufurs are covered in really tall weeds and grass - anywhere but Iceland we'd have been worried about ticks and worse. Not here though! There are still no bugs but crazy Icelandic flies that like to mate while sitting on my hand. But they'd don't bite.

Anyway, I typed up the rest of this post yesterday, and wrote it the day before. I'm not having a whole lot of time for internets. And I'm helping update the official blog, which is here.


( Read more... )

I have to run back to the house because I have a feeling I may be hogging the washer. In the meantime, enjoy.

Today we were at Stóra-Seyla, a Viking-era farmstead a few miles outside of Sauðárkrókur. SASS has worked it for several years in a row, so the site was under a layer of "geotextile," which was under a thick layer of turf. Also, we want to do ground-penetrating radar on another part of the site, so another huge area needed to be cleared of turf and smoothed before we can start that.

( click here for pictures and stuff )

Tomorrow we're going to finish shovel scraping and probably also finish shoveling off the previously excavated walls. And for a big chunk of the day we're going on a Turf Tour, to learn how to recognize various types of turf houses in varying states of decay. I'm looking forward to the tour!

(I know. I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've had time and internet-access issues.)

I'm in Boston! We've been camping up here since Tuesday. melannen and I are currrently sitting in the library at UMass using the free internets. It's been raining a lot, though right now the sun in shining, and we managed to find two geocaches.

I've done a little bit of apartment hunting. The chocolate factory would be perfect, but they didn't have anything available to show me, and it's just a little bit more expensive than I was hoping to go. I found one that I can afford that I sort of liked, but the more I think about it the less I like it - I can see myself holing up in there and never coming out, which is not what I want to do for next two years. No one on craigslist wants to rent to someone two months ahead of their move-in date. I'll do a little bit more looking after I post this, but I'm pretty much resigned to not getting a place until I come home at the end of the summer.

Yesterday we went down to Newport, RI and visited the UMass field school there, behind a couple of 18th-century commercial/residences. The stratigraphy was very clear and the GPR plots were much less ambiguous than I've usually seen. Dr. Landon was very nice showing me all around, and so were the students; hopefully they didn't think I was as much of an idiot as I felt!

The UMass campus is small and pretty, the buildings are expansive, the T seems like it will be very workable (I just need to find myself a place near a stop!). We've stopped by the department twice now and no profs or grad students have been around. I chatted with the office admin, though, and she seems very nice! I'll check in again in a few minutes in case anyone has stopped by; otherwise I guess I'll be meeting everyone for the first time at the airport tomorrow evening. I did check on blogging, and I'm allowed to post about everything we do, without restrictions like waiting for publication or worrying about proprietary data, so I'm really excited about that - that was one of the more annoying things about working for $Giant_Aerospace_Corporation. Now I just have to make sure I make time to post ... ! (They might also want me to keep an official department blog starting in the fall, which should also be exciting - I'll let you know about that when it happens.)

Oh, speaking of school -- I bailed out on finishing my internship before leaving. I needed to pack more than I needed to write it, and I do technically have until the end of the semester to turn it in. I'm hoping to find some time in Iceland -- I have all the data with me, and I *am* taking my laptop after all. I should be able to turn it in over email.

( lots of pictures! )

Tomorrow: beach, reorganize luggage (again. I am obsessive), and then ICELAND!