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EVERYBODY LOOK AT ME, CUZ I'M DIGGING IN A HOLE
[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.)
On Monday the 20th, we had the day off, and I went to Akureyri. We stopped at Gasír first - a previously excavated trading post not far from the modern town, it yeilded more ceramics than any other site in Iceland (all imported). There was also a medieval fair there (Iceland's answer to Renfest), but we had a lot of fun walking around the old búðs and the church with its ring wall, looking at the signs of previous work - turf hanging down over walls, geocloth visible in places.
It was Monday, so the shops in town were open. We went to the used book store and the antique/vintage store (I got some books, a warm hat, and a pair of awesome shoes) - and the Viking Superstore and the regular bookstore and got lunch and dinner (at Domino's, which was not very yummy actually). We also peeked into the church, which is set high on a hill above the town, and walked around the botanical garden. And then we decided to see Harry Potter - which I really enjoyed, probably more so than the 4th or 5th movies.
Icelandic Renfest
Gasír - church in front, búðs in rear
Turf and a yarvistuker (sp?) covering a well-troweled wall
The church in Akureyri and the used book store.
A window in the church depicts Þorgeir tossing the idols over Goðafoss. There's a whole series of these windows, each of them with a biblical scene on top and a historic scene at the base.
There's a boat in the church. Someone donated it, and they hung it from the ceiling.
Botanical gardens.
The theatre where I saw Harry Potter.
The sky on the way home, at 11 PM.
Over the next week I took a few random pictures around Sauðarkrókur.
This is the movie company that was filming in town.
This is the old post office. It's not really a hotel/restaurant, they just made it look that way for the movie. (That was disappointing, we could use more restaurant choices!)
This is the church in town - the only one around that faces east!
Freshly snow-capped peaks.
How quickly the weather changes! Sunny to the left, rainy to the right. (The buildings to the right are our labs. One of the ones on the left is the dentist who fixed my tooth.)
I did go dancing that Saturday night, but there was a band, and a cover charge, and a racing convention of some sort in town, so it was a little to crowded for me. I left by 2 AM and went to bed!
Sunday we had a day off, and we went to Sigulfjorður, a small town at the very northern tip of the peninsula. It was a big fishing town about a hundred years ago, and today it's best known for its Herring Museum and its pizza place. We also found some geocaches, which I need to remember to enter - one of them on a pull-out by the road on the way into town, the second in an actual forest, a completely beautiful park on the other side of town. The road into town passes through a long, dark, one-lane tunnel - it was absolutely exhilarating to drive through.
It's exhilarating to drive anywhere in Iceland, actually. When I get back to the US I'll be so confused by all the straight, level, wide roads. Eight lanes? What? And a median strip? Luxury!
We've also been really lucky (relatively speaking, I guess) in the weather - our weekends have been pretty much faultlessly gorgeous, even when the work week is cold and rainy and miserable. So that means I get to go out and see a lot of stuff, but it also means I have no chance to lay around and do nothing. And so I catch the Ox. Alas.
Siglufjorður is such an adorable little town.
Inside the Herring Museum.
No comment.
One building was set up like a shipyard, another like a herring processing plant, and the last (and most interesting, imo) had a traditional museum on the ground floor, and the upstairs was a house museum set up like the dorms for herring workers in the early 20th century.
This sign means historic site, not highway cloverleaf. I was so confused until I figured that out.
Pizza 67, where we had lunch.
Outside the gas station.
The harbor.
Siglufjorður from afar.
The park.
Near where we found the cache ..
and below the rise, there's a playground!
Next to a babbling brook!
The tunnel of doom.
The remains of a turf house by the side of the road.
Driving home.
A couple pictures from the next week ...
A cloudy day at Meðalheimur.
Another cloudy day.
MOOOOOOOO. I mean, MUUUUUUUUUU.
GPR at Glaumbær.
On Thursday morning we visited Kolkúos, another local site where a trading post by the sea is being excavated, and then a churchyard excavation on the other side of the valley.
Kolkúos - very windy and cold!
They have a sweet little screening setup.
This is at the churchyard. Yes, those are grave cuts, and there's a skeleton in it.
This past weekend, Sauðarkrókur played host to hordes and hordes of people for the Youth Olympics. It was so crowded. We had to wait for cars before crossing the street, even! ... I kid. It was crazy, though - the stores were crowded and out of everything, campers parked in every available square foot, showers packed with tiny athletes. They're gone by now. Thank goodness. I didn't go dancing at all - I thought it would be even more packed than the previous weekend.
Town all decked out with Iceland flags.
Tents outside the pool, selling food, crafts, and sporting clothes (I was sorely tempted by pastel Reeboks), and a big tent for performances. There were also bouncy castles that looked fun.
This past Sunday I just did a couple of little trips, first to the local Þing at Hegranes (first we drove all the way through Hegranes before we found it), and then to the textile museum at Blöndúos. The textile museum was incredible - I'd never been to a museum before where they pass out cotton gloves at the entrance, so you can touch things if you want to! So much incredible stuff - intricate tatting, a tiny book cover, a stitched doodle, clothes and linens and rugs - I wish I knew more about textiles. They also had, in Open Storage, a waffle iron from the late 19th/early 20th century - exactly the same as one that we found half of in an upper layer at Seyla! That was pretty incredible, and worth the trip for that alone. We also stopped for a few minutes at the Sea Ice museum, and to take a picture of the spaceship church above town.
A statue of the ferryman of Skagafjorður, positioned just across the bay from our town.
His view of Sauðarkrókur. He used to go across where the bridge is now.
Me at the Hegranesþing.
Remains of some búðs at Hegranesþing.
Blöndúos is a cute little sea town. I had to keep telling myself I wasn't on the Virginia coast in March.
The Blöndúos church.
Me screening at Glaumbær.
And troweling.
My side of the room, hung with laundry.
Rainbow at Glaumbær.
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.]
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.)
On Monday the 20th, we had the day off, and I went to Akureyri. We stopped at Gasír first - a previously excavated trading post not far from the modern town, it yeilded more ceramics than any other site in Iceland (all imported). There was also a medieval fair there (Iceland's answer to Renfest), but we had a lot of fun walking around the old búðs and the church with its ring wall, looking at the signs of previous work - turf hanging down over walls, geocloth visible in places.
It was Monday, so the shops in town were open. We went to the used book store and the antique/vintage store (I got some books, a warm hat, and a pair of awesome shoes) - and the Viking Superstore and the regular bookstore and got lunch and dinner (at Domino's, which was not very yummy actually). We also peeked into the church, which is set high on a hill above the town, and walked around the botanical garden. And then we decided to see Harry Potter - which I really enjoyed, probably more so than the 4th or 5th movies.
Icelandic Renfest
Gasír - church in front, búðs in rear
Turf and a yarvistuker (sp?) covering a well-troweled wall
The church in Akureyri and the used book store.
A window in the church depicts Þorgeir tossing the idols over Goðafoss. There's a whole series of these windows, each of them with a biblical scene on top and a historic scene at the base.
There's a boat in the church. Someone donated it, and they hung it from the ceiling.
Botanical gardens.
The theatre where I saw Harry Potter.
The sky on the way home, at 11 PM.
Over the next week I took a few random pictures around Sauðarkrókur.
This is the movie company that was filming in town.
This is the old post office. It's not really a hotel/restaurant, they just made it look that way for the movie. (That was disappointing, we could use more restaurant choices!)
This is the church in town - the only one around that faces east!
Freshly snow-capped peaks.
How quickly the weather changes! Sunny to the left, rainy to the right. (The buildings to the right are our labs. One of the ones on the left is the dentist who fixed my tooth.)
I did go dancing that Saturday night, but there was a band, and a cover charge, and a racing convention of some sort in town, so it was a little to crowded for me. I left by 2 AM and went to bed!
Sunday we had a day off, and we went to Sigulfjorður, a small town at the very northern tip of the peninsula. It was a big fishing town about a hundred years ago, and today it's best known for its Herring Museum and its pizza place. We also found some geocaches, which I need to remember to enter - one of them on a pull-out by the road on the way into town, the second in an actual forest, a completely beautiful park on the other side of town. The road into town passes through a long, dark, one-lane tunnel - it was absolutely exhilarating to drive through.
It's exhilarating to drive anywhere in Iceland, actually. When I get back to the US I'll be so confused by all the straight, level, wide roads. Eight lanes? What? And a median strip? Luxury!
We've also been really lucky (relatively speaking, I guess) in the weather - our weekends have been pretty much faultlessly gorgeous, even when the work week is cold and rainy and miserable. So that means I get to go out and see a lot of stuff, but it also means I have no chance to lay around and do nothing. And so I catch the Ox. Alas.
Siglufjorður is such an adorable little town.
Inside the Herring Museum.
No comment.
One building was set up like a shipyard, another like a herring processing plant, and the last (and most interesting, imo) had a traditional museum on the ground floor, and the upstairs was a house museum set up like the dorms for herring workers in the early 20th century.
This sign means historic site, not highway cloverleaf. I was so confused until I figured that out.
Pizza 67, where we had lunch.
Outside the gas station.
The harbor.
Siglufjorður from afar.
The park.
Near where we found the cache ..
and below the rise, there's a playground!
Next to a babbling brook!
The tunnel of doom.
The remains of a turf house by the side of the road.
Driving home.
A couple pictures from the next week ...
A cloudy day at Meðalheimur.
Another cloudy day.
MOOOOOOOO. I mean, MUUUUUUUUUU.
GPR at Glaumbær.
On Thursday morning we visited Kolkúos, another local site where a trading post by the sea is being excavated, and then a churchyard excavation on the other side of the valley.
Kolkúos - very windy and cold!
They have a sweet little screening setup.
This is at the churchyard. Yes, those are grave cuts, and there's a skeleton in it.
This past weekend, Sauðarkrókur played host to hordes and hordes of people for the Youth Olympics. It was so crowded. We had to wait for cars before crossing the street, even! ... I kid. It was crazy, though - the stores were crowded and out of everything, campers parked in every available square foot, showers packed with tiny athletes. They're gone by now. Thank goodness. I didn't go dancing at all - I thought it would be even more packed than the previous weekend.
Town all decked out with Iceland flags.
Tents outside the pool, selling food, crafts, and sporting clothes (I was sorely tempted by pastel Reeboks), and a big tent for performances. There were also bouncy castles that looked fun.
This past Sunday I just did a couple of little trips, first to the local Þing at Hegranes (first we drove all the way through Hegranes before we found it), and then to the textile museum at Blöndúos. The textile museum was incredible - I'd never been to a museum before where they pass out cotton gloves at the entrance, so you can touch things if you want to! So much incredible stuff - intricate tatting, a tiny book cover, a stitched doodle, clothes and linens and rugs - I wish I knew more about textiles. They also had, in Open Storage, a waffle iron from the late 19th/early 20th century - exactly the same as one that we found half of in an upper layer at Seyla! That was pretty incredible, and worth the trip for that alone. We also stopped for a few minutes at the Sea Ice museum, and to take a picture of the spaceship church above town.
A statue of the ferryman of Skagafjorður, positioned just across the bay from our town.
His view of Sauðarkrókur. He used to go across where the bridge is now.
Me at the Hegranesþing.
Remains of some búðs at Hegranesþing.
Blöndúos is a cute little sea town. I had to keep telling myself I wasn't on the Virginia coast in March.
The Blöndúos church.
Me screening at Glaumbær.
And troweling.
My side of the room, hung with laundry.
Rainbow at Glaumbær.
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.]
no subject
(Anonymous) 2009-08-06 10:15 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
And yes, it's so pretty here, but the weather can be brutal!