Hot, humid, sticky, muggy, etc.

I have a GOOD attitude, honestly. We decided, several of us who were at both places, that yesterday did NOT beat the week in about 2002 when we were digging at Cherry Pond in the Mt Washington Valley, one of the prettiest place east of the Mississippi... on some of the hottest days in living memeory with the highest humidity, inside the edge of the forest so no breathe of breeze, at least as hot as yesterday and with biting insects. Yesterday there were no biting insects and there were occasional breezes.

but it was close to the nastiest day we had ever dug. Sweat pouring off people like a Gatorade commercial. AT about 2 we packed up the whole site, which took about half an hour, and it thundered and lightened and blew over. I gather it did eventually rain quite hard after we had unpacked, dug for another hour and a half, and packed up and gone home.

The peregrine falcon youths (I thought they were eyasses, but they're no longer nestlings) spent most of the afternoon sitting under the Amoskeag bridge making their wheezing noise, which made it almost as hot as the sound of a cicada (we have only a very rare buzz from one of them).


The north half of the site has been declared hosed. After much drawing of profiles I was privileged to backfill the trench nearest the road and the pit by the lilacs. Shovelling in the heat requires no brains, unlike trowelling, and it was so hot working couldn't make it much hotter. I was far enough from the target Jen wouldn't let me shovel-throw it (she feared either my decapitating someone or asphixiating all of us, what a whiner) The splendid Ele (as she spells Ellie) was my bucket woman, actually taking trouble to see the bucket was in a handy position and toting and emptying like a fiend. I turned alarmingly purple. It was all quite satifying and no one passed out.

It is my week to have Linda. I wanted to get a curtain for the room she will have and so I took her with me to Target. It was her first time in a Target. It was air-conditioned. Heavenly.

Today Linda, Nancy, Vicky, John and I were at the lab. It was hot there, indeed, but the humidity was better than yesterday. Although we catalogued pretty hard, it was not physical work. A person called Joe (absolutely not Leo, although I was convinced otherwise) who knows Dick from the debacle at St. Augustine's has been taking pictures on our site. He came to the wild and crazy nerve center to see the curation portion of the business, with less dust than the actual dig, and I hope he volunteers again.

On the other hand, it would be great if anyone found anything more exciting than hammerstones and quartz flakes. I often fear we have encountered a tribe of mythical Tidy Indians (the Oceedee, perhaps) who never lost anything and usually swept up all their trash and dropped it in the river.

Tonight Dick and Deb and Jen and Kurt (wandering in from the north country)and Linda and I had dinner in Manchester at Café MoMo (a Nepalese restaurant, and tasty) to say goodbye to two of the three interns. Lauren is going to dig a mediaeval mortuary in Poland (because white people don't mind excavating their dead), and Amanda K is going off to work at a summer camp. We will miss them. They worked hard and were pleasant company.

We're going to keep Julia, the third intern, a while yet, unless she broils. I gather the pits to the south of shed, on the nice south-facing hillside over the river, were particularly intensely hot today. They say the weather will break maybe Friday.