Lab resumes

Yesterday was a quiet day at the lab. Rich and Dawn and Dick and Ann and Mark and Dean (a Field School person and volunteer/refugee from the Sargent Museum) were there.

Mark took some lovely pictures of the three contact-era beads with his enviable camera setup. It involves a camera stand he got at discount (always an enhancement; it has springs on it camera post, allowing careful positioning in three dimensions), a nice Olympus with a super-macro lens, and a small TV attached to display. The resolution is breathtaking, right down into the middle of the beads.

Dean and Dawn got the CA 138 stuff into boxes -- Dawn has only been trying to do this since March. All that fieldwork is a terrible distraction-- and out of the processing area. There are now only 6 milk-crates of kibble to process left from 2000, so once again (third time) I shall announce we might get through it before field school next summer.

As usual, Dick said he wanted to concentrate on 'getting this place cleaned up.' He has only been saying that since maybe 2001. He keeps saying it, and we clean it up, and even though it sinks back into chaos it really has stayed better at each attempt (well, except for his desk), despite my earnest desire to do something besides tidy up. So, for only maybe the second time, Dawn and I announced we needed to organize the data notebooks and stuff on the end of the lab away from the sink, and even though Dick, as usual, said it wasn't that bad (we change places in the tidy-cop/cluttered cop dialogue) Dawn and I began to tidy and organize. This involved browbeating Dick, who finally admitted we did not need soil samples from 1993 right there up front. We were able to box a bit of stuff and will be working further on it.

I am going to buy some archival-what-librarians-use-for-label-covering-instead-of-non-archival-packing-tape, so the labels will stay on (and thus not be sticky after they fall off) the three-ring binders that are the backbones of our record-keeping.

It's pretty exciting there. Next week we hope to catalogue again.