"One day, during the third week, after lunch in the cafe.  I asked Efrat if it was possible to get an Ostrich egg.  After confirming that I was serious, she introduced me to her brother-in-law, who happened to be there at the time, and I explained to him that I just wanted an empty shell.  He said 'Wait here' and left.  About 15 minutes later, he returned with the egg.  It turns out he runs the animal operation at the kibbutz.  I offered to pay him something but all he wanted was for me to find a gold coin at the excavation and give it to the authorities.  So you see there was no need for ninjas although that would have made a better story.  As you know, I have not fulfilled my part of the deal but since I no longer possess the egg.  I am passing that responsibility on to its current owner."

We'll see what I can do. 

As for other loose ends, thank you, dear readers, for following the blog this year.  Also thank you to the team for working with me and making everything run so smoothly this year. 

You all were FAN...TASTIC.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just dropped off the two oil lamps and the amphora head to Jolanta, who is working outside next door on the Israeli's pottery.  She again complimented the team, saying "I trust your team with your pottery.  You don't mix contexts and you keep in ordered."  So well done team. 

As for the amphora - sigh.  If it is possible to feel great affection for an inanimate object, I do.  It was in an awful lot of pieces and dirty when Glenn brought it out of the earth and dirty.  So we gathered together all of the sherds that seemed to fit and then brought them down to the lab.  I first dry-brushed the pieces to remove the excess dirt so I could try to find more writing. 

Then I laid out all the pieces and found one with red paint, but no discernable writing, to see how the paint would react to cleaning.  I used a dry cutip first, but even with that, I noticed pieces of red coming off.  So, for the rest of the pieces, I avoided touching the writing.  Then, because I was worried that the water I was using to get off the dirt for the non-writing parts would drip onto the writing, I cleaned mostly everything with cutips. 

Once all my pieces were dry, I started reassembling.  Once pieces fit together, I glued them with Israeli Elmer's (water soluable!) and then taped.  

And I got to sit in my lab, lovingly fitting each of those little pieces together, to the point that I finally finished.

And it is beautiful, especially since I had no idea what it would look like when I was putting it together.  And the compliment from Jolanta about the reconstruction wasn't such a bad thing either.   

One: Uncover a cistern (man-made hole often bottle-like in shape used for catching and storing water).  The credit for this discovery goes to Brennan (here with his headlamp, ready for the game):

Two: Fasten a rope ladder (such as the one used on children's playsets) securely to some nearby object.  In 2006, I found out what happens when the rope which is supposed to be securing the ladder snaps halfway down.  In order to avoid this, John (the learned forestry guy and all-around smart person) was given the task; he chose to use that crazy stone structure next to the cistern.  Here he is on his way down:

I was supposed to be in charge today.  Snort.

Two days straight and we are on our last buckets (which is sort of like being on our last leg..).  My favorite part is reassembling the pieces - it is then and only then that I get a real picture of the pottery's use.  There is the whole jigsaw-puzzle part too and the glee that comes when they fit. 

Today, as we were going through the pottery, Rachel again drew my attention to this weird, salmon-colored piece of pottery.  Her team had uncovered it in the field and had asked if the Byzantines had glaze in hot pink.  When I had originally looked at the piece, it had two ridges like the sherds we find, but the glaze was all wrong.  It looked almost like a plastic coat - glossy and way too consistent.  During pottery washing, someone again asked about the piece.  Our group thought perhaps it wasn't pottery, but metal.  So finally, when Rachel brought up the piece during processing, I looked at it again.  Lead, perhaps?  I asked Arnie to give his opinion as I had never seen anything like this.  It was all wrong.

He takes one look and says, "I know exactly what that is."  Ends up that last year, Michael (second in command for the site) ran over the survey equipment with his truck.  A piece of it flew off into the excavation hole and they couldn't find it. 

Hence our piece.  I'm keeping it as a reminder. 

In other news, John wandered in this afternoon to talk about centipedes.  I slew one the other day (Japanese sushi chef style - lots of chops until all the body pieces stopped running), which prompted a discussion about why I didn't collect it in a bucket and then let it go.  I claimed they were poisonous, but I'm not sure I hold much credibility as I tend to kill all bugs that pass my way.  So John (who actually looks up plants, animals and bugs he doesn't know) looked up the centipedes for the region and came to tell me about them.  Ends up they will bite, have a toxin in their bite and although they probably won't kill, he did find a picture of a guy's hand which looked like it had been blown-up with water. 

This is all to say that there will be no mercy.  Bugs beware. 

A few of us made plans to watch the sunset on the rocks by the lab, overlooking the sea and the city of Tiberias.  While we are sitting there, I hear from behind me Arnie say, "Kristina!  You forgot a bucket of pottery to wash!" 

Oh dear, I thought. 

So I turn around and he hands me the bucket.  I was a little hesitant to take it because there had been some talk about bringing down a bit of the centipede I killed.  BUT, instead of a nasty, multi-legged creature, nestled in a plastic bag was my very own, shining ostrich egg. 

 I've been bugging my lab slaves for three weeks now about procuring an egg from the kibbutz pen, but even offering an A+ has garnered no response. 

But now, Sir Arnie, knight of all things impossible, has gotten me my very own ostrich egg.  

Now I've just got to get it through customs.   

Our initial goal was to try to level out the square.  Rule #1 of archaeology - you aren't digging a hole, no matter how much dirt you move.  Rather, you are excavating, trying to peel back those layers one by one to see what interesting things await.  So this meant that before any of the tumble overtop the darkness of the cistern could be removed, we needed to bring down the dirt on either side.    

So we dug.

And we dug somemore.

This is by far the less glamorous side of archaeology - especially when you know that something exciting is awaiting you.  The great thing of just digging, however, is that you get into a rhythm of some sorts, among the picking, the shoveling and the passing of buckets.  The pick-ax remains a favorite of mine as every swing at a rock becomes a swing against a worry/problem in life.  Oh, the satisfaction in knocking that stupid, stubborn rock out of its once firm foothold! 

Finally, at some point, we dug down enough so that there was some eveness across, Jim called for a change of pace.  We gathered around the general area of the cistern and discussed our game plan.  The problem with our cistern is that because we could not quite define where its borders were, someone could accidentally step into the hole OR if we removed just the right rock, the entire tumble would collapse down (more rocks to remove in the future).  Brennan described it as a giant game of pick-up sticks, where the goal is to remove one stick at a time from a jumble without making any of the others move. 

The process was that one by one we would identify rocks that needed to go.  One person would lean over the jumble to remove the rock, with two people holding on to the person's belt.  Brennan went first, with Jim and I hanging on to his middle with feet firmly planted.  At one point, John and Dr. Schuler had to grab onto the giant rocks on their side, while Brennan went in for the one in the middle.  

The end result was that we got all the tumbled removed, defined the top of the cistern and only lost one rock down into the hole.  The bottom of the cistern was now visible, so a measurement could be taken of its depth.  At 16 feet deep, it is easily the largest cistern to our little church complex.    

After that excitement, Jim began turrheaing around the hole - carefully as we weren't sure what else was in the space between the cistern and the wall.  Yesterday, we found a RIDICULOUS amount of ceramics from this little region.  Here's a picture of the mass hanging up (I could barely lift the bag - it is bigger than my torso and easily weighs 50 pounds):

Today's digging revealed that most of the ceramic in the bag above is from a drainage pipe that fed the water supply of the cistern.  I'm thinking about having one of my lab slaves try to reassemble this impossible jigsaw puzzle (should be easier than getting one of the kibbutz ostrich eggs for me). 

Anyway, lest you think that the excitement of the day was over after dangling people over the hole of the cistern, guess again.  John and I were turrhea-ing west of the cistern (along the edge that faces the open room) and I noticed an unnatural bend to a stone at my feet.  A shower of dirt later and I found what originally looked like an enormous stone grinding bowl (an observation Dr. Schuler made as he walked by).

But by the end of the day, John and I, shovels, fingers and trowels in hand, still hadn't reached the bottom of the carved stone - it is all one piece, as far as we can tell and has begun to slope towards the cistern:

I did find a coin (super exciting) which means that we will sift the rest of the contents of this smaller hole tomorrow.

For this afternoon, however, my team and I are going to concentrate on getting the pottery in order for Jolanta's comments next week.  As someone recently remarked, it's like we are catching up on 1500 years of cleaning dishes that someone left in the sink, "only cool and not at all like chores." 

I'm certainly amused.  

Several times over the course of these past weeks, I have been tempted to say those four words with a certain amount of chagrin, sarcasm, bemusement...

Today, however, I love my job in the fullest sense of the word. 

I love my job.

For the last two days, I have been working with Jim Rogers, Brennan and Arnie southeast of the church.  Our goal was to find the continuation of a wall, which we began to uncover yesterday.

Today I look over and see Brennan playing with a hole in the ground.  Now, at the beginning of the season, Michael (Number Two for the entire hill) said, "In past years I have spoken about the snake problem and have said not to worry - they are more afraid of you than you are of them.  This is no longer the case.  The snakes are now very aggresive and should be avoided."  Imagine my surprise then when I look over a little later and Brennan's HAND is in the hole.  He says, "There are some good pieces of pottery in there."  Although I am not one to stand in the way of pottery, I did remind him of snakes, animals, too many alien movies, etc. 

Well, after breakfast, I left the square to go over to the inscription with Andrea to see if we could make a dry rubbing of it.  Having found no twelve-year-old child from whom I could steal crayons, we tried to make the rubbing with the edge of a pencil.  It didn't work, unfortunately, but Dr. Schuler now has a pretty bizare picture to hang up on his refrigerator. 

Anyway, I returned to my square to hear Brennan say that the hole went pretty deep.  By now the square was calling it a cistern (a plastered hole in the ground used to catch and retain water).  Brennan dropped a rock into the hole and there was a DEFINITE gap in time before we heard it clunk at the bottom.  Arnie had the idea to tie a rock to the end of a rope and then hang it down until we reached bottom.

It ends up the cistern is about 4.5 meters deep (Four of Andrea, for those who know her height).  We swung the rock from side to side and originally thought that it was bottlenecked at the top and expanded at the bottom. 

So I began digging around.  Imagine my surprise when about 30 centimeters away from where I thought was the opening, dirt started falling down, down, down.  At this point, I backed up to re-assess the situation.  Linda suggested clearing around a bit with the broom to try and pick out the stones and weak areas. 

Ends up that the cistern top is huge, to the point that to remove the dirt from the other side against the wall, I had to sort of a Cirque de Solei splits over top the hole, with either leg bracing agains the side of the hole and me bending and stretching to remove dirt from the other side (No cameras were present (thank goodness), though the comments from the back (thanks a lot, Andrea) were aplenty - at least I learned the reaches of my new-found flexibility).  Many big rocks were still jumbled over top, but I was afraid that once we removed the perfect one, the rest would collapse. 

So Linda and I continued picking around the entrance, until I came across a BEAUTIFUL, ENORMOUS handle of some sort of smooth storage jar, with many, thick pieces of the body still intact.  That can be the find of the season for myself.  Let others have the jewelry, the gold, the nails - I am quite content with a beautiful and unique piece of pottery.

Before we left for the day, we strung security tape around the walls and hole.  The hole still is pretty hidden under the tumble of rocks, so the worry is that some silly tourist is going to leap on top and fall on down.  I'm hoping the security tape provides some hinderance rather than an incentive to gaze closer.  We'll see.

The other option is to stick one of the undergraduates down the hole and see if we can catch the lynx-like creature that has been haunting our site at night, leaving droppings and footprints all around.  I have at least two students working for me, so I could offer them the option of going down in the cistern overnight and getting an A.  The other offer I have made to them is that if they steal an ostrich egg for me from the pen on the kibbutz, I would be more than happy to give an A+.  Otherwise they can just continue working hard and we'll see where the grades fall. 

All in all, exciting day.  I love my job.

My job includes a lot more random things - a few of which I'd love to share with you (The internet was acting up last night and died halfway through this post.  New pictures are now up!).

First of all is a carved piece of bone.  Rachel found this when she was recording the finds of the day - I remember someone asking me about it in the field, but couldn't think of what bone it could possibly be.  For sake of convenience, I'm calling it a hairpin:

And of course we are constantly turning up random pieces of carved stone: usually marble, limestone or basalt - from street pavers to beautiful architectural decoration:

Next are coins.  Incredibly useful for their dating information, these tend to be a rarity.  That said, we've already uncovered at least seven.  The one on the right is likely an Arabic fil (according to Dr. Schuler).  The one on the left is a yet undetermined - Roman denarius?  Byzantine coin?  Sussita DID have a mint, but until this coin is cleaned (not by me - only the professionals), we won't know.  

The following piece of glass was my surprise for the evening.  Last week I stayed down from the hill one day to get caught up and heard tales of this beautiful piece of glass - my ears must have been plugged from Sea of Galilee water, because I failed to hear that it was PAINTED.  Usually the pieces we find are a plain, sea-green color, but I have NEVER seen a piece of painted from on site.  This gives me further cause to bug Dr. Schuler about finishing the square I began digging in (dubbed the "Wisconsin Square" by Arthur Segal - director of the entire project).  Something funky is going on, from the enormous walls to the unique pottery to the interesting small finds.  Please Dr. Schuler?  Please may we dig?  

The really consistent and rather unexpected find of the season is the abundance of nails that are turning up.  Some of these nails are your typical chubby, I-could-nail-my-foot-to-a-tree variety, but as with the following, many are doornails.  The Byzantines would take a regular straight nail, hammer it through the doorhinge (I think) and then bend the end over - thereby giving the piece its noticeable shape.  The great thing about this season is that for the first time, they are being found in great quantities IN SITU (namely, IN the doorways, where we would expect to find them). 

Now the find that makes every archaeologist's heart go pitty-patty is gold.  From Indiana Jones to this nascent digger, gold is such a wonderous find because it still glimmers when taken out of the dirt.  In a square west of the church, this little beauty was waiting for them:

As of now, my eyes are pointing in two different directions after a full day of pottery reading (and a ridiculous two liters of lemon diet coke), but I am almost at the point of contentment.  Last night, I lay on my back on a bench outside the women's dormitory, staring at the sky, petting the belly of a random kibbutz dog (the infamous labrador who chases and eats rocks) and watching the gentle breeze play with the branches of the eucalyptus overhead.  Since I live in Cincinnati, it has been a while since I've seen a truly dark night - one worthy of Wisconsin farmland.  It has been even longer since I've taken the time to watch the night sky. 

Everything in Israel moves slower.  Case in point, a few of us decided to be spontaneous and head over to Tiberias - the dirty, dusty, unbelievably hot city across the lake (and gloriously free of large tourist groups).  Each of us five had specific things we needed - a tape measure, an ATM, man-pris (male version of capris) and milkshake.  Now, in the US, we'd catch a bus, which for the most part runs on a consistent schedule at regular intervals - so I could expect that in Isreal, right?  

Ha. 

It took a total of four hours of travel time/organization for us five to make it over to Tiberias to do 40 minutes of errands.  We first tried the bus stop outside the kibbutz and at one point, even hitchhiking (no one seemed to be going to Tiberias, however).  Then were the two attempts at a taxi, which was made more complicated because most cabs only take four people - unless of course you want to wrangle with prices (I had one taxi driver tell me, "Oh, it is very risky.  This will be more money."  Forget it).  Finally, Efrat (the kibbutz hospitality director and overall saint) got us a taxi big enough (which in the end WAS more money) and we made it over.  

Before we could begin our shopping, however, we had to wait for a reciept from my earlier trip to Tel Kedesh (see my post on the nonesense that accompanied this).  As someone explained to me, in a culture that thrives on getting the most for their services (often times more than the agreed upon price), receipts are a sign of honesty.  So, when the taxi company didn't immediately give me a receipt for the Tel Kedesh, Efrat started bugging them to send one over by courier.  After a week of bugging them, she thought she could use the trip to Tiberias for them to get me a receipt.  I should add that Efrat told the manager that if he did not get me a receipt, she would no longer use them as a taxi company for her guests.  

About ten minutes before our group got to Tiberias, the driver handed me his cell phone with his manager on the other end.  The manager promised he would be waiting for me once we got to Tiberias to give me the receipt.  He wasn't there.  The driver said, five minutes.  

Five minutes passes.  

The driver says again, five minutes.

Now the group was already exhausted by the three hours of figuring out how to make the twenty minute drive to Tiberias, so we finally decided nuts.  We would pay the driver and just leave. 

He wouldn't take the money.  Five minutes, he said.

Five more minutes passes. 

We finally made him take the money and walked down the block.  About five minutes later, a lot of honking and shouting behind us caught our attention.  The taxi driver from our trip was leaning out his cab, yelling that his manager was in the car behind him.  So in the middle of a busy street in Tiberias, I finally got my receipt (more for Efrat's benefit than my own).

After that, the trip went quite quickly - up to the point when we decided to catch the bus back and had to ask around to try to figure out when it came.  One hour later, we were on the bus back to Kibbutz En Gev.   

This is all to say that life moves much slower and is not conducive to spontaneity.  For this particular uptight person, the whole experience serves as great aversion therapy.  Couple this with all the bugs I seem to be encountering, I'll come back to the states a cured person.        

What a week - my muscles ache, sleep is definitely lacking, work looms for the weekend, but what satisfaction!  I FINALLY got to dig yesterday and today and put those road-digging skills from two years ago to go use.  The turrhea (a twisted Arabic shovel - good for scooping up dirt) is my personal favorite tool, although a few swings of an axes are the perfect remedy for ANY tension. 

So tired and happy.  Good end.  I'll write tomorrow about all the cool small finds we've discovered.  The winner of the beer contest this week is Darryl's square, who found at least 10 HUGE door nails WITHIN a stone door frame/threshold.  Perfect context.  Perfect winners.  I'm taking them to the shady pub tonight to celebrate. 

In the meantime, my father sent me this article from the Smithsonian which sort of sums up the whole experience in Jerusalem.  Enjoy!

Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem

Holy War

 FEUDING MONKS at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem don't just cast the first stone - they stockpile rocks in anticipation of future altercations. Several holy men landed in the hospital two Christmases ago after a fight broke out over the dusting of church chandeliers. The occasional brawls at the I,7oo-year-old basilica, believed to mark the birthplace of Jesus Christ, reflect the difficulty of housing three Christian denominations under a single roof

And now that roof is rotting, threatening the structural integrity of the building. Parts of the wooden truss structure date to the 15th century, and holes in the timbers allow dirty water to drip upon the precious paintings and mosaics below. The problem has been worsening for decades, but t the resident clerics-from the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox churches and the Franciscan order of the Roman Catholic Church -are jealous of each other's claims t of custody and have been unable to agree on a plan of action. Despite the Palestinian Authority's recent effort to intervene, historians despair of saving the place.

"It is in the direst need of the greatest care," says Jaroslav Folda, a University of North Carolina professor emeritus of art history who studies the Crusader paintings on the basilica's red limestone columns. "This church is one of the holiest sites in Christianity. It is the victim here."

The fortress like basilica is one of the oldest continuously operating churches in the world, having survived - some would a say miraculously-various invasions, regime changes, from earthquakes and, most recently, the 2002 siege of Bethlehem, when armed Palestinians hid in the church from Israeli forces for weeks. Some wonder if the church has been spared only to be destroyed by the people who cherish it the most. The atmosphere of hostility "taints the holy place," says the Rev. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a Roman Catholic priest who teaches archaeology at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem.

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority; which controls Bethlehem, promised last November that his government would help organize a roof restoration effort and set up a fund for donations. But money isn't the issue. In fact, all three churches seem to want the historic privilege of picking up at least part of the tab, as a means of edging out the competition.

The Church of the Nativity was built around A.D. 330 by the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine and was mostly destroyed-possibly during a Samaritan rebellion in AD. 529 -though parts of the original mosaic floor remain.  Soon after, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian rebuilt the church in a bigger, grander fashion -largely the structure that remains today. In A.D. 614, the Persians, who razed many other churches during wars with Byzantium, spared the Church of the Nativity, supposedly out of respect for a mosaic of the Magi shown wearing Persian attire.

When the Crusaders conquered the Holy Land in 1099, they sent a force of 100 knights to guard the church; eventually; artists from this era embellished the building with their own mosaics and column paintings of saints, done in the rare encaustic method, with pigment suspended in wax.

Political control of Bethlehem has flip-flopped many times since. (The church's famous entrance, the four-foot-high "Door of Humility;" was built not to make pilgrims bow but rather to repel looters on horse- and camel-back after the Crusades.) The question of which Christians had the rights to what parts of the church eventually got so tense that the Ottoman sultans, who ruled over Palestine from the 1500S through World War I, instigated an unwritten system now known as the Status Quo, which mandates that things be done as they were always done. Anyone who has previously processioned down a certain aisle, used a particular cupboard or hung a given tapestry has exclusive rights to that task or item.

However, if someone else manages to use or care for an object, ownership passes to them.

"You know, 'If you break it, you buy it'?" says Adam Porter, an associate professor of religion at Illinois College. ''Well, this is, 'If you clean it, you own it.'''

The highly publicized fight at Christmas two years ago was essentially a territorial dispute. The Greeks were cleaning an Armenian-controlled part of the church, and custom dictated that they could dust the chandeliers by standing on a ladder set up in an appointed place. But the Greeks tried to move their ladder, encroaching on Armenian turf

''Well,'' says Raymond Cohen, an international relations professor at Hebrew University of ]Jerusalem, "they had to know this was like waving a red rag in front of a bull."

Religious officials in the region say that what seem like petty scuffles are part of a larger struggle.

"Our concern would be if we stood back and did not try to defend the rights of two billion Catholics," says the Rev. Garrret Edmunds, a Franciscan friar who is the Vice Commissary of the Holy Land in Washington, D.C. and lives in Jerusalem for half the year. "Even things less consequential than replacing a roof, like cleaning a step, are important. If the Greek Orthodox were allowed to repair the roof without complaint or concern, 100 years from now they could say, 'In 2008, we paid for the roof and that is a sign of our ownership.'''

Cohen says the Palestinian Authority's intervention is a promising sign - not because of the funds it might raise, but because it represents outside leadership. He wrote a book about another charged restoration project at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was badly damaged after a 1927 earthquake. With later supervision from the Jordanian government, the custodial churches were able to begin negotiations, which lasted a mere ten years.

"Do I think the repairs {to the Church of the Nativity} will happen in the near future? I don't, but you have to start somewhere," Cohen says. "Sometimes the behavior is so childish-you can't believe these are grown men. You've got to knock heads together and say, 'Guys, we're taking charge.' " -ABIGAIL TUCKER

As for me, another time (although part of me longed to fly the University of Cincinnati flag).  Today it was more important that I get the pottery operation up and running, which isn't very easy when you are herding cats.  We have an enormous team this year and although they are self-sufficient adults, there is a certain amount of preparation and organization to make sure that they are able to fulfil their roles on site.  [I should add that at this point, my mother says, "Welcome to the world of parenting."]. 

For example, pottery washing.  For some reason, I keep forgetting to remind people that THE TIME FOR POTTERY WASHING is 4:30.  I think part of my brain relies on the fact that there IS a published schedule somewhere and kind of assumes people have read said schedule.  

Abraham Lincoln said something slightly inappropriate about assuming.  

People started showing up at 4:15 - which wasn't a problem, but it did lead to a bit of chaos on my end as I scrambled to get my two fairly self-motivated (thank God) lab slaves going, while at the same time organizing the chairs, the pottery buckets, the brushes and the strainers for everyone else.  To top it all off, I had a meeting with Eva the conservator at 5:00 to continue working on a the Beduin pendant (which I finished cleaning today!!!  Pictures soon!!!) and also the Byzantine cross found last Thursday by the careful girls of square F5.  And then, as I'm on the way out of pottery washing to rush over to Eva's (who lives on the OTHER SIDE of the kibbutz in the Beverly Hills region next to the harbor), a man wanders in who asks to speak to the director.  As acting director (until Dr. Schuler gets back), I dealt with him.  Ends up he is a Tour Guide who lives at the kibbutz and wanted to offer his services.  I took down his information, promising to pass it on to my director, then sped off to Eva's. 

And now, after a fairly productive evening of pottery reading, I can now, FINALLY sleep a bit.  There is a bit of the graduate school high going, where lack of sleep leads to MORE adrenaline.  My hope is that this house of cards can wait to fall until I'm on a plane back to the states. 

Till then, to the wife of Darryl, he moved some REALLY big rocks today and patiently listened when I told him to no longer try to heave them over his head and up the bulk.  He also found a whole series of Byzantine door nails (massive iron nails with the ends bent) and with the care of a crime scene cop (which he is), measured and recorded every detail.  To the wife of Arnie, he's quite the nuisance (affectionately, of course), keeping me on task and together to do the pottery - I have dubbed him "Sir Arnie", for his efforts in keeping me organized.  Many thanks for loaning him.