Hi guys,
Our day was uneventful as far as getting on the bus at 4:40 AM. Everything is going well even with Daniel. He has two roomates. One is Andy, our pastor's son (16) and Ian from Canada. Ian will be leaving next Monday and they will get a new roomate. I've seen their room and it is quite a mess(-), but freezing cold(+). Hope their new roomate is ready for this. :))
We always take a breakfast break at the site at 8:00 AM. On Sundays we get French Toast. It's cold, but still a treat. And there is always cucumbers, tomatoes, fish, bread, and yogurt. Daniel does well, but some of the college kids have to take a jar of peanut butter up with them or they'd go hungry. We usually eat a snack bar before we leave for the dig,
Tina and Nancy worked on the mosaic and repaired about 10 spots in the floor. (I take it back about not having experience with tile. I worked/volunteered for a tile contractor once a long time ago.) In the morning, Tina mixed a soft mortar, a thicker mortar and scraped a section of the tile with a scalpel the rest of the time. We "discovered" a section of the floor near a blocked doorway that was patched in ancient times. About 1/3 of the patch was poorly done. The mosaic pieces are made of a different material than the rest of the floor and does not follow the pattern. Shucks! Someone messed up the floor. The poorly done section had mortar left on top of the surface and not wiped down. So I was scraping away mortar that was 1800 years old. The bonding of the patch was far superior to the bonding of the original mosaic. If they would have used this material to make the mosaic, there would have been no need to restore it. It would have still been intact.
Tina's legs have been swelling (heat induced edema) and it is not serious, but annoying. She read on the internet that it is caused by the body not being able to cool off. When the humidity gets above 75% (according to the web) the body's ability to cool down is impacted. Tina seems to be most sensitive to the heat/humidity. Frozen water bottles used for cooling at the site and ice packs under the arm pits and resting with the legs up at the kubbitz seems to be helping. She also has prickly heat rash around the lower calves. That is letting up too. Oh yeah, first thing this morning, we killed a very large black scorpion, before we even got the shade up.
Daniel reports he found a few pieces of pottery today and dug. He was moved from
A-0 to A-2 and found a centipede. He always makes things sound so simple. At lunch today after he ate his food, he was listening to everyone chat and his head was bobbing and he almost landed in his leftover gravy. Pastor Chambers suggested he take a nap. He didn't need to be persuaded. ,o
Carl's group discovered a cistern (might be misspelled). It is a large hole used to store water. The corner in his square is assumed to be rebuilt, because there is a column in it that runs beneath the floor. It is like they just built around an existing column instead of removing it. It is still a mystery. They also found a new part to the decumanas, a large road running east/west. They found centipedes and a small shrew, killing the centipede and running off the shrew.
We got great news!!!!! We are not digging on Friday. We are going to Jordon for 3 days. We get an extra day off.
Stuff...
Meals at the kubbitz are chow-hall style. At the end of the line, we give our number. Tina's is 22. After eating we clear our own dishes and take them to a conveyor belt. We scrape the food off and put all of our dishes in the trays that are moving toward the dishwasher. Different, but fun sort of. It's better than doing them by hand.
Pottery washing happens almost every night between 5:00 and 5:30. We scrub each piece found with scrub brushes and then it is put in a net bag and washed and dried in the bag, All pieces are logged in the notes for the day.
Ach! Those centipedes are dangerous! Best to be chopped in many, many parts.