On Silence

Lifting the first turves at the Sweet Track Excavation

Hello Internets,

I didn’t blog in May, at all, so that is one of my resolutions I’m not doing so well on, In fact, compared to last year they are not going so well in general, which might explain why I’ve not been blogging- it gets a little depressing contemplating telling you all the things I haven’t managed to do quite yet…

… but that doesn’t mean I’ve been silent- I think in part the reason I’ve not been posting at length is also Twitter; I’ve been using it a lot lately and I have some (badly composed) thoughts on the use of it. I use it primarily as a microblogging tool. I’m not interested in gaining followers by ‘offering them something’ such as news or links or pithy wit. I follow people that are either friends or talk about stuff I find interesting, and I indulge a wee bit of geeky stalking: Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith (Authors/ Comic book writers/ Artists) reduce me to fits of giggles on a regular basis, and Stephen Fry is just lovely. I don’t expect anyone to follow me, and I’m always a bit surprised when people do (One person I asked why answered with ‘because (someone) promised me you talk about archaeology, dinosaurs and cake’- which is great as far as I’m concerned!). But it does serve as my primary vehicle for letting people know what I’m up to; which was the original purpose of this blog.

As I’ve said before, I’m not sure what this should become instead: I don’t feel confident enough yet about my academic voice to blog any strong archaeological discourse much beyond my very narrow field, and I’m at that stage in my PhD (7 months to go and counting) that I’m a little wary of upsetting future employers, or sticking my feet well and truly in it!

So, for those of you that don’t do the Twitter/Facebook thing, or those wanting a summary, in May I did the following things:

• Ran an excavation at the Sweet Track, in the Somerset Levels. I’ve talked about this site before. Running the dig was pretty nerve wrecking if I’m honest as some serious experts had to be on site with me, the archaeology was that important, and I had to have government permission to do the work in the first place. It was pretty successful, despite some glitches with the dGPS (for those who followed my anxious tweets: I’ve just had the data back today and the trench was pretty well in the right place, and caught all of the anomalies we were interested in). I’m still making sense of it- there are issues around just how accurately the position of an anomalous response in the radar can located on the ground, for example, but I think we detected the track, or some associated wood with geophysical survey, which is the whole point of my PhD. I now have a month in the lab to look at the soil chemistry on the site to try to work out exactly how the trackway is causing the responses. Watch this space!
• I invigilated a lot of exams, which was boring but I get paid!
• I had a few driving lessons, one of which involved a slightly scary moment on a roundabout, but I’m getting better, slowly. I still have stopping issues though, so my instructor will only let me go forwards at the moment…
• I tried to see Counting Crows on the 18th, the gig was cancelled and I eventually saw them on the 30th. They were very, very good and mostly played tracks from ‘August and Everything After‘ with mad mid song diversions into Beatles tracks, and one inspired Fairport Convention cover (Meet on the Ledge).
• I saw the Chinese State Circus on one Bank Holiday and spent the other one watching Coraline in 3D, which was also highly awesome.
• I got to see the amazing Cas, but still haven’t been to Oxford to see her.
• In uni I wrote reports and did horrible things to soil in order to determine particle size distributions.
• I read a LOT of Tamora Pierce- this always happens when I get my hands on a new book of hers; I want to go and re-read everything she has written. Her novels are like old friends. I also read the Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman and hated it much less than my friend Cat did, and Pride and Prejudice which I hated a lot less than I though I would. Cas gave me all of the Princess Diaries and I devoured them; my guilty pleasure for the month, though they are actually a lot smarter and much more wholesome than the (not very faithful) film adaptations would have you beleive.
• I loved Star Trek. Matt has been to see it twice.

I don’t have a lot else to report! My dad has started a blog, mainly about poetry and writing so we’ve been having some exchanges there which has been good.

April Chaos

I’m sitting in the house in Bournemouth watching Grand Designs and feeling a slight twinge of guilt- I should be writing downtime for silly roleplaying games but I left all my notes in university this afternoon. So, I’m writing this instead as it’s been a while since I’ve blogged and I think that is in part because life has been a little chaotic lately.

This time last month I’d been back from Dartmoor for a little while and the next four weeks all sort of blur together. Easter and the campus shutdown, plus my birthday and going to Sheffield combined to make everything a bit disjointed. I also had a lot of paid work on my plate which meant that actual progress on the PhD has felt a bit slow. I guess one slow month isn’t a problem but I really need to make sure I get back on top of things. The best way for me to do this is to be viciously well organised and plan all of my time (at least my time in Bournemouth, anyways), so if you follow me on twitter then I apologise for the amount of boring self motivational tweets that are bound to follow from this.

It’s been a good month of chaos though. Easter weekend was good fun- we went to Winchester for the day and went to the Cathedral, the Castle (and saw the round table), the City Mill and walked along the riverbank and laughed at the ducks. We also had some good long walks on the Common in Southampton.

The week after I went to Sheffield for Geoarchaeology 09. The conference was very good; some great papers but some odd ones too. It was particularly good to get to go along to a public lecture about Earthquakes in Antiquity- Pythia over her vent at Delphi hallucinating. There weren’t any micromorphologists there for a start, or if they were they weren’t giving papers. There was also a lot about geomorphology and predictive modelling for site location and CRM. I’m not going to start getting into the modelling debate here and now- better people than me have been there and done it. Suffice to say, I can see in tricky CRM environments it might be a useful heuristic tool, but even the very best model is going to tell you what you already know, and so be full of inherited biases that you can’t account for. In essence, they’re tautologies.

I did meet quite a few people doing peat-related things though, and met some research students. I hate going to conferences on my own, but I was brave and networked, and what do you know, I think it might pay off! There are people out there who know far more than I ever possibly could about peat chemistry, and the good news is they’re enthusiastic about my work, and willing to lend what help they can. Hurrah!

I got back very late Friday/ early Saturday the 18^th and went to bed then was up early organising a secret trip to be pampered for a friend of mine before a triple-joint birthday BBQ in the afternoon. We then went out and danced our socks off at the dinge! I was back in uni for just a couple of days then on Wednesday 22^nd we went to Baraca for yummy Turkish feasts as another joint birthday (everyone’s birthday seems to be from the 19^th to 30^th April!), before getting the last train home.

Matt has been sneakily organising things for my birthday for a while now and I knew I had to have time off, but nothing else. I am a curiosity monster and it’s been driving me crazy, knowing there is a plan but not knowing what. I rather suspect he’s enjoyed winding me up as much as he enjoyed surprising me! I was woken rather early with breakfast and presented with train tickets and whisked off to Bath for the day. I’ve never been before, despite all of the history, archaeology, architecture and literary connections it has. We had a great day exploring- there are so many good jewellery and boutique clothes shops! We also went to the Roman Baths, the Abbey and of course the Royal Crescent and Circus. It was a lovely day and we had a great meal of proper Italian pizza (cooked in a proper ‘forno a legna’). We also had amazing cakes from the tea rooms on the bridge and a nice walk by the river, complete with nesting swans, and, once the sun went in, bats skimming over the waters of the Avon eating all the midges. There were also ducks enjoying a Roman Spa (!) having flown in to the open area of the large bath. There are pictures of all of our adventures waiting for me to upload at home, so expect a monster flickr update over the weekend.

Friday was a day just for us with lovely food at home and a nice walk to go questing for it all. Saturday saw the biggest surprise. First of all Cas arrived out of the blue, which would have been amazing enough on it’s own, but then I was taken out for an amazing meal with 24 of our friends, some of whom travelled a long way to be there! I am very very lucky to have such amazing friends.

So, I’m back in uni now, feet firmly on the ground and trying to wrap up the last of my reporting on my case study sites and get the last of the Dartmoor soils processed before I go and gather a lot more samples from the Somerset Levels in a fortnight. I really need to start writing up as well. I have an internal conference next week which is a nice friendly place to try out a paper, so there is that to write, and Greenham stuff continues apace!

On the exercises front I’m stuck at just over 12st still but determined to bike and swim more as I think it’s this that will shift it. That and not eating quite so much, but hey, it was my birthday!

Thanks to everyone who came out/ kept quiet/ helped out and made my birthday one of the best ever! Thanks more than I can ever say to Matt, who may be reluctant to organise something like that again, given what a monster I was in the week before hand, wanting to know what was going on!

Oh, and on a final note, just seen this thanks to @adrianmurdoch on twitter, and very pretty it is too!

Procrastination?

I have been putting off blogging for ages, and I can’t quite pin my finger on why. Partly, I think because I don’t feel I have much to say (but then I look at the last month or so and realise loads has happened), but more I think because I don’t feel like there is room to stop and think about what to say, at the moment.

I think that I’m a bit scared- I have 9 months (!) left.

I have now finished all of the geophysics I planned to do.

I have 2 lots of ground truthing to do, and a whole load of lab work.

I need to report on my last case study, write an excavation report and properly get to grips with the really cool things my GPR software can actually do.

And I need to write it all up….

The last month was very, very busy and up until going on fieldwork a fortnight ago I was busy until late at night most days. The immediate pressure has dropped off now though, and I while a bit of a rest is good I can feel momentum slipping….

I think not blogging has been about hiding from the big scary tasks; writing here always makes me consider the bigger picture.

So, my question for the day:

Do I sit and do some planning (serious timetabling of research and resources) for the rest of the day/ tomorrow…

… or is that procrastination?

Or is it a bigger procrastination to sit and scrabble away at all of the little jobs on the never ending to-do list, studiously ignoring the big pile at the centre?

In other news:

Driving lessons have commenced. I am not as awful as I thought I would be, but it’s hard!

Birthday is later this month and my other half is up to something sneaky. This is not good. Anyone who knows me knows what a curiosity monster I am. I have to keep working hard at not asking questions of him or friends that I am certain are in on the plan.

I still have not got below 12st and am getting a little frustrated with it all… but I’ve not been biking as much as I should so I know what I need to do…

Neko, out, somewhat discombobulated

Basket Case

OK, so I know it is a sin beyond sins to write a meme as a blog post but I’m writing it for facebook anyways (sigh, I have had about a million of these lately- all variations on a theme but some of them are kinda fun; note to everyone on facebook: I’m only going to do these if they make me go ‘Ooh’ OK?). So, meme below. Possibly giving you more insight into my musical taste than any of you deserve.

In other news:

This year I suck at my resolutions. Those of you who do the twitter thing will know I’ve decided to get back onto the bandwagon with it all. Especially the fitness thing. I haven’t been backsliding, but I feel like I’ve been in much the same place since October last year, and I think that is to do with getting to the point where the fitness work needs to be stepped up to keep having an effect, and for various reasons I’ve been doing less, not more. So, back to swimming, biking and whining on twitter about sit ups then! Sorry if it bores y’all.

I’ve recently shifted a couple of external hurdles to the last few bits of fieldwork on my PhD so if things go to plan I’m back off to Dartmoor in a fortnight, and potentially Somerset soon after, but I’m not counting my chickens on that one ’till I have the site license in my sweaty little paws!

Here is the meme:

WHAT TO DO: 1. Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle. 2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer. 3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS. 4. Tag 10 friends. 5. Everyone tagged has to do the same thing. 6. Have Fun!

IF SOMEONE SAYS ‘ARE YOU OKAY’ YOU SAY? Freak on a Leash (Korn)

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF? So Like a Rose (Garbage)

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL? Release the Pressure (Leftfield)

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY? Ruiner (NIN)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE? Roses for the Dead (Funeral for a Friend)

WHAT’S YOUR MOTTO? Armagideon Time (The Clash)

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU? You Can Love Her (Angelfish)

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU? She’s a Rebel (Green Day)

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN? Where do I begin (Chemical Brothers)

WHAT IS 2 + 2? Right Now (Korn)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND? Big Man With A Gun (NIN)

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY? Android (Green Day)

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP? The Lowest Trees Have Tops (John Dowland)

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE? Survivalism (NIN)

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING? Only (NIN)

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL? I can see clearly now (Johnny Nash)

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST New Year’s Day (U2)

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR Some Days Are Better Than Others (U2)

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET? Just Like You Imagined (NIN)

WHAT DO YOU WANT RIGHT NOW? My Hero (Foo Fighters)

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS? Safe Place (Staind)

WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS? Basket Case (Green Day)

Well, that last one seems appropriate at least!

Greenham in British Archaeology

I have been remiss. The last issue of BritArch went live on the web last weekend and I’ve yet to post a link to it.

You can access the text of John Schofield’s’ article here (but no pictures due to copyright stuff). It’s all about the project I was involved with at the Greenham Common womens’ peace camps for my MSc thesis (and even has a discussion of the results of said thesis!).

Work on Greenham continues, for me; one article is already written about our theoretical practice and I’m working on another method/results paper at the moment, both with two academics I have enormous respect for. I’m trying not to let it eat into PhD time and have to keep reminding myself that publication is GOOD, even if it’s on earlier research