COURSEWORK: One essay down, three to go. Progress: OK. I hope.

DISSERTATION: One weekend of fieldwork down, three to go. Progress: OK. I've successfully used the res meter and total station unsupervised and got valid results - unfortunately those results show there's not much there! (At least, not between 75cm and 150cm below the current ground surface). The local volunteer society have been extremely welcoming and helpful and I'm really worried that they'll be disappointed. I think "geophys" has a magical reputation to it - but it can't find what isn't there, or what's buried too deply for it to reach.

I may have been brutally maligning Dr. McScaryProfessor, PhD, over the last few months. Just bumped into her on the street; she asked "so, am I going to see you at some point?" and was very friendly and nice. Oh dear. Perhaps the whole time I've been thinking "I don't have anything worth showing her, and she's not very forthcoming in emails, and can be quite reserved in person, and I can never find her outside of her office hours...", she's been thinking "I hope she comes and talks to me soon". Oh well. Luckily she's here all summer and seems much more available now too.

I've mostly been haunting OtherSupervisor, he of the green shirt and khakhi fishing vest (both of which had been replaced by a blue t-shirt today, MADNESS); he's fielded a few frantic phonecalls of the "I can't remember how to do the manual orientation setting function on the TST" variety and also came in on Sunday night so I could drop the res meter off so Doc Thornton could have it for Monday (today). He showed me how to despike my data from the res survey today.

DANCING: After a very tiring weekend (9am-8pm survey+transport for my dissertation project, both days) OF COURSE going dancing on Sunday night at the Bungalows and Bears Sunday Swing Thing was the most sensible thing to do. I had some really nice dances with MathGreek, Daf, Scrabbles McNorton and - um, no nickname for K****** yet. Up. Mr Chippadee, as that's what his wife is called. The Philospher was there also, we have been swopping sewing tips lately. Nice. MathGreek's coming over for breakfast and to buy my bike off me at some point (and by "buy", I mean "have for free", though I may ask for reimbursement for the helmet and padlock as they were bought new and are in good nick; the bike needs a full service and only cost me £20 two years ago anyway.

WORK: Um. Of course applying for a casual job at Subway is the logical thing to do when I have a dissertation to write.

LIFE: I want to stay in the UK. Trying to think of ways to make this happen. Need to talk to people about PhDs but having trouble getting past coursework (yet, strangely, not yet panicking about it; either I am prepared, or totally desensitised to my impending doom). I really, really want to stay. I should be organising more things. I don't know where to start - I think I'm a bit afraid of investing heaps in it and then failing - but I'll definitely fail if I don't get my act together ASAP. So many things to sort out - especially a place to stay after September! Daf and MathGreek have both offered me live-in cook duties... Cheeky sods.

CRAFTS: Nope.

Not dead! Just busy.

COURSEWORK: Good grief. Everything's coming along; just going to be interesting to watch it all come together. Conservation Management Plan and audio guide "heritage resource" + lab book and geoarchaeology technique assessment + MORPHE-compliant research proposal + survey report.

DISSERTATION: Oy vey. Everything's kicking off. Risk assessments, Section 42 geophysical survey permits, equipment hire, property access, information days with the local residents, contacting the school (can I survey your site plz?). Information day tomorrow, survey over next 4 weekends (hopefully only 2 of those). Fun times trying to sort out transport. I wish I had my own car. Daf's a champ and has volunteered to chauffeur me around in exchange for fuel costs and fish'n'chips suppers.

OTHER ARCHAEOLOGY: Possibility to attend 2 week community archaeological survey project in N. Lincolnshire as community liaison/survey bod playing with fancy schmancy new survey tech (as in DRONES AND REMOTE-PILOTED SURVEY THINGS, ho-leeeee sheeyit), but unfortunately in June = bang in middle of dissertation-writing time. I have a week to think about it. I want to! It'd be a Thornton Abbey placements reunion.

LIFE: Dancing: fun. Probably too much dancing, not enough study, but sod it. I'll be fine. Munnin-odannin is coming to visit in August, much excitement but god so much to do before then. Health: fine. Exercise: PATCHY. Too much other stuff. Still lots of dancing though. Not sure what to do in the summer re: accommodation once Cousin Lil's back - there's definitely a room for me with the lovely cousins, but MathGreek and Daf both have offered their spare rooms (they both just want me to cook for them, lazy sods, but beats paying rent!) so there are plenty of options. Went to see Bill Bailey's "Qualmpeddler" show on Monday with Daf - AMAZING. Very clever musician, Mr. Bailey.

GENERALLY: Happy, just a bit terrified - feel like I'm at the top of the roller coaster looking down, and the brakes have just failed. Oh well. I made it through my honours year and I think I'm much more robust this time round, and at least a bit more organised. Still trying to sort out PhD things, god, What Happens Next? Who knows...

So, not dead. Just knackered. Doctor's appointment next week as constantly achey/tired. Probably just overworked but I'm due for my annual "are you anaemic again?" blood test so will just see what's up.

Hello, my dear friends on the computer. This is a bit of a delayed posting, coming to you "live" from Bronaber, Snowdonia, Wales, on the Landscape Survey course field trip - ( Read more about the trip to BronaberCollapse )

So - that's the end of the archaeology recap! BUT Now - on to Future Sounds of Swing in Leeds!

Friday - morning coffee with MathGreek. Our first outing outside of dancing = I have a new friend. This is most excellent. We had coffee and cake at Tamper and swopped news about our various holidays. Then I met many of the excellent UoS SwingSoc at the train station and we headed off to Leeds.

Without going into massive detail - it was a really, really lovely weekend and exactly what I needed. I accept I'm a bit addicted and this will no doubt end in tears but for now it makes me very happy and is a welcome escape from study and other issues.

The socials were excellent and there were so many new people to dance with - I obviously have no shame/shyness left when it comes to asking leads for a dance because I met far too many new people. The Cambridge contingent were all awesome, some other dancers scarily so - one guy called Jerry was doing the splits and all… Saturday had 5 hours of classes; Sunday had 3 (I sat the last one out due to massive dance hangover). There was a social on Friday and Saturday night as well as a Tea Dance on Sunday afternoon. There were also tired breakfasts in the Leeds uni refectory, lovely post-dance dinners in a Moroccan restaurant (talking about travel in Egypt and watching stag party lads stagger past in the rain), getting slightly lost in a rather rough housing estate on our first (and only) attempt to walk from the hotel to the university, and catching up with some familiar faces from the Leeds Mini-Camp waaaaaay back in January. I met a lot of MathGreek's fan club and took many messages of adoration back to him (basically, lots of people saying "I looked for him on facebook, but…").

I'd spent most of the weekend feeling terribly uncoordinated and thick, but it all seemed to come together at the Tea Dance and a couple of leads whose opinions I really value said I looked like I'd improved a lot over the weekend. So, yay me.

Monday, back to school - good grief. Luckily reality was temporarily postponed by a trip to the theatre to see the Rocky Horror Show, courtesy of Dafydd's press tickets. Somehow he'd never seen it: "It's about cross-dressers, right?". Oh, you poor, poor boy… Of course, having seen it, he now wants to go back again, in costume (as Brad).

The University Big Band was playing at Revs last night so I had the chance to catch up with some of my favourite leads from the university dance class - I'd missed them over the holidays! MathGreek and OctopusBoy especially, and Tatts caught me for the last dance (I hadn't been spun-round-to-the-point-of-falling-over in a few weeks, after all, and was starting to feel the lack).

And now, somehow, it's already 3pm on Thursday. Tomorrow I'm recording the Sunday Play and then there's work work work… and a bit of Blues dancing at the Shakespeare, and maybe, if I can swing it, a trip to Liverpool. But, mostly work.

Back from Wales.

Did 3 loads of laundry, began the process of updating my Mac to run Windows Parallel (stupid ArcGIS, only running on Windows...)*, cleaned my room, debriefed the cousins, sorted out dancing weekend plans with lovely Sheffield uni and other dancing peeps (Scrabbles, Dafydd, RedWelliesGirl, Flick, Mz Dunn, Lovely Irish Teacher Guy and many others will be there; sadly Octopus Boy can't come). Now off to the bank (ahaha, overdraft issues... ::sob::), then coffee with the MathGreek, then back up the hill to pack (laundry is still drying on various radiators) and then back down the hill for a 3pm-ish train.

See you on the other side.

There will be photos.

---

*I feel dirty

( Click here for some lists...Collapse )

If TL;DR... going to Snowdonia on a field trip for 11 days. I'd forgotten I didn't bring my big backpacking bag this year (the above lists fit perfectly into the big backpack + daypack), so now trying to figure out what to do next logistics-wise.

Also, going dancing tonight, and rather looking forward to seeing my classmates again. I do pine a bit if I don't see people for more than a week or so.

A quiet moment upstairs in a busy family day.

Cousin J has been very patiently coaching little Cousin Sunny through how to play Pokemon on his old Gameboy (Cousin J's "21 year old big boy's room", with its stacks of DVDs, posters, and models of cars, aliens, dinosaurs and other wonders, is a treasure-trove of unsurpassed delight to the eyes of a five-year old); little Cousin Boo has just caught them and her indignant seven-year-old big-sister rage knows no bounds...

... though the shouting has faded, and Boo has come in to see what I'm doing. But I'm not as interesting as Pokemon, and the chance to run downstairs and tell everyone about her little brother's scandalous behaviour. ( Click here to read more...Collapse )

Well, it's holidays now and the weekly LJ update has failed a bit. I'm currently nursing an insomnia hangover (is that a thing?) in the West Bank library and don't feel like facing my geoarchaeology reading yet, so, here are some Words.
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Dafydd's chewy banana flapjacks

2 bananas, 150g each of butter, golden syrup, sultanas, 350g-ish of rolled oats, block of dark or milk chocolate to melt.

Melt butter and golden syrup together, mash bananas. Add everything except chocolate to a bowl and mix well. Put into a buttered baking tray and bake for 25 minutes at 180C. Cool, then melt the chocolate and drizzle it over the top. Cool again and once the chocolate's set, cut into squares and try not to eat it all at once.

Simplicity in itself.

If everything's under control, clearly you're not going fast enough.

What have I been up to?



( going to Leeds, visiting Kamnik, taking a surprise journey, seeing great folk music, baking stuff, visiting Cheltenham and meeting dear friends.... (Click to read more)Collapse )

Well done you if you read through all that! In other news, I'm reading The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters then knitting "owl puffs" as my unwind-before-bed thing, and am busy recording and editing this week's SuTCo Sunday Play, a 1947 script of The Fall of the House of Usher. Oh, and there's, y'know, University stuff.... I've handed in all of my Semester 1 assessment and am awaiting my results. Semester 2 is well underway (we've just finished Week 3) and I'm trying to keep on top of all my reading, hence the long gap between updates.

I thought I'd be better at this by now! I was so much more organised, and read so much more stuff, and made plans and talked to people and scheduled. And yet it comes, as ever, to the mad scramble the week before, to tie it all together and make the bloody things make sense.

Of course I've bitten off more than I can chew, thematically. I had this realisation, earlier, after spending, oh, three hours on one paragraph: "several people have written whole books on this concept. You are not going to manage in 300 words".

So, Landscapes and Environment essay: Approaches to the interpretation of late Holocene shell middens in northern australia are a good starting point for looking at the intersection of landscape and temporality in the construction of narratives about the past. Time and temporality can be defined as X; Landscape can be defined as Y. In the Australian context,approaches to time are as A, and haven't really gone into X. Approaches to landscape are as B, and haven't really gone into Y. Here are some case studies. Now, what happens if we apply X and Y to these case studies. Look, new perspectives! Here are some suggestions for further research. The end. (Taking an average of 300 words per point, that should give me about 3000 words. That's all I need).

Death and Burial essay: What message does the spatial patterning of burials, both within the landscape and within the burial ground, convey about changing ideas of individual and group identity within the late Anglo-Saxon period? This is the late Anglo-Saxon period. Before this time, burials were like A. In the 8th century they were like B. In the 9th century they were like C. In the 10th century they were like D. Here is a summary of trends in how they have changed. Here is an explanation of supporting sources including legal documents and religious texts as well as some other archaeological reports on non-burial related things like venison distribution at elite halls of residence that argue for a change in social structure from a communal redistribution based society to a segregated hierarchical society, and a change from a more communal approach to death to a highly individual relationship between oneself and god and awaiting the final judgement based on individual achievements/sins. And look! I think the burial data corresponds to this. Here are some examples. Look, new perspectives! Here are some suggestions for further research. The end. (Ditto on wordcount).

This journal entry isn't technically procrastination because I've been working out the topics by writing little blurbs like this, over and over again. Each one gets a little better. I've got SO MANY NOTES, and they've been roughly bashed into essay form. It's the linking parts that are hard - the little steps between one slab of information and another.

Oh well, I'll manage. I'm going dancing in Leeds this weekend - tickets bought and everything - so I don't really have the option not to.

Otherwise all is fine. It's snowed for the last couple of days, but I haven't really been outside. At all.