Jeez Louise. I'm beat. I'm tired. I ache. I hurt in places I didn't even know I had.
Let me recount my last few weeks. Exams, exams...more exams...paper in Arabic that officially finished my coursework for my Master's Degree...the next day I started a two day stint in mine safety and health training. That ended last Friday. Saturday and Sunday were spent shopping and Monday morning I left in the wee hours for Jerome, AZ.
Jerome is an old mining town that was pretty much abandoned in the early 1950s when they shut the doors to the mine one day. It's BEAUTIFUL. You MUST GO if you haven't been. I'd move there if there was a good job for me. It's built on the side of the mountain. Many towns in the Verde Valley have the first name of the town above on the mountain side so you can see where the town is from far away. The J in Jerome lights up blue at night :).
Anyway, Monday we drove up and met my bosses at the site after we dropped off our stuff at the hotel in Cottonwood...got there about noon. Our lab is in a warehouse that had to be cleaned of rats, bats, and other creepy crawlies. I'm sure it was a mess before they cleaned it several weeks ago, now it's a comfortable place to work. We loaded up the truck with stuff for the week to leave at the site, screens, shovels, artifact bags, etc. We drove down the hill a ways to the site, which already had test pits from last week. It's a trash dump downhill from a series of homes that are no longer there. Very cool. I had my own unit that happened to have this old water pipe, still active. "Don't break it." Good grief.
Anyway, Monday was a half day, since we drove in. It was hard work. I shoveled dirt, carried 20 pound buckets over to my screen and screen for bits of metal, glass, etc. I found some pretty cool stuff...a pearl button, a tie tack/pin made of copper, china with a geisha painted on it, a watch gear (the small stuff that's delicate is really cool)...we ended up finding the back of the pocket watch in another unit), a fragment of a child's doll, a turn key, and a couple of 100 year old coins. Others found entire shoes (both feet!), paper, a whole bottle, and various hallmarked ceramics and embossed bottle fragments. Someone found an old vaseline jar from the early 1900s.
Since it was a trash heap, you know that most of the stuff was broken and thrown out. The doll was probably shattered and thrown out, maybe the shoes didn't fit anymore, the watch stopped working...etc. I never thought it would be so cool to go through 100 year old trash.
Monday was hard...I was dirty (filthy dirty!!!) but we went back, showered and went out to dinner. I downed a 32oz beer in 20 minutes (never have done that before!), then I watched 24 and went to sleep at 9...only to wake up at 4:30 the next morning to get ready for the day. Tuesday was the hardest day for me. A full 10 hours on the hillside with a 30 minute lunch break in the shade of the warehouse. Man. I started to second guess if I was cut out for this job. It was hot, no release from the heat...wearing pants and a long sleeved shirt...dodging these giant wasps that will for the most part leave you alone but they will sting at random (eeek! I got some wasp spray during lunch and was made fun of the rest of the week for freaking out when a wasp would fly near me). The cool part? Those giant black bees you see around town are truly kick ass insects. These three black bees (they don't sting) were patrolling the two bushes that we were working between, and would chase off wasps. These little guys are hard core. They dive bomb the wasps. I'll never run shrieking from those again, even here in town (I see them at No Anchovies sometimes). They are like little soldiers...it was funny. They'd even dive bomb butterflies who flew into their territory. One kept guard of our trucks every day. I never thought I'd become fond of a bug! But they did a good job in keeping the giant wasps away.
We did take an early break on Tuesday to go explore the change house...the warehouse where the men would come in and change from the mine. There was a board where they'd hang their tags with their numbers so officials would know who was accounted for. Apparently a few weeks ago one of my coworkers found one of those tags, number 939. He might have lived in one of the houses on the hill. Anyway, we found his locker in the shower room. Hundreds of lockers, several showers, and places for the workers to clean up still standing. It was really cool. After we left the change house we started to walk towards the entrance to the mine, which was fenced off and gated, but as soon as we started to walk over, HUNDREDS of those large wasps rose out of the grass and we took off.
Wednesday was not as hard but only because it wasn't as hot. It ended up sprinkling, but it was the lightning that brought us off the hill. We could see it coming down in the valley. It was really awesome. I found a shop token to a clothing store in Jerome for 12.5 cents in my unit (which I finished). After work we stopped in Jerome at the Spirit Room, this bar that used to be a place the ladies of the red light district would have lunch on Sundays...the hotel above is supposedly haunted. Then we ate down the street before heading down the mountain after dark. The whole town only has 300-400 residents and they all know each other. It was cool to start meeting locals.
Thursday perhaps the suckiest day. We got out at noon to drive back. We were driving in two trucks, L in one, A and me in the other. We agreed we'd meet at In N Out in Phoenix. L got a good head start on us so when we reached the restaurant at 2 and she wasn't there, we started to worry. About 15 minutes later we got a call...her tire had blown on a curvy mountain pass and she almost had a bad crash. So back we went. The tire was shredded, the truck was sitting on the most dangerous part of the curve as traffic whizzed by. We couldn't get the spare off the rack and even if we could, we couldn't change it where we were. So we waited for a tow truck for 2 hours. A had AAA coverage so we towed it 100 miles. The accident happened almost at the exit to Bumble Bee (nowheresville) and 100 miles from that are the outlet shops at Casa Grande. Needless to say we didn't roll in to Tucson Thursday night until 9...5 hours after the time we would have arrived.
At any rate...I've never worked so hard in my life. This is by far the most physically demanding and hardest job I've ever had. I'm going out next week too. The sad part? Even if I was skating, I would NOT make eligibility because of my job. It's got me thinking if I can even be in derby with this job. On top of that I've got burlesque...which has to take a back seat as well. I'm defending in July so my priorities right now HAVE to be work and thesis. Nothing else. I didn't get any thesis work done because I was so damn tired after the field. I've got to go in today and let them know I can't work a full 40 hours and still write my thesis (which they know already...just a friendly reminder). Once I get done with the thesis...I'm home free. But until then, I don't have a choice...job and thesis. It really hit me in my tears on Tuesday night (when I was re-evaluating if I was cut out for archaeology and field work.) that I just don't have time for anything else right now.
Argh. That is all.
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