Christmas Decorations = Happy

Sienna is the saddest reindeer ever.

Callie is pretty oblivious, as per usual.  (Huh?)

And our house is officially cheerier for the next month! 

Thanks, border patrol.

Ah, the joys of living in the borderlands...

For Thanksgiving, Josh and I drove over to the tiny town of Lorraine, Texas (population 646) to spend a couple of days with his grandmother and many cousins.  It's about an 11-hour drive from Tucson, so we set out early Wednesday morning to make the drive.  Driving through Texas has got to be the most boring thing I've ever done.  And unfortunately, I've done it numerous times.  This time, however, we had an eventful pit stop about half way to Big Mama's house.

For those who have never driven far distances along Interstate 10 or other main highways through southern parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, you may not know about the friendly folks at the Border Patrol check points.  You may not even realize that there are checkpoints, because I-10 doesn't ever actually cross the international border.  Just past El Paso going east, everyone has to go through one of these mandatory checkpoints.  Typically, you roll down your window, a uniformed agent asks you if you are a US citizen, and then you go about your merry way.  Sometimes they have drug dogs walking up and down the line of cars, and sometimes they don't.  Sometimes they don't even make you roll down your window, they simply wave you through.  This time, Josh and I pulled up to the white line, rolled down our windows, and expected to be sent along like usual.  This time, the drug dog went bonkers around my car, we got a few very stern and suspicious looks, and were asked to pull over to the side of the road.

We were asked to step out of the car, and an agent assured us that they were only going to do a quick exterior check of the car, and that it would only take a moment.  "I need you to be honest with me.  Do you have drugs in your car?"  No.  "Okay, I'm going to ask you again, and you need to be honest.  Do you do drugs?  Do you have any drugs?"  No.  Seriously, No.  "You need to take your hands out of your pockets.  Is there something in your pockets?"  Next thing I know, there is a huge German Shepard hopping back and forth over the seats in my car.  Then we see a guy in handcuffs being led away by a BP agent carrying a huge mason jar of marijuana.  And there are two other BP agents trying to subdue a very loudly-yelling man in the back of a truck next to us.  And our stuff starts getting pulled out of the trunk of the car.  What is going on here?? 

We are asked to go sit inside the building for a few minutes, and when I inquire as to why I am not allowed to watch them search my own car (especially since my purse was still there), they tell me to stay put and not worry.  Right.  The handcuffed guy is now shackled to the same bench on which Josh and I are sitting while somebody counts out the giant wads of cash they found in his vehicle.  Awesome.

When they finally come back in to tell us that there are no drugs in our car (duh) and we are free to leave, we get handed the key and told nothing- no explanation of what set the dog off, no thank you, no have a good day, nothing.  When we go to get into the car, both front seats are soaked because the dog had knocked over a drink from the console and spilled it everywhere.  Our stuff is in a jumble in the trunk, our food scattered across the backseat, and my huge ziploc bag of homemade cookies had been trampled and ripped open by the drug-sniffing German Shepard.  All of this, and we weren't even crossing any borders!

Thanks for keeping our country safe, boys.

The rest of our trip was pretty uneventful, comparatively.  We spent most of our time hanging out at Josh's grandmother's house with she and Josh's mom.  I got to meet lots and lots of the family on Thanksgiving, and on Friday we took a little trip out to see an archaeological site on some land owned by J's aunt and uncle.  Then we drove back to Tucson.  On the way home, we got waved right through the border inspection station without even needing to roll down our window.  I guess the drug dogs at the Las Cruces border patrol station must not like cinnamon cookies as much as the El Paso drugs dogs.

It's that time again!

I may or may not have a small, USB-charged christmas tree plugged into my laptop, cheering up my desk.  Don't judge me.  I realize that it's not yet Thanksgiving, and I also realize that this makes me a little crazy.  I don't care.

It shouldn't be much of a surprise to those who know me well.  I broke out the holiday music last week.  And the decorations will come out as soon as we return from our Turkey Day travels on Sunday.  Red and green-sprinkled cookies are sure to make appearances in the near future.  Josh can roll his eyes all he wants... but I know that secretly he loves it too.  

The Tucson temperatures have dropped into the 60s!  It's winter! (Ha.)  It's the holidays!

We spent the last couple of days with Dad and some of the Trowbridge clan that I hadn't seen in over a decade.  It was good to catch up a bit with folks, and we spent an afternoon out at the Desert Museum, which I always enjoy.  Tomorrow morning, Josh and I are packing up the car and driving to Texas for a couple of days to spend Thanksgiving with his maternal grandmother and a ton of cousins from his mom's side of the family.  It's been a long time since I've attended a big family Thanksgiving.

Since I get crap for playing Christmas music too early, here is a Thanksgiving song for you.  Enjoy.

Bandita

A typical day in the office.

Sexy, I know.

Southern Fried Goodness

Four years and still going strong... Shane and Angel's annual Southern Fried Party is always a guaranteed throw-down of awesome food, people, and hilarity.  But mostly it's all about the food.

What you can't see is that there are many more plates of food on the chairs lining the walls.

The smorgasbord included just about every 'southern' dish you could imagine... cornbread, red beans and rice, fried catfish, fried pickles, biscuits, fried okra, chicken fried steak, fried chicken, cheesy grits, mac & cheese, collard greens, squash casserole, blackberry cobbler, apple pie, banana pudding, sweet tea, Texas Tea, bourbon, and Pabst Blue Ribbon... and undoubtedly some other tasty things that I've forgotten.  It was, in a word, fantastic.  I may not always be quick to claim my southern roots, but I do definitely love me some good home-cooked southern food.

I, of course, made my famous baked macaroni and cheese.  It's always a crowd-pleaser.  But I guess it should always be easy to please the crowd when you're dealing with pasta baked in more than a gallon of mixed cheese, milk, and butter.  I don't know how anybody could turn that down.

I think the Carrot Cake party may have taken the Number One food-related party spot in my heart this year, but the Southern Fried party will always be one of my favorite party ideas.  Ever.

When Meg's away...

This is what happens when I spend too much time out of town.  I guess we're just going to have to upgrade to a King-size in order to accommodate Callie's new fondness for stealing my half of the bed.  

If it goes around, it'll come around.

I think I used up all of my good archaeological karma back in New Mexico.  I should have known that I'd have to pay for all of that awesomeness.

Karma's revenge?  Luke Air Force Base.

In the last few weeks, I've found a total amount of artifacts equivalent to less than one bucket's worth of artifacts from my last project.  I've dug features that aren't actually features at all.  I've dealt with 40mph winds and accompanying dust storms, heavy rain and resulting mud, and daily temperature swings of 40 degrees.  I've become accustomed to the deafening roar of fighter jets all day, every day.  This project is testing my mental capacity to stay enthused about excavating-- and it's supposed to last for six months.  Maybe six months from now I'll find myself digging up Puebloan kivas and sandals again and then I can take it as a sign that I've paid sufficient penance.  [Seriously, how spoiled am I?  Sheesh.]

Valley Fever, here I come!

That being said, though the archaeology is daunting me at the moment, I am actually enjoying this project.  The crew is great, the pay is great, the accommodations are better than any I've had for prior fieldwork, and the schedule is actually pretty agreeable.  It sounds like the company plans to keep me around and move me up the ranks a bit, so really, I can't complain.  Things are good.

Sometimes, when the light is still low enough that you can ignore the fact that you're in Phoenix, 

this place is actually kind of pretty.

Small world

I've been getting to know people on my new work crew over the course of the last two weeks up in Phoenix.  I've worked with just a couple of them before, so there are lots of new faces-- mostly people form Tucson, but a few local people from Phoenix as well.  I've become accustomed to meeting archaeologists with whom I have many friends in common- Southwestern archaeology isn't exactly a huge field, and everybody seems to know everybody or at least be connected by no more than 2 degrees of separation... but it's the non-archaeological connections that can be really surprising.

Back when I was working in Chaco Canyon, one of my coworkers had come out to New Mexico for the summer from Charlottesville, Virginia.  Over the course of a few conversations about us both being from Virginia, we discovered that he had actually taken a drama class from my mom way back in middle school, sometime around 1990.  Crazy, right?  Now, as of last week, I have an even crazier small-world connection.

One of the guys in my crew was talking about a project he had worked on in Virginia.  I asked him where he had worked, and then commented that I had grown up around Richmond.  A different guy on the crew heard me say this, and replied that he was also from Richmond.  It went like this:

"You grew up in Richmond?  Really?  Where'd you go to school?"
  "Oh, well I actually grew up outside of Richmond, so I went to a little school just north of there."
"Huh, me too...  What school did you go to?"
  "Oh, it was called Patrick Henry High.  It's out in-"
"No you didn't.  Seriously?!  I went to Patrick Henry!"
  "No way.  ... Really?"

And this continued for a while, neither of us believing that the other had actually gone to the exact same high school in tiny little Ashland, Virginia.  Comparing notes about people we may have known in common, places we used to hang out.  Ashland, where very few people ever move more than an hour away from home.  This is just too weird.  Turns out we were 4 years apart in school, so we don't really know many people in common, but lots of my classmates were younger siblings of his classmates.  AND, we figured out that we both even worked at the same restaurant, only a number of years offset.  The restaurant isn't even in Ashland, it's in Richmond!

Two kids from a little town in Virginia who've never met each other, both become archaeologists with master's degrees from colleges on different sides of the country, and then somehow manage to both end up working on the same project in Phoenix, Arizona.  This kind of blows my mind.