Okay, so the Harvard beets are slowly simmering and I'll be dancing up and down every minute or so to check on them. Unfortunately, baking them for an hour and a half didn't cook them properly, so I'm praying the simmering takes care of the last little bit of rawness.
After my last post I ate lunch and started off for lab. Halfway there I realized I left the shells I collected yesterday behind so, fuming and swearing, I retraced my steps, grabbed the shells, and headed off to the lab again.
I got there a little after two and finally finished making my last shell-tempered ceramic tile (background: for a lab in my artifact analysis class we're all making a set of ceramic tiles with different amounts and kinds of temper so we can see what's what. I tried to get it all done on Friday, but no one could figure out how to do the plant temper, so we're doing that on Monday. But, on Friday we ran out of shells to grind for shell temper, so Saturday I spent an hour at the beach collecting shells - that counts as taking initiative right? - and brought them in for my last shell-tempered tile today), at which point I started sketching and taking notes on the ground stone tools provided for the ground stone tool lab that is due this Wednesday. For the same class.
I left sometime after five (thanks to my coworker Jake giving me a hand with some of the trickier stuff) and called Mom and Dad for a quick chat before beginning dinner.
After dinner I chopped up my strawberries and they are now residing in my beautiful Michaelangelo crystal bowls (man I miss having money to throw around on things like that) in my fridge.
Then I started on the damn beets, and while they were baking, I tided up a little, since my place has gotten SO messy in the past couple weeks...I've been too tired and too stressed to clean, so it's nice to tidy up a little, although I have a long way to go before my place is actually clean. You can bet it's going to be at least a couple more weeks before I vacuum...I HATE vacuuming!
Anyway.
SAA's: Thursday -
Thursday morning Judy and I got up really early (read: 7:30 am) considering we got to bed after 1 am on Wednesday night. We drove to the convention center and I helped her set her poster up, and hung around for half an hour or so until a steady stream of people were talking to her, which is when I started looking at all of the other posters. I did strike up a conversation with the guy next to Judy, and found out he was a UF alum, which was pretty awesome. It turned out he was a big fan of Hector Neff, who's on staff at CSULB so I promised to introduce them if I could. I also saw one of the guys who I worked with at UF and I chatted to him for a few minutes but he was oddly stiff - it was only later that I realized he might have forgotten my name.
I spent an hour or so checking out symposia (the 15-minute talks people prepare about their work, instead of doing poster sessions) about various things, but I was glad when 12:30 rolled around and I found Judy outside on the balcony. She was with Rich - not a CSULB student - he's actually CSUN if I remember correctly - but he works in IIRMES, so we consider him one of us. The three of us headed downstairs to look for lunch, and found a sweet little deli nearby, and got awesome sandwiches. I forget what they got but I got hot corned beef with Swiss cheese (it was HUGE, I nearly couldn't finish it) and we all sat outside at the little tables provided, enjoying the sunshine and the warm weather. Jake and Dr. Lipo walked up and chatted for a few minutes: Dr. Lipo left, and Jake went to get a sandwich and joined us.
After lunch we all went back to the conference, met Anne, and wandered around the various symposia til about 5:30, when Judy, Anne and I left for California Pizza Kitchen, since we'd arranged for everyone in our department (and all our friends) to meet us there for dinner at 6 pm. One nice thing that happened was I ran into Jeff - the guy who was next to Judy in the poster session - when I knew where Dr. Neff was (he was talking to Scott, another guy who goes to a different university but does his work in IIRMES), and I managed to introduce the two. Jeff was really happy to meet Dr. Neff and Dr. Neff was interested in Jeff's work, so that was nice. I'm glad I got to introduce them.
People showed up really slowly, and we finally decided to order at 7:15 when the last of our party showed up (we were supposed to leave in time to hear Dr. Neff's talk at 7:45 but that didn't happen). The entire party was: me, Judy, Anne, Jake (my coworker), Ginger (a friend of ours from a field school), Paul (in my cohort), Paul's wife whose name I can't remember...oops, Evan (a guy in our class), Steven (in our artifact analysis class), Mike (a friend of Steven's from field school), Carey (a friend of Steven's from field school), Richie (a friend of Mike's), Rich, two of Rich's friends, and Steven's girlfriend Brittany. I feel like I'm missing someone...oh well.
During dinner, Steven told us about how Brittany's grandfather (who they were staying with during the conference because his place was 20 minutes out of town, and free) saw a ghost cop car while out jogging one day and invited us all to go ghost-hunting sometime. We all thought it was hilarious and agreed to go Friday night.
After dinner, some of us went to a nearby Irish pub and some of the others went to other previous engagements.
I didn't drink much - just two beers over about four or five hours - because I was the designated driver, but the others all imbibed and it was very funny to watch. Anne matched Evan drink for drink although he was drinking whiskey and she was drinking beer: the next day she was hungover and he was fine. Boys!
Friday morning we FINALLY slept late and I finally caught up after three days of little to no sleep and was much happier in consequence.
We parked near the convention center and grabbed lunch at a nearby restaurant called Sapphoro where Mike and Evan met us. It's this great Japanese steakhouse that has $9 bento boxes during lunch hours: each bento box has an Asian salad, rice, two slices of California roll, and two entrees of your choice. On Friday I had shrimp tempura and tuna sashimi and it was SO good.
After that we all wandered around the convention for awhile, listening to the symposia that were the most interesting. Mike and I were in one waiting for a lecture on dating ancient coins (that got canceled!!! we were SO mad about that!) when I saw my old mentor, Dr. Steven Brandt, come in. When that lecture ended he left and I followed him and caught him in the hallway where we chatted for a few minutes about Ethiopia and his work and my work. It was really nice to see him again, especially now that I'm a big important MA student...lol
The symposia all ended at 5 pm on Friday and Saturday (you can tell archaeologists organized this - we're notorious boozers) so after it was over we all went back to our hotels for awhile to regroup. For dinner on Friday a bunch of us met up at this little Indian restaurant I found on Yelp called Mati's and it was SO good. Ginger and Matthew (a friend of hers from the same field school that Anne goes to) are a vegetarian and a vegan respectively so they both got the vegan options and I got lamb curry and chicken tikka masala which were SO good - and the naan was pretty good too.
After dinner Matthew left to see some other friends, and the rest of us (me, Judy, Anne, Ginger, Mike, Carey, Evan, and Richie) piled into two cars to go to Steven's girlfriend's grandfather's house to go ghost hunting.
We arrived at the house and everyone (except for myself and Carey, who were designated drivers) cracked open the beer we had in our trunks (seriously...archaeologists drink. And Girl Scouts are prepared...haha) while we discussed the best plan of action. Finally we decided that we would split into two cars (Steven's and the grandfather's...I can't remember his name, sadly) and go to the spot where the grandfather spotted the ghost car.
The background behind the ghost car is that for some time now people would be driving along a particular stretch of road and see a 1950s cop car's lights light up behind them and when they pulled over the cop would just vanish into thin air. Some people would see an empty cop car pulled over on a grassy verge before it, too would just vanish. Brittany's grandfather saw it parked when he was out jogging late one night (he's seventy and jogs six miles a day - makes me feel ashamed of my lack of fitness) and thought nothing of it - except that it was empty - until he told Brittany about it and she somehow knew the legend and found the website proclaiming all the tales about it.
So we drive up (crammed like sardines into these cars) to the grassy verge and all get out and examine it and flash our flashlights and are basically giggling like morons. We decide there is nothing there, and it was slightly anticlimactic until Brittany's grandfather says, "Well, the KKK used hang out just a little ways down the road, and there are supposed to be tons of ghosts there, did you want to see that?" Of course we did, so we piled back into the cars and drove off. We parked on a shoulder and started walking along the road, joking stupid jokes and talking at the tops of our lungs, except for those times we all burst out laughing over something particularly asinine.
Finally we get to the stretch of road where the trees arch overhead and it's said the KKK used to prowl, and now we get more whispery and giggly when all of a sudden someone spots a white cross on the side of the road. There was an instant rush to investigate, and everyone is surprised (I won't say disappointed) to find that it's part of this giant scavenger hunt where you find clues on the internet, find the white cross hidden in out of the way places, and use the clues on the cross to find your next objective. At least I THINK that's how it goes. Everyone whipped out their iPhones and immediately started searching it, but I don't have an iPhone (nor do I really want one), so I spent more time helping Mike figure out how to do the video record function on his SLR (of which I was and am totally jealous).
We moved on and someone noticed there were marks on the road. We all trained our flashlights and found one of those "figures" they chalk around dead people in the old-time crime scene investigations had been spraypainted on the road. Some members of the group started lying down on the road in the figures, but most of us moved on and kept flashing our lights on the road, hoping to discover more. We saw a few more dead-body figures, a lot of stupid l33t lingo, and then we hit a more ominous sign: a spray-painted message in the road reading, "PREPARE TO DIE".
Around this point, Steven and Carey decide to start walking back for the cars so they can drive them up to where we were so we didn't have to walk a mile or so back to the cars after we got bored of ghost hunting.
There were a few more messages in the road, but we didn't pay much attention to them, but further along a phone number was spray-painted on the road with the last digit missing. Ginger volunteered to try it and started dialing the number with different last numbers starting at 0 and working her way up. We were walking further along the road (Ginger had stopped dialing but I didn't know this) and suddenly we heard a phone start ringing!!
We all immediately freaked out (all our phones were on vibrate) and everyone was swinging their flashlights every which way, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. I was convinced some prankster had planted a cell phone, and all the others were gathered around some sort of hollow log that apparently contained a dead bat, and Brittany was yelling, "Don't touch it!" when a red light to my left catches my eye.
I have to pause here to explain that many of the ghosts we were SUPPOSED to see "came back" as mysterious lights that didn't belong to houses or cars that no one could explain.
So naturally, my attention was diverted from the mysterious ghost phone and the dead bat (not that I'm particularly interested in dead bats at any time), and when my vision focused on the light I realized it was a cigarette butt (you may thank my scintillating powers of observation to the many years I have dedicated to going to live shows and hanging out with bands, most of whom are heavy smokers) and without pausing to think I yell, "Hey! There's a cigarette there!"
There's a rush and the next thing I know we're surrounding two laughing locals who were sitting and talking at the end of their driveway, hidden by some bushes, who were planning to leap out and scare us when the guy's phone rang. We all congratulated him on his very successful scaring of us (we were totally thrown into chaos by the phone, as you may imagine) and he and his friend proceeded to share their ghost stories with us, which I don't remember really well, so I'll try to remember to add them here after Mike posts his video of the incident. Yes, Mike was taping for 16 minutes and somehow, by the grace of all that is good and funny he actually got the "ghost phone" and subsequent reaction on there.
Anyway, Mike insisted he saw lights further down the road so since we were bored of the ghost stories, and since I don't believe in ghosts (even though I want to) I walked with him and we continued arguing over the fact until the others turned up with the cars and we all got in and drove back to Brittany's grandfather's place. Once there we listened to the video for Carey and Steven's benefit, but everyone was laughing so hard we missed most of it. I cannot WAIT for Mike to post it!
After that we left Steven, Brittany and her grandfather at their place (Steven had homework...we did too, but we weren't going to do it until Sunday...haha) and went back to Sacramento, to this one club called Dive Bar where Rich and Scott were and told us to hit up. We all envisioned a ratty little down-home bar and were all attracted to the image, so you can imagine our disgust when we found a pseudo-swank bar full (and I mean packed body to body in some places) of girls whose skirts were so short they might as well have not worn any, and guys who looked like extras for a Sylvester Stallone movie.
The one interesting part about the bar was that over the bar itself was a large fish tank, full of tropical fish. When I was fighting my way back through the crowd to the entrance where everybody else was after going to the bathroom, I realized why they called it the Dive Bar: in the tank was a mermaid! Really, it was a very well-endowed human girl in a mermaid tail and LOTS of makeup swimming back and forth and smiling and waving. I had three immediate thoughts upon seeing her: 1) How the heck does she get into that tail? (it was skin-tight...like...she probably had to be surgically removed from it) 2) Damn, she can hold her breath for a long time! and 3) They had better pay her more than minimum wage to do that!
We didn't stay there long as no one liked the tight quarters and the near impossibility of getting drinks (the place was packed, I'm surprised the fire marshal didn't throw people out), and Rich insisted there was a great party "nearby" so we all followed him for ELEVEN BLOCKS to some lame hotel party where we didn't know any of the people. At this point I started seeing red because I had a presentation to do at 10:30 am it was now past midnight and I was legitimately a mile away from my car and I didn't want to be "the bad guy" for dragging people away from a fun night out.
Fortunately, Anne was in the same poster session and she quickly marshalled us into groups: one group was going to go back downtown to party, one group was going to walk to their car a few blocks in another direction, and the third group (Anne, myself, Ginger, Mike and Richie) were going back to the garage where I left my car so I could drive the others back to their cars so they could keep on partying. Thank goodness for Anne and Ginger! Anne knew exactly where we were and where I left my car (I wasn't drinking much, I just had one beer, but I was completely lost and disoriented - I really have no idea how I got my orienteering badge), and Ginger was dancing around and keeping everyone in high spirits.
On the way to my car we had one final adventure: we heard this wonderful saxophone music echoing down the empty streets (it was shocking how empty most of the city was) and we followed it til we found a man playing his saxophone in the entrance to a parking garage. Ginger stopped to thank him for his wonderful music which turned into a half hour conversation, during which I mused on the potential rudeness of breaking in to ask if he could play "Feeling Good" while we walked on, but finally everyone said goodbye and we FINALLY got back to my car, I dropped everyone off at their cars, and Anne and I made it back to the hotel where I took a shower before bed and she decided to take one in the morning before we left for our poster session.
And since it is 11:40 in the here and now and I have class in the morning, I think it's time for me to end. I'll post about the rest of the SAA's later.
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