Field School 2009!

Amy and I both succesfully completed the Boise State 2009 Field school. We worked for 6 weeks (Monday -Thursday) at Elmore County, Idaho's site #216. It was a large lithic (obsidian, and basalt flakes) on the surface, with a large depression that was earlier recorded as a housepit. For those of you that don't know, housepits are pretty rare in the Snake River plain of Idaho so it was unusual to have one here. After battling through the somewhat mild summer heat/dehydration/professors we finished pretty much unscathed. It's fantastic to actually be done, but while we were at #216 Amy faced some brutal sun and got dehydrated through the first week. After I finally convinced her to drink more water she was feeling better, just in time to find that the professors just wanted to add pain and suffering to field school in which I'm thinking was the absolute worst possible field situation. We both worked doubles on Fridays, Saturdays, and then worked Sunday night through field school as well, so we were busy 7 days a week throughout that whole time. Amy is now in the middle of being a maid of honor for her best friend (Summer) and Marshall's wedding that will be this Saturday. I got a job with the Idaho National Guard doing survey work on the Orchard Training Area. We just located the largest site known on the orchard training area so we'll be continuing to map and monitor that area. The really cool thing about working out there is that there is always the possibility of an Apache helicopter buzzing our vehicle (happened earlier this year but I wasn't there) and tanks firing off rounds. Today at work myself and one other guy found two separate 50 mm. live bullet clips laying on the ground. The first lesson I learned when coming here is not to touch ammunition out in a training area as much of it still contains live rounds, not just training rounds! So it's basically infusing archaeology with excitement! I continue to work at the restaurant (Flatbread Community Oven) on Friday Saturday and Sunday so Amy and I don't have much time together right now, but we enjoy our evenings! Tonight we'll be hanging out with her 3 nieces and tomorrow night we'll be going to a Boise Hawks AAA baseball game for the second week in a row, so we're totally keeping busy! However, we're about to begin our last semester of undergrad work at Boise State in Anthropology so we decided to reward ourselves for all the work with a trip to Oregon (to see Drew and Keri) and then followed up with some brewpub tours of Portland and then off to Canada and around the Snake River in Canada to swing back into Idaho through the panhandle and back home. At a 10 days it's going to be a great vacation!