Poster shop.

It seems that every time I move to a new place I get a poster to celebrate and decorate it. It's been an unofficial tradition since I started college. Now I'm anticipating moving in to my very last college dorm room ever, and I'm looking at candidates for the next poster. Which do you like best?


The Neighborhood by Ashley G.


Brooklyn by Jim Datz


Wonderful Copenhagen by Viggo Vanby


For Like Ever by Village*


Brooklyn by Ork Posters


Highways and Byways by Paul Klee


*Yes, I realize everyone and her mother has this poster, but I still like it, dammit.

Wisdom.

At the age of 21 you like to think that you are past such inanities as growing new body parts. At the very least, you feel that you have earned a certain degree of stability for the few years that will elapse before the time when things start to rot and fall off.

You see, yesterday I noticed something different when I got up in the morning. Something ... alarming, and yet probably much less gross than you probably are expecting by now. I have a new tooth. Well, it's technically not new; presumably it's been there all along, but it hasn't made an appearance until now, and I really hadn't expected it to.

My wisdom teeth are badly impacted. This is not actually an X-ray of my teeth, but it might as well be.


My wisdom teeth look like they are attacking my other teeth, like sharks. Yet the one on my upper right side has decided to give up and emerge like a good tooth. I hadn't felt the immense pleasure of having a tooth erupt in almost seven years; I lost my last baby tooth on the day before my thirteenth birthday.

When I first noticed my wisdom tooth coming through, I thought I was a freak of nature. Then I Googled it, and it turns out that the "third molar" (or wisdom tooth) can erupt as late as age 21. Now I still think I am a freak of nature, but for different reasons.

I had been told by my dentist that my wisdom teeth were far too near the nerve in my jaw to consider removing them. I was very satisfied with that. My wisdom tooth, apparently, was not; it has begun its migration away from the nerve and into the light of day.

God knows what this means for my teeth and the roughly three billion dollars worth of orthodonture that has been sunk into making them aesthetically acceptable. At the moment I am happy enough to have four wisdom teeth, only. My mother had five, and the fifth one was swimming around like a shark up in her skull, thinking the surgeon couldn't get to it if it was nestled against her temporal lobe. THINK AGAIN, TOOTH.

Big honking rabbit.

Today I made a wonderful discovery. You see, I had walked down to the Ithaca Commons because I couldn't go to the farmers market (neither I nor anyone I know could figure out the bus routes to get there) and was looking for some place to find groceries. Well, I found a place. The best place ever. It's called Greenstar Oasis and I love it dearly.


There I was able to find everything I usually get at my local whole foods store, including white cheddar bunnies. They had chocolate bunnies, too, but I thought I probably shouldn't get them since I have less than two weeks left in Ithaca, and also because I have a habit of making entire meals of them whenever they're around.

There was also a lot of fresh produce. I wanted to get so much stuff, but couldn't due to my ongoing battle with Single Person Groceries Syndrome. SPGS occurs when you, a single person, cannot eat enough of the food you buy before it goes bad. This is not a problem when it comes to, say, peaches or apples, because you can buy just as many individual items as you need. It's more of a problem with things like bread, tomatoes, and lettuce - it would seem that I just can't finish them off before they go bad. I may be able to finish a small loaf of bread in a week, but what if - God forbid - I want more than one type of bread in my kitchen at one time? I could buy two loaves, but it would inevitably result in an epic bread-wasting tragedy.

Luckily, there are several ways to cure SPGS.

1. Get married/live with someone.
2. Stop eating anything that will go bad quickly, i.e., eat only cheddar bunnies.
3. Join a cult and/or convent.

Speaking of bunnies, I saw a big honking one in the middle of downtown Ithaca. I see rabbits around here almost daily, but this one was large, man - like, cat-sized. I'd never seen such a large rabbit in the wild. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture, because my hands were too full of groceries. Rest assured this was one big honking rabbit. My first thought was that I was witnessing the Lord of all bunnies, chocolate and cheddar included.

Lastly, I would like to publicly thank J. Crew for manufacturing this shirt. It makes me very happy. I don't think I've owned any clothing with ruffles on it since the third grade, but I'm glad I do now.

King of Anything.

Ganondagan.

Today, some members of my Field School and I went to the Native American Dance and Musical Festival at the Ganondagan Historic Site. You can read more about it here. There were arts and crafts, food, singing, dancing, and perhaps best of all, a huge longhouse.





Actually, this particular longhouse is just "average," according to the tour guide. It's modeled after a 17th-century longhouse that was excavated by archaeologists in the area.

I didn't get any good pictures of the dancing, since I was sitting behind a sea of fat heads*, but I did get this picture of the turquoise ring I bought.


That's a stamp on my hand in the picture, not some kind of weird rash.


*Hey, I have a fat head too. Fat heads happen.

Grad school.

These are pictures of the schools on my list. I have a long way to go before I know where I'm going, though.








Does anyone else have a list yet?

Zinc Oxide + Bread.

You should have seen my face today. I really should have taken a picture. I was wearing so much zinc oxide that one of my classmates was prompted to joke, "This is field school, not clown school." Who says they're mutually exclusive? I'm pretty sure that by the time this course ends I will have three credits in Archaeology and ten in Looking Like A Dork.

In other news, the sky was ridiculous today.



Ridiculously beautiful, that is. It was reasonably hot and pretty humid. On the way back to Ithaca we stopped at an ice cream place that had a big wooden train in the yard and fluffer nutter ice cream (although I didn't get it, nor did anyone else, so I can't tell you how it was).

During the excavation, we found a tooth (or claw?).


We don't know what type of animal it belonged to. A bear, maybe? There was a large group of bones in the area we found it, along with a possible pipe stem and some charcoal.


Here are some pictures from my weekend that I didn't share - including this one of Collegetown Bagels, which has incredible sandwiches. I got a turkey wrap. It was the best turkey wrap ever.



Another food-related fact worth mentioning is that I went to the Ithaca Farmers Market, which is perhaps the best Farmers Market I have ever been to. I got some plums, bread, garlic scape pesto, tomatoes, and Romaine lettuce. I think the bread alone is the best thing that's happened to me this week, and it's been a good week.


Lastly, I have the lyrics "Hold me closer, Tony Danza" stuck in my head. Yes, I realize that those aren't the actual lyrics, but that was the way everyone was singing it in the van on the way to the site.

Posters.

I love these Brooklyn and Manhattan posters by Jim Datz.

Ithaca Summer.

I think the summer in Ithaca is beautiful by necessity, in order to balance the famously dreadful winters. I have no personal experience with such winters, but I hear they are awful. Today was the opposite of awful. We went to two waterfalls and Cayuga Lake. Along the way, my camera ran out of batteries, but I managed to get a few good pictures before then.






We found fossils. You can just sit down anywhere beside Ithaca Falls and find a bunch if you look carefully enough.


We also went to the Ithaca Commons. That was last night, and involved ice cream from Collegetown Bagels. It was pretty damn good.


In other news, I am continuing to win the war against the sun. I am so happy to be pale right now. Some people may find that odd, but you must understand that I only have two skin color choices: "albino white" or "blistered agony red." There is no in between. Consequently, I live my life as a Boo Radley impersonator. It's like an elaborate piece of performance art.


Lastly, here are some of the houses around Ithaca. I like that so many of them are big and old and a little bit worn.

Pretty July.

Today I'm headed out on an Ithaca adventure and am hoping to procure some pretty July pictures of my own. Until then, here are some I have collected from various websites (which I have since forgotten in many cases, but where I can remember I've noted the source).








1. Kate of For Me, For You; 2. ?; 3. Design Sponge; 4. ?; 5. Edward Hopper, "Room in Brooklyn," 1932; 6. ?; 7. My dreams. All right, I'm pretty sure it came from the internet, but this image is seriously like a dream for me. I have so many books stacked in towers all around my room it's like living in a miniature city. This arrangement would solve all of my problems. And I mean all of them, because I'm pretty sure I could accomplish anything with this level of awesome on my side - grad school, world peace, whatever.

Field School.

I didn't know that the program I'm in at Cornell is actually known as a "Field School." I had been calling it Archaeology Camp, which it is, really. The way my schedule is arranged now for Field School, I get up before the sun has fully risen and go to sleep before it fully sets. Excavating lasts all day. If I'm not excavating, I'm preparing to excavate or cleaning up after excavating. With the time that's left after that, I read about excavating. Then I go to bed.

That, of course, is the explanation for why I haven't been blogging much lately. I haven't been doing much of anything lately, besides excavating!







Above are pictures of Cornell in the morning. If you get up early enough there's no one around and you can walk around pretending that you own the place. I like to pretend that the Uris Library is my own personal spaceship. It kind of looks like one.

Now, to get to the good stuff, I can show you some of what we've found at the dig since I wrote here last. We unearthed a feature! More specifically, we found a post mold - a circular patch of dark soil that marks the place where a post once stood. We excavated one half of it to find out how far it went and to extract any artifacts from it that we could find. We discovered abundant amounts of charcoal, which we painstakingly picked from the soil.



The presence of charcoal could mean that the ashes from a fire (perhaps from a central hearth, such as you would find in a Seneca longhouse) were swept up against the post as it stood within the house, or possibly that the post itself burned in place.

That was yesterday. Today was less exciting, but still good. It rained in the morning, meaning that we couldn't open up any of the test units for digging. Instead, we went to the Geneva Historical Society's Museum, which was fun. Afterwards we did surface collection in the vineyard - put simply, we went on our knees between rows of vines looking for artifacts. This can actually yield some pretty amazing finds, as Seneca-era material is continuously churned up from beneath the ground by plowing and can actually sit right on the surface. Today, for instance, I found a navy glass bead and a heavily-corroded iron nail that was most likely hand-wrought. Other members of the school found an additional bead and a copper medallion with Catholic iconography on it that was pretty incredible.

The very last hour of the day was notable for one important non-archaeological find: a bird's nest built into a wall of vines in the vineyard, complete with three enormous, fluffy chicks.



Just look at those things; they barely fit in there! Can they even get out? Are they some sort of metaphor for the overextended youth embodied by the students of Cornell, who remain immature, but fattened with knowledge, until they're too bulky to fly and too big to leave the nest? Is my ability to casually project metaphors on to random wildlife a sign that I have been in college way too long myself? Please, somebody write a dissertation on it before my mind explodes.