What do you want to hear?

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:54:18 -0400

(I posted this originally as a Facebook note, but thought it warranted another posting on the blog)

Alright, y’all, I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, and I’ve just about got all the resources together to launch a new podcast. I want to call it “The Accidental Archaeologist” to match my website and Ustream show, but I’m not going to do an entire podcast just about archaeology. So, here’s what I’d like to know: what do y’all (and a potential audience) want to hear? I have a few ideas, but I’m fishing around for some suggestions, too.

My original intent for this podcast was mainly to take the audience along as I get ready to move from the States and make the transition to the UK, and then to catalogue what it’s like to be a graduate student settling and studying in England. I don’t plan to do a very serious show dedicated to informing a large audience about the nuts and bolts of archaeology. Rather, I’d like to make it a short (20-30 min.) variety-type show with small 4-5 min. segments on various subjects (much like the types of podcasts I like to listen to).

Many of you on my Ustream chats have mentioned that you like some of my stories from past adventures on sea and land...and I may be able to tie in some of these stories with whatever subjects I’m talking about from show to show. I need a little more substance, though, not just stories...so, what else might be of interest?

Here are a couple of segment ideas that have come to mind...let me know if any of these grab y’all:

- Ex-pat update (latest news on moving to/settling in England)
- Recent study topic (once I start school, and only if interesting to the average layman)
- Interesting nautical/archaeological/British fact or story of the week
- News from the front (latest thing I’m doing that could get me killed...diving, fencing, climbing around the rigging, etc.)

Any other ideas/criticisms/comments would be appreciated. Y’all already have an idea of my varied interests and what you like to hear...so let me know! Comments on this blog would be fine, or you can email me at: lwpittman [a t] mac [d o t] com

The “Q” word

Tue, 3 Jun 2008 19:59:17 -0400

Now for a more recent story. I know a lot of y’all have already seen my tweets and have realized that I have changed jobs rather suddenly, but I really haven’t had a chance yet to fully explain what has happened in the last couple of days. So here’s the full story:

Most of you already know that I’ve been working on a long-term excavation of a prehistoric site only two hours up the road from my hometown in Charleston. The project has been going on for about three months, and we were approaching the halfway point in the dig. Needless to say, the weather has been getting steadily hotter and the work has been getting steadily harder, but I’m pretty good with hard work in hot weather. I’ve been doing it all of my adult life. This was not what got me. Rather, I was having a hard time of late figuring out why I was on the job in the first place. I had been hired as a crew chief, but I have no real experience with prehistoric sites, so I was led to believe that my promotion was solely based on my ability to organize and direct a field crew in an efficient manner. This I can do. And I was managing it pretty well from the beginning. The project manager gave me several administrative and logistical duties, which I juggled right alongside doing all the same labour the rest of the crew were doing.

The last month or so saw a change, though. The project manager started ignoring any suggestions or warnings I had about improving the working conditions and easing up on the crew. She became focused on achieving and maintaining an unreasonable work pace. Even in perfect weather conditions, the crew can only work so fast, and, with the approaching summer, work was sure to only slow down. She would not accept this, though, and I was told under no uncertain terms that the crew needed to “suck it up.” By last week, morale had hit rock bottom, and mutinous rumblings were rolling around the excavation block. By this time, I had effectively been stripped of all of my crew chief-related duties one by one by the project manager, until I was doing no more than calling break times. I was prepared to stick it out for the sake of the rest of the crew until yesterday (Monday) morning. The PM was out “sick,” but left instructions with one of the other field techs for work that day. Despite my emphatic insistence to the contrary, she had added more diggers to an already meager and overburdened screening crew, and then scheduled me to be on the screening crew for the morning. I was ready to quit immediately, but I realized that leaving before work started would make it seem like I left because I couldn’t face the impossible pace that would be required for that five-hour screening rotation. Plus, I didn’t want to stick one of the other crew with my shift. So, I gritted my teeth and stuck it out for the whole five hours, going at a frantic pace, drinking almost five liters of water, and finishing with legs and shoulders on fire. At lunchtime, I was dirty, exhausted, and fed up.

I want y’all to understand, though, that this was the first time in my working life that I ever uttered the words “I quit!” It was not an easy thing for me. I didn’t even really know how to go about doing it, especially since the reason I was leaving (the project manager) wasn’t even there. I gathered up my field equipment, walked over to the group of techs sprawled in the shade, and said “I’m leaving.” One of them asked if I was leaving early for a class. “No,” I said, “I’m leaving for good.” They stared at me, but then one by one started to understand what I was saying. A couple of them muttered something about being right behind me, and most of them congratulated me on getting out with my joints and limbs intact. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I will be the only one to ditch this project. It was a short, ten-minute walk through the woods to where my truck was parked, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt happier as I left that site than I did heading out yesterday. I called the PM on my way out to break the news to her. She didn’t seem too surprised, but she did ask me why I was leaving. I think I was pretty tactful and succinct, given how angry I was with her. I told her that I had been hired as a crew chief, but lately it had become evident that she didn’t need a crew chief, so I was leaving to work in a job where I was needed. All of this was absolutely true and kept me from stooping to mud-slinging.

I did think long and hard about this decision over the last couple of weeks, so it was certainly not a spur-of-the-moment choice, though I didn’t completely make up my mind until yesterday morning. Upon further thought, though, it is definitely a good thing that I didn’t wait any longer. I didn’t like the bitter, angry person that this boss was turning me into. It was hard for me to face a work-day with anything but a negative frame of mind from the very beginning. Life’s too short for that kind of aggravation.

So, on to better news. I am very fortunate in having had the ability to come and go as I pleased as a tour guide for one of the carriage companies in downtown Charleston. Through a minor miracle, my timing has been perfect for going back to work with them full-time for the rest of the summer. One of their most experienced drivers is leaving this month, and they have three new draft horses and three new drivers to train before he leaves. So, I will be splitting my time this month between helping him train new horses and driving with the new drivers. The manager was so happy I was coming back to work at a time when they were having to scramble to fill hours, that she put me on the schedule right away...starting tomorrow! So I will have been unemployed for a little less than 48 hours. That’s got to be a record for me!

There you have it, then. All else will be the same. I will still be attending the big event in Atlanta in a couple of weeks (for those of y’all concerned), and I will have even more time there, as I managed to schedule off-days from Friday to Tuesday. I will also still be heading over to the UK in September. The only difference for the next few months is that I will be taking a welcome break from digging in the dirt, I will be back at a job I love (getting paid to run my mouth all day), and I will be back full-time in my beloved Charleston. I don’t think I could have dreamed of a better scenario for quitting a job!

The grey cliffs of exhaustion

Tue, 3 Jun 2008 14:24:13 -0400

(This is Part 3 of my tale of my trip to Ireland with twin sister Charlotte. If you have not already read Parts 1 & 2, they are the previous two entries in this blog: “15 hours on Lurpack and raw salmon” and “Maybe we needed a Golden Ticket?”)

Having left Dublin as a retreating skyline in the back window of a bus, Charlotte and I proceeded to travel down the east coast of Southern Ireland to the market town of Skibbereen in the large county of Cork on the very south coast. Charlotte had pulled another helpful tidbit from her most excellent guidebook which told us that the small village of Baltimore was nestled right in the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic and had a small, cheap, but wonderful hostel where we decided to stay. Upon arriving in Skibbereen, then, we found it easy to hop a bus into Baltimore, and we arrived late in the afternoon with just enough time for a short hike up to the cliffs for a stunning view. We were quite amused by the fact that these cliffs towered hundreds of feet over the ocean, yet there wasn’t so much as a low rail to keep one from plummeting head-first over the edge. All there was was a small sign politely warning visitors that there was a precipice ahead. No kidding. If this had been the US, there would have been a 12-ft high fence topped with razor wire and possibly electrified. So, we played around for awhile, climbing around and taking pictures. To the right is a photo of Charlotte waving from the top of a cliff opposite to one I was standing on. At the top of the page is a photo Charlotte was particularly amused by of me pretending to be clawing my way back up over the edge for one of her Clif bars.

When we had had our fill of the amusements the cliffs offered (it didn’t take long), we headed back into the village of Baltimore to find the hostel mentioned by the guide book. It turned out to be a medium-sized stone building, more like a large bed-and-breakfast than a hostel. We found, to our surprise, that we could get a double room to ourselves for only €8 apiece, and that the German couple who ran the hostel also maintained a popular restaurant on the ground floor of the building. Giddy with delight at our luck in finding both uncharacteristically comfortable and amazingly cheap accommodations, we quickly signed up for a Friday and a Saturday night stay. Our plan, then, was to spend the whole of the next day on a long hike out to a famous lake in the area, Loch Hyne, and then continue our travels up the west coast on Sunday. With this decided, we headed up to our room, which turned out to be a small room up on the second floor above the restaurant with two single beds and a sink. There appeared to be a few other travelers staying in other rooms off of our hallway, but they were quiet, and we soon fell asleep, exhausted by the long day’s journey.

The next thing I remember was waking up with the most horrible and instantaneous feeling of nausea I had ever experienced. I leapt the distance from my bed to the sink in one bound and ended up head-down and clutching the sink like it was the last life-ring on Titanic. My sister was awakened by my rather audible misery and lifted her head groggily to see what was going on.
“It’s three in the morning!” she whispered.
“I can’t help it. I’m really sick.” I groaned back.
“Well, see if you can keep it down. The neighbors might hear you.” With that, she rolled over and tried to fall back asleep. There wasn’t much sleep to be had, though. I developed a wretched routine of jumping to the sink, then crawling back to bed. Charlotte tossed and turned, unable to help me in any way and equally unable to get back to sleep.

Dawn found us both red-eyed and miserable. I continued to be as sick as ever, and it became very obvious that we were going to have to scrap our plans to visit Loch Hyne. Charlotte had been particularly looking forward to this hike, so my inability to even crawl out of bed was really “bumming her out.” There wasn’t much to be done, though, so we spent a quiet morning up in the room, resting. By early afternoon, I was feeling a little better, enough to venture out of bed at least. After managing a little tea, I thought maybe another short hike up the cliffs might make up in a small way for missing the big trip to Loch Hyne. Charlotte enthusiastically agreed, since a little cabin fever was starting to set in on her, so we left our packs at the hostel and started down the road for the 2km walk up the road. I think I made it about 500m before collapsing on a road-side rock and begging for mercy. It seems I hadn’t recovered as much as would have liked, and even a stroll down a paved road was too much for me. Poor Charlotte had to drag me, shaking and pale, back to the hostel and sit me in front of the fire with a piping hot mug of tea to revive me. We spent the rest of the evening sitting at a large wooden table in the small restaurant and playing cards while sipping endless cups of tea. We watched people come and go, the majority of which were local Irish villagers. The German couple running the place seemed to have a very large fan club in the local area, and the restaurant was quite busy far into the night. By the time we went to bed on our second night in Baltimore, I was almost back to normal if still just a little pale.

On our second morning in Baltimore, we woke up to a clear, sunny Sunday morning. I was feeling much better, and we headed down to the restaurant to fortify ourselves for the day’s trip up the west coast to Galway. Over a heaping Irish breakfast and steaming cups of tea, we casually inquired when the next bus to Skibbereen would be leaving the village. Our hosts stared at us blankly. “Bus? To Skibbereen?” They seemed to think we were joking, which surprised us, because we had arrived by just such transport. After a little further questioning, we discovered the source of their confusion. We had not taken into the day into account: there were no buses running on Sunday. Charlotte and I stared at other in desperation. We absolutely had to get to Galway that afternoon if we were going to see any of it before heading back to Dublin for our flight home. Some locals in for breakfast soon jumped in with advice, though. “You could always walk.” We were somewhat dubious about this, since my stomach virus was barely 12 hours behind me, and the hike was a daunting 13km over country roads. They were adamant, though. “No problem,” they said, “surely someone will stop and pick you up in the first few kilometers. Everybody catches a lift around here.” This was something we had not considered, the possibility of hitchhiking. The locals continued to reassure us, though, and with this certainty, we headed out the door and started our hike.

Do I even need to say that we never got a lift? It seemed inevitable on this trip that what we expected to happen would most certainly not happen. Our jaunty step and light chatter at the beginning of the hike turned into a silent, dragging death march of a trudge toward the distant horizon. Our frame of mind most of the way through the trip is evident in the picture above of my almost complete collapse against the sign at the last crossroads on the way to town. After what seemed like ages (but was probably only about three hours), we staggered into the outskirts of Skibbereen under packs that seemed to be full of lead. We gratefully threw ourselves onto a bench near the bus-stop and took stock of our situation. As it turned out, we had made it in time for the afternoon bus to Galway, and we even had a little bit of time to grab a snack from the newsagent across the road. We were grateful for this, as we were starving, and there were no more hidden snack bars tucked away in Charlotte’s pack. We lost no time in loading up with crisps and sweets and settled back on the bench, munching contentedly. One thing that makes Charlotte and I excellent travel companions is that we are both good at bouncing back from a rough patch, and we were quickly laughing and carrying on quite happily as we waited for the bus.

The rest of our trip went by in a flash. We spent that Sunday night at the Salmon Weir Hostel, a very popular stopping point for the young party crowd. The place was crazy, but full of interesting and lively backpackers from every corner of the world. We stayed up far into the night, trading stories and tips with them, only to wake early the next morning to head back to Dublin. Much Murphy’s Stout was consumed in the south of the country, much Guinness was consumed in the north of the country. Charlotte documented this with a picture of my Guinness “mustache” (left) on one of our trips out to the pub. I definitely developed a taste for the substance on this trip.

Our last challenge before heading back to the States was sorting out the arrangements for getting to the Dublin airport. This time, we would be taking a non-stop flight to the US, but the early hour of this flight meant that we would have to be at the airport at about 4:00 in the morning! We were all set to stay at the same hostel in which we had spent our first night in Dublin, but we were not at all sure we could get a bus to the airport so early, and we certainly didn’t want to pay for a taxi. Our only choice, then, was spending the night at the airport itself. Once we got there, we spent the first part of the night playing cards in the upstairs food court. Soon, though, the staff started to put up the chairs and turn off the lights, so we were driven to a large open floor next to the food court. While sitting on the cold tile and discussing what to do, we experienced one of the strangest things I have seen. Dozens of backpackers in various states of disarray started to appear literally out of the woodwork and began settling in small camps around the perimeter of the open space. It eventually dawned on Charlotte and I that the wall was the most protected place to grab a little sleep, and we scrambled to claim one of the last coveted spaces in the midst of this chattering sub-culture. Then, as quickly as they had appeared, they fell silent and the room echoed with the quiet sounds of dozens of exhausted fellow travelers. We slept fitfully on the hysterically uncomfortable tile, and rose with plenty of time to join the shuffling line through security and on the plane back to the US...and home.

Maybe we needed a Golden Ticket?

Mon, 3 Mar 2008 10:29:46 -0500

(Part 2 of my story about a trip to Ireland with my sister Charlotte. If you haven’t read Part 1, go down and click “Previous” at the bottom of the page)

And so it was, Charlotte and I finally found ourselves in Dublin and ready to start our week of exploration in Southern Ireland. Armed with an excellent guidebook Charlotte brought along, we found with relative ease a decent hostel right in the heart of downtown. Early the next morning, we set out to see what Dublin had to offer before moving on to the south coast. Unfortunately, the hostel was slightly lacking in the breakfast department. In fact, almost completely lacking, since all they had to offer was dry white toast. Made me feel like one of the Blues Brothers. We shrugged this off, though, thinking we could always pick up something more along the way, and hoisted our packs to venture out into the city.

Our first stop was Trinity University to take a look at the Book of Kells which was supposed to be on display. It’s not that either of us are really drawn to ancient manuscripts or anything, but we figured we might as well get a little culture, and maybe we could take a picture for our dad, the historian. When we got to the university, though, we realized that there was an entry fee required, and the amount caused us to stagger back in horror. Even with our extra cash from SAS, we weren’t prepared to hand over that kind of money to look at an old manuscript, so we settled for a picture next to the entry sign instead. We made it up to our dad by buying him a Book of Kells tie instead of getting a picture of the actual thing.

After a morning spent wandering around the university, we eagerly moved on to the next part of our exploration of Dublin, the Guinness factory. We had been looking forward to this particular part of our visit since our arrival, and our interest had been peaked by an ad campaign which greeted us in every corner of the city in the form of posters advertising “Guinness Extra Cold.” Our encounter with a pint in the pub the previous evening had led us to believe the former generation would now be labeled “Guinness Tepid.” Y’all can probably tell from earlier entries that Charlotte and I are fans of a good pint, though, so we turned our steps toward the looming factory like pilgrims heading to some distant and awe-inspiring shrine. Now, one must understand the Guinness factory isn’t so much a landmark in Dublin as a land-sprawl. It’s absolutely enormous, taking up many, many blocks near the heart of the city. Charlotte’s guidebook said there was a whole building dedicated to visitors where we could get a tour and enjoy a pint, and we foolishly assumed this particular building would be well-marked and easy to find. Silly us. We proceeded to walk the entire circumference of the factory boundary, which was surrounded by high walls, towering gates, and worrying signs depicting German shepherds and telling us to beware of the guard dogs. Oh, and let me tell you, a breakfast of dry white toast does not carry one even halfway around that perimeter. I was hitting the whiny phase, and Charlotte was getting very annoyed when she struck upon an idea. Bottles of Guinness are labeled with the location “St. James Gate,” so all we had to do was find that gate, and we were sure to find a way in. Alas, this was not the case. The picture at the top of this blog shows me standing, much like Charlie Bucket at Willie Wonka’s factory, pounding on St. James Gate in frustration. It was actually quite eerily like the movie “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” The older version with Gene Wilder, that is, not the newer, creepier Johnny Depp one.

Anyway, we had almost given up hope and resigned ourselves to trudging back to the bus station and continuing our journey, but we rounded one last corner and noticed a small, inconspicuous sign pointing the way to the Guinness tour. With whoops of triumph, we hastened down the lane and made our way into the tall building which, by the way, was not connected in any way with the sprawling factory complex. Once inside, we paid the 12 Euro for the tour and were each handed a clear plastic pebble with an embedded magnetic strip and a small bubble in the middle inside which floated a drop of Guinness. We were told the pebble would entitle us to a “free” pint at the end of the tour. The tour itself was mildly entertaining. I don’t remember much about it, except that it involved ascending in a spiraling fashion through numerous levels depicting the various stages in brewing Guinness. When we reached the top, we stepped into the round bar at the top of the building which afforded a 360 degree panoramic view of the city. At the bar, our pebbles were scanned, and we were presented with our choices for pints: Guinness or Guinness Extra Cold. Being fans of cutting edge trends, we both opted for the Extra Cold, imagining frosty glasses and little ice crystals floating in the foam. What we got instead was a pint which was exactly the same temperature at which we were used to drinking them. In other words, American cold. Well, at least they were reaching out to those of us who weren’t used to drinking our beer at a temperature a little under the degree of molten lava. We sat down with our pints, toasted our success in surviving our first full day in Ireland, and set about making plans for the next leg of our trip. By the time we boarded the south-bound bus, we had agreed upon our next destination: County Cork.

To be continued in Part 3...

15 hours on Lurpak and raw salmon

Sun, 2 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve let my blogging schedule slip a bit, but I’ve really been enjoying being home for a while on a little vacation. My next job starts in a week, and I’ll be working on an excavation in Columbia, SC for the next four to six months. Should be a lot of fun.

However, it’s time to add another installment to the tales of my past adventures. I really enjoyed writing the previous entry about my travels with my twin Charlotte, so I decided to continue on that theme and tell y’all about another trip we took the year before we ventured to Germany. It was actually the first time the two of us went overseas with just each other, so we decided to start out easy with a week-long trip to Ireland. This was a VERY eventful trip, and there were many great stories which came out of this adventure, so I’ve decided to split the telling of it into three parts to keep the length to something a little less daunting. So this will be Part 1: The journey across the Atlantic

Now, I love my sister dearly, and she is incredibly talented, but sometimes the fact that she pilots multi-million-dollar helicopters for the Coast Guard scares the hell out of me. Why? It has nothing to do with the danger of the job or the fact that a helicopter has the aerodynamic properties of a rock. No, it scares me because this hot-shot pilot can sometimes be a little hazy when it comes to basic geography. Let me illustrate by opening my tale of Irish adventures with the phone call I received one day while still aboard one of my ships:

Charlotte: “Hey, Wese [her nickname for me], guess what? I got us a great deal on a trip to Ireland!”
[she quotes me the price]
Me: “Really? Wow, that’s cheap!”
Charlotte: “I know, and it’s practically direct to Dublin.”
Me: “What airline?”
Charlotte: “SAS [Scandinavian Air] out of D. C.”
Me: “I didn’t know SAS flew directly to Dublin.”
Charlotte: “Well, it’s not totally direct. There’s one stop, but it’s totally on the way.”
Me: “Well, where can we change planes that’s on the way to Ireland?”
Charlotte: “Copenhagen. It’s practically right there”
Me: “Are you insane? Copenhagen’s in Denmark! That’s not even close!”
Charlotte: “No, it’s, like, right next to England. Just a short hop.”
Me: “*sigh*”

See what I mean? It’s frightening sometimes. To this day, Charlotte maintains that Denmark is about as close to Ireland as, say, the Netherlands. Anyway, geography problems aside, we got a great deal on a week in Southern Ireland, and we arrived at the airport with full packs and high spirits. Scandinavian Air at first glance appeared to be your average international airline. The plane was large and populated with politely smiling flight attendants. After settling ourselves into our seats, we quickly discovered one of the disadvantages of not being of Nordic decent: the large movie screen on the bulkhead was completely obscured by the freakishly-tall blonde heads immediately in front of us. So much for the in-flight movie. As we started to roll away from the gate, the overhead speakers came to life with the usual welcomes and cautions which were first spoken in crisp, melodic English and were then repeated in a series of harsh, hacking noises which we took to be Danish or Norwegian or some such language. It was, as Charlotte later commented, “definitely NOT the language of love.”

Once off the ground, the flight slid into the usual tedious transatlantic haul. We tried to sleep in our cramped seats and to fool ourselves into thinking we were really getting a full nights’ rest as the plane skipped over time zones like a pebble on water. Finally, as we started to cross land once more, the flight attendants woke everybody for breakfast. It was still around 03:00 AM our time, but we stirred to life and became almost enthusiastic as the plastic trays were handed around, envisioning a typical continental assortment of cold bread, fruit, and coffee. What greeted us instead on our tiny airline trays was a couple of small slices of raw salmon, what we took to be a variety of potato salad, and a hard roll with the inescapable packet of Lurpak butter. I should explain that SAS seemed to have invested quite heavily in Lurpak, because that little packet of rock-hard, butter-like cheerlessness came with almost every item of food they handed out on that flight. If they had had peanuts, I’m sure those would have been accompanied by it, too. But this meal was the last straw. Sleep deprivation and a decidedly American aversion to fish and potato salad for breakfast fueled my anger, and, as I tore into the roll and chopped up the Lurpak into little bits to dab onto the roll (it had the spreadability of a slab of marble), I muttered to my equally miserable twin, “If I see another square of this @#$% Lurpak, I’m going to lose it!” She quietly agreed, and we gnawed on our rolls in silence as we waited for the plane to start it’s descent into Copenhagen.

We finally made our arrival into the large Copenhagen airport and stumbled off the plane on legs aching from ten hours of cramped sitting. As we made our way up the jetway, Charlotte startled me by bursting out laughing. I turned to see what was so funny and found her pointing to my right shoe. After all the fuss I had made about the stupid Lurpak butter, I had apparently managed to step in a square of it carelessly dropped in the aisle as I left the plane. There it was, squashed flat and sticking out the side of the sole of my shoe. I did not see the humour in the situation, though, and muttered darkly as I stomped off to find a restroom in which to wash off the offending article. Once this was done, Charlotte and I wandered down the vast, echoing hallways looking for our next gate. For those of you lucky enough to have avoided the pleasure of Copenhagen’s airport, let me give you a visual: imagine an IKEA exploded inside a large air terminal. Everything was in bright, primary colours with that signature stark, pine furniture. It was surreal. I was looking for price tags on the chairs. That wasn’t the only strange thing about this airport, though. There was also the unaccountable absence of any other signs of human life. We went past gate after gate, all of which sat empty. It was rather early in the morning, but this still seemed pretty odd. Even when we got to the gate for our connecting flight to Dublin, which was due to leave in less than an hour, we found no one else there waiting. We started to wonder if there was some secret Scandinavian party room they didn’t tell the foreigners about where tall, blonde-haired Danes and Norwegians drank and made hacking noises at each other. We didn’t wonder for long, though, because we were exhausted from the long flight, and decided to take advantage of the quiet to get a little sleep on the empty seats in the gate room. The picture above is Charlotte doing just that.

Our naps were interrupted soon after by the arrival of a gate attendant, the first person we had seen since disembarking the previous plane. She entered the gate room and slid behind the desk just inside the door to type quietly on the computer for a minute. Charlotte and I sat up bleary-eyed and watched her wearily, wondering what was to happen next. She reached behind her and picked up the microphone which was connected to the speaker to make announcements in our particular gate room. This seemed a bit over-dramatic, since we were still the only passengers in the room and we were sitting directly in front of her, but she cleared her throat quite seriously and proceeded to announce over the loudspeaker (while looking directly at us) that the flight to Dublin was overbooked, and she was looking for two volunteers to give up their seats in return for a cash compensation. She then put down the microphone and calmly returned to her computer. We thought at first this must be some kind of strange Scandinavian joke, but, after a few minutes and some hurried whispers, I ventured up to the desk to find out. She assured me that the flight was indeed overbooked, as I stared around at the patently empty gate room. I agreed to the later flight and substantial cash vouchers for both of us, not entirely convinced that this wouldn’t end up on a Danish “Candid Camera” somewhere. She thanked me crisply, and told me the details of our alternate flight, which would leave an hour later but would not take us straight to Dublin (as our original flight would have), but would involve a stop-over and plane-change at London Heathrow. I groaned at this new development (I would generally rather have a root-canal without the benefit of anaesthesia than fly through Heathrow), but couldn’t turn down the cash offer which would pay most of our expenses over the course of the week. We waited in the gate room until the flight boarded, just to be sure no one cancelled. Our suspicions of the secret Scandinavian party room seemed confirmed when, just as the first announcement for boarding was made, a stream of chattering passengers flooded the gate room until it was standing-room only. Shocked, we gathered up our packs and headed down the hall to wait for the next flight.

The rest of our trip to Dublin was harried, but relatively uneventful. We arrived in London already running late for our connection to a domestic British Midlands flight to Dublin. We waited in an agonizingly long line for non-EU immigration, watching enviously as Brits and other Europeans breezed past us. We then raced down the terminal to stand, shivering, waiting for the bus to take us rumbling through various wandering streets to get to the domestic terminal (why, oh why, does Heathrow seem to sprawl over a majority of London?). We then sprinted flat-out to get to the very end of a series of subway-like lengths of terminal to get to our distant gate, and finally made it, panting, onto our flight as the last boarding call was being announced. By the time we made it to Dublin, we were ready for a large beer and a long sleep.

To be continued....

No wonder monks drink beer!

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

No ship stories today, I feel like branching out a bit, and I want to write down an account of an adventure that was on my mind today. Over the recent holidays, I was playing around with a new recorder I got which plugs into my iPod and records audio files straight to an mp3 file on the iPod itself. My twin Charlotte was intrigued by this, and immediately suggested we start recording conversations with our parents about all those little stories that get told over and over in a family, but never seem to get written down or recorded. We did a couple of recordings in which we attempted to get stories from our parents, but then spent most of the time talking between the two of us about a series of trips we did back when I was a sailor and she was a brand new Coast Guard officer. So, yesterday I was organizing a bit in iTunes, and I came across these recordings and started to listen to them a bit. That was how I found myself thinking about the time Charlotte and I went in search of “the best beer in Germany.”

Now this story begins, like most of the adventures of the Pittman twins, with a rather loosely-planned, we’ll-figure-it-out-as-we-go kind of last-minute trip somewhere around 2000 or 2001. For a couple of years, Charlotte and I had had a deal in which one of us would troll the travel websites looking for late-winter bargain prices on flights to Europe, and, as soon as we found such a deal, we would purchase tickets for both of us. The purchaser would then call up the other and say something like, “Hey, we’re leaving in a week to go to Ireland for six days,” or some such sudden announcement. That particular year, it was my turn to find something, and I got us a cheap flight to Frankfurt for a week. Our version of planning ahead for these trips usually involved both of us finding a good backpacker-friendly guide book and doing a little internet research on in-country transport (such as trains and buses). The rest was figured out as we went along.

For this trip, we had one main objective: get out of Frankfurt pretty quickly and head to Munich, which was more centrally-located for the area we wanted to travel around. So, directly from the airport we hopped on a Munich-bound train, stuffed our packs into the rack, and settled into our seats to study our guidebooks with that giddiness which only comes from a mixture of exhaustion and anticipation of the countless possibilities which lay before us. While looking through the options for interesting day trips out of the city, Charlotte came across a mention of a monastery where the monks brewed what the guidebook claimed to be “the best beer in Germany.” Now, given Germany’s reputation when it comes to that particular beverage, that seemed a pretty bold statement, and it was obviously one we would have to investigate for ourselves. And so it was a day or two later, we found ourselves heading out of Munich on another train in search of Andechs monastery.

Now, we had gone to an information center before we left the city to try to find out a little more detailed information on how to get to this famous place, and we were told by a very enthusiastic woman at the center that it was definitely worth the trip. Upon further questioning, she related to us in impeccable English that it was quite an easy trip, merely a matter of a short train ride on the S-bahn, and then a little hike up from the town to the village and monastery nearby. She assured us the hike would take about 45 minutes, maybe an hour on the outside. No problem. So, armed with this assurance and bathed in the lovely glow of trusting ignorance, we alighted from the train at a remote station in a small town in the mountains outside of Munich.

Of course, our first order of business was to figure out which way to walk as we left the station, since just about any direction appeared to go up the mountain, but we couldn’t find anyone nearby who seemed able to help us, so we decided to just start walking and hope to find a sign along the way. Sure enough, not far from the train station, we found a sign pointing off down the road simply labeled “Andechs.” Now, I recently found a picture taken by someone else who made a similar trip to the monastery, but probably found a better way to get there than we did.

As you can see, there are two signs pointing in different directions: one simply says “FuBweg nach Andechs,” that’s pretty straightforward, “Footpath to Andechs;” the other one says “FuBweg nach Andechs uber Horndlweg.” Now that one also points to a footpath to Andechs by way of the “Horndlweg.” I haven’t been able to find a translation for this word, but my closest guess is it translates to something like “steep, icy, treacherous path which will take you four hours and reduce you to the kind of panting, glassy-eyed exhaustion you usually associate with guys at the end of a marathon.” If I had a guess, that’s how I would translate that one, because I’m pretty sure that’s the path we took. We didn’t see a soul for the last couple of hours of this trudge either, once we passed up through the actual village of Andechs. We couldn’t see the monastery at all, even started to doubt it’s existence and put it in the category of cruel jokes played on tourists, when all of a sudden we had one of those “hallelujah” moments when we turned a corner and stopped to throw snowballs at each other. The sun broke through the clouds and struck the onion dome of a distant mountaintop structure. Cheered by this, we hefted our packs once more and continued our hike with lifted spirits and excited chatter, anticipating a warm meal and a large stein. It proved to be a premature excitement, though, as our hike dragged on. The dome would retreat into the distance with each new turn of the path. It would disappear altogether for half and hour, only to reappear tantalizingly close as we rounded another bend. I was on the verge of sitting down and refusing to budge another step when, quite suddenly, we topped yet another rise and found ourselves in an outer courtyard right near the church. We stumbled in and threw our packs and ourselves down onto and stone bench, too tired to do much celebrating. After catching our breath and regaining our senses, we started to comment to each other on something we had been wondering about for most of the hike up from the village: we hadn’t seen any other people on this pilgrimage up the mountain. If this place was as popular as the book suggested, where were the droves of tourists accompanying us to the top? They certainly weren’t on the path or milling around the church. And, perhaps more importantly, how were we supposed to find the beer if there wasn’t a stream of eager tourists heading to find it themselves? After a little bit of wandering, though, we did see a handful of Germans heading into a pretty large building downhill from the church. We discreetly followed them inside, and that’s when we found the droves of tourists.

We were standing inside a large cafeteria-type restaurant overflowing with excited Germans. Starving, we grabbed a tray and joined a shuffling line to one end of the room where we were presented with the standard bratwurst-and-saurkraut kind of fare we had become accustomed to in Bavaria. With our trays groaning under the weight of a mountain of food, we looked around for an empty seat, but the main room was packed. After a little investigation, we found a side room which was still surprisingly empty, and set our trays down at a large wooden table with big solid benches near the door. I offered to stay with the food if Charlotte would go in search of the longed-for beer, so she set off in a hurry to fetch our beverages. She returned very quickly to present me with our options, which were pretty simple: dark or light, and large or small. My answers were, respectively, “dark” and “are you kidding? LARGE!” She disappeared for a little longer this time, while I unloaded the food and tried to stow our packs under the seats. I looked up when I heard her walking back in the door, and my jaw hit the floor. She was clutching two of the biggest glass mugs I have ever seen, easily 1.5 liters, and they were both full to the brim. Charlotte set these mugs down with a thud, we stared at them for a minute, and then we both shrugged with the same thought: ‘Well, why not? After all, we came all this way for this stuff. Bottoms up!’

We dug in with enthusiasm, and, after making a little bit of progress on our beer, we were joined by a whole gang of what we took to be Volkmarchers, Germans who go on organized hikes as a social activity. We’d been on a few of these as kids when we lived in Germany, and these folks had the look. A lot of them were actually in the whole traditional kit, lederhosen and all. One big guy with a stereotypical feathered hat and handlebar mustaches stood up once the room was full and started to read from a scroll. We couldn’t make much of it out (both of us are pretty rusty on the German), but it seemed to be a funny account of some kind, because everyone periodically roared with laughter and applause. Thanks to the beer, Charlotte and I were soon cheering and toasting right along with them, with no idea what it was we were cheering for. By that time, we had made it most of the way through our mugs and had almost reached that stage where you start hugging your friends and telling them how much you love them, so they might as well have been reading a grocery list for all we cared.

Eventually, though, we came to the realization that time was slipping away from us, and we still had to make it back down the mountain and hop a train back to Munich. Reluctantly, we lugged our packs back out from under the benches, and trudged out of the warm, friendly cafeteria into the cold mountain air. Before leaving the monastery, we did take a quick tour of the grounds. We never did see a single monk, but we looked in at the church and even paid the small fee to climb to the top of the onion-domed bell tower. The last bit of this involved rickety vertical ladders and crawling over beams, like being in a very low attic, but the view was spectacular and worth the acrobatics involved in getting up there.

I don’t remember much about the hike back down the mountain. We were still pretty happy and warmed by the beer, and there were other cheerful tourists this time, trudging down the mountain with us. Suffice it to say, the trip down was a LOT shorter than the trip up, spurred by the steep downslope and the sinking sun. I do remember discussing the burning question which we had hiked all this way to answer: was this actually the best beer in Germany? Well, I still don’t have a definite answer to that. The beer was indeed very good, but, then again, warm soda would have tasted good after that death-march of a hike. The answer we decided upon during the dark, sleepy train ride back to the city was this: given the means of getting up there, for anyone who makes the hike, Andechs monastery does indeed brew the best beer in Germany.

Room to swing a cat

Thu, 7 Feb 2008 15:47:49 -0500

Ahh...the bliss of four (maybe five) uninterrupted days off. This morning, I had to get up early one more time to go to a meeting at the field office for our “changing of the guard,” so that the on-coming crew chief could get coordinated with me and the pipeline guys. After that, though, I had the rest of the four-day stretching in front of me with little on my agenda. Granted, I still haven’t caught up with all of last week’s paperwork and artifact cataloging, but I plan to do that a little at a time over the next few days to minimize the unpleasantness. So, until the next day at work (probably Tuesday), I’ll be hanging out in the sprawling metropolis of Griffin, GA with not a whole lot to do except chat with folks online, read, and watch DVDs. I might venture up to Atlanta if I can find a good reason to go up there...I’m not big on big city driving.

Anyway, I figure it’s time for the next installment of my Tales of an Ex-Sailor series, but first I had a request to explain the “Mr.” Pittman thing. Well, it actually started as a bit of a joke. A lot of my sailing life focused around the ship Kalmar Nyckel (which I pictured on my last two blogs), and the captain of that ship was one Capt. David Hiott, who was really my mentor in the tallship world. I had known him since I was a cadet at the Maritime Academy back in TX, and, once I started sailing, he kind of took me under his wing, so to speak. When I was still a deckhand in the summer of 1999, I was sailing on a schooner up in Penobscot Bay, Maine, and we were told each of us would get a week off during the season. I immediately contacted Captain Hiott (or “Cap” as he was known) to see if there was a possibility of visiting the brand new Kalmar Nyckel while I was on break. Not only did he say yes, but he invited me to sail with them on a four-day cruise from Delaware out in to the Atlantic. I was thrilled, and spent a wonderful four days as a “guest of the Captain,” which meant I was still a volunteer deckhand like everybody else, but I got a bunk back in the officer’s wardroom, and I got to play with the navigational equipment *LOL* At the end of the trip, we were tied up back at the dock in Delaware, and the exhausted crew were going through the last stages of “putting the ship to bed,” which included doing a nice, neat “harbour furl” of the sails. On that ship, the process could take hours with a “green” crew, and I found myself down on the main deck with Cap and the Chief Mate staring in exasperation up at the bumbling topmen who just couldn’t seem to get it right. I kept my mouth shut for a little while, but as things got worse and time dragged on, I couldn’t help myself, and I started adding my own shouted instructions between those of the two officers. Next thing I knew, I was on my feet in the middle of the deck in Cap’s favourite pose: hands on hips, head thrown back, squinting up at the yard, and pointing and shouting commands to the baffled crew. I came back to earth with a crash when I heard the familiar deep bass rumble of Cap’s voice behind me drawling, “You know, Cadet” (that’s what they used to call me) “I’m gonna have to change your name now. If you keep that up, I’ll have to start calling you Mister Pittman.” And so, the name was born. What he was hinting at was that he was starting to entertain the idea of hiring me for the next sailing season as a junior mate (which he did), and the title for a mate is traditionally “Mister,” regardless of gender. Nobody really pays attention to that tradition anymore, but Cap was very traditional, and so “Mister” I was, whether I liked it or not.

So, that wasn’t going to be my main story for today, but it was a little longer in the telling than I expected, so I think, rather than telling another story, I’ll say a little bit more about nautical traditions while I’m already on that theme. Sailors are still a very superstitious lot, and there were a lot of peculiarities to learn when I started out as a “greenhand.” For instance, no whistling onboard (might whistle up a storm), no mention of bad things which might happen (like a storm or sinking or such). It’s bad luck to see a shark swimming behind the ship, because that’s supposed to be an omen that someone will die, and they’re waiting for the body to be buried at sea. Weather omens are paid particular attention (like the whole “red sky at night” thing). I know a few sailors who got a pig tattooed on their foot, which is supposed to keep you from drowning (don’t ask me why). When you’re drinking any kind of liquor near the water (these days, it’ll probably be on the dock, not onboard), you’re supposed to pour the last sip out into the water as an offering to Neptune. And so on, and so on.

But one of my favourite traditions is that of having a cat onboard. The cat, of course, is for the purely practical purpose of keeping the rodent population to a minimum. Now most ships nowadays have other effective means of keeping the critters at bay, so it’s pretty rare to see a cat aboard ship anymore, but Kalmar Nyckel has one, and her name is Toolbox. While the ship was being built around 1997-98, there was a large population of half-wild “shipyard” cats, which are very common at these projects. They live around the lumber stacks and rigging shops, and they coexist fairly peacefully with the shipwrights and carpenters. There was one particular kitten, though, that got the attention of the builders of Nyckel, and she was the runt of a litter, solid grey, quite serious-looking. There are conflicting stories about how she got her name, Toolbox. Some say she was born in one of the big shipwright toolboxes placed around the construction site, others say she just slept in one of them. Either way, she became a bit of a mascot to the building crew, because she was the most social of the kittens, and she didn’t seem to mind the noisy machinery. The carver says she actually used to sleep on top of the big lumber planer (one of the noisiest machines on site) while it was grinding its way through countless planks! So, when the ship was launched and fitted out to start sailing, Captain Hiott noticed that this one little grey cat kept coming onboard and didn’t want to leave. His decision was, “Well, it IS tradition to have a cat onboard, so we might as well keep this one.” And so Toolbox started her sailing career. She’s a great ship’s cat. She likes to climb the rig in the evenings and sharpen her claws on the big hawsers lying on deck. She’s a good mouser, though she does have a tendency to catch them onshore and then bring them still alive back to the ship to have something to catch later. When I came onboard in the spring of 2000, I became the only live-aboard crewmember, so she became somewhat attached to me. She slept in my bunk and followed me around and left dead mice in front of my cabin. At one point in the winter, I got tired of her constantly tripping me up as I walked around, so I started scooping her up and sitting her on my shoulder to get her out of the way. She loved it, and that became her preferred mode of transport. Many a visiting tourist got a laugh out of seeing a small grey cat perched on my shoulder watching intently as I fixed a piece of rigging or patched a sail. Of course, I have since moved on from that ship, but Toolbox is still there. She’s the longest sailing crewmember, and the only one to sail every single day the ship’s been at sea. The crew has been talking lately about getting another kitten as her successor, so that she can train it in the ways of the nautical cat, and there has been one so far, Clew Garnet, but he didn’t last too long. They all agree, though, that when they find the next cat, it’ll have to be the same serious-looking grey cat which has become so familiar onboard Kalmar Nyckel.

Going in the deep end

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:25:30 -0500

Those of y’all who have been following me on Twitter recently have probably noticed that the last few days have been pretty stressful. I’m in Griffin, Georgia now, and I’ve been serving as crew chief on a 30-mile stretch of pipeline survey with a crew of four guys, three of whom are fresh out of college with no experience. That makes for pretty slow going in the field. Also, this is the very beginning of the project, so all of the various civil surveyors, land agents, pipeline guys, and such are still working out how to make things go a little more smoothly for us. What’s caused me to have such long hours in the evenings, though, is that fact that both the project manager and the field director (essentially, my two bosses) were just hired on, so I’m spending a lot of extra time trying to help them adjust to this company while they’re away from the New Orleans office.

So, put simply, my days since Monday have started at 06:00 and ended around 23:00 with no real time for myself. Hence the lack of blogging. All I will say about field work for now is that it is the usual routine of walking long distances over hill and dale and digging little holes every 30 or 50 meters. We’ve found a few cool prehistoric points so far, and the area is pretty in a wilderness kind of way. But I promised myself I wouldn’t spend this whole blog talking about work, because I quit work for the evening an hour ago, and I’m determined to think about something else.

Instead, I’m going to tell y’all a story, and, since I’m feeling a bit like I’m in over my head right now, I think I’ll start with the story of the one and only time I became a man overboard (well, ok, “person” overboard, then). Here’s the scene: It’s May 2001, and I’m Chief Mate of the Delaware square-rigger Kalmar Nyckel (the one in the picture above). We sailed out of Philadelphia one evening on our way out for an ocean voyage, but we spent the night anchored off of New Jersey in the Delaware River to have a little extra time to get the ship up-rigged and ready for sea. Two of our crew didn’t make it onboard for the departure, so the Captain had made arrangements for them to get picked up on the Jersey shore at daybreak. Of course, his “arrangements” involved waking me up before sunrise and telling me to take the inflatable rescue boat (our ship-to-shore launch) to go pick them up. It’s cold and windy, so I bundle up in all of my warm clothing topped by all of my heaviest wet weather gear, including my brand new heavy sea boots and the necessary lifejacket. By the time I was climbing in the boat and ready to launch, the sun was just peeking over the horizon and the crew were just starting to perform their early morning rituals of brass polishing and deck swabbing.

So, the Captain and another guy lower my boat to the water, and I leave one of the tackles hooked up the bow so I don’t drift away while I start the ever-unreliable outboard motor. Miraculously, it starts on the first pull, but, as I’m revving the throttle and looking up at the Captain in surprise, the boat bounces and I put my knee into the gear shift, shifting it into forward at full throttle. The next thing I remember is opening my eyes and simultaneously realizing I’m underwater and the boat is running at full speed right behind me. I had done a “header” over the stern, and the boat, still hooked up at the bow, starts doing tight donuts. Without the ability to form a clear thought, I just start swimming hard for a few strokes in whichever direction I’m pointing, and then surface to try to make sense of what just happened. Meanwhile, the Captain has leapt into action and starts taking up on the tackle to haul the boat out of the water by its bow. I surface and turn around just in time to see the propellor push the boat straight up and it shot out of the water like a torpedo, hitting the underside of the gallery, before the engine sputtered and died. What followed were several long seconds where I bobbed with my head just above the water and my boots earnestly trying to drag me down. I remember one thought clearly running through my mind as I floated there: “Wow! These lifejackets really work!”

My stunned reverie was interrupted after a moment by the Captain, who leaned over the stern, panting. But there was no ‘Oh my God, are you OK?’ or any other expressions of concern. Ever practical, he takes a breath, looks around, and says, “You’d better start swimming. There’s a strong current here.” It was then my brain kicked into gear, and I realized that it would do no good to wait for rescue. Our rescue plan required a boat, and that boat was the one hanging like a hooked whale at the stern. Besides, the person assigned to drive the rescue boat was the one in the water. With a start, I flipped over and started pulling hard to get around the stern of the ship.

Of course, none of the crew on deck has realized yet what’s going on, so they are blissfully ignorant as they carry out their morning duties. The first person I spot is a teenager up on the quarterdeck, and I yell at him to throw me a life ring, but he just stares at me, trying to figure out what’s going on. I yell at him again in my best do-it-now-or-else voice, but by the time he gets the ring over the side, I’ve already swum past it. A crowd starts to gather at the rail ‘midships, all trying to decide what to do. One of them thought it was another drill and hollered, “Whatcha doing in the water, Mr. Pittman?” (My title on the ship was “Mr.” but that’s a different story) I’m starting to get a little ticked at this point, so I yell, “Would somebody PLEASE just throw me a ring?!?” And that was when one of my crack crew (which had been trained within an inch of their lives for any contingency) sprang into action and made a perfect throw of the ‘midships lifering....a perfect throw which finished by hitting my in the head. In the end, I had to drag my own soaking-wet butt up the side of the ship and onto the caprail. As I swung my legs over the rail and the worried crew flocked around me, I took a deep, shaky breath, stuck my feet straight out, and asked the nearest sailor, “Could you please dump the five gallons of water out of these boots?”

Leaving go the jack

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:25:41 -0500

I have these occasional periods of daydreaming which seem to be happening more and more frequently these days. In these daydreams, I chuck this drudging shovel bum life and go back to my somewhat parallel gypsy life as a schooner bum. My old crew mates hail me as a survivor of strange lands returning home after all this time. I fit back into the routine of watches and voyages like a well-worn impression in a favourite old armchair. My days suddenly revert to the simplicity of managing just four hours at a time without a thought for the next four. The familiar sounds and smells of wood and canvas and tar and diesel surround me and I experience the powerful feeling of an entire crew working away smoothly without any of the distractions of the outside world to break their concentration.

I refer to these daydreams as little moments of “leaving go the jack,” episodes of being so swept away by the moment as to forget common sense. The phrase comes from one of my favourite poems by John Masefield, “Cape Horn Gospel II.” It’s a kind of dark-humored account of how different shipmates died on long voyage, but the one verse that has stuck in memory was about one who fell from a yard while he was horsing around:

Josey slipped from the tops'l-yard an' bust his bloody back
(Which comed from playin' the giddy goat an' leavin' go the jack)

It’s pretty obvious when I stop and think about it that indulging in these fantasies of the “romantic” sailor’s life I used to have completely ignores the wet, cold, queasy reality of that life. Going back to it would also immerse me once more into the many aggravations, deprivations, and sometimes moments of sheer terror which marked every waking minute. So, when I have these starry-eyed musings of how much I miss the life of the pioneering tallship officer plowing into the great unknown, I try to temper them with reminders of the many “luxuries” I am privy to now that I have joined the ranks of the landlocked. Looking around my hotel room, I can think of a dozen right off the top of my head: dry bedding, clean clothes, electricity, carpeting, privacy, hot water, fresh fruit, coffee that doesn’t taste like diesel, eight unbroken hours of sleep, a phone, a ceiling which doesn’t drip water on me, and the ability to take a shower whenever I feel like it.

I once received an email containing a list of things to do when you get nostalgic about going to sea. Here are a few from my somewhat fuzzy memory of it:

- Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the door with a curtain. Several times during the night, have your spouse whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your face, and mumble ‘Sorry, wrong bunk.’

- Occasionally run into your kitchen, yell ‘Man overboard! Ship recovery!’ and then sweep everything from the counters and shelves onto the floor.

- Sleep with a lawnmower running in your living room all night

- Have the paperboy give you a haircut

(and my all-time favourite for the tallship sailor),
- Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it does, leap out of bed, get dressed as fast as you can in the dark, run out into the front lawn, and douse yourself with a garden hose.

You see? It’s crazy to want to go back to that. But life was so clear-cut and simple. Do your job well, and you will make it to the next port. Do it poorly, and you might not. So the argument runs in my head. I think of some wonderful, exhilarating memory and then I think of the cold reality behind it. The breath-taking sunrise in the morning was quickly followed by the deadly squall it was hiding. The cute squirrel scampering along the caprail amusing the crew was merely a harbinger of the hours I would have to spend gripping the topyard with numb legs as I clumsily patched the huge hole he chewed in the tops’l. Oh yeah, and I sewed the sail to my pants.

So, I won’t go back to the sea. At least, not right now. I will be responsible and keep earning a paycheck and keep looking ahead to grad school and making a place for myself in maritime archaeology. But I think I will start writing down some of these memories, good and bad alike, of my past nautical life. Maybe that will be something to blog about on these cold, rainy days when I’m stuck in my hotel room with nothing to observe or comment on. I am, after all, mostly a story-teller at heart. I don’t have the patience or the inclination to write long commentaries on politics or current events. I’m not incredibly good at giving insightful impressions of books I’ve read or movies I’ve seen. Besides, in third grade I won the award for the “Kid with the most stories” in my class, so I figure I should try to live up to that.

Hotel hibernation

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 13:44:29 -0500

Sorry for the lack of updates this week, y’all, but it’s been a little rough. I’ve been battling a nasty cold since Thursday, and living out of a suitcase in a hotel doesn’t help much. I’m feeling a bit better now, though, and I figured it was about time for some kind of blog. Not much to say about the past week. The company’s had me “in-house” all week, which means doing field projects in the home city of New Orleans. Right now the main project is surveying areas near the levees before the Corps of Engineers starts doing more reinforcing on them. It’s basically just walking along at the base of the levees and digging shovel tests. This means long days, lots of clay, and wet boots. I think the wet boots and the copious amounts of rain we’ve been getting lately contributed to my illness.

So, I started feeling bad on Thursday, but struggled through the workday. Friday, though, I could barely get out of bed, so I called in sick and hunkered down for a weekend of sniffling, coughing, and bad TV. I can’t really write much, therefore, about the outside world today, because I haven’t really seen the world since Friday. Instead, I guess I’ll write about a couple of observations I made while hibernating in this tiny little den...

1) It’s absolutely amazing how much space the contents of one suitcase and one carry-on can occupy. That whole “your stuff will expand to fill the space you inhabit” idea could be scientifically proven by looking at my hotel room. I only brought six books (definitely a modest amount for me), and yet somehow they are taking up the whole desk, scattered haphazardly and propped up against a bottle of Nyquil and the abandoned attempts at a letter. The couch I’m sitting on and the coffee table I have my feet propped up on are both obscured by wadded tissues, electronic detritus, and half-finished Sudoku puzzles. I don’t even want to mention the fridge/microwave area...

2) When you’re starved for entertainment, it’s surprising what your brain will settle for. My mind and eyes just couldn’t handle too much reading, so I turned to cable to fill the endless hours. After half a day I actually found myself caring about who got kicked off of “Make Me a Supermodel.” I watched reruns I’d already seen a hundred times. I found myself getting sucked in to MTV marathons for whole shows. Eww...as I write this, I’m reaching for the remote to turn the TV off.

3) So my incredibly well-read twin sister Charlotte told me about an experiment she read about recently. The gist of it was that two groups of people, made up of both optimists and pessimists, were put in a room individually with a light bulb and a switch. They were told to flip the switch off and on. For one group, the switch was actually connected with the bulb, and the light turned on and off under their direction. For the second group, the switch had nothing to do with when the light bulb turned on and off. Afterwards, each group was interviewed over how much control they had over the light bulb. The optimists almost always thought they had complete control over the bulb, regardless of whether they did or not. The pessimists knew exactly how much control they had in both situations. Conclusions: Pessimists are realists, optimists are mostly delusional

I’m an optimist

I’m pretty sure that experiment is being conducted on my heater thermostat.