57 posts tagged “my life”
I was woken up a few nights ago (and have
not had a chance to blog it between now and then because my sister glued
herself to the computer 0900 to 2300 every single day) by an ungodly din coming
from just outside my window at about
0200. Yowling, hissing and spitting noises that made me think that that
a cat or owl must have got itself caught in the netting I helped put up over
Dad’s apple trees to protect them from wasps and hungry birds. So I pulled back my curtains, pulled up the
blind, and started shining my torch out of the window. Something bolted and
fled into the undergrowth past the apple trees and under the gap in the fence by
the barbeque. What, I don’t know. A fox or a badger I would guess; we have both
locally. The other combatant was lying rolled up in a ball outside my window. It
was a hedgehog, with moss stuck to its fur. I realised it might have been hurt
and debated going outside to so if it was ok, but when I shone the torch beam
on it, it hissed like a possessed kettle and so I guessed it wanted to be left
alone. I checked in the morning and it
had left under its own power, and there was no blood. But just in case anyone
was wondering, although they look quiet and peaceful, the sound of a large hedgehog
fighting for its life outside your window is really, really loud.
Since it woke me up, and made my put my lights on, here's a song.
What part of your childhood do you miss the most?
Submitted by Maretta.
Late 1980's and 1990's cartoons. The cartoons now a days are appaling! bring back he-man, thunder cats, ewoks, T.M.N.T and A.O.F.W!
I would like to thank all my family and my friends from university and my lectures for a great graduation. Thanks Guys!
I only wish I could remember the day from 5pm onwards… free wine and archaeologists was not a good combo…
Well, im at home and having a great time, except I need a haircut later today.
I have never particulary liked haircuts, and what is worse because my graduation is coming up my parents have offered to take me to a proper hairdresser so I can look good for my photos and so my grandchildren won’t be able to laugh too much on seeing these photos in the distant future. I don’t really want to go, but as restrained and person who knows how much it means to them (damn you British reserve and stiff upper lip, what have you done to my mind!) I was too polite to say no.
But the problem is I have always had my hair cut by the same person, a friend of the family, for as long as I can remember and would trust with my life. And my hair. She knows exactly what I mean when I say "um, can I have it a bit like it was last time but not quite?" and peacefully trim by hair whist I sit their tharn.
And yet in three hours I will find myself in a hairdressers/barbershop, with big glass windows so I am on public display whist some total stager wields sharp bits of metal around my head and tries to make small talk, something I have never been good at unless with a peer of similar interests. (”So, what’s your favourite element of archaeological science then?” or “What did you think of Wales’s performance in the six nations this year?” does not sound like hairdresser friendly conversation….”What’s your favourite Prog-metal band?” is frankly not even worth considering).
To be fair, I would rather anyone waving scissors in the vicinity of my ears would not talk but would instead pay utter attention to what he or she is doing. Also I hate mirrors; I use an electric razor and shave by feel, not sight and I have never quite trusted mirrors. Oh yes, and I don’t know whether or not I will shave my beard of, so any haircut that looks good with a beard may look stupid without it, I hate hair gel, like long hair but have a receding hairline I ideally need to hide, and need to look respectable enough for my grandmother. Help!
Today, my flatmate B moves out. We'll keep in touch, but not Uni is officially over and people are moving out. I may never see some of them again. Sad thought; but at least me and B were both at the Boss concert last night. It was an awesome set, and the Millennium Stadium is a great stadium. big, perfect coverage all round, no pillars or supports anywhere to block the view. If only the stairways were wide enough to have ice-cream hot-dogs and beer vendors walking up and down like in American stadiums, but the shops for food beer and merchandising were close enough, and i got some beer and a Springsteen barge before the concert started. My sister got a poster. Me and my family were in what in a theater would be the gods, about as far from the Boss as it was posible to be, but right in front of the stage; the distance was bad but the angle was great; near enough back-row-center. I don't know were B and his dad were. I was next to my Boss crazed sister, and i think that by about the third song i had hurt my hand clapping. After a hello Cardiff the Boss launched into about twenty or thirty minutes of non-stop songs before taking a break, during which he told a story about how he had to play a gig in New Jersey to pay bail in Virginia only to get the police breaking up his gig and arresting band members in NJ because he played for too long, just like Virgina. He also grabbed some placards from the front row with requests on, and went straight on playing. We got to here "the River" played for the first time in Wales thanks to a request. After the requests it was straight into some more of his classics, with a bunch more saved for the encore. He didn't play "Born in the USA" or "Dancing in the dark" but he did pleasantly surprised everyone by pausing for a bit after "born to run" which we all thought must have been the last song, before carrying on for another twenty minutes at the least, Including
a version of "the American land" which nearly finished of my hand and hand enough soot stamping in time with the beat to do in my foot as well. All in all, Brilliant!
Oh yes... over the last few years i have very successfully picked subjects that have come up in exams to revise and do practice questions on. This year i however outdid myself when a question on how you would study bioarchaeological remains came up... that apart from saying "How would you study bioarcaeological remains from a Norse site with these characteristics..." said "How would you study bioarcaeological remains from a British Iron Age site with these characteristics..." and then folowed with the exact same question as the one from a previous year I had done as part of my perpetration for the exam!
...It's been a LONG few weeks.
The Student Union Real Ale and Cider festivals was all that it promised. Me and will teamed up to show whoever wrote the Pub quiz that setting a round on Dinosaurs followed by one on Ancient Rome and when one team consisted of an archaeologist with an interest in paleontology and an ancient historian was a recipe for disaster for them, and a guaranteed win for our teem. We only got one t-shirt, one bottle of beer and six beer tokens between the 10 of us, but the gloating right were worth it. I then promptly got onto the cider (I still maintain that the American phrase "hard Cider" is a blasphemy, ALL cider is by definition alcoholic) which was a nice whiskey cask conditioned scrumpy on the masochistic side of 8% and the rest of the day became quite hazy.
The next day, unwilling to let my unused low value tokens go to past, i went to the beer festivel again and had a far more sedate time with Bullmastiff Son Of a Bitch, Valley of Glamorgan Vog y Grog, Bragdy Mŵs Piws (purple moose brewery) Ochr Tywyll y MŴs (Dark side of the moose) and a whole other range of Porters, stouts and Milds, especially a nice little mild i think was by Rhymney brewery in Mertha tydfil.
Then came Thursdays trip to London to see the British Museum, then go to the millennium dome to see Tut Ankh Aten, later Tut Ankh Amun, well, we knew HE wasn't there, but a lot of his grave goods were in London on display, and although i have seen them, and in fact seen his mummy in Egypt, it was worth the trip to take another look.
However, to get there in time we had to leave Caerdydd at 0600, which for me meant getting up at 0530. For R it meant leaving work at 0430, drunk, to get there just in time to fall asleep in a doorway, so me and the rest of our friends had to pick him up and guide him to the bus.
This more or less set the tone for the rest of the day as the next generation of the UK's finest archaeologists wandered in a sleep deprived, and as far as at least 50% of these present, hungover state, about the capital ("Hey guys, if we get drunk we'll get to sleep really early and so waking up at five will be okay!"). However the Brit was, as always, excellent, and as our lecturer knew some people there we got to go behind the scenes and handles some roman finds.
Tut was also good. Sure, the boy king himself was absent and the display on Akhenaten, AKA Amenhotep the fourth, was far to brief, mentioning only that he was most likely the father of Tut-ankh-amen, and mentioning briefly his sweeping religions reforms that replaced most of the traditional pantheon with the worship of one god, the Sun Disk, The Aten.
So aside from not mentioning the most interesting new kingdom Pharaoh, if not THE most interesting pharaoh exept in breif terms, the exhibit was good. Oh, and i had the minor inconvenience of having to empty all my pockets as the coin that slipped out through the hole in my coat pocket and is not trapped in the lining set of all the metal detectors. Considering that i carry several pounds of largely useless, occasionally VERY useful shrapnel such as miniature screwdrivers for fixing my glasses, a comb, gaffa-tape, a hip flask, a tin of fisherman's friends lozenges and a dozen bottle openers on my person at all times, as well as scrapes of paper with useful aids to the memory, this took five full minutes and attracted a small crowd. Remarkably the security did not bat an eyelid and were quite happy to let a walking toolkit like me in, despite the fact sleep deprivation was kicking in and i was quite possibly dribbling slightly at the time.
The exhibit was... beautiful.
After a full two hours and an quarter oggaling the exhibit, including giving a small child a basic lesson in how to read Hieroglyphs ( read from the direction the animals face, and remeber that the names of gods come at the start of a cartouche name, so for example Tut-Ankh-amun is written "Amun Tut Ankh") we had to leave as several other groups had lapped us and because as i was wearing my National Geographic top, and the exhibit was sponsored by National Geographic, and because i was telling anyone who would listen about how great Akhenaten compared to the rest of the 18th dynasty several people had mistaken me for staff. Eventually, too tired to even get drunk, we were herded about London aimlessly until we got the bus home were me, R and the third year organizers of the trip ended up stuck next to the bus's emergency loo, one that by the smell had seldom, if ever, been cleaned. Ammonia closet aside, the trip back was utterly hilarious, in that way ANYTHING is when you have had 4 hours sleep in the last 48, some of them in a doorway if you were R.
Fast forward to Saturday; Rugby time!
the weather killed the attendance's at the big open air screen dead- we went twice and the first time about 12 people were there, the second only a few hundred. Considering there more than that on the ground floor of the gatekeeper when we left it to check out the open air screen we went back.
Ireland lost their match, which upset me, but i did take solace in the projector repair man. As the Projector the Gatekeeper mega-pub uses to show big games had broken weeks ago, and considering this was the biggest match for years and they were the closest watering hole of any size to the stadium, and this would be one of the biggest drinking days for years in wales, you would think they would have had the projector fixed before now.
They hadn't.
So when we got there, there was STILL a repair man rising out of the sea of red rugby shirts struggling with a machine that I could from a distance of ten meter, tell was utterly kaput. The burn-marks were a clue. so what did the repair man do facing a potential angry mob if the wales-France match failed to make it from the many small plasma-screens to the giant screen at the appointed time?
He went outside for a moment, came back with ANOTHER projector and, i kid you not, strapped it to the bottom of the first one with car-ties and gaffa-tape. Thus the second half of the Ireland match and the entirely of the vital wales France match could be viewed on the big screen.
As for that match i will say only this; I have never been in a more alive crowd and taken part in more genuine jubilation than on that sweaty and beer-soaked pub floor on that day. It is not something i think i will ever forget, not look back on with anything but genuine happiness.
Wales, this is for you.
Oh and a happy St Patrick's day.
I can now Drink in the USA as well as in the civilized world (defined as 'those countries that would let me drink already'). Brilliant!
Ireland lost their last game; this has annoyed me more than I have thus far let on.
Practically dragged from by bed by my flatmates yesterday in order to make it down town in time to get a good spot in a pub to see the Wales-Scotland game I soon found that my flatmates had forgotten to take into account the fact that said game was being played in the Millennium Stadium in Caerdydd and as a result getting anywhere on foot was imposable as the streets were rammed to bursting with welsh fans, a few Scottish fans, ticket touts, mounted policemen (pointedly ignoring the touts, they were there to break up fights and only break up fights and the touts knew this) police horses (they may or may not have been pointedly ignorring touts, with horses it is hard to say), drunks, loonies, hot-dog and other fast-food salesmen and one French fan hoping to find a quiet place to wait until the France-Ireland match started and feeling very alone in the world in the mean time. I knew how he felt.
Having settled on the Gatekeeper, which was rammed, we set about getting pints and watching the Wales-Scotland match, which wales dutifully won to the adulation of all my welsh friends who had dragged me down there, and to the slight adulation of my English flatmates with welsh girlfriends.
On the suggestion of one of these welsh girlfriends we left the gatekeeper to find somewhere a little quieter to watch the Ireland match, something that even then struck me as a bad idea given that as soon as the Wales-Scotland game had finished and the stadium started chucking out the population density off the streets outside had risen to approximately that of downtown Calcutta, and most of them were drunk. The game started in five or so minutes. Getting to the Bar in the establishment we were already in required serious effort and deployment of T.E.M, Tactical Elbow Maneuvers. Getting from one pub to another would require, preferably, a bulldozer. However as it was go with my friends or watch the match on my own I went.
Once we were allreday stuck in the streets it was casually mentioned to me that the pub we were heeding to was opposite the stadium.
Twenty-six minutes and one encounter with a megaphone-wielding evangelist later, we reached the pub. It, of course, had a giant queue to enter, but at this point all the girls were desperate for the toilet as they failed to go before leaving the last pub (why they couldn't have used the stalls in the gents in the gatekeeper like ever other woman in that bar I have no idea) and several people whom I had never met but who were from this point on referred to as "all our friends" were already in this pub, so we obviously had to wait to get it.
The Pub in question was in fact the bar of a youth-hostel/hotel. As it was opposite the stadium and cheep lots of traveling Scotland and wales fans had decided to stay there. As a result they could get in without queuing. The result of this was the bar filled up instantly but the queue did not move one iota for a very long time. By the time we got in the first half was nearly over, Ireland was loosing (clearly due to the fact i had not been able to wish them on as I could not see the game), the worlds tallest, biggest, baldest, nastiest looking welsh fans ever born had taken up residence right in front of the screen and as their teem had won they were partying and not moving for anybody (as a result I watched most of the second half reflected of the shaven head of the one standing in font of the projector), I had been waiting so long I had semi-sobered up and left the happy-drunk stage, I now needed the lavatory as well, "all our friends" had evaporated back into the aether without ever introducing themselves to me, and we had all waited far too long to get in here to go somewhere better. So i got a pint and watched the second half.
Despite the best come back since Lazarus in the last quarter of the game, when Ireland were within a try of winning and in Frances danger zone in the last seconds of the game, the French still found touch and ended the game to secure them a win. This quite annoyed me, and not even the remarkably good singing of the Welsh fans behind me could cheer me up (their must have been a Welsh male choir in there somewhere). So the night ended with me going home to the worrying news our neighbor two doors down had been burgled, spending far to much money, drinking far more than is good for me, and still feeling faintly disappointed. Still, Blogging about it helps.
Firstly, national preferences aside, i think anyone will have to admit that the Welsh comeback in the last quarter of yesterdays six nations match was a peace of utterly thrilling rugby.
As Ireland had already won their match i was happy to sit and watch the England-Wales at Rob's house and indiscriminately egg-on/mock both sides as the game progressed. What was quite fun was that out of the two Welshmen, one half-Welsh-half-English, one half Irish-half-English (me), one Australian (a girl) and two Englishmen only one person there supported england. He was quietly confident all the way through the first half. Then the second half started. Things did not go well for Wales to start with in the second half either, and so it was suggested that if Me, Rob and Joe wore plastic Viking Hats, Wales would win.as the person suggesting this was giving me beer i did not think this was a bad idea.
We put on the hats.
Wales won.
Now, a must say i cannot take sole credit for the welsh turn-around that started seconds after the plastic hit my head, Joe and Rob also had the hats on, and so the 3 million Welshmen who now owe me everything should also defer to those two. But needles to say, there was quite a party; we could, in the house, overt the top of the music and drinking, hear the distant chart of "Wales! Waaalllles!" from every pub in Caerdydd. I can remember comparatively little of the next few hours as we went drinking when we exhausted the supply of alcohol in the flat, but i recall the center of town was packed to bursting point with jubilant Welshmen, and that i ended up drinking beer out of one of the plastic horns of the helmet (yes, as a archaeologist i KNOW that real viking never wore horns on their helmets, but real viking also did not have plastic molding and rugby) and getting very lost and winding up with a kebab-meat pizza.
which just goes to show. something.
