Today was my second day of lab/babysitting sick people so that Vanessa can hopefully get some work done. Yesterday’s catalog was easy - making a catalog of artifact fragments on which we’ll be doing XRF analysis (someday), but today I was tasked with cleaning the recent finds from the field, mostly ceramics caked in hard dirt.

The weather here is best described as inconsistent, or perhaps consistently erratic. There’s no way of predicting what today’s climate will look like, so you’re supposed to prepare for a little bit of everything. In Spanish, the word to describe the drizzle which sometimes showers us with light rain is called “paramo”.

Yesterday Matt, Sofia, others, and I considered places to go for our upcoming 3-day weekend. The other staff members mentioned going to various resort locations like Mindo or BaNos, but I’m not sure that I don’t feel like splitting from the group and going somewhere difficult on my own. I considered Colombia, but I’m on the fence because of the reported danger to American tourists. Then again, a guy’s gotta live, right?

After lunch today my ceramics cleaning partner (Kenny) and I noticed a fire near the hacienda rooms, so we put the fire out. I should remind myself later to update my LinkedIn profile to say “Archaeologist, firefighter”.

There’s some trouble with the databases, not just in that there are multiple databases but in that people are actually having trouble with them. I’m considering pushing to MySQL/PHP, which should be easier to use but might be harder to learn. I need to come up with a solution which is easy enough to learn.

The pigs at this hacienda almost ate some of our ceramics. Stupid pigs.

I can’t help but start to feel the impact of knowing that I won’t see some people back home very much (if at all). I don’t mind losing some people, but others…