Back at the Digs

I've been back from the Vindolanda digs for a couple of months now.  But the work goes on.  Here's some clever small finds from Vindolanda and the sister site Magna.  

Here's an intaglio, a small carved semi precious stone that would be fitted into a ring.  These tend to drop off, especially in places like baths where the temperature might make metal expand more than the stone it was holding!

Here's a nifty belt buckle.  Some designs don't change much over the centuries.

Dice are a fairly common find, although I've not come across one yet.  Like most this one is made of bone.  Not infrequently these are "loaded" with either weighting or shaving of edges!

Sometimes really old craggy things turn up on site.  Here one such, Dr. Birley, holds a nifty bit of stonework.  It is felt to be a bit of household gods shrine.

You tend to find heavily encrusted iron "things".  Some sort of pan or ladle.  

Looking over these I can feel the warm sun, hear the distant bleating of sheep.  Makes me want a nice pint of celebratory ale.

Dog Sitting

A week in which I expect to be close to home a lot.  Here's why:

And here's why with a bit more detail:

We do try as a family to get together for fun stuff.  The 4th of July for instance.  Kids, their spouses, their kids, their dogs.  All the bipeds get along well.  But one of the dogs - a gangly puppy - decided to play really rough with my dog Hank.  It was WWF level of play, if by that you mean Woof, Woof, Lunge.

Well after a day or two of that Gangly Pup was limping.  Somehow she managed to fracture a toe.  I did not know dogs could do that, nor that the treatment involves a splint/cast for six plus weeks.

The problem is that most of the fam was getting ready to head off for a reunion of one of the northerly branches of the tribe.  Leaving me with the long suffering Hank, and his tormentor.  Now suitably chastened and in the Cone of Shame.

It's tough duty.  I'm wiping up floors more than once a day.  Can't really blame the puppy, although I do intone the dreaded words Bad Dog on occasion.  She's disoriented.  Her people have left her.  Hank don't wanna play.  Things look and smell wrong.  There has been thunder, road construction noise and a mailman that comes to the door instead of leaving things out at the mailbox.  Sigh.

Hank and I will manage.  Between feeding, cleaning up, walking and every two hours or so just getting out to the yard on spec, I won't do much more than that.

Mans Best Frenemy sometimes....

Den Four, Buddy.

 Oppressive summer weather kept me inside a bit in late July.  And put me onto some tasks only marginally nicer than sweating and breathing the horrid Canadian smoke that blew in for a while.  Closet cleaning and organizing.   Ugh.

But you find stuff.  Here's something I hauled home from the clean up of my parent's house.  It dates to my days as a Cub Scout.  Some of the photos have helpful date stamps and/or scribbled notes.  The cover is plywood, with the letters burnt in with a soldering iron or something similar.  Not exactly safety first back then.  Join me for a jump back in time some six decades.

Scouts were organized in a sort of military fashion.  A Pack of Cub Scouts would be like a Platoon in the Army.  A Den was a smaller group, like a Squad would be.  Oh, not in the cool sense of the word that Squad was used until fairly recently.  Here's Den Four.

Statistically speaking, a couple of those smiling lads are no longer with us.

Below is a moment in time.  February 1967 in the kitchen of my parent's old house.  Making paper Mache puppets.  I have a grandson about the age I am here.  His spelling and penmanship is better than mine. 

A guy in uniform.

This next one is an oddity.  Not the same paper or quality as the other photos, which were taken on an old Instamatic camera with 'flash cubes'.  

I think that's my older brother.  He appears to be just about to step on that model train car and fall on his butt.  These are the stairs going down to the basement.  My recollection is that we had a Scout activity that involved taking pictures with an old school camera - something like a Brownie - then developing them ourselves.  I can call up a memory of swishing moist paper around in stuff that smelled like vinegar.

Just random glimpses of an earlier time.  A time when most everyone had three or four kids.  Heck, the Catholic family across the alley had more.  And there was a solid culture of volunteerism.  My mom was a Den Mother.  Had a swell blue outfit and everything.  She was also president of the PTA and a bunch of other stuff.  This despite having four kids, one with special needs.

Now its much harder to rouse people to any volunteer efforts.  They wanna get paid.  Or they wanna just keep playin' with their phones.