Lately I’ve been finding myself in the incredible position of writing about sharing without sharing, writing about blogging without blogging, writing about photography without taking photographs, owing writing to people and being owed writing, and being surrounded by profoundly bored people without having the luxury/curse of boredom. You’d think it would all balance out, but sometimes it feels like I’m chasing my own tail.
And that’s without the wind.
The wind has several flavors in Qatar, but it’s nearly without pause, and in the calm, blessed moments, there are hoards of flies. The best is to hope for a small respite, enough to ruffle the paper on your clipboard, but not enough to snap your measuring tape–something that happened twice to our team last week. My measuring tape didn’t snap, but it did rip one of my grid pegs out of the ground.
Happily my archaeology has been good lately–I am not allowed to discuss details, but the sequence of my features and architecture has been making sense and what we call natural, which just means stratigraphy beneath the human occupation layers, is showing up in several places. Getting through to the bright whitish-yellow shelly sand is a relief, especially as we only have a couple more weeks to dig before we start shutting things down for the year. Funny ol’ job, methodically recording and removing the traces of other humans.
It also helps that I’m working with really good people, but I think we’re all getting a bit sick of each other.
And the wind. The wind.
Colleen Morgan 
At least you have internet access! That’s always a plus. Every field season gets to this point. Keep on pluggin’.
It never ceased to amaze me in my desert years how everything got blown away except the flies.
“Funny ol’ job, methodically recording and removing the traces of other humans.” <– THIS!!!
I'm in awe, so succinct, so poetic, and so accurate.