Bragg Family South

For those of you still suffering in the cold and snow up north, here are some beautiful wisteria flowers to tease you about spring (they smell as good as they look). This last week was pretty quite for us. Kenny went to a birthday party last Sunday for a school friend of his. On Monday, Hope and I (and Beth and Stephen) went to Little Rock to official trade-in the Taurus. On Tuesday, I took the day off and went up to that archeological dig in Little Rock. We were using trowels to clear off a large area that had the top soil scraped off by a grader earlier: If you look closely in the picture above, you can seen a round, greyish-brown feature in the foreground. This is a cultural feature that the archeologist in charge, Dr. John House, wants to excavate to determine its origin. He suspects it, and a number of other features, are burials--if so, once he gets the permits to excavate, he will remove the remains and burial objects for study, then reburial elsewhere--this site will like...

I finally got back into the 4-wheel drive world today. After Kenny was born, and we knew we planned to have more kids, we realized that my old Ford Bronco was not a practical family vehicle (at least not for the next few years). So we sold that SUV and got the minivan (actually, I got the 2001 Ford Taurus that we bought before Kenny was born, and Hope got the Toyota minivan). This arrangement worked fine for a while, but I got the itchin' for 4-wheel drive and clearance to explore the back country and haul firewood, etc., and today we scratched that itch. We had gone up to Little Rock and I was going to work on that dig while Hope took the kids around to other events. Well, recent rains have made the fields too muddy to dig, so we went with our alternative plan--we started looking at used trucks. We looked at a number during the day that would have been okay, but at the last dealership we stopped at they had this 2004 Dodge 1500 full-sized (quad cab) pickup truck with a 4.7 L...

Here, Kenny's proudly showing off his new bunk bed. Stephen has the bottom bunk, and Kenny the top, and besides catching Kenny almost ready to jump off the top bunk the first day Hope assembled it, they've been pretty good about using it. Hope put this bed together over the weekend while I worked on the front window (which is one layer of paint short of completion). On Tuesday, I took the day off and went up to Little Rock to help on that archeological dig I've been volunteering on. We're at a different part of the site now, which has different characteristics about it. The field we are working in has been plowed and planted for many years, resulting in a deep plow layer. The picture below is of an excavation unit I've been working on. The gentleman standing next to the pit is the archeologist in charge of this dig, Dr. John House of the Arkansas Archeological Survey. He's taught me quite a bit about field archeology, and archeology of this area. If yo...