Hope's boondoggle

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 you look closely in this picture, you can see some light and dark colored bands in the soil. The light colored areas are the plow layer, which has been furrowed into the darker cultural soil layer next to it. We dug this pit looking for a feature that showed up on some specialized imagery they had taken. I also dug up the ground where Dr. House is standing in the picture above, and exposed the large potsherd in the picture below:

The sherd may not look too big, but it was (relatively speaking) and it was unusually thick for the time period it was associated with (between 500 and 1000 years ago), making this unassuming sherd fairly significant.

Now to Hope's boondoggle...Tonight (Thursday night) she had her Cub Scout den over for a lesson on historic cooking (hotdogs on a campfire and cherry cobbler in a Dutch oven), as well as a short lesson on planting seeds to grow food. Below, Hope is adding butter to a cobbler:

and here is a picture of Beth, Stephen, and a daughter of one of the mothers of a Cub Scout:

Actually, things worked out pretty well--Hope just suggested calling it a boondoggle because the second of the cobblers she tried to make didn't come out because the coals cooled off too soon. The boys really seemed to enjoy cooking outside and planting the seeds, and we had a beautiful (temps in the 70s) if breezy evening to do this program.

We are excitedly awaiting the arrival of Grandma and Grandpa Bragg and Uncle Bill Bragg, who are set to arrive on Sunday (assuming the weather cooperates). Stay tune for more action-packed adventures then!

Comments

Lisa said…
A breezy 70 degree evening-! Wish I was there!!!!
1:36 PM
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