Not tonight, baby

I just couldn’t get cracking on the thesis tonight. I was up until 3am yesterday, and I did a bunch of bibliography and scanning stuff today during slow times at work. I decided to work out instead (I have been really lazy and it showed), drink some herbal tea and read.
Unfortunately, tomorrow starts the SXSW mayhem. I actually have a light schedule planned out for tomorrow, which will leave me time to write tomorrow night. But Thursday through Saturday will likely be washes as far as getting work done, although I may try and read some articles on the bus.
After that, I have somewhere around 3 weeks to get a complete rough draft to my readers so they can edit and prepare for the thesis defense. Sigh…

How dry I am.

It’s unusually dry in Austin right now. Before that, it was extremely dry in Nolan County. And the Bay Area wasn’t as humid as I’m used to either. Add to that working with dried out flotation samples from Laredo, and my skin is flaky and uncomfortable. In some ways, the lack of humidity is very nice, as it’s making for nice warm days and cool nights. And when June rolls around and it’s 90+ degrees and 80% humidity, I’ll look back wistfully. Right now, I’m just itchy.
Not much to say about the latest Buffalo Gap survey. We got it done, and found 14 rather dull sites. Basically, there’s lots of chert up there, and everywhere there was chert to be found, the prehistoric Texans had found it, quarried it, and left their detritus laying around. Not really any nice tools, no hearths, just lots of chert flakes lying on the ground.
This week, I’ve processed the aforementioned flotation samples (almost 2 years old!), captioned some photos, filled out some site forms, and made some artifact tables. I’ve worked on 3 different projects so far this week, and there’s still one more that I know of. The plus side is that some of the work is leading to helping write an interim report for the big Junction dig. That’s another writing credit on my CV and good experience as well. Some of the other work is also good experience and positions me to have a lot of input on a cool project. So I can’t complain.
I’ll be working on a job west of San Antonio next Monday through Wednesday. I was worried that I’d be sent on an all-week job and have to miss the free South by Southwest stuff. Now, I’ve got clearance to work on Sunday in the office, which along with a vacation day means I can do daytime stuff on Thursday and Friday. I also live on a bus line now so I can indulge in the free beer without having to worry about driving. If only there was more stuff I really wanted to see.