In the garden of evil... baby....

I've been a very good girl and taken pictures of my garden for you all.

This is my garden from my bedroom, right before spring errupted.  Across the road is the duck pond, where the nefarious Ducks of Doom await and plot world domination.  Then there's the harbor and the sea beyond that.  My uninterupted sea views are, in fact, interupted by the harbor.  But come Fleet Week, I get a great view of both ships.

BWHAHAHAHA!

Actually, we did have two small navy vessels in port a few days ago.  It was a little dark to take a non-flash photo and I only take military photos when I am sure no one is going to catch me because I don't want to get shot, thankyouverymuch.  So you'll just have to trust me that we had sailors in town.

*Insert seaman joke here*

Of late I've been suffering from insomnia.  This is partially exasperated by having my husband rush off back to Aarhus to make money as a taxi driver until his job here beings in July (more specifically, until his first pay check is deposited) and I just kinda forget to go to bed.

I'd forget to breathe if it wasn't a subconscious act.

But it means I end up getting to watch the sun rise over the duck pond.   Once I even managed to photograph it!  I love sunrises.  Provided that I've been up all night to watch them.  I'm very unfond of seeing sunrises because I've had to get up early.  I like watching the sun rise and then going to bed.  I also like wandering around town after everyone else has gone to bed.  But taking pictures in the dark is a little difficult - I would need to find the tripod, learn to use a camera properly, and have patience.  Posh!  The point of wandering around in the dark at night is the wandering around in the dark at night!

I hear tonight is a full moon.  I'm so tempted to go out and wander around in it.

Anyway, my garden.  I didn't plant it.  According to our landlord, he spent a Great Deal of Money on it and we must take care of it.  This would be much easier if I knew anything about plants.

Like this plant.

I like it.

It's all spiky and the red flower thing is even more red in real life, but I'm not a fabulous photographer and I lack photoshop.

And I have no clue as to what kind of flower it is.

There is also this flower that's growing in the gravel and nowhere else in the garden.  This suggests it's a weed, but it's pretty and I want to keep it.

Then there is this flower.  Bush.  Flower.  Bush.  Flowerbush?

It's got spiky thorns like a rose, but it doesn't look much like a rose.  I was going to lean in and sniff it, but I'd have to step on some things that may or may not be baby plants and possibly grasp another spiky plant-bush thing in an effort not to fall on my face into the flowerbush and that would just suck.

This picture also shows how much lusher my garden has gotten since I took the picture at the top of this post... just a few days ago.

I also really like this plant.  It's a purple plant.  Has little bitty flowers that remind me of a plant back home that I used to think was Fox Glove, but now I know is not.

Oh, you say, I thought you said you didn't know about plants?

Yes, well, I am sort of a nut for poisonous plants used in murder mysteries.  And Digitalis is one of the fun ones.  But I did just learn that it's considered a weed by the USDA.

Then there is this little yellow flower growing right next to my ornamental pond.  It's got leaves that totally scream "weed" or possibly "romaine lettuce" but a quick wikipedia trip doesn't tell me if lettuce has flowers.

Because of the whole Fox Glove thing, I tend to not eat random plants in gardens.

That and my mother liked to tell us kids the story of the boy scouts who went camping and then used Oleander sticks to roast marshmallows and DIED!

Speaking of the ornamental pond...

Here is a picture, with a newspaper for scale.  Or perhaps I've kidnapped this pond and this is a proof of life photo.

It's about two feet across and probably about that deep.  It seems to be made of a cement ring, sunk into the ground, with some solid bottom keeping the water from leaking away.

And it is full of dead leaves.  Topped by small green plants that do not seem to be algae and perhaps are meant to be there.  Not really sure on that one.

My husband is at a loss as to it's purpose.  In my husband's world, things have purpose.  I like things to have a purpose, and in my house, if you don't serve a purpose (which sometimes just has to be "entertain the Archaeogoddess for half an hour) you don't get to move with us then next time we change addresses.  It's a harsh old life in the Archaeohousehold, but it makes it easier to move from house to house.  However, I recognize that sometimes we don't need to know the purpose of a thing to appreciate and like it.

That being said, the ornamental pond creeps me out.

I went and fished a plastic bag out of it the other day and I thought, just for a minute, that I was about to fish a foot out as well.

A human foot.

I mean, come on, doesn't that pond just scream "body dump" to you?

It would have to be a small body.

Which just makes it all the more creepy, doesn't it?

Don't worry folks, if I was going to go about killing people, I would definitely not put them in my ornamental pond.  Because putting the body in your own backyard is how they catch you.  There is also the problem of size.  My pond is just too small.  To fit a body in it I'd first have to cut it up and deep fry it until it was crispy and then run it through the wood chipper, and if you are going to go through that much trouble you might as well just dispose of the body somewhere else, like the fertilizer ponds that are all over Denmark.  Your victim could be spread out all over Samsø without you having to lift a finger.

Then there is all that business about pig farms.  Lots of pig farms in Denmark, you know.  This country is just crying out for a crime syndicate and a mob boss.

So it seems...

So it seems that the only way I am going to graduate with a PhD is if I cut out everything that I was even remotely interested in and focus entirely on bits I specifically did not want to write about.

And for what?

So that people can call me "doctor"?  That's a bit pompous.  Was I going to use it for anything other than slapping it on a business card?  I'm not planning on going into scholarship or academia.  I get physically ill at the thought.  Teaching is great, it's the rest of it I can't stand.  I might get paid a bit more as an archaeologist.  Except that experience is very important when hunting for a job in the field and of course, I can't get any more experience while I'm supposed to be finishing this thing.  (I had to use our extreme poverty as an excuse to go and work in Qatar and I've been going against my advisor for years when it comes to my digging in Israel and Jordan - if I listened to my committee I would never dig until after I got a degree.)   I might have better opportunities for jobs, except that having a PhD is a requirement for the jobs I don't want and not a requirement for the jobs I do.  It might help others get better grants.  And while I do love my colleagues very much, I'm no good to them if I have a complete mental breakdown over this.

I managed to finish a draft after hours of pain - tears, cramps, headaches, nightmares, bit lips, chewed off fingernails, stomach aches, nausea, acid reflux, heart palpitations and sleepless nights.  I shut off the bits of my head that told me what I was doing was pointless and stupid and wrote the biggest piles of poop I've ever written.  I can't actually read those chapters.  I have full on panic attacks when I think too much about them.

Those are the chapters my committee wants me to keep, of course.

The chapters I wrote, that I slaved over, the ones where I worked on the sentences until I can proudly step back and say, yes, I wrote that and I think it's pretty good.  The chapters that I can read without getting that horrible feeling in my chest... those are the ones they want me to throw out.  "Pointless" was one, unforgettable, comment.

I brought this up to my advisor, because I was rather upset about the whole thing and he told me to stop whining and complaining and that he should have thrown the book at me long ago.  Thanks, that was really helpful.  I'm glad you're here to advise me.

Can someone tell me why I'm doing this again?

Oh, yes, I wanted to be an archaeologist.

Wait a minute - I *am* an archaeologist!

I'm a PAID archaeologist!

Why the hell am I turning down opportunities to go do what I love to do so that I can sit at home surrounded by post-it notes, sobbing hysterically and clutching a German-English dictionary?!  Why do I keep having to send apology emails to my advisor because I'm miserable and need help and it's "getting on his nerves"?

What about my nerves?  I'm a wreck when it comes to this thing!  I'm sitting here sobbing NOW and all I'm doing is talking to you lot about it.

I don't need to prove that I'm smart.  I know I'm smart.  I don't need to prove anything.  Especially that I can write hundreds of pages of crap that I cannot defend.

(But it would be a funny defense.  Any question my committee would ask would have to be answered with "because you told me that if I didn't put it in here, I wouldn't graduate.  I personally think it's wrong and stupid, but what do I know?")

There's the usual, oh, but my dear, you've spent the last 10 years of your life working on this!  You can't just walk away now!!

If I'd spent $50,000 trying to get a $2,000 car working, you'd say I was an idiot, right?  And you'd tell me to stop throwing good money after bad, right?

I've got one life to live here, folks.  One life.  Every year I spend doing what I hate, and paying to do it, mind - we've been paying to keep me enrolled for 5 years now - is another year gone.  And I will NEVER get it back.  Money is just money.  This is my life I'm spending.

Instead of sitting in a library, trying to find every last different meaning for representations of fish in the 3rd century CE (there are a lot, and by the way, I think that there is an interesting relationship between images of acquiring food and images of food itself and that someone might make a really interesting dissertation out of it... I'd rather kill myself that write it, but if you are interested I will totally tell you all about it and *you* can write it), I could be out trying to get jobs in the field.  I could be going to conferences and meeting up with people and making contacts and exploring other things I may be interested in.  I could be enjoying life EVERY DAY instead of just the days I decide that I can't possibly be asked to try to work on this horrible horrible pile of crap.

I remember feeling like this before.  It was in my last marriage and every conversation we were having about why I was unhappy had to do with me not trying hard enough and not compromising enough.  All I did when we were together was cry.  And feel stupid and unworthy of his attention.  Leaving him was the best thing I ever did.  I learned that love is about loving the person that you are and the person you are with for who you and they are RIGHT NOW.  Not who you want to be or who you want them to be.

That was sort of a non sequitur, but that was also major depression that resulted in some heavy medication that gave me the courage to just go off and do what I really wanted to do for once... still non sequituring.... but the point being, I don't want to be that depressed again.  It sucked.  And it's starting to feel like that again.  Not the marriage.  The current marriage is great.  Graduate school, folks.  Graduate school is depressing.

If I'm so unhappy in graduate school, working on this dissertation, that all I do when even thinking about it is cry, if working on it makes me feel stupid and unworthy of a degree - WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WASTING MY PRECIOUS TIME ON IT!??

I know I'm not stupid and I'm not unworthy of a degree - but I don't need to get a degree to tell me that!

In many respects, grad school has been great.  I really enjoyed the first few years.  I met people I really needed to meet and without it I wouldn't be here today.

I mean that in every sense, by the way.

But I'd really like to go back to being able to look up stuff I'm interested in, read the things I'm interested in reading, think about the things I'm interested in thinking about without feeling guilty.  I'd like to not feel nauseous in my office.  I'd like to stop having heart palpitations when I check my email.  I'd really like it all to be over.

That's it.

I'm done.

Let me out.
Let me off.
Let me go.

And if I could just get someone in my department to email me back it would be fan-fuckin'-tastic.

Island life...

So I may have mentioned that I moved to an island who's name I cannot pronounce, to a city who's name I cannot pronounce, to a street who's name I cannot pronounce.

This is the joy of Denmark, constantly being unable to ask people how to get home because you can't tell them where you live.

I think this is the real reason they invented identity cards in this small nation.  How else could the Copenhagen police know which train to put west coasters on?  It's not like you can understand the words that are coming out of their mouths.  I mean, jeez!

And at some point you *will* need help getting home.  Maybe because you've had too much to drink, but it's just as likely that you'll discover that the bus stops have moved and the buses have been rerouted and suddenly you shouldn't be taking the 15, because that no longer goes by your house, or stops anywhere near your house. In fact, the 15 now goes to Hamburg.

Which is in Germany.

And we don't go to Germany.

Unless we are buying ridiculous amounts of cheap snacks and liquor which would have cost us the same amount if we'd just gone to Bilka because we used half a tank of gas to get us to Germany and will use half a tank to get back, and petrol is viciously expensive in Denmark, but going to Germany to load up on crap reminds us why we fought the war.

Oh, and we go to Germany to visit Berlin.

But as we all know, Berlin is not *really* Germany.

So OTHER THAN THAT, we don't go to Germany.

Speaking of Germany, if I went to the south side of my island I might be able to see it, on a clear day.

Thus giving me enough foreign policy experience to run for Veep.

*hurried whispers* What?

*stressed whisper* Oh.

Apparently, my associates tell me, I live in a foreign country and have worked in several other foreign countries, thus giving me OODLES more foreign policy experience that some people who have, in the past, may have run for certain public offices.

Moving on...

This island.  Under 7000 inhabitants.  Which still makes it a larger community than what I grew up in, shockingly enough.  You can only get here by ferry boat.  There are three ferry boats leaving from different cities and arriving in different cities.  This does mean that from time to time you race from one end of the island to the other trying to get on a ferry boat.  Important note if you ever visit me: make a reservation for your car.  We get weekenders.  *scoffs*

I have lived a good chunk of my life in tourist destinations.  This is because I share my parents philosophy of "why just visit a lovely place when you can freakin' live there!"

(They probably wouldn't put it that way, or they'd point out that they have other, more important philosophies like "be kind to others" and "please don't bring the car back without any gas this time" - but they did decide to move us all to a charming town in the country rather than raise us in suburbia because it is way more awesome to live in a beautiful place all the time, instead of living in a sucky place and only going to pretty places when you can.)

So I tend to have a bit of impatience with tourists and a certain smugness when it comes to where I live.  Add that to my irrational hatred of summer homes... and well, I'm an islander by nature.

My husband and I have had oodles of fun exploring the island.  We've been beer tasting at the local brewery, we've gone in search of the butchers so that I can get a shoulder of pork (not a common cut in Denmark, by the way) and we've been antiquing (which is very touristy, but also a great way to find out if you can afford to decorate your house... and the answer is NO).  We've found out that although we live on an island and a huge number of people living here are fishermen, you cannot buy fresh fish in any stores.  But some fishermen may be keeping some fish from their catches, which they aren't supposed to do, and these men may be willing to sell you some under the table, which they aren't supposed to do, but of course, no one really knows if this is *really* so...

For those who wonder, yes, there *is* a hospital on the island.  Somewhere around here.  I just had it a minute ago, must have set it down somewhere... forget my own head next...

We've discovered that we can get just about everything we used to be able to get in Århus, except some American foods (no SuperBest here) and I'm having an herbal issue, where I keep buying potted herbs and then eating them instead of planting them.

I feel strangely guilty about that.  I mean, I buy my chickens pre-dead, cut and packaged for my dining pleasure - why can I not get herbs the same way?  Having me buy herbs in a pot forces me into some big lie about how I'm going to take this potted herb home and care for it, give it a good life, nurture it.  When the reality is, I'm going to go home and pull it's little leaves off!  The herbs even come with little tags telling me how to care for the plant.  I tell you, it's just sick.  Now if I bought a bush of mint, it might last - although the care tag tells me that mint is not meant to survive in northern Europe and therefore needs plenty of sunlight - ohmygod, set me up for failure why don't you!  Denmark, sun?  WTF?!  But a small, scrawny mint plant is just not going to hack it in my house if I'm making a Jamie Oliver risotto (ever notice the man asks you to throw in handfuls of everything?).  The guilt is compounded by the similarity between the scrawny mint plant and the Christmas tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special.  I feel like I should be swaddling the mint in a blankie and singing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" at it instead of systematically stripping it of the ability to photosynthesize.

If you are also wondering if you remembered correctly that I get seasick... uh, yeah, I do.  Does this mean it's really rather silly that I live on an island that can ONLY be reached by BOAT... uh, yeah, it is. But I also hate flying and yet spend a lot of time traveling long distances by plane, have allergies and yet spend a lot of time outside, suck at learning languages and yet live in Denmark, etc.  If I avoided things I do not like or make me uncomfortable, I'd have to live in a lab somewhere in Kansas.  And never leave.

Boring!

I shall now leave you with two photos of the town in which I live that I did not take.  Alas, the photos I seem to have taken of this island SUCK.  I'm going to have to do something about it, but not now.  Not while it's so cold the ducks have frozen to the sidewalk.

What volcano?

It snowed today.  In fact, it may snow again.  And it's April.  Freaking April!!

Isn't there a statute of limitations on winter?

I spent 5 months, count 'em FIVE MONTHS in the desert avoiding winter.  I do not want to be experiencing it now.  Especially when we should be having spring.  I don't want to hear about how it can be spring in Denmark and still snow.  I follow a strict philosophy when it comes to the seasons, one in which snow = winter.  I'll admit I was a little hesitant to join my fellow inhabitants of Denmark in celebrating the coming of spring.  The majority of the trees and bushes in my yard and lining the street on the way to Netto are still as bare and dead looking as they appear in the dead of winter and thus did not say "OHMYFREAKINGGODITSSPRINGYO!" but rather "uh, y'all celebrating prematurely" and while I am a bit better with nature than my husband, I am no Grizzly Adams.  So I bought into the idea that it was getting warmer.

Fool.  FOOL!!

Because it snowed today.  Big ol' puffy flakes of cold wetness drifting down upon the knit cap of our heroine.

Or would have drifted down upon her cap, expect she is NOT going outside in this.  Nope.  She's got toilet paper and pastrami and leftover frikadeller and some mushrooms, she doesn't *need* to go outside.

Except that if she keeps referring to herself in the third person, she may have to seek outside intervention.

But as the weather continues to confuse, confound, and generally obfuscate my life (like right now: brilliant sun... seconds ago I was trying to turn on a light, but failed because it was too dark to find the switch), I look for something to blame.

I mean, someone has to take responsibility for the this weather - I won't have it being an act of god.  I won't.

I'm blaming the ducks.  The ducks in the pond across the road from my house, specifically.  I'm sure they are up to something.  They certainly aren't your normal quack-waddle-quack ducks.  These guys are organized into an effective gang of duckishness.  Just yesterday our next door neighbor was a little slow in getting out to feed them and they sent a duck into his yard to remind him who was in charge.  Meanwhile the others milled about on the bank, quietly quacking amongst themselves.

There's something afoot here.  I'm sure of it.

This post has no soul

I really ought to be posting Stories From the Field, like about the time the camel spider ran through my tent and I was trying to be all quiet about hunting and killing it and then my tent mate from the other side of the partition wall was all "Ah HA! Got you!  Oh shit." And it turned out that she was chasing the same camel spider around her side of the tent and didn't want to alarm me and so was being quiet about it.  Only she was chasing it wearing nothing but her knickers and with bare feet, so she'd whacked it with a slipper that she picked up and that didn't work so she'd put one sandal on it and was holding it down with her hand and thus was now stuck in a Very Compromising Position with a possibly Very Angry Camel Spider under a Not So Substantial Sandal.

It was like Schrödingers Cat and the world was held for a brief moment at the crotch of the Trousers of Time.

I came over with a not-a-proper-hand-ax, or some fancy geology term for a small hand ax that is completely useless for archaeology which is why the museum authority bought so many of them for us, and gave the flat spider a good further flattening.  Just in case.  Because you know how in horror movies when the baddie comes back from the apparent dead?  SPIDERS DO THAT!  Then I carried it's corpse into the desert.  Or the courtyard because it fell off and I wasn't going to pick it up again because I had the post spider heebee-geebees.  And because bending over the pick up a dead spider is EXACTLY when they turn zombie on you and bite your face off.

So that's what this post should have been about.  But instead I was distracted because I'm back to living in a caravan, trying to connect to people who may or may not be in Denmark and my breakfast bun with cheese and jam tastes of onions because I tried to save half an onion last week before going to Spain and now everything in the small 'fridge tastes vaguely of onion.  On one hand, yay, I have half an onion that I can use, on the other hand, I don't need that onion now because the onion flavor is already in everything.

For my patient readers...

Especially those who have been waiting and wanting photos...

The photos are not on this blog.

I have photos that have friends and coworkers in them and to protect their privacy, these photos cannot be uploaded to the blog as long as the blog remains completely open to all and sundry.

My options were then to either make this blog private, which would on one hand work, but would keep me from meeting random people on the internets, or to make the photos private.

Which I may have been able to do.  In a round about fashion.  Probably making it harder for myself than was truly necessary.

This leads to a quick question: how on earth is it that I can get a grip on FinalCut Express in just a few hours and yet spend all day trying to figure out privacy controls on photo sharing sites?

Anyway, to keep these photos private I have to "invite" you to see them.  That means you need to send me an email at the address you see on the main blog page.  Then I will send you a link to view the photos.  Ooooh, I know, how cool is that??

Please be advised that this process is not instantaneous - I'm popping back to a temporary home near my husband's school in order to help him with his computer needs (very funny considering that I have a hell of a time with this blog) and that means lousy internet connection.  And caravan living.  Yup, caravan living.  I'll be checking the email and trying to send links as fast as I can, when I have internet.

Also, for those who know me via Facebook, most of the photos are the same as those you see there.

If this works... this photo sharing site, that is... if I can choose certain photos albums to be shared and others not, I'll try to post more photos there and link them here or send out guest passes and thus save me the hassle of trying to load photos one at a time, cutting out some of the most interesting ones because of privacy issues, and will allow you to see oodles of photos in one go.

Fingers crossed, folks.

I don't know what day it is nor what country I'm in...

Actually, my watch tells me it's Wednesday and I'm cold, so I must be in Denmark.

But I spent several days in Spain.

Because, you know, why not?

Oh, okay, honestly, I had a wedding to attend.  Yes, my friends rock.  My husband and I were discussing our friends and their inherent coolness in timing over breakfast as we looked out from the hotel in the Sierra Nevada (in Spain, not the one I grew up next to) and realized that we've been on three destination weddings over the last four years, four if you include our own.  And not only does that average out to one a year, it really has been one a year.  That makes this a tradition.  My husband and I do not go on vacations, we go on weddings.

So, friends of ours, we're ready for our next destination wedding.  I'd like to try Greece.

Holy Easter Eggs, Batman, it’s April!!

How did that happen?  Anyone?  Hello?  Anyone still reading?

Boy does the time fly.  The last four weeks of the dig were completely and utterly mad.  The end of a season is always mad; on a four-week project the last week is non-stop mayhem, on a five-month project… well, let’s just say it was a blessing that we learned to brew our own refreshment.  That and the generosity of ex-pats.  Bless those ex-pats!  Gin is a wonderful thing, don't you agree?

At the end of the project I’d catalogued 802 objects.  There are still more stones to catalogue.  But I’m not really enthusiastic about possible hammer-stones.  I mean, it's a rock.  Maybe someone used it to hit something once or twice, but does that mean it's a cultural implement worthy of my time?  Or architectural fragments.  At what point, exactly, do you stop cataloguing architectural fragments?  Do you only catalogue the really pretty pieces?  What about the pieces that aren’t pretty but are interesting because they show construction methods? What about the random crap that comes up that I’m supposed to store but would rather accidently drop down the loo?  (This is the vast majority of plaster artifacts that come out of the field.  I look down at them and think, why, god, did you give me this chunk of plaster doorframe?  We know they had doors.)

Apart from cataloguing, there was also the matter of storage.  Over 300 crates were packed.  Each crate needed a tag and a list had to be made that indicated what was in each crate so that we knew a) what we had and b) where it was.  MSExcel and anal-retentiveness are our friends.  Once packed we then had to move all of these crates.  Half went to the fort and half went to our house in town.  Using our hired workmen, we moved everything in two days. While the goddesses of registration were doing this (that would be me and Miss H) everything else, including my office, was packed up and put away for next year.  I can tell you where the ceramics from locus 1215 are, but not where you can find a ball-point pen.

The last day we were in camp, we got up at 6 am and were out of the tents by 7 am.  This is vital, because the tents started to come down at 7:30 and if you weren’t out with your stuff, you were likely to be surprised when the whole thing came crashing down like an unwieldy umbrella.  By breakfast at 10 am, the entire camp was dismantled and packed up.  We left camp at 2 pm for Doha.

I don’t think I’ve ever been part of such a smooth breakdown and pack up of a site - ever.  Especially considering how much stuff had to be moved and cleaned and boxed and moved and packed and moved.  I think it really shows what a great group of people I spent five months of my life with - no one had to ask for help, people did what needed to be done and then asked if they could help someone else.  It was smooth and easy and really stress-free.  How stress-free?  So stress-free that I finished typing up the last of the lists, walked out of the office and discovered that all I needed to do was get my bags and get in a vehicle.  There was this amazing double-take - "wait, what, we're done??" followed by "yeah, okay, I'll get in the car, no complaints, I'm ready."

I still can’t believe it’s over.  Where did five months go? 

I also can’t believe I’m not going to get up in the morning and hear AW and TR in the kitchen, meet KC in the bathroom and trip over the doorframe going into my office.  I don’t have to shake my shoes out before putting them on… in fact I don’t have to put on my shoes to go get coffee anymore!  I certainly do not miss the public toilets, but I sure do miss the people.  Thankfully, they don’t live too far away.  (Odd, isn’t it, England now qualifies as “not that far away”?) Many of them are even trying to get jobs or into university here in Denmark, which would be Very Convenient as far as I am concerned.

But after five months of seeing the same people day after day?  All day.  Well into the night, every night, in fact.  To suddenly not have these people in your life, right at your fingertips, is very jarring.  Especially since I really really like them.  

A moment while I get all maudlin and melancholy. 

This post wraps up the general boring posts from Qatar.  There’s a few random stories to tell, but I really must post about What Happened While the Archaeogoddess Was Not in Denmark, because my husband got a job and moved us to a small island and I only just started to unpack in my new huge house when I was swept into the car and back to the big city to camp in a caravan for a week so he can finish a school project (so as of this moment I am still freaking camping!!) and then we’re flying off to Spain for a week before another week of camping back in Denmark and *then* I might be able to go back to my GORGEOUS house and finally unpack from Qatar and the move, but only if we can buy a new washing machine so that I will be able to wash my clothes properly for the first time in five months (now going on six).  But for the moment I need to see if I can post this, er, post before I run out of battery, because I’m using mobile internet in a café and there’s no damn power sockets.  WTF??*

*Note: still couldn't post this in the cafe because the internet crashed and I had to go back to the caravan for power.  This is attempt to post take #2.

Hugs to all and hope to post more frequently in the near future!

BY THE WAY FOR ALL THE PHOTO NUTS OUT THERE... THERE ARE PHOTOS (not mine, but taken by a lovely woman who will let me post some of them) AND I STUPIDLY LEFT THEM ON MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WHICH I CANNOT PLUG IN WHILE I HAVE MOBILE INTERNET ON!!  I'M SORRY!!  I'll try to get you some soon.