Apparently it's the hottest day of the year so far and frankly I can believe it *fans self* I was doing really well work-wise this morning, but now I and my poor brain are melting. I have, however, managed to write up the section on sexing the animal bone from the site I'm working on and have also done the %NISP tables for birds. I'm in the process of calculating the percentage of wild versus domestic birds and the percentage of high status to low status birds.

Today is even hotter than yesterday. Fortunately, we have a fan in the room in which I am working, otherwise I might have melted into a little puddle of goo by now. I know it's not as hot as some folks regularly deal with, but I've come to the conclusion that it's all relative. England rarely gets as hot as many other places, ergo when it does get warm, everyone is kind of shocked.

Work-wise, I've been nicely productive though. I plotted the measurements of deer metapodia against one another in a scatterplot to see if we could determine sexes. I tried to do something similar with sheep, but decided it wasn't worthwhile; the sample is too small. I also got confirmation back about the NISP counts, so I tweaked those and bunged them into the report with the odd explanatory paragraph. I think tomorrow I will spend the day doing relative proportions of different species and then send what I have so far to the ex-supervisor. We're already up to 15 pages or thereabouts (although admittedly there are some big tables and graphs in there), so he can be editing and adding comparative data to that whilst I'm working on the next section.

It is far too warm today. It's not even that nice dry heat you get sometimes, it's humid and close and there seems to be no air.

On the plus side, I did get a fair bit of work done. I've chugged through most of the taphonomy section for the bone report I'm doing. Fingers crossed, I won't need to alter it too drastically, but at least I have a first draft anyway. I'm looking at what to do tomorrow. I may do the bit on sexing. I've got one or two details to hammer out with my ex-supervisor with whom I'm working about NISPs and so on, so I'm trying to avoid doing things in the interim that I might have to re-do later once we've got that sorted out. However, using metric data to sort out male/female ratios shouldn't be affected by that. So tomorrow might be spent doing graphs of deer metapodials and chicken spurs.

In light of the bust-up waaaay back now with An'Thaya, this is terribly funny. I swear I didn't fiddle the results...

Get Your Monster Name

It's Mum's birthday today, so she's taken the day off work and we're going out for the day. Most likely to here: Donington le Heath Manor House. Hopefully, the weather will stay nice for us.

This depends on:

a) what I'm trying to do;
b) what mood I'm in.

If I'm trying to concentrate, I might well go for something classical or otherwise instrument. Film soundtracks can be good for that, especially the orchestral type: Lord of the Rings, Gladiator etc.

If I've got a lot of number crunching to do, something I view as a necessary evil rather than enjoyable, I'd probably go for something loud and maybe upbeat too to keep me going. Rock music of all sorts tends to work well.

Since it was Father's Day, we went out for dinner at a local pub and very nice it was too. Mum and I had goat's cheese tart to start, whilst Dad had pate. Then we all had roast from the carvery: beef for Mum and myself, pork for Dad. It was all lovely and the portions were very generous. I think I prefer places like that to really posh restaurants, they are more comfortable.

I've also been puttering around at BW playing catch-up, as well as dusting off one or two pieces of RP. I seem to be reasonably on top of things at the moment, although saying that is probably fatal. It will all go nuts now *lol*

It's been quite a pleasant week on the whole. It was my birthday on Thursday, generally a quiet day since it was a work day. I did open presents and so on though in the evening. I received a couple of nice bits of jewellery and a DVD.

I've been working on the castle stuff again work-wise. We're now into the write-up phase. This will undoubtedly take awhile because it's a big site. What I'm currently doing is all the analysis - turning all the raw data into charts and tables. Then I'll try to assemble them in some sort of order and write up the interpretation.

Today I've made a truck-load of shepherds pies to go in the freezer. It's been quite warm lately so we had a bag of potatoes going over quickly despite being kept in the dark. Mashing and freezing seemed the simplest way to resolve that problem, and it means we've got more than one dinner ready to go in the freezer for when we need it.

Tomorrow we're going out for sunday lunch since it is father's day.

Yesterday's music in the park was great. We had a very nice picnic in the grounds of Wistow Hall which is where it was being held. In the first half we listened to a local jazz band, and in the second a brass band. We particularly enjoyed the second half as the repertoire was the traditional proms stuff: fantasia on British sea songs, Pomp and Circumstance (aka Land of Hope and Glory), Rule Britannia and Jerusalem. People clapped and sang along where appropriate, conducted by the brass band's conductor, and the kids waved flags. It was fun.

Today we're being productive. So far I've made a lasagne for dinner tonight, picked a load of swiss chard from out of the garden, as well as bunches of fresh parsley. The parsley has been turned into parsley butter and frozen for use at a later date. Dad pulled a load of our rhubarb so Mum is now turning that into a pie. Dad and I have also peeled a whole bag of fresh brown shrimp. We've frozen those too and plan to make potted shrimp later on. We've now paused for a bit of a break before moving onto blanching and freezing spring greens.

Tonight, Mum and I are off out again. This time to the local theatre for a charity gala night. They did the theatre is the new one and we haven't been in it yet, so that in itself should make things interesting. We're curious to see what it's like inside.

It's been quite a busy week in some ways. On Monday we had the trip to the armouries, which was nice. We watched a display of Tudor riding skills in the tiltyard and listened to a short talk about a Confederate cavalry raid during the American Civil War as well as one one longbows and crossbows.

I discovered the following day that the phasing I had been waiting for had shown up. Finally. So I've been trying to sort out what I'm doing there for the rest of the week. It's quite a large site with two phases of excavation, the phasing of which aren't hugely compatible, so I can't decide whether to merge them or keep them completely separate in the write-up. I'm currently fiddling around with tables and trying to decide what works best.

It's a busy weekend too. Tonight we're going to a local music in the park event. We're going to take a picnic with us and listen to music and watch the fireworks. Tomorrow night, Mum and I are again going out, this time to the theatre. She got free tickets from work to a local charity gala night. Hopefully, it should be fun.

So much for summer; it's raining like mad. Oh, well. It's been a productive weekend anyway. We cleaned the house yesterday and today we're baking. Mum has made a carrot cake and I'm doing bread rolls.

I probably won't be around much, if at all, tomorrow. We're going to the Royal Armouries in Leeds for the day. It should be fun.