Movin’ on up

Hello all! Settling into our new apartment, I find myself with an intense urge to post. I now realize that it has, once again, been far too long. Since I last posted, we made a trip to Boston. Staying with Kaila’s brother who happened to be in town, we saw much of the city. It gave us a chance to experience a wonderfully new place together while providing me the opportunity to visit UMass-Boston, where I hope to attend graduate school. The city was beautiful and I can easily see myself there. It felt to me as though it was a small town masquerading as a big city, considering how dense the city is and how close everything seems to be.

It was remarkable to walk the Freedom Trail and see important historical sites. I must admit that I admired the burial grounds much more than I had at first expected. It was a very humbling experience to see so aged tombstones, including those of Paul Revere and John Hancock. I was very impressed by the effort to maintain a certain historical charm in the city, as well as various plaques relating archaeological information. Following are a few of some of my favorite sights in the city.

These first few photos are from various burial grounds throughout the city.

Ben Franklin statue in front of the old City Hall.

A building along the river.

I fell in love with this little side street.

I loved all the contrast.

The USS Constitution.

St. Francis of Assisi.

A lonely, solitary window.

Upon returning from Boston, we learned that our original apartment we were seeking had fallen through. We made a mad, two-day dash to find a new place and found a gem in Washington Heights. it was a little farther north than we were hoping but we have fallen absolutely in love with it. We have an amazing view of the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge as well as an amazing neighborhood. This photo was taken today from my bedroom window.

We will be returning to Boston this coming week for UMass-Boston’s graduate school fair, then continuing to settle into the excitement of this entirely new experience! Chris has [finally] arrived and I, for one, am having the time of my life! I’m loving it all!

Tags: Boston, NYC, Washington Heights

A most delightful maelstrom

These past weeks have been one whirlwind after another. A hurly-burly three-ring circus, if you will. Throughout all of September, I watched as I gave away a quarter of my life, sold a third of it and packed up the remainder. There is something incredibly liberating about downsizing, but it comes with other less delightful feelings when any number of realizations hit you: you’ve purchased all these objects and you don’t have space or a desire for them any longer, having spent money that could have been better used in other ways; you must also inevitably abandon some possessions you love. Luckily for me, the sense of liberation is a high that it is difficult to fall from.

I’ve been thrust into and shared this experience alongside my aunt Loolie and my dear friend Chris as we three move. I could not have asked for better company. In fact, Chris will be joining me here in NYC in November once Kaila and I secure a place for the three of us.

The move has provided me with experiences of all sorts already. I have experienced such great, thrilling moments such as leaving Minneapolis knowing full well I’m flying on a one-way ticket, stepping off the plane at JFK, securing a job and discovering something beautiful in the city. But I have also had more dispirited moments, particularly the bout of loneliness and homesickness I am freshly recovered from. This past Thursday and Friday were particularly difficult for me, emotionally stretched out and missing home desperately. I realized quickly that I had not spoken or Skyped with any family or close friends back home, having been wrapped up in work. After speaking with Naseem last night for three hours on Skype, talking through the tumultuous state of affairs we each find ourselves in, I felt back to myself.

I arrived in the city last Wednesday and proceeded to get a job at the restaurant where Kaila works on Thursday. I immediately jumped into training at this new job, where I experienced difficulty with absorbing/memorizing an entirely new menu [seafood versus straight-up pasta] and procedures. I have finished my training and feel relatively comfortable with the restaurant and how it runs, I’m now in the last legs of getting to know the menu before I take the exam to hit the floor this coming week.

We have found an apartment that we’re hoping to get and it’s all looking good. This particular apartment is the first one we saw and immediately fell in love with it. It’s in East Harlem just off the 4 5. More to come later.

It will be a slow easing into this new life but I’m already loving it overall [not putting too much credence in the more glum parts as being indicative of my experience as they pass]. I look forward to the countless adventures I will find myself embarking upon in the time that I live here, and Kaila and I already have plans to jump up to Boston in just about a week’s time! Being a whirlwind in and of myself, I suppose it should stand to reason this time should also almost invariably twist, turn and warp without any signs of slowing.

Tags: Brooklyn, Minneapolis, NYC

Change is in the air

Today, I’ve been completely and entirely captivated by the deliciously [maybe a mixed metaphor, but applicable in the depths of my mind] wondrous weather. I can feel fall coming and I could not be happier. But this isn’t just because of the weather. I’ll give you one clue as to the other reason[s] for my exuberance:

It should be rather clear that I’m very excited about the possibility to build a fort in my apartment with copious numbers of cardboard boxes.

But I have the boxes because, as I’ve pointed out, change is in the air. It’s finally time for me to move out to New York City to live with my best friend Kaila after countless [four] years of discussing the move! 6 October is the day.

In the meantime, I could not ask for better weather to have whilst rummaging through my things, deciding what to bring with, what to send home and what to get rid of entirely. Having already sold off lots of my things, my apartment is descending into a place where furniture is replaced by empty cardboard boxes. I wish cardboard were as fulfilling as a desk and a comfortable couch, but alas it is not and such is life. At least if I get hungry, it will be a much better source of fiber.

I am absolutely ecstatic about the move! Four years of planning is finally coming to fruition and I am looking forward to amazing new experiences in NYC with my best friend during my favorite season. I will dearly miss everyone here in Minneapolis, between friends and my definitively monstrous family network, but this is an opportunity that I cannot pass up and have been waiting for, on pins and needles, for years.

On another note, I saw a standoff between two cocks at the Minnesota State Fair this past week. I didn’t get the most intense part of it, but I love these guys because they remind me of the dandelions from Alice in Wonderland. Enjoy:

Minnesota’s North Shore

After the dig, I went to Milwaukee for a ‘surprise’ 50th birthday party that was a HUGE success. The trip back to Minneapolis on the Megabus proved to be my first truly ‘exciting’ Megabus trip, having to rescue people from a broken down Megabus, then be trapped in a McDonald’s, eventually arriving in Minneapolis 3 hours late.

Upon my return, I turned in my two weeks notice at Caribou, effectively making my last day of employment with the company 31 July. Over the last week of July, I took a trip with my sister to Minnesota’s North Shore for the first time I can remember. We had a great trip, being just the two of us.

We stopped briefly in Duluth to visit Glensheen, which was a beautiful estate stuck in the middle of northern Minnesota. During the tour, we learned from other tourists that there were two murders in the home, a topic that the tour guide strictly avoided. Anyway, the estate was gorgeous.

We continued up the shore after this stop, eventually camping at Grand Portage, just minutes from the Canadian border. Grand Portage State Park and the State Forest had no camping to speak of, so we found ourselves camping at a marina on the reservation. The marina was part of a little concentration of buildings including a gas station [and 'trading post'], a casino and hotel and the marina itself. Although it was a quirky little place, perhaps involving some illicit activities, it provided a beautiful view of Lake Superior:

Let’s get those pesky boats out of the way to see the real beauty of the location. The following panorama is definitely worth seeing closer. Check it out:

We visited the High Falls on the Pigeon river in Grand Portage State Park and all the while pondered jumping on stones across the river to Canada:

We then hiked up to a beautiful scenic overlook, just a couple of miles from the High Falls:

These are two of my favorite captures from this trip. The moon one night was absolutely beautiful, cycling between oranges and pinks for the first couple of hours as it rose:

And this beautiful schooner with maroon sails outside of Grand Marais reminded me of a delightful bygone era:

Of course, we visited both Betty’s Pies, which everyone and their mothers rave about, and the fantastic Split Rock Lighthouse:

But my absolute favorite part of the trip was spending time with my lovely sister, Reba. Here we are, dutifully wearing the bandanas our mother insisted upon providing us for the long, treacherous journey we embarked upon on Minnesota’s North Shore:

Tags: Duluth, Glensheen, Grand Portage, Minnesota's North Shore

Little Round Hill

The field school ended almost a full month ago now, and I find myself missing everyone from the dig much, much more than I expected. On the dig, we all grew so close. I think this was largely due to our 24/7 presence in each others’ lives for a month, but also in part due to our shared experience with the tornado [our shared liminal state, ha!].

The dig was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. First and foremost, it cemented in my mind my choice to definitively go into archaeology. I had been uncertain if field archaeology were for me before the school, since there exists a large gap between reading archaeology and doing it. But it certainly seems to be the life for me now that I’ve gotten a taste of it.

On the dig, we found lots of animal bones, but this was not what we were after; we wanted proof that French fur traders were at the site or had some archaeologically relevant impact on the site. After producing sick alien pods, the unit called Sigourney revealed some of her other secrets: trade beads. These glass seed beads proved a European presence. Napoleon quickly thereafter also began to produce beads.

In the end, among the most exciting finds were:

A very intricately detailed copper button

Two pieces of clipped copper

Two gunflints

A musket ball

A piece of lead shot with a hole bored into it

Copious amounts of trade beads [mostly white, but two vastly more difficult to find blue beads]

Lithics [both worked tools and many, many flakes]

A musket spring

A flake of obsidian [the nearest source of which is in Yellowstone!]

A broken glass bottle [of a yet-to-be-determined time period; it could be more recent than the desired time period]

I’m probably missing an artifact or two since it’s been a month since the dig, but that covers most of it. We proved beyond the benefit of a doubt [for the second year in a row on the site] that there was a European presence on the site.

From the Little Round Hill site, we moved on to the Cadotte site to do survey work. After clearing the forest, leading to heat exhaustion among many of the students, myself included, we began shovel test pits. Unfortunately, we found nothing at the site except severely disturbed soil stratigraphy and other disturbances from previous logging activity on the land.

It was disappointing, but I find that it was a good exercise in archaeology as a discipline. We worked on open excavation and found extremely interesting and important artifacts. But we also surveyed and used shovel test pits, finding nothing. I think it was a valuable experience because it runs the gamut of archaeology from large-scale academic excavation to surveying land with nothing of archaeological relevance. The latter is a large part of archaeology, as anyone working in cultural resource management [CRM] will work primarily with surveying and digging shovel test pits to determine if anything is on the site.

I said it before and I’ll say it again. The experience was amazing.

Tags: Archaeology, Cadotte, Historical Archaeology, Little Round Hill, Old Wadena County Park, Wadena

Cyclone

Yesterday was one of the longest days of my life. We got up for the fourth day in a row to go out to the field and work on our site. We are all approaching the soil horizon between rich, silty, organic-filled stratum A and the brown, sandy, rocky stratum B. We got pummeled by rain around 11:30, forcing an early lunch, but then the rain cleared out and the sun came up. It was a long day already at this point, so we decided to call it a day at 3:00 instead of the usual 3:30.

We arrived home in time for me to shower and come out of the shower to find, about fifteen minutes later, the tornado sirens starting to whir. Being from Wisconsin, I accepted this as what it was and thought we’d be fine to just sit, judging by the fact that lightning on the train tracks near my house in Marshfield always set off the siren. However, we were funneled into the basement and waited until the tornado warning expired at 5:00. At this point, a group of us emerged and went next door to our house to continue cooking dinner. At this point, the sirens came back on, followed shortly thereafter by sheets of pouring rain and hail.

We went downstairs in the duplex and waited. And waited. Then we heard the cracks, the bangs and the crashes. We emerged from the house to find this, our duplex on the right:

The pine tree against the duplex was 100+ feet tall [maybe this is hyperbole, but it was gigantic]. The trees on the house on the left were quite tall as well, and resting on our other dwelling just as dangerously. But we got lucky, as you can see:

This poor house was shaved clean off the Earth by the Community Center.

The trees came down all around our favorite playground at the elementary school across the street from our house.

This was the general view down every street in the neighborhood.

This sign seems to have been pleading with the twister to stop its incessant destruction.

This tree even ripped up some of the street.

This tornado, which I’ve seen now on both national and international news, destroyed the poor little town of Wadena. Their ‘all-class’ school reunion was slated for this weekend, with every graduate from the high school in attendance. This is said to have doubled the population of the town for the weekend. Festivities were starting at the high school yesterday, but luckily they got most everyone there into the basement before the collapse of the school’s roof. This could not have happened at a worse time. But, like an Amish barn-raising, fire trucks, ambulances and rescue vehicles flew past our house with the names of every small town you’ve never heard of emblazoned on their sides. It was truly incredible to see each and every little Midwestern town in the area that could spare manpower and vehicles pull together to respond so quickly to the disaster.

After hours of waiting to hear or do anything from the emergency vehicles buzzing back and forth in front of the house, we finally found out [4 hours after the tornado ripped through] that we were being evacuated to the city’s armory due to unsafe conditions thanks to chemical spills, natural gas leaks and asbestos in the air. We decided to exile ourselves back to Minneapolis for the weekend to get out of the danger zone rather than stay in the armory. This entire time since the tornado has seemed like some strange movie. Out of boredom, we whittled stakes out of uprooted wood, only adding to the eerie elements of silence combined with the police not letting anyone near our block and the sun setting in the rubble of the high school. It felt like some post-apocalyptic ‘here come the vampires and zombies, protect yourselves and get out of town’ movie.

Now I sit in Minneapolis, still somewhat in shock at what happened, the day that seemed like three weeks in and of itself, feeling like a displaced exile in my own apartment. The extent of the disaster was worse than what I initially thought, and my heart goes out to everyone in that community. We hope to return on Sunday, back to our home away from home and our work. We have none of us seen the site and we are all hopeful that it is relatively unscathed and work can continue. We have cars left in Wadena, in addition to tons of personal items left in the mid-night candle-lit evacuation.

I cannot explain what this feels like or what the event felt like, and now I truly understand what people mean when they say this exact same thing about events such as these. It’s impossible to put it into words that convey the feelings to the extent that they are felt. I’m just glad that all my field school brothers and sisters are all happy and unharmed, and my hopes are the same for everyone in Wadena.

Tags: Archaeology, Disaster, Historical Archaeology, Little Round Hill, Old Wadena County Park, Tornado, Wadena

Memorial Day

In case you missed the memo, today is Memorial Day [in the United States]. I learned today that the holiday originated as a day of remembrance for Union soldiers lost in the Civil War, but was extended to encompass fallen soldiers in all wars after World War I [or the Great War, a more affectionate term in my little mind, not meant to detract from its importance].

I visited my maternal great-grandparents and my grandfather at the cemetery today with my aunt Lucy. My grandfather served in the Marines in World War II, and my mother’s uncle is memorialized on the family tombstone, having fallen at Iwo Jima.

Seeing family members of all the other residents, as I’ll call them, milling about the cemetery provided me with a muted calm in the middle of the sprawling metropolis, and it was a moment I soaked up like the sun. As Loolie [Lucy] and I discussed the importance of family and other loved ones while digging filth out of the engravings with small twigs, we basked in the peace and tranquility: a few minutes or hours where we were truly at peace, feeling entirely removed from the harrying onslaught of our impatient, far too rushed society just a few miles away.

Last week, I planted basil, coriander and spearmint in a small homemade planter in my windowsill and have been waiting in fevered anticipation to see any signs of growth, checking it at least three times daily. Upon getting out of bed this morning and looking in my little herb garden, I was ecstatic to see a bright little bit of green poking out of the soil!

After a day of reflection on our country’s lost souls, I came to find it very fitting that today, Memorial Day, my herbs began sprouting. I feel very moved by the emergence of new life today, and I like to think that this new life serves as a brilliant reminder of the natural cycle that life and death entail. Though one may die, another is born, in this case in another form.

Resisting a full-frontal attack upon the question of an afterlife is difficult in this line of thought, but I think it’s best to avoid the question and merely recognize the cycle of life that I have seen beautifully played out today. The buzzing about of other families and the chirping of the birds in the trees as both my aunt and I silently wept for my grandfather while recalling her memories of him also illuminated the beauty and continuity of life and death. Death is merely a stage and there will always be more life to be lived.

To my grandfather Michael Maghrak and all other veterans, whether fallen in the field or after living a full life after returning from service, R.I.P. You are greatly missed, but your efforts will always be admired and your presence will eternally be felt with those who love you. We know you are always with us.

Tags: Cycle of life and death, Life, Memorial Day, Remembrance, Resurrection Cemetery

May Meanderings

Sitting and reading in the park today, a flurry of thoughts rushed through my mind as I watched the caterpillars twist and tangle themselves up and down tree trunks, branches and benches and squirrels dart to and fro across the grass, digging up acorns and finding remnants of human meals. I had to scratch my thoughts out on paper. This was as close as I got.

The caterpillars and squirrels reminded me of myself in many ways, from their innate restlessness to their apparent curiosity. This little guy followed me back and forth on a park bench until I finally gave in and let him crawl up onto me to learn that his travels to my brightly colored shirt proved fruitless:

And this little guy was about as nutty as I could imagine, at first sprinting from me up a tree, then deciding to inch ever closer to me until finally coming to the conclusion, once again, that I was too much of a threat:

Anyway, let’s start the spewing of thoughts. I graduated in December, but it feels like just yesterday. It’s impossible for me to believe that an entire academic semester has passed since my graduation, and I cannot figure out for the life of me where the time has gone.

This means that I’ve now been working at Caribou Coffee for just over five months, again, an entire semester. Working two jobs has proven very tiring and difficult, but as a means to an end, I have relatively few qualms with it. I’ve been able to save up some, but more importantly I’ve been able to pay down some of my student loans early.

Work in the delightful world of Caribou Coffee entails rising at 4:45 a.m. to be at work at 5:30 a.m. I often discuss with a close friend Bethany the fact that she finally creeps off to bed as I am walking to work and we will occasionally text one another good mornings/nights. It’s a life that definitely requests adjustment, driving me to bed earlier than I ever thought possible. But whilst I work, I love the job because of the dedicated group of customers who return daily for both coffee or coffee-related products and a short but meaningful conversation with their favorite baristas. I truly enjoy schlepping coffee when I work the espresso bar, although I still cannot stomach the stuff.

In less than two weeks, a very dear friend of mine will be leaving the country permanently to return home and it both pains me and, at the same time, it fills me with more delight than I could possibly explain. She has worked more than anyone I know in a country not her own, living away from her husband and children for three years without a single visit, in order to earn enough money to provide a very comfortable living for the very same family back home. I am so immensely overjoyed that she will finally be back with her family, but I also lament the fact that I will be losing my personal contact with her.

This leads me to a blinding revelation: I take the people in my life for granted. I assume that I will be able to see loved ones at some other point in time, passing up on certain activities, a decision I now regret. I’ve known her for three years and have only spent time with her outside of work three times in three years, and now I will bid her godspeed in the airport in two weeks.

In less than three weeks, I will be embarking on the next step in my life. I will be going on an archaeological field school in Old Wadena County Park in central Minnesota. The site we are digging is a winter encampment for a trading party composed of the French and members of an Ojibwe tribe. They were attacked by 200 Dakota at this site and it promises more than artifacts, it promises a reconnection between myself and the university. I have felt so out of sorts being out of school and this will reseat me within its thralls. I am beyond excited to finally gain field experience in archaeology and also determine if this is the life for me!

I have so many competing ideas for the future, I can barely keep them straight. I dream of hosting a travel show, being a travel correspondent for a major news organization, being a professor [of archaeology, linguistics, hispanic linguistics or a related field], acting, owning a bakery, bar or restaurant and many other things. I’m told by so many people that my future is so bright and that I just need to make the first step, and I’m well on my way of doing so to trek down one possibility.

I took the GRE last month and got results that are pleasing. This essentially guarantees that graduate school will be within the next five years, unless I decide to put it off further of course. Right now, I can only imagine what the next few months will bring, much less the coming years.

Tags: Anthropology, Archaeology, Caribou Coffee, Elliot Park, French fur traders, Historical Archaeology, Ojibwe, Old Wadena County Park

Video blog v5

Tags: Vlog

Video Blog v4

Tags: Classes, Halloween, Peter Pan, Vlog, Whoopula