Day Ten - and home again.

I'm home for the weekend. One more week to go for me at Megiddo 2010 and I'm already sad. I have had an amazing time. It is wonderful to come home for the weekend and at least I will get some sleep. My square, Area Q, D6 is coming along just great, thanks very much and I know I will hate to leave it at the end of next week. Once I got home and had some time in front of a real high speed network, I have posted some pictures below. The sizes are a bit wonky, but I'm too tired and worn out to futz with them now.

This is the view from our area this morning. We get to the Tel at 5am, and we watch the sun rise each morning (when we are not heads down in our squares). They are spectacular. That's Mount Tavor in the the distance and the Jezreel valley. Looks like Armageddon (the word is derived from Har Megiddo) is near :-)
I took this picture during the windstorm we had a few days back. It doesn't look so bad, but it was brutal believe me. Our black shade blew off completely and all the supports collapsed.
This is what our area looked like when we got back the morning after the storm. That's my square, D6 in the foreground. Those poles are the supports that used to hold up the shade. We got to work and in a few hours we had it all up and stable.
Below is what Area Q looks like at the moment. That's our Norma, dressed in orange in the distance. She is absolutely the most special leader you could hope to have on a dig. She is patient and kind and yet totally knowledgeable and when she puts her foot down, there is no argument.
These are my two squaremates, Katy and Katelynn. Two harder working and more fun partners you could not find. We have sweated through hundreds of buckets of dirt together. You can see some of the wall we uncovered in our square peeking out behind Katy. These are good people.
The picture below is of the two big cheeses Professors David Ussishkin (with his back to us) and Israel Finkelstein (using his hands) sitting in the pottery "reading" area. You can see the baskets of pottery at their feet. There are many of these filled each day on the Tel.
The two pictures below were taken by Professor Eric Cline, who is associate director of the dig and the chap who walks around all day with the camera. There a many, many pictures of Megiddo 2010 up on his facebook page which you can get to from the Megiddo blog - I have a couple of blog postings on that blog as well.

Dr. Cline caught me out and quickly snapped the shot below, as you can see, my gloves are not black. I'm sorry to say that is rather 80% of me.
Katelynn and I sifting - we found no gold unfortunately.
I think it's now time for bed. I get to sleep in my own comfy bed, next to my lovely wife. Life is very good.