Dig Widow

It's that time of year again, when the covers come off the archaeological dig at the Ness of Brodgar and the OH disappears all day to go and scrape at stuff with a trowel or draw trench plans with a 3H pencil. He's away by 8, not back until 'the back of 6' as we say here, and I am left 'abandoned and alone' or 'in peace and quiet' (depending how I want to spin it) for eight weeks.

To be fair he has not actually done the dig every year, and last year he did only two weeks. It does have to be worked around earning a living and 8 weeks off the 'day job' isn't always convenient or possible. But he enjoys it so I am happy for him to do it. The dig diary for this year is here, and the OH even features in one of the photos of Day One. 

(We went to the annual pre-dig lecture about ten days ago and although I was not particularly looking forward to it I enjoyed it very much as, rather than a rehash of what we've heard before, it was all about the new scientific developments that are being used in archaeology these days. And absolutely fascinating.)

And in fact this year it works well that he is out  as I am enmeshed in preparation for my viva. This is somewhat surprising. I had intended just to read through the thesis text a couple of times the week before but I was rather horrified to see a photo on Facebook from a  friend who was about to be viva-ed in which she showed her thesis absolutely full of colour coded highlighter strips. 'Golly' I  thought, 'that looks a bit serious, perhaps I ought to do a bit more than just a last minute re-read'. I am accordingly currently going through the text with a fine toothcomb looking for typos and careless mistakes, and finding far too many of them for my peace of mind. The downside is that I am mortified by them, but the  upside is that I am finding the text itself rather better than I thought I would. So that's this week's task, and once it's done I will stop. Next week I will start thinking about what questions I might be asked and how I might frame my replies. But chances are that on the day the examiners will throw me a loop by asking a question I could never have anticipated in a thousand years ...