Half-way house

I'm currently on the mid-season break, which consists of 2 days off... most normal people call that the weekend, but it only happens once in 7 weeks on the Pella dig, rather than every 7 days. We've had warning that a cold front is rolling in, which isn't a surprise given that it's been blowing a gale for the past couple of days. Considering the glorious 1st 3 weeks' weather, we can't complain... it is winter, after all, and Jordan needs all the rain it can get. But it'd be great if we could get through the whole season without getting too squelchy - my trench, being the lowest, will turn into a swimming pool / mud-bath.
Given the ominous weather I was relieved to get the trench photographed and planned over the past couple of days... (just because you have mid-season break doesn't mean you don't do any work, if you're silly enough to hang around the dighouse). The 4m wide expanse of cobbles took a while to draw, but the plan looks pretty good and we're now about 25cm above the thick yellow plastered surface and other Late Bronze Age goodness. Given what's coming up already, it's exciting.
Had a pretty busy 3rd week on the finds front - I kept on trying to put the guys / vollies in places where they wouldn't turn up too much, to give me time to detail what had already emerged... but you turn your back and up pops a multi-handled painted krater, about half a metre in diameter, associated with burnt olive pips... and an opium-bulb kournos fragment, and an Egyptianizing trefoil lamp offering, not to mention copper pins from a possible sink hole, beautiful painted Cypriot and Mycenaean painted pottery fragments, 1/3 of a copper bangle, etc. Crazy. Sometimes all I seem to do is write labels.
But it's great - the best trench I've had at Pella, and now that we've dug out most of the Early Iron Age pits, the architecture's starting to make sense. I've even found time to puddle a few more mud-bricks, as part of my side-study on what people were making the bricks out of (yeah, I know - mud... but also other stuff which is where it gets interesting, if you're into that sort of thing).
Most people seem to have recovered from the cold that afflicted us last week - just in time for the next lot of vollies to arrive tomorrow with their lurgies. Honestly, there's sharing, and there's sharing we could do without. But the 1st group were great - really pleasant, dedicated people, and hopefully the next 15 will be too.