Dr Kayt Armstrong

This week has been good. I’ve finished a report that was starting to feel like a millstone (and at 31,000 words, was longer by a third than my MSc thesis, and more than a third of my PhD), and instead of feeling daunted by all the things that were waiting for ‘after’ I’m looking forward to getting my teeth into something new.

I’ve not been running since I got back from my trip to the UK the other weekend. This was for two reasons;  firstly I upset my knees on fieldwork. I don’t think it’s anything major, they were just having a grumble, and I didn’t have a chance to rest them ’till now. Secondly, I’ve spent most of this week floored by some weird bug that never quite turned into the death-flu the initial symptoms portended. It seems to be on it’s way out though, so I am going for a run tomorrow and I’ll see how I go.

In archaeology-related news, my paper got accepted for EAA this year, so I’ll be speaking in a session about geophysical methods for studying later prehistory, as well as co-chairing our round table on methods for investigating rural sites. It’s going to be a busy few days in Pilsen, but has anyone got any sight-seeing tips for someone who’s never been to the Czech Republic before? I’d like to cram some touristy things in while I am there.

On a similar note, I’m off to Vienna for ISAP at the end of the month and can’t wait to catch up with the usual suspects. I’ve never been to Vienna before (or Austria for that matter), so, same question really! What shouldn’t I miss? We have an excursion to Carnuntum that I am quite excited about, but what about in the city itself?

I’ve just realised that all that comes off as a bit of a humblebrag, sorry. I love that my job lets me do all of these things!

This week has been about re-learning balance. About an aspect of the ‘simply do’ motto I’d overlooked, or got a bit wrong. The flipside is: or do not. I had a mini crisis at the end of last week, about all kinds of daft stuff, and my mum and dad reminded me that it’s important to be gentle with yourself. Do, or Do Not. But don’t beat yourself up for the things you don’t do. Don’t get stuck in a spiral of negative feelings and introspection. Sometimes it’s OK to be shallow and just skim along the surface of things. It’s how I got through finishing the report: I stopped agonising over every last bit, because it’ll be read and edited by the project team. I stopped hating that I needed to do it, and found that once I was actually doing it, I enjoyed it. I’ve had the same revelation about running, but apparently it’s an epiphany I need to have many times over. I’m struggling to pick a photo this week. I had fun taking pictures of the May fair in the city centre this weekend, I fitted into my old boots (and still LOVE them), I was outraged at/covetous of pink Darth Vader t-shirts, and my brother rightly mocked me for instagramming filtered screen shots, but I think it has to be my first picture of the week, which was a letter from the ever-lovely BrightMeadow reminding me I have wonderful people in my life, and that they need to remember to be kind to themselves too.

So, be excellent to each other, and yourselves! I am continuing this theme by spending a chunk of tomorrow being uncharacteristically girly and doing moisturising-type-things… I may or may not post pictures of the no doubt hilarious state I’ll be in while face packs do their thing….

I owe you all at least three weeks of  #project52 pictures, and at some point a longer blog about fieldwork and life in general but it has been a really busy few weeks! So, without further ado, here is week 16:

I was home for 4 days before I went away to Italy again (this time with Matt, for my birthday) – I think I wrote the last blog just before I headed to Black and Bloom in Groningen to pick up the awesome cakes they made me to take to work. We have a tradition where you bring in cake for everyone on your birthday, but I was away for my actual birthday…. and besides, who really needs an excuse to eat brownies?!

Week 17 was spent in Italy with Matt. It was the first time he has ever been, and we had a wonderful time. At some point he’s going to put up the pictures he took, and I’ll post some here, or link to them, but he’s not had time to sort them out yet (over 9GB of images!!). I hardly took any; it was nice to be in Italy not working for a change, and I was too busy taking things in properly to be snapping all the time. I did get a few though, so my week 17 picture is of M at Herculaneum, which was amazing.

Week 18 contained many things. Again, I was only home for a few days before zipping off again, this time to the Uk for a wedding. It was also Queen’s day / the inauguration of the new Dutch King, and so I went for a wander in the heaving city centre with Olivia. Everything was either orange, or red, white and blue (or sometimes all 4). We went to a roof terrace overlooking the main square for cakes, and even the cakes had little orange crowns:

I’ve been so busy for so long it has left me a bit run down, and earlier in the week, a bit blue. But today Inger (my friend and landlady), Steven and their wonderful daughter Oda arrived. How can anyone be sad with these three around?

So I’m off to cook us all a tasty (I hope) curry, and hopefully things will quieten down a bit and I can post more regularly. I don’t go away again until the 27th now, when I head to Vienna for ISAP….

This is a really quick post to put up my #project52 pictures before I run off to Italy again tomorrow, this time for a short holiday with my beloved, who has never been before. I am almost unreasonably excited about showing him around Rome for the first time and watching him have all of these amazing ‘firsts’… On the MUST DO list: The Pantheon, The Forum, The Crypto Balba Museum, Castel San Angelo and Gelato from San Crispinos… have you got any quirky/unusual suggestions to add to our list?

As you know, I went to Calabria for fieldwork. The weather was better than we were hoping, we got all of the work done, but one of my bits of kit died fairly early on in the trip, and we didn’t find a lot of archaeological anomalies. The landscape, the company and wonderful local friends more than made up for any minor frustrations though. We ate agnello, went caving, climbed precipitous things and did a survey at 1400m at an amazing place called Trizzone della Scala. There are a LOT of (mostly unedited and undescribed so far) pictures on my Flickr account, but here are my three picks for #project52….

Week 13 is my colleague Wieke portering my FM onto Trizzone della Scala… I love this photo because it gives you some idea of the height we were at, and of the crazy topography we needed to go over to get there. This is why the FM is on her backpack- there were places where I really needed both hands!

This was the most ‘interesting’ bit of our hike/climb to get to a really cool cave. I needed a lot of help to get past where the lead guy is standing in this picture- at one point I was too scared to try. Fortunately, that ‘lead man’ is our friend, expert speleologist and mountaineer Nino Rocca. He’s amazing, and has at least one mountain goat in his ancestry…

The reason I was quite so nervous is more apparent when you look at the view in the other direction:

The last week was a bit more relaxed, with only one trek up a serious hill, and we spent a lot of time at my favourite place, Mandrone Di Maddalena, which is right where the Raganello river forces its way through a geological fault.

And now I have to run to work to be in time to supply early birthday cakes for my colleagues at morning coffee ^_^

Just a short note as I am doing my last minute hovering about the house stressing about whether I have packed enough layers, if the cold weather is going to affect our travel plans tomorrow. We aren’t exactly digging on this campaign- soil research, geophysics and field survey are the order of business until April 16th.

The week kind of got taken over by little jobs so I’m also behind on work, but I guess it will give me something to do in the evenings. We’ll be up in the mountains, staying in a village called San Lorenzo Bellizi. This means that I’ll be unlikely to have even limited internet access so I’ll be out of the loop for a week, though I’ll try to tweet by text. If you need me, you’ll have to call.

Be excellent to each other!

This should have been posted over the weekend, but I couldn’t seem to find the time to sit down and write, and there isn’t a lot to say about last week. I felt blue, didn’t go running, and lost faith in myself a bit. I sort-of predicted that last week… But I’m wondering if there isn’t an element of fear of success in there somewhere.

Anyhow, enough with the navel gazing. Last Tuesday was a fun day. I took two of my student assistants out to the local park to do some testing of a pair of second-hand FM256′s that we bought towards the end of last year. We want to do some surveys in rocky upland environments, so we need something light and maneuverable rather than something designed for speedy coverage. I had so much nostalgia- it’s been ages since I worked with Geoscan instruments and their very particular repertoire of beeps and whistles took me back to so many fun PhD (and before) memories.

We were also visited by no less than 15 species of bird (that we could identify) within an hour or so of arriving. It made all of the snow and cold hands worth it.