It’s Saturday Night and I’m gonna hafta take a shower.

I never take showers between Friday and Sunday. Or shave. I like to get really stinky and hairy on the weekend. Then on Sunday night, just before bed, I take a long shower and shave my head and face and voila! new me for the new week.

But since Orion joined us, I’m a little short on time during the week to shower (or shave, or brush my teeth for that matter), so I generally get a shower in every-other-day. Or maybe I’ll skip two days, I dunno. This leads to weird hiccups in the schedule.

And, to tell the truth, since I quit doing the kind of work that involves sweat and dirt and weather — ten years ago this month, actually — I kind of don’t see the point. I kind of dislike bathing, when all I’m washing off is cubicle stank.

So now it’s Saturday night and I realize I haven’t had a shower since Wednesday. And I have to go to the grocery store tomorrow where there will be other people and I’m not sure I can count on all of them being anosmic.

Everyone should shave their heads. At least once in your life.

It has been twenty four days since my last blog post.

I spent the whole weekend cleaning. I mean like the whole weekend because I got up at 6:00 each day and fell into bed exhausted at 8:30. And I mean like cleaning as in rake up all the leaves and windfall from last week's storm, and pick up the dog poop in the yard, and sweep the porch and the patio and the street in front of the house (and did you know red cedars lose about half their needles in the fall? I did not), and mulch the garden¹, and air out the garage, and scrub the bathrooms and kitchen, and vacuum the basement and stairs.

Then last night I shaved my head and shaved my face like I do every Sunday night and I woke up this morning feeling new born.

¹So I have this theoretical method of garden mulching inspired by a phrase I heard somewhere: “compost is what happens when you pile up organic material.” In September, I cleared the vegetable garden (which had become badly overgrown under the previous owners’ tenure) and have been fighting weeds there ever since. So instead of spending the winter fighting those weeds, I piled up all the pine needles and leaves from the yard, which cover the garden to a depth of about 8 inches. My theory is that some of those leaves will compost into the soil (which is pretty rich already), and the rest will a) discourage weeds and b) encourage earthworms. I can pull away the mulch in the spring and add it to the compost pile, which should be pretty mature by then anyway. We’ll see how that works out...

Every day I ride my bike over the Hill. Well, almost every day. About one day in ten I don’t ride the bike at all — I ride the bus.

About one day a week I’m too tired to ride over the Hill, so I ride “around” it.

In good weather I might ride over the Hill as many as three times (once at lunch).

The Hill is about 1100 feet above sea level at Council Crest. I don’t always ride all the way to Council Crest, some days I coast around the summit on Fairmount Drive, between 900 and 1000 feet. If I don’t ride over the hill, I have to ride “around” it which is actually more direct than going over it, but still requires that I climb to about 500 feet above sea level.

Our house is at about 400 foot elevation, and my office downtown is around 100 feet above sea level. Whether I conquer the hill going to work or from work matters.

The great thing about riding my bike over the Hill, other than being on a bike and making it go up a hill which are a priori pleasant sensations to me, is that I have a sense of accomplishment. I forgot to do the dishes, the redesign at work remains unfinished, I fucked up my breakfast sudoku, haven’t mowed the lawn in three weeks, keep putting off my freelance project, haven’t been to yoga since June 9 ... plenty of stuff in my life is unfinished, hell the state of life is that it’s unfinished. When it’s finished, you’re dead.

But nuts to all that, I just rode my bike up a big hill. So none of that other stuff is finished but I just accomplished something and it was a little bit difficult.

The art of ascending is deeply mental. You think a little about suffering, which is good for the soul. Really monster climbers, polka-dot-jersey climbers: I think they’re oblivious to suffering. They become hill-climbing bicycle engines and their minds go OFF. I feel that suffering, but kind of don’t hate it. At the least, I know that every hill has a summit, sooner or later I’ll reach it.

The traffic dangers of cycling fatalities are offset at least 10 to 1 by the cardiovascular health benefits.

From John Pucher, via this video (around minute 23)

Update: Also: “For every hour you spend cycling, you add more than an hour to your lifespan.”

I spent a portion of my weekend sorting and cleaning some of my old bike tools. Mixed in with which were the bare core of my archaeological field kit. Said discovery occasioned me to reflect on a life I used to have: I used to be an archaeologist.

I left that life behind nine years ago. After seven years of chasing work around the country, I wanted to put myself into a place first, and a job second. That’s when I took up the website-making stuff.

When people learn about this past life, they wonder either or both of two things:

1. Why I ever left it for web design
2. How my archaeological work prepared me conceptually for web design

The answer to the first question is easy: because it’s so much easier to find jobs designing websites. This is not, for me, a matter of income: I could (and did) happily live on my archaeologist salary. No, what makes website design a better career is that no one, ever, has said to me “you’re lucky even to have a job.” I think I heard this phrase, or variations thereof, from nearly all of my archaeology bosses, even the good ones whom I liked and who valued my abilities. The sad fact of having a job title like “archaeologist” is that the supply of people with that title far outstrips the demand.

The answer to the second question is also easy, but most people don’t like to hear it. So I don’t tell them. I think studying anthropology excellently prepared me for heavy-duty brain work, as I’ve written about previously. (Grad school also gave me another headstart on web design, but the reason was historical. I started grad school in 1995 when the web was young and unfettered high-speed Internet access kind of tricky to come by. By virtue of my status as a grad student at the University of Oregon, I had time-share access to Unix web servers, and fast ethernet.) But really, I’d have had (most of) this preparation if I’d have gone straight from my undergraduate degree, through grad school, and into the non-anthropology workforce. It has more to do with the great ability of a liberal education to prepare a person for nothing and everything all at once, provided that person is actually paying attention.

One perceptive person once deduced that archaeology — especially geoarchaeology, which I was pretty good at — conditioned the mind to think four-dimensionally, which was useful lateral training for work with computers. Everyone else sees some connection between the patience or care they imagine archaeologists use in excavation, and web design. I don’t buy that at all, because archaeology really doesn’t require that much patience or attention (just good note-taking), and web design doesn’t require it at all.

No, the real (and very prosaic) answer to “how did your archaeological work prepare you conceptually for web design” is “because it got me working with databases.” That’s really the only connection between what I used to do a decade ago and what I do now.

I often miss archaeology, because it’s a very satisfying job in its daily details. I particularly miss working and living outdoors. The career also provided a good mix of brainwork and hard physical labor, a combination lacking in most other (any other?) jobs. For the sake of reminiscence, I scanned a few old photos of my archaeology self, shaggy hair, beard, sunburn and all.