Sometimes when I’m commuting somewhere here; I look at the hills around Fremont and Newark here in the SF Bay area. The Hayward hills remind me of hills I used to clamber over back in the way gone days. When the sun rises over those hills, I sometimes remember being there. I remember when the destination was never as important as the travel and when the companions were cherished but yet we all wanted solitude. Anthropology while its the study of the vastness of human behavior; archeologists seem to need the solitary nature of person versus excavation unit.

I remember digging out on Edwards AFB in SOCAL and the wind was howling at 45mph and the dust swirled around the unit we were digging. Mark and I would stand up and periodically survey the unit and the wind and dust swirling never amounted to as much as us doing science. As one archeologist remarked at some time; “archeology is the mind wielding a trowel”.

In those other hills, I traveled over terrain I sometimes wondered if another had ever seen. The country was wild and open and I was never sure that another human being had walked the same trail. The other archeologist, sometimes my wife, was 30 meters to my right or left. There on the far side was RWR. He seemed introverted and focused inward. We never talked that much. Until…

Until we went to the Pizza joint or the hotel. One of the more humorous stories took place down in Mojave. We had been out all day long and were dirty and dingy. Tired and filthy. Dirt clinged to every place you wished it would not. We tramped into a hotel and the front desk clerk almost sniffed at us. He gave us the look that we were transients, homeless waifs and we could never spend the night at his place. RWR produced a Corporate AMEX card (no preset spending limit) and put rooms, food, massive orders of beer on the rooms. The clerk just watched us walk away. We were laughing and pointing at him. But we all went to separate rooms.

What was it about that career and life? What was so special that makes me wander the history of my own life gathering its artifacts? It was more than it was. It always was more and the archeologist were more. Simply put, archeologists are bigger than life. Bright minds, dirty trowels, clothes clinging with dirt. But the talk, friends.

The talk was like blogging all the time. Science came out as though we were constipated and we had to remove it using some philosophical diueretic. it was painful because it was so hard; but it felt so good. We gathered and talked. Once a year we produced scholarly papers.

All of this compressed in one drive after a summer’s over BBQ party for my son. I have so much compressed in archives, readers. This blog serves the same need I guess.

Perhaps the quality of this thing has gone down. I don’t blog so much about Linux; yet these days at work Linux is very much in my sights. I’ll blog more about that later. Things are still evolving there too.