I had just stepped into the shower and turned on the water Sunday afternoon when Michelle’s phone rang.
I pondered a moment. Michelle couldn’t hear the phone, she was still out in the garden. The last two calls I’d answered on Michelle’s phone turned out to be wrong numbers.
But, Aly’s field school doesn’t work on Sunday. Aly could be calling.
In the end, I ignored the call, and went about my business.
A short time later I felt properly washed and dried, and Michelle stepped into the shower, when the phone rang again. I picked up to hear the sweetest words: “Hi, Dad!”Michelle shut down her shower and got out. I put the phone on speaker, and we had about a half hour visit with our adventuring daughter.
She’s doing great! She really likes her professor, the dig staff and fellow students. They’ve had a lot of interaction with the local Native village. The day before, they’d helped butcher a moose, which was why she was in Beaver Creek, washing blood off her gear. She asked about substitutions in some of her favorite recipes, to accommodate a classmate’s milk allergy, and the acquisition of baking chocolate in bars rather than cocoa powder.
When I asked about weather, she said that most days were cold and sunny in the morning, but in the early afternoon they usually hear thunder, “then we get every kind of weather,” mostly rain showers and hail on and off through the rest of the day.
“It’s fun!” she enthused. Obviously, she’s going to do okay.
She says that they’re finding some interesting bone fragments in the dig, that the bugs aren’t as bad as they’d been at Yukon-Charley Rivers last summer, and that they should have Internet at the camp sometime this week. Hopefully, that means they’ll get the blog going soon after. We’ll see.