Feats of Strength

There's an episode of Seinfeld that revolves around the Costanza Family's holiday tradition called "Festivus." Essentially it is Frank Costanza's invented holiday which the family celebrates around Christmas time. Some traditions include the "festivus pole," the "airing of grievances" (I GOT A LOT OF PROBLEMS WITH YOU PEOPLE) and the "feats of strength," which means someone has to wrestle Frank... Today we weren't wrestling any geriatric veterans, but what we were wrestling were gigantic basalt and limestone rocks.


Inside the square...many of these await our arrival tomorrow morning and have to be removed before we can do more digging...


Using the "Arny Net" to remove a large basalt stone...

Andrea, who is pulling double duty as a blogger on this (our personal blog) and the "official" dig blog (Dig It) posted a great You Tube video today of what it truly takes to get these monsters out of the square - they aren't light, although the limestone is much more manageable than the basalt.

Thus far I have been incredibly happy with our square, and with our team in F8. We've gotten a lot of work done, especially when you consider the fact that when we started to dig in our square we had to work through at least a half meter of debris that was dumped on the site last year. Now we are nearly a meter down from the original ground level, we've found (fingers crossed) a wall and a door frame and we are only about a half meter above the street level. All-in-all it has been a quite eventful week.

Tomorrow is our last day for the workweek. When we get done on the mountain we will come down, eat a quick lunch, finish packing for Jerusalem and then leave the Kibbutz by 2:30. We will be touring on Friday and Saturday, and will head back on Saturday night just in time to eat a picnic dinner (Saturday is Shabbat and the dining hall is closed) and then to bed to get ready for more digging on Sunday! We will not have our computers with us in Jerusalem, and even if we did we would not have time (or internet access) to do any posting of anything. So, we will have to get you up to speed when we get back...Fear not - we will return to our regularly scheduled programming shortly (and there may be a short post tomorrow before we leave, but I make no promises).

I'll leave you with this...this morning we saw the moon set and the sun rise while we were on the dig and both were quite spectacular.


Andrea's camera ended up underneath her ice-cold water bottle and when we took it out of the pack it was a little foggy...it created a neat effect on this photo however.


The sun rise...thankful for the cloud cover (it did not last until breakfast today, we were not nearly as spoiled.