Survived

Despite my efforts to have a “shorter season” this summer, it still felt pretty long. My time in Greece and Cyprus was both productive and exhausting. I’m looking forward to going home and tucking into a few publishing projects, the next issue of North Dakota Quarterly, and some more serious writing. Maybe I’ll even have time to pet the dogs (but not because Donna Zuckerberg told me to).

I learned new stuff this summer. I discovered that I really like Loux brand soda water, I learned how to make and how not to make a GeoJSON, and I discovered that for a label to be effective in a photograph, it must be visible. I also feel like I came to accept my fate as someone who publishes Hellenistic fortifications and I learned about topobros. I continue to try to come to grips with the 7th century in Greece and maybe the 8th century in Cyprus. I thought carefully about how I use legacy data and started to think about whether island archaeology can productively inform the archaeology of Late Antiquity and Byzantium. So far, then, it was a good summer.

Finally, I discovered that sometimes it’s not the lamp that you photograph, it’s how you photograph the lamp.