the Dalaverse

OH SWEET INTERNETS NEVER LEAVE ME AGAIN!

Two days the Internet was out in all the dorms. TWO DAYS. And in that time - well, technically three days - shit has gone down, let me tell you. The back story: project due on Friday consisting of a 5000-word report on a maritime site. We haven't been out to our site in something like three months. We are missing the rear half the frames on the port side. Our site is on the foreshore and is thus covered by water except for a few hours at low tide.

SATURDAY: vague plan to go out to the site, postponed since the previous weekend, made after seeing 'Indiana Jones' with 3/4 of the archaeology department on Friday night. Low tide is not in the afternoon like we thought, but actually in the morning when we are all sleeping off the geek joy. Failure. Plan moves to Sunday morning, as follows: meet at 6:05 (yes, AM) for to take taxi from uni to train station, take train station from Soton to Fareham, take taxi from Fareham train station to site 1.5 miles away, draw details of timbers.

SUNDAY: around midnight, Mehvash realises that first low tide is earlier than previously thought, which means we can go for the evening low tide before it gets dark. Obviously this is preferable to getting up at the asscrack of dawn, so Mehvash and Kelley agree to leave at 4:30 PM instead. Kelley calls me at 1 AM.

Except...I have gone to sleep at 11pm, I sleep right through the call (v. unusual), and the call comes from a number my phone doesn't recognise. When I wake up at 5:15 (STILL IN THE AM), I think it's probably a wrong number. I send Kelley a text reading 'We're still going today, right?' at 5:45; getting no response, I hope she's walking over to the Interchange and missed the text beep. I run to the bank with all my kit to get cash for the cab and am standing at the agreed-upon meeting spot at 6:05. Alone.

I call Kelley, not particularly caring that I'm waking her up, and she explains that they changed the plan and somehow no one told me definitively (for the rest of the day they will argue about who was supposed to call). I don't really care who was supposed to tell me because NO ONE DID. I have woken up at the asscrack of dawn for no reason whatsoever. My irritation, she is profound. When I get home I sleep until 11 and entirely fail to feel rested, so naturally I'm grumpy for the rest of the day. I call Kelley at 2:30 and say I have a headache/upset stomach and can't go today. It is spiteful, and I admit it. But I didn't count on Kelley and Mehvash deciding not to go without me. So we still don't get to the site. Plan moved to Monday morning.

I go to bed at 11, same as before, and Marissa calls me at 11:30, having just gotten back from London. She was the only damn one of us to realise that the bank holiday means the uni bus in on Sunday hours and that would screw up our intricate plans. She books a taxi, because she is awesome, and we agree to meet a full 20 minutes later.

MONDAY: a text from Kelley wakes me at 5:45, just before my alarm is set to go off. It says, 'It's pouring down rain, what do you guys think?' It is indeed pouring down rain, has been raining all night, and will in fact rain steadily until noon. The four of us have a small, dark mobile phone conference and agree that there is little point in us going out in this kind of weather. Plan gets moved - again - to Tuesday morning. Kelley can't go because she has a research appointment, but the remaining three soldier on. I go back to bed and get way too much sleep once again.

TUESDAY: five minutes after I wake up before 6 for the third day in a row, Mehvash texts to say that she's sick and can't go to the site. Marissa and I decide there's not much we can do except keep on. At least it's not raining. We take a really expensive taxi ride to the site. On the way, I realise I've forgotten my wellies. Awesome start to the day. We bitch about the project and about life in general and wait about forty-five minutes for the water to drop enough for us to go onsite. The plan has come with us, in the form of timber points plotted, on an enormous and unwieldy board three feet by four feet. Kelley wants us to finish the last quarter of timber measurements, take offset measurements from Datum Point D, and draw in the details of the timbers.

There is no base line anymore. There is no line or long tape to make a baseline. Datum Point D has disappeared since the NAS did their partial survey. All of this is impossible with one person down on the wreck and the other up on the bank shouting back and forth to each other. I try to construct some foot coverings out of plastic grocery bags. My shoes stay dry, but I sink immediately and give up, retreating to the bank. We do some fuzzy measurements from the timber ends to the (unstable mud) ground, so the drawing will make some tiny amount of sense, and measure the sternpost and bow. We consider this a job well done, under the circumstances.

Later Mehvash and I work on the drawing, making up some stuff from the scale photos and some stuff from the drafty recesses of our own minds. We are content to turn it in as a survey of the bow half only. Kelley is not so content; she wants to go back to the site and record the missing timbers. Mehvash and I think she is cracked in the head and what we have is sufficient for the project at hand. We call and text back and forth. I refuse to go down to the site again, seeing as how I have that report AND a 4000 word Seafaring essay due on Friday.

Finally it gets worked out that Kelley will go down tomorrow with Jo, our missing fifth group member who started this whole project in the first place. So far we're all still speaking to each other, but it was a near thing. I am so ready for this damned project to be over with, you have no idea. It'll be good to have a more complete drawing, even if Fraser flat-out told us we should only survey half the wreck. And I'm thrilled at the prospect of staying up late. It's 11:30 already! I will watch TDS and hit the sack, and sleep until 8:00. MAYBE EVEN 9:00.

This is the week of FAIL.