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good news from a good friend

It’s always fun to get good news from friends and family back home when you’re in the field! (Unlike in 1999, when I found out my maternal grandmother had passed away while I was working at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Do you ever just get the sense that you should call your mother? Well back then cell phones hadn’t yet arrived in East Africa, so I never really called back home – to do so was expensive and inconvenient. But for some reason, when I got back to Kenya from Tanzania in August of that year, I decided to call my mom, and she gave me the sad news.)

But let’s get back to the good news.

Fire is engaged!

That sentence may seem strange, until you find out that I have a very good friend (nick)named Fire. (If I told you her real name she’d probably un-friend me, and I don’t mean on facebook, since she’s one of my only friends not on facebook, so I won’t.) She was a post-doctoral fellow at the museum a few years ago, and we really hit it off – so much that she was one of my bridesmaids!

Anyway, she now has a great job teaching in the Anthropology Department at Durham University in the UK, and she’s been dating this lovely guy named Nick for a few years now. She *really* wanted to tell me “in person”, meaning over a phone call on Skype, but when she got me on Skype it was really late at night and an actual voice call would have woken up everyone in camp. I thought it was odd that she sent me an email nagging me to sign into Skype because she was missing our Skype text chats… since I hadn’t logged in for a month or so. Basically she was bursting with the news that he popped the question! She’s over the moon. It’s very cute. I sent them a cheesy card from Kenya, and I wasn't quite sure how to write my return address, so it was just:

3rd tent from the left
Olorgesailie, Kenya

That’s all.

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