Skip to main content

The museum work begins!

We're settling into our museum work routine pretty nicely. I always appreciate the ~5 minute walk up the hill from the apartment to get to work in the morning - as opposed to my hour long commute at home...!

Toby in the museum collections building courtyard


Which is bigger, an extinct elephant skull or Toby?


Toby was SO EXCITED to see actual dinosaur fossils, courtesy of a research group from a few different institutions around for a few days before they go off to the field.

Toby is definitely enjoying the company of Mercy, his nanny! I found her thanks to my other-archaeologists-with-kids network; Mercy is the daughter of a woman who was a nanny for archaeologist friends of mine, Sonia and Jason, when they lived in Nairobi for about a year a few years ago with their (then) toddler daughter. Mercy is currently on summer break between her second and third year of law school. The staff at the museum have been very kind and accommodating, allowing Toby and Mercy to set up on a table in a large room where some of the staff work on computers. They've been keeping busy with LEGOs, reading books, doing art projects, playing on a nearby playground I didn't even know about, and more. They are on the other side of the Paleontology lab from where I'm working, but Toby can still easily swing by when he wants to say hello, show me his most recent LEGO rocket ship or art work, or just get a hug from mommy.


Making a variety of LEGO creations on Monday

Making a LEGO race track for Toby's matchbox cars on Tuesday

Toby coloring in Mercy's drawing of cartoon characters on Tuesday

My work is going well too. I'm continuing to work on fossil collections from a prehistoric site called Olorgesailie in southern Kenya. I helped run the excavations at this site for 6 years (of the ~35 years of excavations led by my boss Rick!), before Toby was born, and for about 10 years now I've been studying the fossils from the many excavations across a single time horizon dated to just under 1 million years ago. Since the excavations have been going on for so long, I'm actually studying fossils that were excavated back to when I was 10 years old - which is pretty cool. I'll post a little more about my museum research here soon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

D minus a week and a day

I'm leaving for my annual migration to Kenya soon, just like the wildebeest.... well, only there's a few million less of me than there are of them. Also, I'd like to think I run in a few less circles than they do, given that they spend their year basically making a big circle between Kenya and Tanzania in the Serengeti/Mara ecosystem (though that's debatable!). I'm going through my usual 'I'm leaving soon' routine: getting together with friends who want to spend a little time before I leave for a few months; making sure I can take care of all my (as my fab friend Fire calls it) "personal admin" online while I'm gone - banking, paying utilities, etc.; adding things to the duffel bag I keep stocked during the rest of the year with my 'going to Kenya' things. It's always hectic, and no matter how well I plan - and those of you who know me know I plan! - there's always a lot to do at the last minute. So it's D (departure) mi...
5 comments
Read more

But... where do you go to the bathroom out there?!?

[NOTE: PLEASE IGNORE THE RANDOM BLACK SPECK IN THE UPPER RIGHT QUADRAT OF ALL OF THESE PHOTOS. SOME IRRITATING PROBLEM WITH MY LENS, I THINK. GRRRR.] This is one of the most common questions I get, so I decided to let you know all about our bush bathroom! I go to the bathroom in a long drop "choo" (Swahili for toilet, rhymes with "yo", not "you"). When you enter in the "front door", You can see it's a big hole dug in the sand, with a toilet seat on it, surrounded by a wooden frame wrapped with muslin on all sides and open on the top. We make sure there's plenty of toilet paper, and insect spray - which you can see tucked away behind a post on the right - for the flies that invariably like to hang out there. To discourage the flies, we also scoop sand from these buckets and throw it down into the hole to cover the, uh, stuff. Unfortunately, whoever designed this toilet seat - with the ring part made of wood, but the rest made of metal - di...
1 comment
Read more

a shout-out to Solomon

I just want to give a shout-out to our armed guard this year, Solomon (he's the one on the left in this 2011 research team photo). We've worked with a different guard each time we've been here and they've all been great. Solomon has a particularly good sense of humor with a great laugh; keen eyes that can see elephants from a few hundred meters away as well as bones seemingly hidden in the grass; and is always patient as we ask him questions about animal behavior and footprints while we're tromping around the bush. Thanks for keeping us safe out there, Solomon!
2 comments
Read more