Contrary to popular belief, I wasn't one of those kids who walked home caked in enough dirt to add an inch of topsoil to the yard, so doing what I usually do around the house is sort of amazing considering how I hated getting dirty in elementary school.
Fast forward to undergraduate school at a university that's chock-full of...well, I'll save that for another time - and I'm the one willingly shoving my hands into trash cans full of everything except human body fluids and/or waste to fish out something that looks interesting. I apparently got a serious case of the "Oooh, Shiny" from a magpie, and finding everything from laundry money (seriously, how did several pennies, nickels, and dimes wind up in a trash can) to an extra load's worth of detergent in the bottle by just looking around does nothing to discourage it.
Over the summer, I've switched to occasionally looking in boxes dumped on the curb and mostly throwing around bags of dirt and sand while I look after the garden my family keeps trying to start in most of the yard. Potatoes are high-maintenance - you have to keep piling up dirt and sand or they won't actually produce anything - and really good for building upper body strength.
And now I just learned that I've been accepted into the community college's summer field school program. It won't even be a sleepaway field school, since it's so close to home. It'll be three hours each afternoon of shovel bumming at a chosen location, and cataloguing and otherwise learning how to properly handle artifacts in the morning.
I don't know if my rapidly darkening skin pigment comes more from being out in the sun so much or from the fact that I'm actually covered in dirt up to the knees and elbows until I take a power washer to myself.
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