Happy Yom Kippur.

Today is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, when Jews here in Israel and everywhere else fast and remember their sins. Everything in the country is pretty much closed down. For Gentiles like me, that means a day off to catch up on extra work such as this blog, which I have neglected for what must be 20 or 30 years. So what's happened since then? Oh, you might have read on the dig website about "Herod's Revenge," which several of our teammates picked up. Well, I was and am one of those teammates. I've had it for four or five days now, and I'm getting rather tired of it. It's not too big a problem except when we're actually up on Mount Sussita, where there the only bathroom is a patch of weeds and some barbed wire. Well, that's one of the pitfalls of foreign travel.

In the last two days I've also processed all the pottery that we've collected and most of the little tesserae (mosaic tiles). This means that I am almost totally caught up! Woo hoo! Take that, pottery! Today Jolanta, the pottery expert from Poland, is coming to do a "pottery reading." This is similar to a poetry reading, except that instead of Jolanta reading a poem while we listen, instead Jolanta identifies and dates pieces of pottery while we all listen. It's very exciting.

Actually, yesterday while I was processing pottery I found a little sherd (that's a broken piece of pottery) of a red bowl or plate with a cross imprinted in it. This was pretty crazy becaust the sherd had come from outside the church, in the area that was probably used as a kitchen hundreds of years after the city of Hippos was abandoned. So there's no telling what the cross means.

Well boys and girls, I'm happy to be blogging again. See you soon!