resolution, bah. morality only takes me so far, I guess.

...which covers maybe half of what I have to say about the weekend. Aside from that, highlights: much traffic (eew) but I did not get horribly lost anywhere, or try to fall asleep on the road, so it all worked out. Woods battle was good, despite the greenbriars attacking my skirt in force (I swear I pulled up about a quarter of the thorny bits that were out there, and kept having to get other people to help drag them off my hem. Though I'm impressed with how well the skirt survived the process) and I'm starting to feel like I actually know what I'm supposed to be doing out there or something. Although I swear the other team was totally not paying attention-- they kept leaving these big gaps for me to wander in behind their lines (not the Ponte Alto people, but many others)... other battles went ok, although there was FAR TOO MUCH sun. But I'm just picky about these things. Had some good pick-up fights, though they chased us off the field so they could ride horses around behind court. (there were horses!) Got to see/socialize with many worthy people, particularly grauwulf, and had actual worthy conversations in which I learned stuff with several people. How odd. Had dinner (after interminable waiting, but still) in a pirate-themed restaurant, which was sort of cute but they were totally not equipped to deal with the hoardes of people we brought down on them. Then it rained this morning and so far as I saw nothing happened at all except for everyone leaving.

right... this post is beginning to resemble one of skittblink's update e-mails that go on and on for about a page and a half with absolutely no paragraph breaks whatsoever, and are impossible to find your place in again if you happen to lose it. :) Perhaps I should do something about that...

In any case, I'll be in the lab all this week dealing with artifacts, as we need to get at least the bag lists done, and preferably wash and catalog everything too, before we get to the stripping down to subsoil bit where it would be good to map in where everything is so we can tell where to clear...

decimate

For troyfish and grauwulf and anyone else liable to find it interesting: (and my computer dictionary is mean and won't let me select and copy text, so this may be abbreviated somewhat...)

definition 2 (historical) kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.

Originally applied to a punishment for mutinous Roman Legions, but became generalized as a punishment for a group of people, or merely to kill one in ten people (as in "the virus decimated the population") before being skewed into the modern sense of destroying a large percentage of something. Purists believe that it should only be applied to people, and one can not decimate crops for instance. Originally used in English to refer to a tithe, and later to Cromwell's tax on Royalists. (er?) Even in the modern skewed sense of drastic reduction of forces, it doesn't mean "destroy utterly." (did anyone think that?)

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So in other words, I am a bad classics major, and while I may have remembered my numbers right, I'd forgotten the punishment bit entirely. Sorry about that. (what was that I was saying about not listening to me when I'm wrong?)