I got up this morning, had tea and started writing at 9 and sat there largely uninterputed until 7 tonight writing, expanding on a remote sensing proposal for the historic cemetery. Got 15 pages, which is a pretty respectable day's worth of writing, in fact 8 pages is pretty good. Now I don't really want to do any more. But I have a report on a survey at Eagle's Nest, near Clarksdale, Coahoma County, a mid 19th century narrow-guage railroad village and cotton plantation that I need to be working on too, so if I don't waste all evening browzing the net, that's what I will do.

I went over to Eagle's Nest the other day with some Ole Miss students to help me. We each found one marble. I found a translucent blue one, then John found an opaque blue and white swirl, then Brianna found one with pale blue and deep red swirls. She said hers was the best and I guess it is. But they were disappointed they don't get to keep them. Then what does happen to all these broken bricks, rusty nails, pieces of dishes and bottles...and the perfectly good marbles? Maybe you saw the movie "Raiders of the Lost Arc", where in the end the looted treasure gets hauled away to a vast dark government warehouse? Yep, they go into perpetual care where nobody will ever play with them again. Yes, I agree it is a shame to lock good marbles away like that when we could be shooting them around the yard. We had gotten a pretty nice marbles court beaten down this spring, but then came 14" of rain and turned the yard into Lake Yakni.