elanya

So, yesterday was a long one - but good!

It was the day scheduled (well, re-scheduled, really) for the class trip to the battleship Texas - the only dreadnought left floating in the world. It is a cool fucking ship. It was commissioned in 1916, and at the time was the most powerful ship in the world! For you know, about 6 months, because that was how things were going at the time. It was used heavily in WWI, and after Pearl Harbor, it became a very important symbol for the US in WWII as well. It was an exceedingly lucky ship, with only one wartime casualty ever, even though it 8was* used heavily in both world wars. The thing is still floo the public! ating almost 100 years later, although now of course there are problems that will take an awful lot of money to fix. It is set up as a museum, although being as the thing is ridiculously huge, clearly not all of it is open..... To the public.

Of course, being a bunch of Nautical Archaeologists from Texas A&M University, we ain't hardly the public! So we got to crawl down into her guts and check out some pretty cool places that are still under reconstruction, or not. We got to crawl through tiny hatches into dark passageways, down shaky ladders, through rooms where stuff has just been left lying in place for something like 60 years. It was exceedingly cool. We got to see one of he magazines at the base of the towers, the plotting room, the boiler room, and so forth. My lungs were a little unhappy about the air quality down in he bowels of the ship, but I survived. Some of the parts of the ship were still inaccessible to us, alas, such as the engine bits, because they had some damage to the lower areas of the ship when the ship grounded in its specially made slipway due to low water this winter. We didn't get to see anything like the whole ship - that would have taken a looooong time.

Of course the public is left some fun, and we also got to play around with he anti aircraft guns, pretending to shot down ships in the harbour, and so forth. it was really interesting - because we are archaeologists they talked a lot about the issues they have with conservations, artifact storage, collections, etc. one of he places they took us is down into the coal room where they have racks and racks of unidentified *stuff* (some might say 'junk') that the people who cared for the ship before the Texas parks people took it over collected.

I have an ass ton of hot pictures - I really need to find a better way to upload them in batches that isn't imageshack. Time to look into flicker, I guess! ETA: peectures!

So after we crawled around in that for a few hours, we went about our other important errand of the day which was the House of Pie! They sure do have some good pie, it is true. I started with a BLT which was good but not amazing, and then moved on to a nice slice of lemon icebox pie. I got to sample a few other kinds from generous people at the table, including Texas pecan fudge (chocolate pecan - exceedingly rich!), and the Bayou Goo - chocolate cream pie with a pecan crust and a light cream cheese layer, with pecan bits. Also very rich! I thought about buying a pie to take home, but in the end did not. I have some egrets, but it si probably for the best!

We'd left around 7, and got back around 7 (got the Friday exodus traffic coming out of Houston -_-). I worked on my Elissa paper for a bit, and then went over to chez Claire and LeeAnne where we hung out and watched Money for Nothing, a mediocre John Cusak flick. I worked more on the paper, came home, and pretty much finished it. It needs some revision, formatting, and other details, but it is 'done' enough for me! I am going to go in to school on Monday to touch up what needs to be done on it and on my Rigging paper, and that will be those done. All that's left is the Bahamas! I have another volume or so of the CoSP to get through today, then I need to go through my notes and start writing. Whee - I've got a week. Slightly less because I have a day earmarked to finish my other papers, and I have to go in on Thursday for one last M&T session.