The round thing thing.

I have this thing about  round things.  Circular, flat, usually metal things.  Think about it – the circular shape is not very common in nature – I mean really round like the sun (which you’re not supposed to look at anyway) or a really full moon.  Down on earth, if you see a round thing, it’s almost always man made.  As the daughter of archaeologists, sometimes we’d walk farm fields in Kansas and Missouri looking for sites.  I blame that activity for the fact that I continue to look down and pick up stuff I see on the ground.  In the last couple of decades the things I’ve focused on have been round – usually metal things – like washers, nuts, small bits of detritus of construction and cars that have been broken off and abandoned.  Things like this:

Round things in a junk yard in Ankara.

In particular, I collect metal round things, and over the years this habit has led to some interesting adventures and some wonderful gifts from people.  And it’s given a focus to a tendency to wander around looking at the ground.  Since this blog is now about what I’m doing in Erbil, here’s some I’ve found lately.  (And this is just what’s not on the server since it’s still down.)

Water tanks on the roof.

I’m starting a series on these water tanks. You’ll see more of them later….

Wire calligraphy found on the roof.

This relates to another collection I’ll talk about later that lives in the house at Gordion, in Turkey.  More about that in a couple of weeks when I’m there.  But in the meantime, let me say I’m unsure what language this calligraphy is in because Arabic, Kurdish, Assyrian, Turkish, English, and a little bit of German are all spoken regularly in my house.  I’m the only one who only speaks one of them.

A round thing hole in my roof.

I don’t know why it’s there, but if I didn’t go around looking for round things, I never would have noticed it.

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