Hi readers, it’s time for a quick update about my PhD and recent travels to British Columbia. As of right now, April 27th, 2024, my brain has turned to mush after completing all the dissertation edits from my two supervisors! I’m currently waiting for a few more comments back from my external supervisor, and once I do those my dissertation will be off to examination! If all goes well, I should be defending sometime this summer, hopefully sooner than later. I can’t believe how quickly my PhD program has flown by!

After completing the majority of the edits, I headed out to BC to visit my parents, Grandpa, and best friend Kelsey! A much needed visit to the Okanagan, and a huge different in weather and abundance of flowers from Newfoundland. Because I flew out early in the morning, it was daylight flying over the rockies, and I spent that last part of the flight with the flight map up so I could identify lakes in the Kootenays as we flew over.

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I still had quite a lot of work to do while I was in BC and my parents were at work, and I spent the week getting the copy edits from my publisher reviewed for my hexfoil on gravestones book (out this September). It was my first time being on this side of editing, since typically copy edits have to be made by me and it’s something that I’m really not that great at! I so appreciate my editors hard work, it’s a tough job, especially when you have someone like me writing who sometimes leaves sentences just…unfinished in the middle of a paragraph (sorry team).

The week was also filled with three different activities that involved helmets! Kelsey took me horseback riding for maybe the 4th time ever in my life, and we went for a 1.5 hr ride with her instructor through the hills. It was amazing, and my legs were So Sore the next day! I’m so glad I got to do that! A couple of days later, I went outdoor rock climbing with my dad and his friend. My little blue Kanken backpack turned from bookbag into climbing pack for the day, and my shoes and harness actually fit inside. It was so nice to be climbing outside again, my first time since 2017, and I’m totally excited to start climbing outdoors in Newfoundland again!

The 3rd helmet-related activity was a 15 km bike ride with my parents on an old train track turned trail in Summerland. It was gorgeous, but I apparently hadn’t been on a bike in a decade, which I realized in the first 30 seconds of riding on my old bike when I nearly crashed into a bollard. Didn’t end up falling over at all though, and it was great!

One of the other really exciting parts of the trip was visiting my friend Janell at the Oliver & District Heritage Society. We met working at this museum back in 2013 as Museum Assistants through the Young Canada Works program. It was my first job in a museum beyond volunteering in the Penticton Museum & Archives in high school, and really made a lasting impression on me about combining museum work and archaeology. It’s my favourite! Janell has come full circle and is back in Oliver as their curator, and I couldn’t be more proud. The museum is so lucky to have her expertise!

Janell showed me around the whole museum, and all the changes that have happened since we started there together, including a very cool exhibit in the room where we used to catalogue artifacts. We fed the feral cats that live in the old mine carts outside, and it was amazing to see all the updates that the building has seen in the last 11 years, especially when those changes involve proper storage, cataloguing, and acid-free boxes. What they’ve done with the landscaping is really cool too, and if you’re ever in the South Okanagan, make sure you pop into the Oliver Museum!

My favourite part was going into the old Fairview Jail, one of the last surviving buildings from the Fairview mining townsite, which was just up the hill from Oliver, and predated the modern town. Established after gold was discovered by prospectors in the 1880s, the town was home to several hundred people with multiple gold mines, as well as shops and hotels. It was a fairly short-lived boom town, with the Fairview Hotel burning down in 1902, and the town population dwindled into the 1930s. If you want to learn more about Fairview, check out the museum’s page! The majority of the jail looks the same as it did when we cleaned it all in 2013, which was the museum’s reopening year after being closed for asbestos abatement, but Janell has some plans to revamp part of the natural history / mining display. I can’t wait to see! It was so awesome to be able to visit!

I had such a great time in BC , and am excited that I got to do so many fun activities while also actually getting some work done, because it wasn’t totally a holiday (that’s later this summer, stay tuned for lots of death heritage). Other highlights included Cage n’ Curry day, where Kelsey and I eat curry and watch Nic Cage movies, working at a cute cafe in Penticton, and sampling fancy cider atLa Petite Abeille cidery in the sunshine after our horseback ride. I flew home and had a brief overlap with my husband, before he flew down to Arizona to see his parents for a week. It’s hard to fit trips into grad school and fieldwork schedules!

Waiting for me at home this week was my new job as an Education and Public Programming Officer at The Rooms Provincial Museum! I did 1 week of training before leaving, and jumped back into it a day after getting home. I’m really excited to be there, and I’ll be working on research and development for new programs (especially in archaeology) moving forward. After quite a while, I’m back in the museum world, armed with research knowledge and public engagement experience from my research and our work in cemeteries around the province. As I get closer to the end of my degree, book projects ending and starting, and a new job in the early days, I’m so glad I also still have opportunities to travel and write little blog posts about visiting heritage sites!