Whatizit??

Well, yesterday afternoon, my parents and I betook ourselves to the field that runs at the end of their street, a field which is now burdened down by heavy bulldozers and earthmovers and which will shortly be filled with a huge number of disgustingly large houses squeezed onto postage stamp sized lots with too many bedrooms to count and families with only one child to fill all those rooms... as if there weren't enough houses already in this city, but they have to allow urban sprawl to ooze its way onto my parent's quiet little street. Why, oh, why can't the city dwellers stay where they are and leave our little paradise alone? Not only are these houses coming, but the city is planning to add sewers, sidewalks and curbs to ensure that there is an urban feel to life. Not that any of this was asked for since we seemed to be doing quite well without all these "improvements". Sometimes i can feel so angry and frustrated with the city planners who never listen to the "little guys" and simply proceed with their plans in all their concrete glory.

So we took a little wander out in the field to see what there was to see, to ponder the loss of country life and to see what changes were afoot. About a year ago, there were some people who whose job it was to find out if there was anything archeologically significant to be discovered in the field. They dug a lot of little test holes in the ground and spent some days seeking but apparently not finding the lost Incan city of gold or Atlantis or any other archeological treasures. Thus development could continue... Mom and I thought we had to take matters into our own hands and see if there was any last ditch efforts which could be expended to halt the building process... At last our search proved fruitful, there hidden in the tiretracks of a large machine lay our treasure! It just displayed a little rim of ceramic to us from the dirt grave. However our curiosity was peaked and we now would not be denied. We had to know what this thing was... Was it an ancient Indian burial pot? Was the former emperor of North America perhaps entombed here? We frantically dug on, using the only tools available to us, shards of the former pot?/bowl?/urn? We most likely botched up every single archeological dig rule - first of all stomping all over the ground in the vicinity, not using white gloves, not using a cute little vacuum, using a piece of the artifact to unearth the larger part, and not taking one single picture of the dig. However, sometimes in life, one has to break a few rules! After much blood, sweat and hacking, we managed to extract the below pictured object from the clutches of the muddy earth.

Its identity has since been made know to us, but as we carried it out of the field, multiple uses for this object filled our thoughts - perhaps it was a huge ceramic ashtray from the explorers who first discovered Mount Hope? Perhaps it was a lamp base for a huge primative searchlight used by the first inhabitants of this area to find their lodges back at night? Perhaps it was a tractor wheel mechanism - this was my best guess since it had two initials embossed on it "HI" which could have stood for Harvester International. Though HI could also be Hamilton International - which led me to believe it was part of an airplane which was accidently lost in the Twenty Triangle - slightly less well known but equally as mysterious as the Bermuda Triangle! Though this option was a little bit shady since HI can also be taken as IH which could potentially be International Harvester or Internal Hangover or Investing Hamilton)

The options were endless - we wanted to bury this object back in the middle of one of the archeological test sites and then call them up and ask them to take one last look - and then when the object was found, all the plans for housing development would have to be put on hold indefinitely as the experts were all called in to identify the mysterious thing and build a theme park to celebrate its history and then we would have so much traffic from the theme park that the initial housing development would start to look pretty good.

So in the end, we took it home, hosed it off and it is now on display on the outside table, a symbol of the past and our quest for discovery.

Mom's war wounds displayed alongside the mystery object.

Presumably the underside of the object... Happy guessing!