Yesterday, Lori and I put out flyers for the Music Festival on Mitchell's Main St. and I made several notes about the different coffee houses and antique shops I need to revisit. After I got back to the museum, I helped Ada, Ruth, and Jean fold membership flyers. Oh those old ladies are sooo much fun! We just laughed and laughed.
After lunch, I spent the afternoon completing a very unique and exciting project. A man named Mick Hersey showed up and had an encyclopedia’s worth of information for us about some old family photos we had in our archives. His mother brought some back in 1967, and he had brought a huge box of more pictures in 1970 and 1974. He was back in town for his father’s funeral, and he has spent the last several years doing genealogy research so he could now tells us who was in the pictures, who they married, where the pictures were taken, who took them, EVERYTHING! Lori let me take care of him, which was so great. We went into the basement for a good 2 hours and I pulled about 60 photos from the 5 huge file cabinets that house our accessioned photograph archives. I would pull them, he would write down everything he knew about them, and then I’d put them back. Some were hard to track down, but we did end up finding all he was looking for and while we were doing it, he was telling me all about the pictures and drawing up family trees for me. So once we got all the pictures found, Lori had me get into PastPerfect, pull up every picture, and add into each picture's file all the information Mick had told me. Took me about 2 hours to get it all entered because there were so many connections among the pictures and PastPerfect was happy to have every possible detail I could dig up. By the time it was all over, I felt like I knew Mick Hersey’s family history better than most of his siblings.
Best part came towards the end of my PastPerfect entries. A few of the pictures were not yet entered into the archives, so I got to give them accession numbers and put my own name down as the cataloger! YAY! I’m in the system! :) Kind of an exciting Monday: I spent most of it alone in a dark, scary basement going through filing cabinets, and the other part of it at a computer entering all my findings into the database!
But that was Monday. Thought I couldn't beat it, then I got to DD this morning.
If yesterday was my crash course in cataloguing, today was my crash course in rehousing. Went to the basement with Pat for 3 hours and worked on a 18” by 22” photograph of a beautiful young woman…or what we thought was a photograph. Once we put on the gloves, took it out of the intricately carved and painted frame and examined it, we discovered it was actually a charcoal drawing. BEAUTIFUL! Took us til noon to get all the scratches, stains, and spots recorded. We even found a few charcoal fingerprints from the artist on the back! Then we cut out new backing and a new frame support, cleaned the glass, put the frame back together, applied the new backing, attached new hanging gadgets, and hung it in the huge stack-like hanging galleries in the basement. Whew! What a morning! Tedious and stressful, but oh so exciting! By the time I got to sit in on Lori’s marketing meeting at 1:00, one of the board members said I was glowing and asked if I had just gotten engaged or something. That made me laugh, especially since my response was, “No, I just got done rehousing this really cool charcoal piece in the basement!” :)
Not a whole lot of action this afternoon. Ran some errands with Lori and got things ready for the Music Festival on Saturday. Cleaned the glass display cases, put up more flyers around town, and made out our schedule for Friday for picking up ice cream, sodas, coolers, etc. Not as much fun as the morning, but it’s all part of the job, and that charcoal piece really did make it all worth it!
Really hot the last few days, but not terrible humid like home. It’s just at that point of hot that I’m glad I’m in AC all day. By the way, I want to give a shout out to my amazing Grandpa Roger, who celebrated his birthday yesterday. I also want to give a shout out to my equally amazing Grandpa Geiger, who passed away fourteen years ago yesterday. I’ve been thinking about him a lot today and how he always smelled like his pipe. Miss you Grandpa!!
Also putting up some pictures of my host family's house! Me and Clay and Cindy worked outside over the weekend so the lawn and gardens look WONDERFUL! Enjoy! :)
Wild flowers in Cindy's yard. We're not sure what they are, but they're GORGEOUS and they smell heavenly at night.
Cindy's Place. It's her little shed with some old antique pictures, furniture, and a fan so we sit out there and read and talk at night.
Clay's truck....I'm helping him fix it up as much as he'll let me. :)
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