A week of troubles

Hello everybody,

So I didn't post last week. I had some serious car trouble. Very serious. You see, I "used" to drive a 94' Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was a pretty good car. I had it for a little over two years. It made it up to Kentucky and it made it back (of course it only made it back from Kentucky because my dad switched cars with me while I was up there.) Its broken down a couple of times, but normally cause I was stupid or because it was old.

Well, needless to say. I'd been waiting. I had a feeling it was going to cop out on me sometime soon. So when I left Cherokee county last Tuesday I was slightly concerned when for just one second, the Transmission didn't shift gears and dragged. However, it only did it once. So I thought, "Oh. I probably didn't warm up the engine long enough." So last Thursday, the day I was supposed to write my blog post, I was going to go out with my mom to do some Antiquing about 30 minutes away. Luckily, I had to run a few errands.

As I left the gas station to go to the post office. My car started doing that dragging thing. I told my mom, who was naturally concerned, that it just needed to warm up. It did it Tuesday.  I left her in the car with the engine running as I ducked into the post office to drop off a package. Oh good lord, I had just barely made it out of the parking lot when the darn thing's transmission started messing up again. I wasn't sure if we would make it home. Especially since the only way home, from the post office, is using the freeway, and my car wouldn't go above 35! No matter how hard I pressed down on the gas it stayed stuck in first gear. Luckily, I know the back way home along a little mountain road. So I got us home.

We didn't go antiquing. Which is good. See, I told my dad I was buying a new car. I couldn't use the jeep anymore. When he got home from work he checked out the car and decided that was probably a good idea. We decided to take it to the shop on Monday, which is why on Monday you also didn't get a post I was planning on writing. Then we would go car shopping over the weekend. Didn't find a car over the weekend so we decided we'd hit a few dealerships further away to find a used car. My dad drove my car to his work so he could drive it to the shop. He got it into a parking space and it quit! Wouldn't even bother going into first gear anymore. We had the shop tow the car.

Monday afternoon we went to Decatur to buy a car. I got the first one I was interested in. A 1995 (an upgrade :D) Infiniti J30. Which is a nice car, by the way. I got it for 3000 because I don't let salesmen push me around and well, that was almost all the money I had in savings. (Yeah, still jobless.) But the important thing is I have a working car. It, of course, has an idling issue and Tuesday I found out that the lock can get stuck. I'll work on those as soon as I get a job.

Now for the museum stuff! Actually, I have something very exciting to report. First, I finally got a friend to come help me out this Saturday! Yay! Even better, this Saturday they're having a guy come in to show visitors how to flintknapp. So that'll be pretty cool. It'll be the busiest day I've ever seen.

Guess what's even better though. No really. Guess.


Okay, I'll tell you. I finally figured out what I'm doing for that exhibit I'm designing. (Mentioned in last post.) And! The director approved my idea! So, this Tuesday I was looking for things to put in the exhibit. Cause, you can't have an exhibit without having artifacts. Wanna know what the exhibit's about?

A history of objects. (Oh man, just saying that makes me realize I have to come up with a title for it!) Well here's what its basically about. We're going to take everyday items. Like phones, toys, games, cameras, and household or kitchen items. (Probably household) Can any of you think up a good title for an exhibit comparing items used from the 1900s to now?

This is what I have to do to prepare for the exhibit. I have to: come up with the title, make a list of the artifacts I'm going to use, locate the artifacts that are in the museum, make a list of the artifacts I need to get a hold of, decide where to put the exhibit, decide how the exhibit is going to look, write up all of the information that will go in the exhibit, and of course put the whole exhibit together. All of this will have to be approved by the director. It gives me a headache just thinking about it.

Well. I've got a good idea of what artifacts I'm going to use. Except for the household items. I found board games I can use, a spinning top from the 1940s, and tons of old toys. The phones, except one, are at the director's house waiting to be put in the system. I know where the cameras are, generally. I just have to actually find them. The cameras are the frustrating part. See, I found out Tuesday that all... wait. I have to go back further.

Before the museum board hired the director (remember I just call him that, its not his actual title and he's not a museum trained person) the museum was run by a man who was also not trained, then after he died it was run by a few volunteers. The museum has these shelves mounted along both the east and west walls. I say shelves but today there are really only two left with shelves on them. The frames have been turned into wonderful exhibits. Each one of these frames had about 5 or 6 shelves on them. Each one of these shelves was crammed with no rhyme or reason. The director told me, it used to be so bad that the items actually reached up to the ceiling. Its a pretty high ceiling. Sometime in the last two years, all of the stuff cramming those shelves were boxed up and put upstairs. Or, not boxed up and put downstairs. The cameras were on one of those shelves. The cameras are in a box upstairs on a new shelf system. Each range upstairs, and I can call it that because it is the length of a single library range at New Mexico State University, has five or six sections with about 5 or 6 shelves on each section. Each shelf has two to three boxes. The ones with less than three have an artifact placed on the shelf as well. There are three of these ranges. In each box is anywhere from 2 to 20 artifacts.

I know this because I decided, since I'm looking for the cameras I might as well inventory the boxes. Tuesday I pulled down a box that had two bed pans in it, most definitely used before. The next box I opened had china from 5 different companies! Plus, a stamp holder, a tape dispenser, an unknown item, and two pieces of fleece cloth. When I asked the director if the cloth maybe had been used to protect the china, he told me nothing had been packed well. They only packed those boxes as fast as they could to clear space, so they're probably in the system. What! The fleece pieces were about the size of a handkerchief. Why in the world would you have that in a museum without any information attached to it! Gah!

Inventorying is just so much fun! < said in a sweet falsetto tone. Actually, it is. Especially because I like getting frustrated. And you really don't know what you're going to find. Which takes me to the last bit of writing of the day. So Tuesday I was entering stuff into the system. (I have a huge list that's built up and I don't want to risk losing the paper and having to redo things.) I was looking up items I knew nothing about, like this ashtray on shelf 37. Well, I went to look at it. I had a picture of it, but it was only of the front. So I turned it around and there was a maker's mark on the back. I typed that into google and came up with what it actually was.

That wasn't an ashtray! It was a porringer bowl that was eventually used as an ashtray! Don't know what a porringer bowl is? Well neither did I. A porringer bowl, which has been used since the medieval ages, is a bowl that you eat porridge or gruel out of. I got really excited. Is it pewter? Because the company on the back made pewter bowls in the 20s and that would be cool. Alas, fate is cruel. It was not pewter. I did some research, to make sure it wasn't a reproduction. You never know, also the director wanted to know its value in case we needed to lock it away. The pewter bowls from Stede (the company) have the handle soldered on. The later aluminum reproductions, probably made in the 60s (I was unclear on that), have the handle cast on. Another cool thing I learned. Pewter bends super easy. Like, really really easy. This thing, didn't bend at all. And when I looked at the handle, sure enough, it had been cast on. So we have the reproduction aluminum bowl. Which, neat fact, the aluminum bowls were used as ashtrays and various other items. Because really, who eats porridge nowadays? Not many people, that's for sure.

That's it for this Thursday. Look forward to a Manageable Monday this coming week.

84/More Thousands than I thought.