Dudley Eve

I'm burning the midnight oil again tonight! Once again, it says here on the website that it's Sunday morning, but to me it's still Saturday night--late Saturday night. I meant to go to bed earlier, but Dan, Aly, and I were watching "24" on DVD, and then I started working on stuff, and before I knew it, it was the middle of the night! I noticed in the picture at the left, which was taken today at the Dudley House after I had rolled out of bed, jumped in the shower, and gone over there, that I look a little tired. I think I'm developing dark circles under my eyes--a definite sign that I need more sleep. So I'm going to try really, really, really, really hard to do better at getting to bed. What was I doing at the Dudley House today, you may wonder. Well, today was Dudley Eve--the eve of the opening of the Dudley exhibit, and I took Aly over to the house this morning, planning to stay for maybe 30 minutes to help the exhibit team put up the exhibit panels. But, as always, 30 minutes turned into six hours. In this lovely picture, I am displaying a portion of the 15 foot roll of velcro we were using to stick the panels to the wooden display walls in the Dud House. We soon ran out of velcro, so Dr. Reid and I made a velcro run. She expressed to me that she was a little frustrated with the exhibit team because they were making everything a lot harder than it had to be. I told her that it's like that with everyone about everything--thus the seven-hour meeting a couple of weeks ago :-) We decided that everyone in the program is so totally focused and loves to work so much that people are making more work for themselves. It's like everyone thinks that you're supposed to be stressed out in grad. school, so they stress themselves out by making things more complicated than they need to be. Dr. Reid said that she never imagined in a billion years that the Dudley project would turn into such an ordeal. I think she felt a little better when I told her that it wasn't just this project--everything our class does turns into an ordeal :-) After the velcro run, while Dan, Aly, and Kristen stuck panels to the walls, Dr. Reid and I sifted through the pile of Dudley artifacts and papers that had been pulled out to be scanned for the project. I thought we had been upstairs for about an hour, but when we left it was 3:45 p.m.!

Thankfully Dad prepared me with a toolbox in my car before I left for school. It has come in handy many times, but today nearly every object in the toolbox was utilized. The first panic this morning was that they needed a screwdriver. I said, "Oh I have one in the back of my car." For some reason they were very surprised by this. I told them that I literally have everything back there that they could ever need (except for velcro)--including a week's supply of non-perishable food. They didn't believe me at first, but then they realized I was serious. Some of the foam core labels looked really bad, and they were wondering how to fix them. I whipped a file out of the toolbox and took care of filing off the rough label edges. Then they needed electrical tape to cover the lamp chords, and I had that too. :-)

There was one nearly catastrophic incident at the Dudley House today. Dr. Reid and I were upstairs with the artifacts, when Kristen came running up there holding an extension chord that was smoking. She said, "Dr. Reid! I think this chord almost caught on fire!" It smelled terrible. I guess that they plugged it into the wall, turned on the lights, and then, as the story goes, Kristen thought she heard something burning. Then they smelled something strange. Then they saw smoke coming from the wall. Luckily they pulled the chord before any flames erupted. That's all we would have needed--to burn down the Dudley House the day before the exhibit was to open!

I finally ate lunch at 4:30 this afternoon then Catherine and I worked on our Dudley presentation together. Needless to say, I'm a little tired of the Dudleys right now. Usually I'd be able to take a break from them on Sundays, but it will be another Dudley day tomorrow (today) because of the exhibit opening. Earlier this evening I was able to take a little break from everything, but I've been working on the HA website since then. Check out the new activities page: http://www.eiu.edu/~history/ha/2008%20Activities.htm. I still need to make some changes and add some things, but it's coming along. Well, I'm going to go take a little nap for a few hours before church starts :-)