Woolly Mammoths and Winter Weather

It's starting to feel more like winter outside today--it's been cold and rainy all day, but later this week it should be nice again. I popped a picture up here of a pretty fall tree out behind the castle here at school today. Even though it was a dreary day outside, the leaves were still bright and beautiful.

Today for our Museum Exhibits class, we went on a field trip up to Taylor Studios--great name--in Rantoul, Illinois. It is about an hour away from Charleston. Taylor Studios is a fabrication company that makes exhibits for museums all across the country. In fact, they just shipped some exhibit materials out to the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City! They're doing a project right now for Gettysburg NMP, the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans, and a whole bunch of other places. They are a really neat company! You can check out their website here: http://www.taylorstudios.com/. Everyone who works there is very nice, and we got to meet with their CEO today who is especially nice. She said that if any of us want a job there she'll hire us. It would be a cool place, but would one want to live in Rantoul, Illinois? Hmmmm, maybe. Our favorite part of our tour today was seeing the LIFE-SIZE woolly mammoths they're making! In the picture here, we are posing in front of the momma mammoth, but she's not quite done yet. At this time she has not hair on her head, and her body is separated from her legs. Her legs are gigantic though! I think they don't have her legs on yet because she would be too tall for the building she's stored in. They also had a cute little baby woolly mammoth who was probably about six-feet tall. It was a really cool place, and we had a fun time there. I tried reading New Deal books in the van on the way back to C-town, in preparation for the T-Dud presentation on Sunday, but the books were terribly boring and I kept falling asleep on Angie's shoulder.

This afternoon I did more T-Dud stuff, then went to Institute class this evening. I was the only student who showed up, so class was nice and short, and then I went over to the library and read microfilm for a couple of hours. The funniest thing I found was when a senator from Michigan spoke angrily of the "glib-tongued, smiling and curly-haired boys of the NLRB." Tilford was the trial examiner for the NLRB at this time, so he was surely one of the "boys of the NLRB" to which the senator referred--though T-Dud didn't have curly hair, but "glib-tongued" is probably a good way to describe him. :-)