A Date with Greg and the Dead

Trivia question: The casket pictured here is a replica of which famous person's casket?

A) Elvis Presley
B) John Wayne
C) Tilford Dudley
D) Abraham Lincoln

I would have guessed Elvis, but it's a replica of Lincoln's casket!! How snazzy is that? I wouldn't have pictured Lincoln as being buried in a snazzy casket--more of a stately casket. This replica casket is on display at the second-craziest museum I have ever visited: The Museum of Funeral Customs, located just outside of the cemetery where Abe himself is buried. The first most crazy museum I have ever visited was the Louisiana Country Music Hall of Fame and Tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier (yes, it was all combined into one place) that Angie and I visited this past summer :-) The museum today was really interesting though, and they had some craaaazy stuff on display there. They had information about early embalming methods in the U. S., as well as the funeral customs of different religions. They also had info. about different funeral traditions such as Presidential burials--and of course they had a big section dedicated to Lincoln's burial process. I picked up a brochure entitled "The Embalming of President Lincoln," which informs us that Lincoln's body was preserved using a mixture of zinc chloride and hydrochloric acid. The embalmer guy had to travel along with the body on Lincoln's funeral train journey back to Springfield, and he made frequent cosmetic touch-ups to the President, as the "grim nature of the murder" caused various facial discolorations. My favorite part of the museum was the gift shop. They had these funny t-shirts that said "I dig the Museum of Funeral Customs!" Ha ha ha. I've got to get one of those sometime.

Who better to visit the Museum of Funeral Customs with than a mortician? Greg Bowles, the very nice son of some people at church, who also happens to be a mortician, picked me up this morning and we took off for Springfield. It was a perfect fall day today--sunny, warm, and the leaves were beautiful. Our first stop was the museum, then we of course had to visit Lincoln's tomb. There were some hilarious people at the museum. They were an older group, and they said that they used to run a funeral home in Iowa. They wanted us to take pictures of them out in front of the museum because they had been wanting to come to this place for years--it was surely the happiest day of their lives. We ran into them again at the tomb, and they were so enthusiastic about everything that you had to smile. Greg and I decided that should there ever be a tornado, like there almost was the other night, Lincoln's tomb would be the place to go. That thing will surely survive any natural or nuclear disaster. And Lincoln's body, under two tons of concrete, will surely be protected forever.

Well, after Lincoln's tomb--that's when the true excitement began. :-) Greg works at a funeral home about 15 miles north of Springfield in a little town called Athens (pronounced Ay-thens--strange, like all town and river pronunciations in Illinois). The mortuary is located in this cool building that has been there since 1892. The funeral home even still has the same name as the original company that was based there! Greg showed me all around--including the hidden places where there are still old caskets from the 1800's stored. It was even better than the museum! They even have an old horse-drawn hearse there. Then, I was kind of curious about the embalming process, so it's my own fault that we entered the "prep" room, as they call it, but I was not prepared for all that I learned in the prep room. Basically he showed me all of the tools and chemicals that are used to drain a body of blood and get it ready for burial. I really was intrigued by it all, but when we got to a certain part of the process, which, for the sake of all who may read this, I will refrain from describing, my head started to feel a little fuzzy. I have had this sensation in hospitals before and realized that if I didn't act quickly, I was going to pass out on the floor of the embalming room--not a place I would want to pass out!

I said to Greg, "Um, this may have been a little too much anatomy for me today. I think I need to sit down for a second." Then I felt all the blood drain from my head (it was probably afraid it was going to get drained out of my body if it didn't move quickly), and I got super dizzy. So I hurried and sat down, and Greg got me some water. I recovered pretty quickly, and he said that I did much better than when he first took his brother on the tour. We decided that it must have been the smell in the room. It smelled very chemical-ish, and I decided that I never want to be a mortician. In fact, I never want to die--because I don't want my body taken to a "prep" room :-) Other than the fact that I almost passed out, I actually found the tour to be very informative.

After the tour, we drove back to Springfield and had a tasty dinner at T.G.I. Friday's, which was very good and helped restore my face to its normal color :-) Then we hit the road again and headed back to Charleston for a delicious ice cream treat before calling it an evening. I had a great time, and hopefully he and I can do something again sometime (although I'd prefer not to visit any more mortuary prep rooms).

I got home just in time to go bowling with all of the HA kids for Sarah's birthday. We went to Charleston Lanes, which is a really funny place. It was Saturday night "Cosmic bowling," and they had this deal that if they put a pink pin down with your other pins and you got a strike, then you won a free game. I got a strike with a pink pin, so I won a free game! I also won both games we played, so thankfully my near-fainting experience did not affect my ability to bowl. Well, I'm off to bed now. This is going to be a long week. We've got more Dudley presentations tomorrow, then I have to make a presentation in my Museum Admin. class on Wednesday about a guy I've never heard of, and then next Sunday I need to give my Dudley presentation. Maybe instead of talking about Tilford and the New Deal next week, I could just talk about how Tilford's body would have been embalmed at his death--I know more about that now than I do the New Deal!

Photo Album = Fortune Cookie

Hey, I just discovered that the article from the Charleston Times Courier about the Dudley presentations is online! Click here to see it. Thankfully there ended up not being any tornadoes here last night, but unfortunately some bad storms did a lot of damage in other parts of the country. This morning I've been compiling the bibliography for my upcoming Material Culture paper, which I am quite excited about. I love writing papers (seriously)! I had originally planned to write a paper about floorcloths for that class, but after talking with Dr. Reid and doing some research, it evolved into: "Interpreting Antebellum Slave Culture through Material Culture: A Case Study of Louisiana's Cane River National Heritage Area." No, the new topic has absolutely nothing to do with floorcloths :-) I was thinking about it last night and I wondered how I went from floorcloths to Cane River--and I don't know how it happened exactly, but I think this will be a fun paper to work on. I am excited because I will be submitting said paper to be considered for the upcoming Material Culture Symposium held at the University of Dealware next April. The professors encouraged us to submit our papers for this conference, but I think I'm the only one who enjoys writing papers, so I might be the only applicant from EIU. The best part is that if my paper is accepted, the university will pay for me to go to the conference--hooray! I love free trips.

You may be wondering what the title of this blog entry is talking about. Well, it's kind of a funny story. You see, about two years ago, I ordered an old photo album on e-bay. I was looking for pictures for a project I was working on, and this album had some from the 1930s and 1940s. I didn't know what any of the photos looked like, and I can't even remember where it was sent from. You have to remember that this was back in the day before I had even thought about where I wanted to go to graduate school, and I didn't even know that there was a city named Natchez--I thought it was just the name of a steamboat in New Orleans. Well, when I received the photo album in the mail, the first page had one photograph labeled "Natchez, Mississippi 1941," and then a series of photographs of Abraham Lincoln's tomb in Springfield. I had been to the tomb before, so I recognized that, but I didn't think anything of it, and I didn't know what Natchez was. Well, later on after I ended up in Natchez and decided to go to grad. school in Illinois, I was going back through those photos and saw that random Natchez picture. I also noticed that it was there with a bunch of Lincoln photographs--it's like it was predicting all of the places I would end up! I wondered if the Lincoln's tomb photos meant that I was supposed to go to school in Springfield, which I did consider at one point, but then I ended up not going to the U of I at Springfield and hadn't thought about the photo album for a long time. Well, Mom called today and told me that she was flipping through that photo album, and there are pictures in there from the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site back in the 1940s!!!! I had totally forgotten about those photos--it truly has predicted my future! Forget fortune cookies, the photo album knows everything. Although last night I did get a fortune cookie with my dinner, and it said "Right now there's an energy pushing you in a new direction." The fortune came true in that the energy of tiredness pushed me right to bed after everybody finally left! Now the energy of nervousness about next week's Dudley presentation is going to push me from my apartment to the library to read more microfilm.

Chinese Tornadoes

Today was a crazy day. This morning when we woke up, it looked like the sky was falling. There were these really low-hanging gray clouds that were moving at what looked like about 100 miles per hour. And the wind was blowing really hard. When we got home from school, however, it was nice and sunny outside--thought it was still windy. Last night's rainstorm had left us a little present: Lake de Campus Pointe in our backyard, shown here. This is the biggest that the lake has ever been. It almost looks big enough to swim in . . . or boat, or fish? This afternoon I did homework for a long time, then I fell asleep, then I woke up and did more homework. It was still sunny outside until about 5:00 when a few clouds blew in. When I talked with Mom on the phone at 6:00, however, things outside changed quite rapidly. Mom told me that there was a tornado warning in Charleston. I hadn't heard anything about it, but then I realized that I'd been so wrapped up in homework that I hadn't really been paying attention to anything else. So I turned on the Weather Channel, and there was the lovely warning beeping noise telling us that there was a tornado spotted near a little town to the southwest of Charleston. And the tornado was heading northeast! During the 20 minutes that I was on the phone with Mom, it went from gray to black outside. The second picture here was taken outside at 6:30--long before it usually gets dark, but it was pitch black. As you can see from the picture, it was a little nasty to the west of us. Aly and I were scheduled to meet Dan at the QQ Buffet to get Chinese food, but we were a little nervous to go outside. We figured, however, that the QQ Buffet was as good of a place as our apartment to be should the tornado come, so we headed over there. When we went outside, it was really hot and completely still and silent. That's almost worse than if it had been storming--it just felt like creepy tornado weather out there. Aly said, "I feel like I'm in the movie 'Twister.'" There was some crazy lightning in the sky, and there was this giant mass of blackness that looked like it was heading straight towards us. Thankfully, however, in the time that it took for us to order our Chinese food and leave the restaurant with it, we could see that the mass of blackness was heading to the north of us. There was still some crazy lightning, but the nasty stuff skirted around us. It was kind of creepy, though, how quickly it got so completely dark outside.

So we brought our Chinese food back here to the apartment and watched the Weather Channel while we ate it--endless excitement! Then Alisha called Aly and said she was bored, so she came over to watch "The Office" with us, which is hilarious. Then everyone wanted to watch a few episodes of "24," so we did that too. Alisha is really nice, but she is always, and I do mean always, talking about her boyfriend Matt (who none of us have ever met, so we wonder, does he really exist?). She talks about him constantly--during class, at meetings, while we're watching TV--all the time. Almost every comment that comes out of her mouth begins with, "My boyfriend Matt . . ." So, during "24," at a crucial and exciting moment, her phone rings, and she picks it up and says, "Hi Sweetie! Hey, can you guys pause it for a minute." Then she went outside and talked with him for about a half an hour. I'm a little irritable lately, and this irritated me. Plus, she was drinking all of my Diet Coke (which I only have to help me through class sometimes, but still--she was drinking all of it). Oh well, I think I just see waaaaaaay too much of all these people! I need to not be irritable though, so I'll work on it. The Chinese food we got was really good. I had egg fu yung.

Tiffany Chair

For Material Culture today, our assignment was to find a piece of furniture fitting within the time periods of Eastlake, Art, Arts and Crafts, or Art Nouveau. When I found that Louis Comfort Tiffany made Art Nouveau chairs, I had to do that! I didn't know that the Tiffany Glass and Decorations Company made furniture, but Tiffany was trained in all types of decorative arts, including metalwork, painting, ceramics, and wood work. This particular chair was made in 1892 in New York City. The diamond-shapes on the arms are really intricately detailed. Each piece of wood making up the diamond is surrounded by a minute layer of brass. It's a very cool chair, and I enjoyed learning about it. Everyone liked that Tiffany reported on a Tiffany chair :-)

We are famous for our T-Dud exhibit and presentations! The Charleston Courier printed up a big article about our project!! We've gotten really good feedback about it, and people are telling us that they are excited to hear the remaining presentations. In fact, Catherine and I found out that one of the Political Science professors has offered his students extra credit if they attend our October 28 presentation about Tilford's career--whoa, no pressure there! The Dudley House isn't very big, so we can't fit too many more people in there than we had last week. I think I forgot to mention on Sunday that the Coles County Historical Society served birthday cake at the exhibit opening--in honor of Tilford's 100th birthday :-) All of the professors love the website I updated the other day--especially the fact that they can access the Dudley exhibit.

Well, I have a random Halloween-ish date on Saturday! A few weeks ago at church, one of the men there was asking me about myself, and he said, "Hmmm, I have a son who lives in Springfield. I'll need to set you two up sometime." I didn't really think anymore about it, but then a couple of weeks ago the son, Greg, showed up at church. We just talked for a few minutes, and he seemed really nice, but again, I didn't really think anything of it after I left church that day. But then last night I got a call from Greg, who just so happens to be a mortician up in Springfield! How random is that? :-) He's going to come pick me up on Saturday, and we're going to spend the day in Springfield. He especially wants to go to the Museum of Funeral Customs--which is where I've been wanting to go!! How funny is that--I'm going to be going to the Museum of Funeral Customs with a mortician! :-) The museum is located in the same cemetery where Abe Lincoln is buried, and I guess it's a pretty famous place. I never thought I'd be going on a date with a mortician, but somebody's got to do that job. And, you know that he'll always have a job--definite job security there. He does seem very nice, so I am excited. It's kind of funny because he did part of his schooling in Utah and interned at a mortuary in Orem, where I'm from (the Sunburg-Olpin). Ha ha, it's a small world! Today Catherine and Sarah were asking me about the date, and I told them that we are going up to the Museum of Funeral Customs. They thought that was totally cool, and then we started talking about how we should all do our internships there. We decided that instead of living history programs, we could have dying history programs! :-)

MORMON CHILDREN

Sorry that I was kind of grouchy yesterday. I employed my conflict resolution skills, and we worked things out amongst ourselves. Catherine realizes that it was a little unfair to expect Dan and me to write the whole storyline for the exhibit, so it's all good now. Today is a happy day because we had no class this morning, and Dr. Hardeman is out of town, so I'm FREEEEE! I slept in a little bit, and now I'm doing some laundry, homework, and cleaning--things I didn't have time to do this weekend. Alyson and I have to get the apartment cleaned up for the HA meeting tonight--it's our week to host it here. Maybe that means we can kick everybody out after one hour! :-) I should tell them that there is a 9:00 curfew at our building and all guests must leave at that time.

Last night I had a great time reading microfilm at the library. Reading newspapers on microfilm can be kind of addicting--because once you finish one day's paper, you have to move onto the next, and then the next, and then the next because you want to see if there's any good stuff in there. Last night I was reading the Charleston Daily News printed here in Charleston, Illinois. I was looking at the front page of the December 9, 1936 issue, hoping to find something about Tilford Dudley, but instead I saw a big headline that said: "NO WAR TOYS FOR MORMON CHILDREN." Random! I was quite surprised to see that on the front page of the newspaper in Charleston. The article was about how the Relief Society issued an official statement saying, "How inconsistent it is on the holiday honoring the birth of Christ to put into the hearts of children, by means of their toys, the very opposite of the message that heralded His birth, 'Peace on earth.'" The article went on to say, "The Mormon church organization asked America's Santa Claus today to exclude from his Christmas bundle all warlike toys." :-) Speaking of Mormons in the news, the other day Dr. Hardeman told me that even though he is a died in the wool Democrat, he doesn't think people are being fair to Mitt Romney. He said, "These people giving Mitt Romney a hard time about being a Mormon are about as un-Christian as they come! What is our country coming too?" Right on, Dr. H. I told him the joke that if we really wanted a Presidential candidate who fit all of the criteria for "first ever," we would elect Gladys Knight. She's a woman, she's African American, and she's a Mormon--all in one person! He said that if Gladys Knight were running for President he would switch parties.

Back to the microfilms. Just before I called it a night, I finally found something about T-Dud in the paper! It was soooooo funny. On Friday, February 18, 1938, the Charleston Daily News ran an article entitled: "Local Man Fined in St. Louis Court." The local man was none other than T-Dud himself! The article related that he was fined $30 by the police for "speeding 55 miles an hour and ignoring a stop sign." At this time Tilford was serving as the trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board in DC, but he was in the area for the big court case against the Ford Motor Company's St. Louis operations. I guess that back in the 1930s, they were pretty serious about speeding violations--the article says, "He was arrested late at night, Feb. 5, by Motorcycle Officer Riley Evans, who reported Dudley drove north in Grand Boulevard between Park and Chouteau avenues, at 55 miles an hour and crossed Chouteau against a signal without stopping." Fortunately T-Dud was famous enough that he did not have to be present in court, and he had an attorney pay the $30 fine for him.

I read through a whole bunch of newspapers last night, but that's the only thing I found about T-Dud! You'd think that in Charleston, where he was from, that they would at least report his being nominated to FDR's administration or something like that. But I guess it's more interesting when someone gets arrested for speeding. Well, I'm off to do some homework.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Hmmmm. I'm a little mad. Or maybe frustrated is a better word for it. The three-and-a-half hour meeting last night was in regards to the exhibit label outline that was due today in our Museum Exhibits class. It was a multi-part assignment, and since for all of our exhibit projects we are paired up in teams of two people, Catherine and Laurie--the exhibit curators--decided that they would have each of the partnerships work on one section of the assignment. Dan and I, the "Photography and Web Design Team" got assigned to write the storyline for the exhibit labels. This, first of all, is problematic in that we, being involved with the technical, not the conceptual stuff, have no idea what storyline the exhibit writer people want to use. So, they expect us to read their minds and come up with all of the information for the entire exhibit in one night (we had to complete our part of the assignment last Wednesday). Dan and I were totally confused about what they wanted us to do, so we did our darndest, but Catherine was quite upset that we ended up being "on a different page" than everybody else. Well, hello, we're not even going to be involved with writing the exhibit text, so why would we be on the same page as those who are--especially when no one even knows what the exhibit is going to focus on anyway!!!! So, at the meeting last night Catherine basically wanted to change everything Dan and I had done--which was fine with us, and it truly didn't have to take three hours to do. If Catherine knew exactly how she wanted the storyline to go anyway, how come she didn't just do it--since she seemed very irritated that she had to fix our work. Aly was hoping that Dan and I were okay after the meeting last night. Personally, I didn't care--I just wanted to get the dang assignment off of our backs. Aly said that the other day when the other groups were completing their parts of the assignment, Catherine instructed them to disregard the storyline that Dan and Tiffany had done because it was way off. These people are kind of making me mad! Sorry to complain--this is actually very therapeutic to be able to vent a little :-)

One more thing I need to vent about: in regards to ideas for the corridors exhibit (which will open in April), everybody is being totally impractical!! We spend hours throwing out ideas--99.9% of which could not possibly work. I'm all for being creative, but everybody needs to realize that we have very limited time and resources. But try telling them that, and they'll look at you like you don't have faith in their abilities. Sigh. Oh well, there is one bit of good news: we don't have our Research and Interpretation class tomorrow, so that's three more hours of time to work on other stuff! Hooray!!! Well, I'm off to Institute class, and then I think I'm going to go spend some time with Tilford Dudley on the microfilms at the library. I'll try not to be upset about everything. Oh, and one more reason why I'm a little grouchy is that my computer has a weird virus. I don't know how it got it, but it's really acting up. I had to spend a lot of time today, time which I didn't have, fixing it. I think it will be okay now though.

The Tilford Train

This morning when my alarm went off, waking me up from my little nap, I opened my eyes and realized that I felt like I got hit by a train--the Tilford Dudley train! I couldn't get out of bed to go to church. :-( I was completely exhausted, and another day was just barely beginning. I realized that this was not a good thing, so I started trying to plan how I could fit a nap in between church and the Dudley exhibit opening. According to my groggy mental calculations (while I was still half asleep) I would not have time for a nap--and I couldn't take one after the exhibit opening because we had another class meeting scheduled for this evening. Suddenly I realized that if I kept going at this pace I was going to have a relapse of my cold or get mono or something that could totally take me out for a while. So, I did the only thing I had energy to do and I turned off my alarm and went back to sleep. I slept until noon, but I woke up refreshed and feeling much better about everything. I think I just needed a morning off. I felt bad I missed church, but if my body were to shut down, I wouldn't be able to go anyway, and I'd rather not have my body shut down, so this was probably the best thing.

So, I got up, had breakfast, got dressed, and then it was off to the Dudley House. One of the people from church showed up at the Dudley House. Turns out he's one of the directors of the Coles County Historical Society! I told him sorry that I wasn't at church, and he said, "Oh, that's okay. Today the academic ox was in the mire!" There were a lot of people at the opening of the exhibit, and everyone seemed to love it. Angie and Sarah presented lectures about Tilford's childhood in Charleston, and everything went really well. Next week Laurie and Alisha will be talking about Charleston and the Dudley family during WWI, and then it will be two weeks from today, October 28, that Catherine and I will be presenting about Tilford's career as a lawyer and labor advocate. Everyone seemed very enthused about the exhibit and lecture series, so that was encouraging. A man named Harold Marker, one of Tilford's childhood friends even showed up today! He's super duper old, and Angie and Sarah said they were afraid they were going to lose him up on the front row a few times, but he perked up there towards the end and was telling all of these funny anecdotes about life in Charleston back in the day. You can check out the exhibit on our new web page I made! The direct link to the Dudley info. and pictures is: http://www.eiu.edu/~history/ha/2008ActivitiesDudley.htm.

After all of that was over, it wasn't too long before we had to have a class meeting to talk about one of our transportation exhibit assignments that is due tomorrow. It never ends! Catherine assured everybody that the meeting wouldn't go longer than two hours max. BUT, I'm sure you can guess what happened. It was a three-and-a-half hour meeting. It's sad when that seems like a "short" meeting--I was just glad that it didn't go for seven hours! Kristen said, "Maybe next time we should say that we're going to have a six hour meeting just so we can finish sooner than we plan for once." I immediately said, "NO!! We all know that if we planned for a six-hour meeting, it would turn into a ten hour meeting!" She concurred. I have decided that I really, really, really, really don't like school meetings. If someone is in charge and you have a purpose, that is one thing, but otherwise it's a total waste of time. And I hate wasting time--especially when I have other things to do. I get really antsy at these meetings, but everyone else seems to love them. Are all of my classmates crazy? I often wonder. The one bright spot at the end of the long meeting was that tomorrow we only have one class--no more Digital Applications for now! I miss the days when I had real weekends :-)

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 :-)