Big 'n' Fluffy

Today was a "big 'n' fluffy" day--meaning it was necessary to break out my big 'n' fluffy red coat for the treacherously cold weather outside. It was FREEZING all day today!! This morning when we went to class, it was one degree outside, but the wind was blowing, so it felt like it was well below zero. My big 'n' fluffy keeps the bulk of my body warm, but my hands, legs, feet, and head freeze--even if I wear gloves, scarves, hats, etc. The sun was out, but as Aly and I were walking from the parking lot to Coleman Hall, we felt like our faces were going to fall off! I think this is the coldest it has been here all winter. I checked weather.com, and it said that the low tonight will be ZERO degrees. I don't think I'll be going outside anymore this evening! Luckily tomorrow it will warm up to a balmy 27 degrees.

Today was kind of a long day of classes and meetings, but we got a lot done. It was a little hard to stay awake in Dr. Barnhart's archives management class this morning--after being outside in the cold and then coming in to the warm building. I think I've said this before--but it's amazing how much he can talk! :-) This afternoon for Mr. Riccio's Digital Applications class, we had the university web guy come meet with us and work out a way to do the Tilford Dudley website. That was a good way to do it--then we were all able to give our input, and it wasn't like I was in charge of the whole thing. I threw out the idea that instead of uploading the pictures of the Dudley collection to our own website, we should upload the pictures to e-bay and sell the Dudley family artifacts to raise money for our spring field trip, but Mr. Riccio and Dr. Small weren't agreeable to that :-) Speaking of our mandatory spring field trip, it will probably take place during the first week of May--after we finish finals. We had hoped to go to New Orleans or Washington D.C., but we don't have enough money or time to do that, so Dr. Barnhart and Dr. Reid are going to take us to Cincinnati, Ohio to see, among other things, the Underground Railroad Museum. That should be pretty cool.

I was supposed to go visiting teaching this afternoon, but after Mr. Riccio's class, we all met with Dr. Small and the Tarble Arts Center lady to discuss the script for the upcoming museum exhibit. They thought what we had was pretty good overall, so thankfully there isn't too much we need to change on that. We will, however, have to change the floor plan of our exhibit so that we can fit everything in, but hopefully that won't be too bad. Dan and I have been given the assignment to go take pictures of random transportation corridors and gas stations throughout the area, so hopefully it will warm up a little one of these days and we can get that done. I've been trying to be nicer to Dan, so he's been a little nicer to me, although he still makes random derogatory comments about Mitt Romney. He can't say too much though, because he's one of the classmates who is from Michigan, and we all remember what happened with the Michigan primaries! I'm pretty tired tonight, so I'm glad that tomorrow is Friday. It will still be a busy day, but at least I won't have any classes. It's cool that I have a three-day weekend every weekend, but unfortunately it always kind of turns into a zero-day weekend because of all the stuff we have to do :-)

The latest news from Coles County is that a group called Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Farm are going to try to sell deeds to square-inch property plots from a four acre tract of land that used to be owned by Abraham Lincoln. The funny thing is that Abe never farmed the land--he just purchased it so that his dad, who owned the adjacent land, could use it for growing crops. I don't think that the city is going to allow the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Farm to divide the land up into such small sections, but we'll see what happens. You can imagine though, that if the deeds go up for sale, people will be jumping to buy some Abe Lincoln land! As I said yesterday, you know you're famous when mice found in the walls of your house are mummified and put into a museum collection. And, I might add, you know you're famous when people want to use your name to sell souvenir land plots of farmland you never farmed!