Birthday Sausage

Yesterday was Dad's birthday! I hope that he had a great day (even though he had to go to work). It sounds like the family had a very fun birthday party on Sunday night, and the girls were quite excited about the Book of Mormon "Go Fish" game they gave him. Speaking of birthdays, today is Catherine's birthday, and so she wanted to have a birthday breakfast at her house. I figured that since I won't be here for the combined Laurie and Catherine birthday dinner on Thursday, I'd better go this morning, so I showed up and cooked some sausage. Catherine made some crazy flax seed chocolate chip pancakes. After we ate breakfast, everyone got up and left, and she had a huge pile of dirty dishes in her sink. I suppose that since the breakfast was her idea she should have anticipated there being a lot of dishes, but I just didn't feel right leaving her with all of the dishes to do on her birthday, so I helped her clean them.

Now I'm trying to do the truckload of reading for tomorrow's collections care class. There is way too much information to even comprehend! We're learning about cataloging procedures, acquisitions, deaccessioning, loans, collections policies, legal issues, museum nomenclature, storage, condition assessment, monitoring, automated documentation, numbering, handling, measuring, and marking. I feel like crying right now because in addition to trying to wrap my mind around all of this, I have to go to the Dudley House in a little while, then I have to pick Dr. Hardeman up and take him home, then we have our ridiculous meeting tonight. Mom asked a very good question last night: since we'll be spending two hours in the van together on Wednesday morning, why not have our meeting then? Especially when we have so much reading to do and we have to get up early the next morning!!!! I asked Aly this question and she said, "Because it is what it is, and for some reason the weekly meetings at someone's house HAVE to happen." It's like the meetings control our lives :-(

We were supposed to go to the Dudley House at 3:30 this afternoon, but Mr. Riccio is in St. Louis installing a museum exhibit, so he said he won't be back until 4:00. I am dreading going over there and cramming all 11 of us into a room built for two or three people and going through everything to decide what we want to scan for our disaster of a website. I'm hoping that when I pick Dr. Hardeman up at 4:00, he's running really, really late so I don't have to go back to the Dudley House. There are only two keys to the Dudley House in existence, and one of them belonged to the History Department. The department secretery, Donna, was in charge of this key, and during the entire Dudley exhibit and presentation time, she was sure that one of us irresponsible students would lose the key. But we didn't. Then the History Department had their Christmas party at the Dudley House, and someone lost the key to the house there!!! :-) I wish that meant that we never had to go there again, but unfortunately there is that one other key which is in the possession of Norma Winkelblack--the Coles County Historical Society president.

Sorry it seems like all I've been doing is complaining lately--there's just a lot of crazy stuff that goes on here, and it wears me out. Tomorrow will be a pretty wild day up in Springfield. We're leaving at 6:30 in the morning and aren't scheduled to return to C-town until 6:30 tomorrow night. Dr. Reid is going to be taking us to the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency main offices where we'll look at their collections, then at some point we'll go to the Old State Capitol building to see how they preserve the collections there. Supposedly we have to fill out a bunch of worksheets and things like that throughout the day. It should be fun, but thinking about it makes me tired :-) Well, off to read some more before today's Dudley adventures (or nightmares)!