Sombreros and Styrofoam

Why am I doomed to always have to wear the sombrero at Mexican restaurants? I can't escape it--whether it is really my birthday or not, I always end up looking like one of the Three Amigos. The top picture was taken in June 2006 when the park rangers took me to La Fiesta in Natchez, Mississippi to celebrate my birthday. The Wesselmans and McClures took me to La Fiesta again on my birthday this past year, and again I had to wear the sombrero. The picture on the bottom was taken last night at Los Potrillos here in Charleston where the compadres decided to take me for my "half birthday" (since we'll be done with classes by the time my real birthday rolls around). Except--it wasn't even my half birthday yesterday--that was back on December 29, but since we were not here at that time, they decided that last night after one of our crazy meeting,s we needed to celebrate something (I thought we should just celebrate Elvis's birthday which was really yesterday). So, once again I got stuck in the sombrero with a sopapilla and a chocolate cake in front of me. Sorry that the picture from last night isn't very good--it's a scan of the Polaroid picture the Los Potrillos people took of me :-) I guess if we have to have one of our lame meetings, we might as well have fun too.

Today was the first day of my Care of Historical Artifacts (aka Museum Collection Management and Artifact Preservation) class from Dr. Reid. It will be a great class, but it is going to be freaking hard!! Basically we're going to learn all about preserving different types of materials and cataloging large quantities of artifacts. Today we had to identify a whole bunch of archival materials. I never knew there were so many types of foam! There's of course styrofoam as well as polyethylene foam, polypropylene foam, ethafoam, and ester foam. Styrofoam is bad for artifacts whereas the others are good for artifacts (except for this one type of gray mushy foam we talked about, but I can't remember what it's called). There are also many types of plastic document protectors (actually referred to as archival polyester), papers, adhesives, packing materials, and fabric gloves. It is going to be a chore to keep all of this stuff straight! This class will entail much, much, much reading and many field trips. We'll be going on a field trip pretty much every week. We go up to Springfield five times (the first time is next Wednesday) to meet with people at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, the Lincoln Library and Museum, and, of course, Abe Lincoln's house. The unfortunate thing is that for each of our field trips, we have to leave Charleston at 6:30 a.m. and won't return until 6:00 p.m. or later. Dr. Reid is going to try to cram two class sessions into each of our field trip days so that in April, when we're having to set up our exhibit over at the Tarble Arts Center, we won't have to meet for this class.

Today's class will also require us to each write a new collections care plan for the Coles County Historical Society, as well as a research paper about some aspect of the course material. After having only three out of my five classes so far this week, I already have three research papers to write this semester! :-( If tomorrow's two classes also require a research paper, I might as well just throw in the towel right now (just kidding). It will indeed be a busy semester, but I will surely learn a lot. I've already learned far more than I ever wanted to know about foam.