Good Milk

Illinois has weird weather--we've established that already. It also has no mountains. But, the state does have a number of things going for it like Abraham Lincoln and . . . milk. I have decided that Illinois has some of the best milk I've ever had. My family knows that growing up I was never a big milk drinker. I only really liked chocolate milk or regular milk if I had some chocolate to eat with it. But, I love milk now! Illinois has a lot of cows--fat, happy cows--and the milk that you buy at the grocery store is from local Illinois farms. So, I've decided that this must be why the milk is so good--because it is so fresh. It's so cool--the expiration dates on the milk are like two-and-a-half weeks after you buy it! My favorite brand is Prairie Farms milk, which is produced in Carlinville, Illinois--about 100 miles west of Charleston. It's declicious.

Anyway, today has been a good day except that it is really cold and snowy outside. Poor Stryder was carrying around about 100 extra pounds of salt and slush junk down around his tires, so I spent about a half an hour tonight knocking excess snow junk off of him. I think that this is the most it has snowed all year--there are probably about four inches or so on the ground right now. Earlier today we had to meet at the Dudley House to film that video we're doing for one of our class projects and for a university competition. My job today was to drive up in my car and walk up to the house like I'm totally cool--so all I had to do was act natural! :-) The next phase of our movie will need to be filmed at night sometime because part of the movie is supposed to be about the ghost that lives at the Dudley House, but I don't know when we'll do that. After the movie filming, I worked with Dr. Hardeman grading papers for the afternoon. He didn't fall asleep once! The funniest thing we read today was a student's essay about the 13 colonies. They were talking about different acts imposed by the British, and they referred to the "Currency Act," which, according to them, was England's way of saving the environment. The Currency Act, the student claimed, prohibited the colonists from printing any more newspapers because they were wasting a lot of paper. Actually, the Currency Act prevented the colonists from printing their own paper money--because everyone was printing their own, and all was chaos. Dr. Hardeman and I decided that the student who wrote that essay must be a big "green" person. It's a good thing that the British were so environmentally conscious back in the 1700s!

Tonight I'm going over to the local hang-out spot, the Panther Paw, to meet Catherine's new boyfriend Kevin who just flew in from Detroit. She is quite enamored, so I'll go meet him and see if I approve :-) Tomorrow it's off to Vandalia, Illinois to take some photographs for the upcoming exhibit. Thankfully Laurie is looking for something to do tomorrow, so she will be going with Dan and me. I really wasn't looking forward to hanging out with Dan by myself, so that will be good. Then Greg is coming in the afternoon, so we can hang out for the rest of the day! I love weekends!

The Reality of Logistics

Aw, I don't think I can get the kitty :-( Tonight I spent some serious time thinking about the logistics of it all, and I really don't think it could work right now. As fun as it would be to sneak him into my apartment so he could sleep on my bed at night, I did sign a lease saying that I wouldn't have any pets in my apartment. And even though my neighbors don't always hold up their end of their lease (like when they drink alcohol and listen to really loud music), that doesn't mean that I shouldn't do what I signed my name to in the lease. Then there would be the question of what to do with the kitty while I'm working on my internship. It wouldn't really be fair to leave Greg with the kitty for an indefinite period of time--especially since he has his little doggies to tend to. As many of you know (I'm sorry to those of you who I haven't been able to talk to in person about this), Greg and I have slightly adjusted our wedding plans due to school and internship stresses. We had originally planned on getting married on June 7th, but I discovered that my school schedule does not allow time to plan a wedding, and none of the internship possibilities in Springfield have been panning out. So there is a good chance that I will end up in Utah at Camp Floyd State Park for my internship for a few months (which would be a really cool and fun internship). That would just mean that we'll bump the wedding back a little bit until I can get my school requirements in the bag and can be in a better position to get married. I will keep you all posted, and I am grateful that Greg is being so understanding of my crazy schedule.

As far as the kitty goes, since I will probably be driving back and forth across the country, I don't think it would be possible to adopt him right now. I also realized that I have a hard enough time just barely taking care of myself each day, and I wouldn't want to be a negligent kitty owner. Catherine and I decided that some nice family in Michigan will surely adopt him because he is so very cute. Thank you to those of you who encouraged me to get him--I certainly wish I could! But I think he'll make some nice Michiganders very happy. Aunt Karalie sent me some pictures of her cute kitties, Zoe and Dumpster, and the cute Michigan cat looks like a mixture of the two.

Yesterday I received the cutest valentines ever in the mail! Thank you Camden, Riley, Sidney, and Eliza for sending such wonderful Valentine's Day greetings. You are four of the most adorable girls in the whole world.

I'm having a hard time going to sleep tonight, so I made a video about World War II war bonds. I have no idea why I did that, but it was kind of fun. You can see it by clicking here: http://americanimage.unm.edu/clip?id=415. Oh, man! I just barely found out that Aunt Karalie had to start chemotherapy last week :-( That is the worst news ever! I hope that she can make a quick recovery when all of this is over, and I am looking forward to being able to visit her during spring break. Everyone please keep her in your thoughts and prayers!

The Cutest Kitty

Is this not the cutest cat you have ever seen???? He is five years old and, like the famous cats at Ernest Hemingway's house in Key West, Florida, has six toes on one paw. He is currently housed at an animal shelter in Michigan. Catherine's sister volunteers at the shelter and sent Catherine this picture of the kitty hoping that Catherine could find someone to adopt him before he gets euthanized. I don't want him to get euthanized! Ever since I became a cat person, about a year and a half ago, I have always wanted to name a cat General Sterling Price, and then call him Ol' Pap for short (like the infamous Civil War general). Would this kitty not make the perfect Ol' Pap?? He's got Confederate general written all over him. And his big, fat paws melt my heart. Hmmm, do you think I could get away with housing a cat at my apartment? The Campus Pointe people give us a notice before they come check our apartments, and Catherine said that if we did sneak a contraband cat into the apartment, he could stay at her house during apartment checks. Aly is all for it. Catherine also said that she would pick the cat up and bring it back when she goes home for spring break. Unfortunately I don't think it could really work, but I wish it could--maybe we could make it work? What do you all think? Anyone want to adopt the cutest cat ever? :-) Greg, you know that your doggies need another four-legged creature to play with! :-) He's supposedly a super friendly, super cudly cat, and he's up-to-date on all of his shots, and he's potty trained.

It is snowing really hard outside, and it's cold and icy too. Today on my way back over to school after lunch, I accidentally did a perfect fish tail in the car when I was pulling out of the Campus Pointe parking lot. Even though I was being careful, the tires couldn't find anything to grip, and I did a movie-esque little 90 degree spin. Even though it was a good one, I don't want to do that any more--and I wish I could stay inside tonight. But, alas, there is more to be done today. I have institute class this evening, and then everyone is going out to eat for Dan's birthday. I would become the total outcast of the group (even more so than I already am because of being the only Mormon and Republican in the bunch) if I didn't go, so I guess I need to. We're supposedly going to carpool, so I am NOT going to drive in the snow! Speaking of Mormons, today Kristen was telling me that the missionaries keep calling her every few hours, leaving messages on her answering machine and wondering if they can come visit her (I think things might be a little slow for the missionaries here in Charleston right now). Kristen was totally kidding, but she said to everybody, "If any of you make me mad, I'm going to give the missionaries your phone number." :-) Alisha piped in and said (unlike Kristen, Alisha was serious): "Well, then, I am NEVER going to make you mad!!!" That made me laugh really hard inside. Alisha's eternal fear is that some Mormons--whether they be missionaries or classmates--are going to try to make her go to church.

Well, I'm going to go bundle up in preparation for going outside and heading to institute. Oh, I almost forgot to tell you a funny Mr. Riccio story. He's such a nice man, but he's a little spacy, and we never know what is going on during class. So, on Tuesday during class, we weren't really doing anything, and he was just kind of wandering aimlessly around the classroom. I had my textbooks out on the table, and he stopped and was looking at one of them. He said to me (he was totally serious), "What book is this?" Everyone stopped and stared at him in disbelief. I said, "The book for this class." He said, "Oh, where did you get it?" I said, "From the textbook rental place with all of my other books for the semester." He said, "Oh, cool, I haven't seen this one. Are you sure it's for this class?" Considering that we were sitting in our Museum Exhibits class, and the book's title is Constructing a Museum Exhibit, and the book is listed on his syllabus, I said, "Yes, Mr. Riccio, I'm pretty darn sure." I have a funny life here--but funny in a good way!

If I was a Podcast . . .

. . . I would look something like this :-) Tonight I am working on a paper about the use of podcast technology at museums and national park sites for Mr. Riccio's class tomorrow. Mr. Riccio likes Photoshopped pictures, so I thought I might as well score a few extra points by imposing myself onto an iPod for the cover of the paper :-) There is a cool lunar eclipse outside tonight! It is a clear, cold night here in C-town, so the eclipsed moon is quite visible. Hopefully everyone in Utah will be able to see it too!

It was soooooooo cold all day today. For today's Collections Care class, we went over to Mattoon and worked with the collections at the Coles County Historical Society research facility, and we all had to majorly bundle up to even go outside. We spent the entire day painting catalog numbers onto artifacts, and it felt very strange to be rubbing paint thinner onto old farming equipment. After the paint thinner, I had to paint some whiteout-like substance onto the metal, then write the number on top. Theoretically all of this painting on artifacts is supposed to be reversible, but taking it off is easier said than done, and I still don't like writing on artifacts. But, I do as I am told :-) And, I do like painting. I felt a little bad for Laurie because she had to catalog an old bed pan--ewww! :-)

My classmates are back to their old ways. I thought that Christmas break had cured us of our never-ending meetings, but 'tis not so. Yesterday afternoon during and after Mr. Riccio's class, we were working on re-numbering our museum exhibit items, and it took us from 2:00 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. Then, we had our weekly meeting at 8:00 p.m.! We spent waaaaay too much time together yesterday. I'm kind of used to it now though. Well, I'm going to get back to writing the paper, and Wednesday night is also my "Ghost Hunters" night on the SciFi channel!

The Mormons are Coming!

My classmates like to joke around with me and say, "Ahhh, run for your lives! The Mormons are coming!" :-) Everybody encounters the missionaries every now and then, and as I mentioned the other day, Kristen accidentally requested that the missionaries come visit her when she ordered a copy of the Book of Mormon online. She just likes free religious books and didn't mean to get the missionaries involved. The missionaries have called her multiple times, but she told them that she has a Mormon friend who would give her a Book of Mormon. Luckily I had some extra copies! I told her, "Well, you're the one who filled out the form online." ha ha ha. We will get her! :-) Last night before our evening class, my classmate Angie was eating dinner at the Thai restaurant here in town. She said that she saw the Mormon missionaries outside parking their bikes, then they came and looked into the door of the restaurant but didn't come in. Then they left. She said, "Maybe they realized that the restaurant served food from a non-Christian country or something?" I looked at her and said, "Angie, my sister went on her mission to Thailand. Missionaries can eat Thai food." She said, "Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot." :-) That's cool that one of Dad's missionaries in his branch is from Champaign! Good ol' Illinois folk. Well, I'm off to class, and then Aly and I are hosting this week's weekly meeting tonight, so I guess I should vacuum the apartment and do some dishes.

"Father, I Cannot Tell a Lie"

Happy President's Day! It didn't really feel like a holiday today because I had school, but I made the most of it by taking the yummy chocolate cherry sticks that Mom sent me to school and sharing the Taylor family tradition of eating cherry stuff on President's Day with my teachers and classmates. They all thought that was pretty awesome, and I was appalled to learn that no one had ever heard of cherry sticks before--or orange sticks, or raspberry sticks! Is the idea of fruit flavored jelly centers dipped in real milk chocolate just a Utah thing? I said, "You guys have never gotten orange sticks for Christmas??!!" My jaw hit the floor when they all said no. They think that cherry sticks are pretty amazing though. Of course somebody had to bring up the fact that the George Washington and the cherry tree story is just a myth--but that's what makes it extra cool! As the story goes, when George was about six years old, he got a new hatchet and found that he loved chopping things with it. One day he started whacking at a pretty English cherry tree in his family's garden. When his father questioned him about it, he said: "Father, I cannot tell a lie. I cut the tree with my hatchet." According to Parson Weems, the man who supposedly "invented" the story when he wrote the first biography of America's first president in 1809, George's dad replied: "Run to my arms, you dearest boy; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son, is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold." It's kind of like the story of Santa Clause--by saying it's not true, you ruin all the fun! If the story was indeed invented by Parson Weems to honor Washington and teach kids values, then so be it. Historians say that there is no proof that the story is true. Well, I say, where's the proof that the story is false? :-)

Today I worked with Dr. Hardeman and read papers to him for a while. As usual, there were some crazy ones. They were critiquing a book about the origins of American slavery, and going along with today's President's Day theme, George Washington was the object of many of the students' papers. Unfortunately they kept calling him a hypocrite, saying that he professed "liberty and justice for all," but he held slaves. These students would probably also say that Columbus was an evil man. Hmmmm, they need to understand the first rule of being a real historian: don't impose today's standards on the past!! Try to picture things in the context of their time!!! I am not defending the fact that George Washington had slaves--I'm just saying that just because he did doesn't mean he was evil. Unfortunately slavery was a part of the lifestyle back then, and I believe that George Washington helped to put in place foundations for our country that were later able to be used to eradicate slavery--it just took time, as all history does. That's my little President's Day soap box. I'm a big George Washington fan.

Today was a good but very busy day. I had my architecture class this morning, then work for Dr. Hardeman, then 19th Century Social and Cultural History tonight. In that class we're reading a book called The Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. It's basically all about the Second Great Awakening and religious revivals in upstate New York during the early 1800's. Hmmmm, sounds like a book that would at least mention Joseph Smith or the beginnings of Mormonism once!!! But it doesn't. The book talks about Palmyra a bit, but to mention a major American religion that was a product of the Second Great Awakening and that was founded by a young man who lived only 20 miles from Rochester would be an academic sin, I guess. I checked out the book's author, Paul E. Johnson, and discovered that he taught history at the University of Utah for about 12 years before moving to the University of South Carolina where he is currently teaching. That explains a lot--he's a U of U guy. Being the audacious person that I seem to be these days, I e-mailed Dr. Johnson and, trying to sound like an innocent, naive Illinois college student, asked him why, in his book about religious revivals in upstate New York, he never even mentioned the Mormons--the story of which epitomizes the social and religious turmoil of the Second Great Awakening. He hasn't written back :-) I'm kind of a smart aleck these days, aren't I?

Presidents, Pigeons, and Pie

Since it is President's Day weekend, here's an interesting tidbit about one of our most intriguing and complex presidents:

Andrew Jackson, or "AJ" as I like to call him, was the first president on whom an assassination attempt was made. A man named Richard Lawrence approached Jackson with two pistols both of which, for some reason, misfired. With the possibility of an assassination taken off the table, Jackson proceeded to beat Lawrence near death with his cane until Jackson's aides pulled him off the assassin. The guns were inspected afterwards and it was discovered that they were in perfect working order, leading some historians to believe that it was an odds-defying "miracle" that Jackson survived, while we're pretty sure that the bullets, like everyone else, were simply scared of Jackson. :-) Favorite Jackson quote: "I have only two regrets: I didn't shoot Henry Clay and I didn't hang John C. Calhoun" (which is especially funny when you remember that Calhoun was Jackson's VP for a while before they got into a big fight about South Carolina's right to secede and Calhoun resigned).

Whoa--it is SO WINDY outside! I've said it before, but I'll say it again: the weather here is really weird. Wasn't it just last Sunday, when Stryder froze to death, that is was something like 2 degrees outside? Today it is 55 degrees! But, before you get too excited and think that it is warm and balmy here, you must understand that the wind is also blowing at like 55 mph . Needless to say, the drive to and from church today was rather eventful. It wasn't as bad on the way over as it was on the way home. I just kept thinking that I'm glad Stryder has some meat on his bones and is a substantial enough car that he won't blow off the road. The 10 miles from Mattoon to Charleston is across flat, open fields, and so there is nothing to break the wind except for your car. I literally had to keep the steering wheel turned to the right the whole way to keep from blowing into the other lane. And, these creepy black clouds were moving so fast across the sky that is was kind of making me dizzy while I was trying to focus on the road. Craziness. Church was really good though. We had ward conference today. Someone in Relief Society said something good for me to hear: "When you take it by the inch it's a cinch, but by the yard it's hard." Mom and Dad are always telling me to just take things one day at a time--because when you try to think about the whole semester all at once, it gets very overwhelming, so I'll follow everyone's good advice and just try to take things by the inch.

We now have some pet pigeons. I'm thinking of training them to deliver messages for me :-) Just kidding--they're kind of causing problems because they poop everywhere (and we learned in our historic preservation class last semester that pigeon poop is highly toxic--seriously). I don't know who the lovely person was who left a bunch of bread pieces just outside of our apartment door, but when I opened the door yesterday morning, all of these pigeons flew away, nearly scaring the living daylight out of me. Two of the pigeons discovered that if they hid themselves under the stairs going from our apartment up to the next floor, it was a good place to stay out of the cold and be near the bread pieces. So, while the other pigeons have moved on, the two lovebirds have stayed, and I don't think they'll be leaving anytime soon. At least they don't fly out at you every time you open the door. They still poop a lot though, so I don't know what we'll do about that.

Mom sent me a special President's Day treat in the mail--cherry chocolate sticks--in case I didn't get any cherry pie for President's Day!! She is soooooooooooo nice. You will all be happy to hear that I ended up getting my President's Day cherry pie too! Last night everyone decided that we needed to go have some chicken wings at this place called Johnny's in Mattoon, and then after, it was decided that we needed to have a President's Day viewing of "The Washingtonians," and, since I have suggested the tradition to my classmates, eat some cherry pie. "The Washingtonians" is a great movie to watch while you're eating cherry pie. I think I've mentioned this before, but my favorite line in the movie is when this lady says, "George Washington chopped up cherry trees, not the arms and legs of little kids!" :-) Or did he??? Just kidding. The problem was, all of my classmates had gotten slightly tipsy while we were at Johnny's, and the talkative stage of being semi-drunk set in just as the movie ended. So, they kept talking and talking and talking. I finally just went into my room and did some stuff while they were out there talking (we had watched the movie over here at Aly's and my place). The classmates have come to a general concensus that the Campus Pointe apartments are the only places to live in Charleston. Our rent here is a bit higher than everyone else's, but they all have problems galore. All of their utility bills have been in the $200's since it has been so cold, but because we just have a set amount to pay for utilities every month, Aly and I really only pay about $25 each. And we have a washer, dryer, and dishwasher. It's a good place to live (despite the pigeons). Well, I'm going to go curl up in my bed with my heating pad to comfort my tummy, which is not happy today. Hopefully Campus Pointe won't blow away!