Woolly Mammoths and Winter Weather

It's starting to feel more like winter outside today--it's been cold and rainy all day, but later this week it should be nice again. I popped a picture up here of a pretty fall tree out behind the castle here at school today. Even though it was a dreary day outside, the leaves were still bright and beautiful.

Today for our Museum Exhibits class, we went on a field trip up to Taylor Studios--great name--in Rantoul, Illinois. It is about an hour away from Charleston. Taylor Studios is a fabrication company that makes exhibits for museums all across the country. In fact, they just shipped some exhibit materials out to the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake City! They're doing a project right now for Gettysburg NMP, the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans, and a whole bunch of other places. They are a really neat company! You can check out their website here: http://www.taylorstudios.com/. Everyone who works there is very nice, and we got to meet with their CEO today who is especially nice. She said that if any of us want a job there she'll hire us. It would be a cool place, but would one want to live in Rantoul, Illinois? Hmmmm, maybe. Our favorite part of our tour today was seeing the LIFE-SIZE woolly mammoths they're making! In the picture here, we are posing in front of the momma mammoth, but she's not quite done yet. At this time she has not hair on her head, and her body is separated from her legs. Her legs are gigantic though! I think they don't have her legs on yet because she would be too tall for the building she's stored in. They also had a cute little baby woolly mammoth who was probably about six-feet tall. It was a really cool place, and we had a fun time there. I tried reading New Deal books in the van on the way back to C-town, in preparation for the T-Dud presentation on Sunday, but the books were terribly boring and I kept falling asleep on Angie's shoulder.

This afternoon I did more T-Dud stuff, then went to Institute class this evening. I was the only student who showed up, so class was nice and short, and then I went over to the library and read microfilm for a couple of hours. The funniest thing I found was when a senator from Michigan spoke angrily of the "glib-tongued, smiling and curly-haired boys of the NLRB." Tilford was the trial examiner for the NLRB at this time, so he was surely one of the "boys of the NLRB" to which the senator referred--though T-Dud didn't have curly hair, but "glib-tongued" is probably a good way to describe him. :-)

Fabulous Fall

Wow--today was a pretty fall day! It was about 80 degrees and sunny outside. It was, however, a little too windy. Today on my way to and from church, which includes about a 10-mile stretch of open prairie land, my car was almost blowing away, but it didn't. I can't believe how pretty all of the leaves are right now. It's supposed to change a bit tomorrow and turn about 15 degrees cooler and perhaps rain a little. It should be in the 60's through most of next week though, so that will be nice. It sounds like a different story at home in Utah! I can't believe that it snowed so much last night!! Winter seems to have come to the West early. I'm sure we'll get our turn out here eventually.

So I went to church today and had a nice time there. Greg stayed at his parents' house last night, so he came to church down here today. We had a good time chatting, and he said that if no one dies this week, thus mandating a viewing next Sunday, he'll plan on coming to my Dudley presentation. So, let's cross our fingers and hope he's free next weekend--all of the girls in the program are dying (pun intended) to meet him! Speaking of Dudley presentations, we had #2 today at the Dud's house. Laurie and Alisha presented today, and we finally got to meet the mysterious Matt, or the boyfriend that we have hear so so so so so so much (too much!) about. I was beginning to wonder if he was real, but I guess he is. I'm pretty nervous about my presentation next week--as I mentioned before, I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around everything I need to talk about. I'm sure it will come together though (it will have to)! Well, I'm off to go visiting teaching in a few minutes, so I'd better eat the rest of my egg fu yung really quickly before I leave.

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.