The Circle of Life

We are all very sad today because Dr. Small's cute cat, Bear, the big, fat, fluffy, mischievous black cat that always made us laugh when we went to her house, died :-( They had to have him put to sleep because he developed an infection that has been plaguing him for several weeks, and the vet said that there was nothing they could do for him, and he was in a lot of pain. Poor Bear. He was so cute!! He was one of the funniest cats I've ever met. He would romp around the house, jumping on things, and then he was always trying to escape outside. He had even figured out how the door knob worked, and if he'd had thumbs, he could have opened the door. Dr. Small and Mr. Riccio are very sad, and it was especially hard for them to break the news to their two kids who are away at school. I remember that when Aly and I spent our first night in Charleston at the Small/Riccio home (because we couldn't move into our apartment yet), I was really sad and homesick. But big, fluffy Bear was really nice to me and helped me feel better by making me laugh. Luckily Dr. Small and Mr. Riccio still have three other cats, a dog, and the two horses to keep them company.

On a happier note, there was a birth today! My best buddy Angie who lives in Pennsylvania gave birth to little Benjamin Lee Atkinson at 4:45 this morning!!! He was 7 lbs. 6 oz. HOORAY! He wasn't due until May, so he was a little early and will have to be in the hospital until his lungs get a little stronger, but he and Angie seem to be doing well. I wish I could be there to see him! But hopefully I can go visit them sometime soon--and I'm sure there will be pictures here before too long. It sounds like Angie and her husband Matt must have come to an agreement on the name. Matt, the biggest Civil War buff I know (and I do know a few) was pulling for Robert Edward Lee Atkinson, or States Rights Atkinson (there was really a Confederate general named States Rights Gist!), but Angie liked the named Benjamin, so it sounds like they came to a happy agreement with Benjamin Lee. Since Angie, like me, loves the Happy Bunny cartoon, I thought it would be appropriate to send the baby the pictured Happy Bunny onesie. Isn't it funny? It says, "If it's so good you eat it." Ha ha. There were some other funny ones, but this one was my favorite. I talked with Matt on the phone this evening, and he said that everyone seems to be doing well, so that is good news. Babies make life fun!

What a Year

Look! Dr. Rugh is totally famous. They had a cool article about her in the Daily Eastern News today. The article was entitled "Family Traveling Critical Part of American History," and began with the line: "Susan Rugh believes nothing is more important than family." Right on. It's cool that they wrote an article about her presentation!

Tonight we had the second presentation in conjunction with our exhibit opening, but it wasn't nearly as good as Dr. Rugh's. Our speaker tonight was Dr. Richard Longstreth from George Washington University. His talk was really long and a little boring.

There was another earthquake today! But nobody felt it. Supposedly it occurred at 12:40 this morning, but it was only a 4.5, so it didn't wake anybody up. Maybe the New Madrid fault line is collapsing! I once watched a thing on the Weather Channel called "It Could Happen Tomorrow," and they talked about what would happen if a really big earthquake happened along the New Madrid fault, and basically Memphis would fall into the Mississippi River and everyone would die. That would be bad. Hmmmm. Tonight I was surprised when I went outside and saw that the moon was dark red! It does say in the D&C that before the Second Coming "the earth shall tremble and reel to and fro as a drunken man; and the sun shall hide his face, and shall refuse to give light; and the moon shall be bathed in blood . . ." (88:87). And in Matthew it talks about "earthquakes in divers places."

Anyway, the weather was really, really, really nice here today. It was the perfect spring day and it smelled really good outside. Catherine, Laurie, and I went and had dinner at my new favorite place to eat in Charleston: Dogs 'n' Suds--a funny drive-in. I had the best hamburger ever, and I loved that they serve their root beer in frosty mugs. It reminded me of the drive-in in Natchez that all of the rangers (and Mom and I) love.

Speaking of Natchez, it was today a year ago that Mom and I embarked on our adventurous journey from Utah to Mississippi! We made it to Gallup, New Mexico that first day, but we had quite a time getting there considering that we got caught in a blizzard in Cortez, Colorado! Little did we know that the next day Stryder would break down along Route 66 in Moriarty, New Mexico! But luckily that was a blessing in disguise because it kept us from driving across Texas in the middle of a tornado outbreak. It's crazy to think that it was a year ago that we left, and that I've basically been gone for a whole year with just a few trips home. A lot has certainly happened in that year!!

Our Own Lincoln Pilgrimage

Yesterday was such a FUN day!!! Yesterday made all of the seven-hour meetings, the days spent building the train car, and all the hours spent listening to Mr. Riccio talk about light bulbs worth it. The exhibit opening was awesome, and everything went even better than we had all hoped.

One of my very favorite BYU professors, Dr. Susan Rugh, got to Mattoon on Friday night, and then she met up with me here in Charleston yesterday morning. I took her on a tour of town and campus, and then she wanted to eat lunch at Jimmy John's. We decided that Provo needs a Jimmy John's. There is one in St. George, but I think the BYU kids would like it in Provo. Then I took Dr. Rugh to the Tarble Arts Center, and she did a wonderful job giving a presentation about travel and tourism to kick off the exhibit opening. She talked about heritage tourism and pilgrimages to historic sites, focusing mainly on Lincoln sites. It was so great! Everyone loved it!! Her presentation was very interesting, and she brought just the right amount of humor into it. She was also very courteous even though some people asked some weird questions. She totally rocks!

Dr. Rugh liked seeing the exhibit too. Here we are sitting in the "economy class" train car. Dr. Rugh was quite impressed that we built the train car ourselves :-)


Greg and his mom were nice enough to come all the way from Athens, where they had taken a load of things from the house in Sullivan, to see the exhibit! That made it extra special to have them there. A lot of my classmates had their families there, so we had a pretty good crowd.

After the exhibit opening, Dr. Rugh, Greg, Pam, and I decided to take our own Lincoln pilgrimage, like Dr. Rugh had talked about, to visit Thomas and Sarah Bush Lincoln's grave and the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site.

Here we are at the grave at Shiloh Cemetery. Dr. Rugh thought it was especially pretty out there in the cornfields.



Then, we went to the Lincoln Log Cabin. Dr. Rugh thought it was really funny that people make a big deal about the Lincoln Log Cabin as an Abraham Lincoln site--even though Abraham Lincoln never lived there :-) As I've said before, if there's even a remote possibility that Abraham Lincoln may have slept someplace or drawn water from a particular well, they put it on the "Looking for Lincoln" tourism list :-) Greg and I posed for a cute picture at the cabin. Speaking of cute pictures, I saw some pictures of Greg when he was a baby, and he was adorable!!!! And that hasn't changed!

Then, the highlight of the pilgrimage was a visit to the world's tallest Abraham Lincoln statue. Dr. Rugh loves crazy roadside attractions, so she thought that Lincoln Springs Resort ("Honest Fun for Everyone") was just great. I learned something really funny about the statue--back in the 1980s it got hit by lightning which fried Abe's finger off and turned the whole statue black! He looks pretty spiffy these days though, with his fresh paint job. I can see how he would get hit by lightning though, because he is a lot taller than anything around him.

He really is very tall! After a visit to the statue, we went to dinner with the whole Historical Administration crowd at AJ's. It was a pretty funny dinner because Kristen had all of these slide shows that we had to watch before we ate, so we were all getting pretty hungry. The only table that had enough seats for us to all sit together was the table where Alisha and her parents and her boyfriend Matt were sitting. It was so funny! Much to Alisha's chagrin, her parents proceeded to tell Dr. Rugh that they were both BYU graduates, and they started talking about a bunch of church stuff. Matt was totally oblivious to what was going on and was asking for clarification on a number of things like "What is LDS?"--he obviously doesn't know anything about the person that Alisha was before she met him. The look of sheer horror on Alisha's face as the dinner conversation developed around the Church was priceless. It was great. :-)

The only sad part of the day was when it ended. I was sad to say goodbye to Dr. Rugh. She was going to head out early this morning to make it up to Chicago to fly home today, so we had to say our goodbyes last night. She is such a great person! I am looking forward to this summer when she and I will get to work together on an article about tourism at LDS historic sites. After dinner, Greg, his mom, and I went and got ice cream at Dairy Queen, which was super fun, but again, I was sad to say goodbye. There had been so much work and anticipation leading up to yesterday, so it was kind of like the post-Christmas let-down when the day came to a close, but I had so much fun with everyone, and I will always remember yesterday as a great day.

I am totally pooped today though, and I have a lot of homework and catching up to do before tomorrow. Even so, today is also a great day because it was six months ago today that Greg and I went on our first date!!! I am really glad that he called me and we went out that day! As soon as he asked me if I wanted to go to the Museum of Funeral Customs, I knew I'd found a keeper :-) I love you Greg, and I am so very excited that in less than six months from now, we'll be married!

An Earth-Shaking Exhibit

The exhibit is complete!!! I can't believe it, but it is finished. Both galleries are up and ready to go tomorrow, and we didn't even have to stay there all night. It must be an earth-shaking exhibit because the earth certainly shook out here today. Here is a little map showing how widespread the rumbling of the earthquake spread this morning. On this map, Charleston would be just north of the epicenter. Luckily the earthquake didn't knock all of the artwork for our exhibit off the walls! I was telling my classmates this morning that it would be just our luck if an after-shock came and knocked everything down. They didn't know what an "after-shock" was, so I explained it to them, but then there really was an after-shock! It was centered just north of the earthquake epicenter, and it happened at about 10:00 this morning. We didn't even feel it though while we were at the Tarble. We figure that we must have been hammering some nails into the walls or something because we didn't know it had happened, but then everyone started calling us and asking us if we had felt the after-shock. I guess it was a pretty good-sized one--a 4.5 magnitude. Everyone here in Illinois is kind of freaking out about it. They were worried about the skyscrapers in Chicago this morning, so they're checking everything out, but there didn't really seem to be any major damage. Quite the exciting way to kick of exhibit weekend! It really was a little disconcerting to be woken up with your entire bed shaking. A lot of people thought it was a tornado because I guess that the rumbling noise an earthquake makes is similar to what it sounds like when a tornado is coming. We've had some pretty bad weather this evening, but no tornadoes. That would be a little too much for one day :-)

Here is a sneak-peak at the E-Gallery with the train car and all. Do you see the crate I painted in the boxcar section of the train car? The whole gallery looks surprisingly cool, and we even have some interactive media on two wide screen computers which adds a little interest to the exhibit.
































Here's the best quote in the exhibit--by Eliza R. Snow! Ha ha ha. I was able to sneak some Mormon history into the exhibit after all. It is the perfect quote for our "changing transportation corridors" section:








So, tomorrow is the big exhibit opening. It should be a really fun and busy day, so I will for sure post more pictures tomorrow. Dr. Rugh is driving down to Mattoon from Chicago tonight (she got the extra travel bonus of feeling the earthquake last night in Chicago!), and then I will meet her over here in Charleston tomorrow. Thankfully Kit, who made Dr. Rugh's travel reservations, was wise enough to book a hotel in Mattoon, which has a variety of nice hotels. Charleston only has two motels, and they are both very questionable. So I'm glad Dr. Rugh will be at a nice place tonight. Tomorrow Dr. Rugh will be speaking at 1:00 in the atrium at the Tarble, then there will be a reception (including refreshments!) after her presentation so that visitors can see the exhibit. I think we'll have a lot of people there, so it should be great fun. Even Greg and his mom will get to come to Charleston for the day! We will all be having a dinner tomorrow evening at AJ's--Charleston's version of an "upscale" restaurant (with neon beer signs on the walls). :-) It should be a really nice dinner though, with a lot of my classmates' families in town, and we're going to be showing some videos about all of our crazy times this year. So tomorrow should be a busy but very fun day. The best part is that the exhibit is finished!!!

Oooh, I just found this cool seismic chart recorded today in Olney, Illinois--about 50 miles south of Charleston and 20 miles north of the epicenter. Crazy!

EARTHQUAKE!!!

Whoa! There was totally an earthquake here in Illinois early this morning! It was a 5.4 magnitude quake and the epicenter was in West Salem, Illinois, which is about 70 miles directly south of Charleston. It happened at about 4:30 this morning. On the news they are saying that it was felt as far away as Georgia! The earthquake totally woke me up. I was half asleep, but I wondered why my bed was shaking. I wondered if it could be an earthquake, but I didn't think so. I thought that maybe I was going crazy and was just dreaming it :-) So I was relieved to find out this morning that at least I am not going crazy (yet). It didn't even move anything on the walls here at the apartment, but I just had a scary thought--what has it done at the Tarble? Hmmm, I hope it did not disrupt yesterday's beautiful measuring and hanging job in the Brainard Gallery. I guess I'll find out in about an hour. Well, I'll give you an update later today, but I'm off to get ready for the day. I guess that all of my earthquake-preparedness training that I received growing up on the Wasatch Fault with earthquake drills at school and such didn't sink-in much because the thought of getting under my bed this morning did not even cross my mind. I just went back to sleep :-) This was the first time I've ever felt a real earthquake!