Home Office Sort-Of-Makeover

Ta-da! I present the result of about 45 minutes labor this morning - a new & improved home office space.  We got the magnetic board and picture ledge at IKEA recently and I've been waiting to put them up.  I love having the board right there now, waiting for notes, reminders, inspiration, etc.  And the picture ledge gives me a space to finally display my Bachelor's and Master's degrees, as well as my husband's Bachelor's and his Army Achievement Medal certificate.  His Master's in teaching will take over that spot once he's got it.

Now that I'm working from home one day a week (since it's winter), I'm happy we could carve a more officey space out of the guest room.  And for under $30.  That's museum professional frugality at work.

And one more thing - happy 4th birthday to Museophilia!  I started this blog four years ago for a class assignment and here we are now.  To be honest, I get very few readers, but that doesn't really bother me.  I just love thinking & writing about my field & my work and this space is a great way to chronicle all that.

A Museum-Only Moment

You gotta love it when you are searching for an old family Bible in the museum's collection and you find one from 1814, yet it's not even the right old-ass Bible.  :)  What other kind of job gets you that conundrum?

Unionised

Pretty cool flag, eh?  One of my museums is preparing for an exhibit on women in the Civil War and this is going to be a featured artifact.  A local hatmaker sewed it from millinery scraps when she realized the city's first regiment did not have a flag with which to march off to war.  Love it.

Rhyming & Scheming

The above shows how I spent much of my work day today. January in my museums is all about planning. We're too small to be able to plan 2012 much in 2011. So once the calendar turns over, it's go time!

Natural Heating

I worked on Saturday at one of my museums, doing a public event for our annual holiday festival.  The plan was to read some Christmas stories (The Night Before Christmas, the final chapter of A Christmas Carol, and Snōshoo the Christmas Bunny, which was written by one of our volunteers) by the fire in our 1710 house.  After that, I had some simple Christmas crafts (paper chains, paper snowflakes, and cranberry/popcorn garlands) and a scavenger hunt set up back at the museum.

We ended up getting around seven kids and a few adults, but everyone came at different times, so I never did read the stories.  Instead, I hung out over at the house for a couple of hours, tended the fire, and talked with the visitors who did come over.  I may have also nibbled a few of the gingerbread men in the photo above.  :)

I know our weekend manager was disappointed that more kids didn't come, but I left out the crafts and scavenger hunt for later kid visitors to do.  The museum was open seven more hours after I left around 1pm, so I'm sure we got some who enjoyed those activities.  And as for my part, as I said to my mother via text, "I'm hanging by the fire now.  No visitors.  But hanging by the fire in a 1710 house.  So  :)."

Grey Majesty

I had to work this morning, visiting a school to talk to some young students about the Native American history of the area.  It was a fun program, but a rainy, messy day, so I was happy to be done for the week around 11am.  I hurried out of the building to my car, but stopped for a quick shot of this lovely church.  Even grey stone on a grey day can sometimes seem to glow.  Love it.

The Scuttlebutt

So after a late night at the museum, I got up around 6:15 this morning and headed down to Hartford with the curator of one of my museums.  We were attending the second day of the 2011 New England Museum Association conference.  The workshops I attended were interesting (the view above is of people listening to a great period wallpaper reproducer), but the best part, as usual, was the gossip.  ;)