Wild Archival - Day 13

I can't believe it's already been two weeks! Things are going by fast, but work wise the pace has settled into a comfortable tedium. I'm doing folder level inventories at the moment, which means pulling out every folder in the building, taking a quick look at what's in them, and recording the contents with a description that will help people find things, but won't overwhelm with too much information. I missjudged the time this would take by a number of days, but that's why I developed an open schedule.

The great thing about getting down to folder level is that you end up in contact with pretty much every item in the collection. As a result there have been some great finds. I'm holding off on scans until I get posting permission, but I'm going to show off a few of the cooler artifacts that have shown up at the bottom of a drawer or hiding behind paper.

There was a set of four of these. They're old Kodak negative books. The front is a slide index for easy cataloging and retrieval, and the slides are kept in transparent paper to allow for ease of viewing without one needing to remove the negatives from their places, or so the little description on the inside cover crowed. The negatives were the size of the paper you see here, huge.

I'm not sure what this pipe is about, and neither was the archivist I talked to yesterday. She suspects that it may be a family heirloom from Norway. The head can be removed and the whole thing is a little longer than my arm. This photo is crap so I may try for another one later.

This is a galley for one of the many books published by the Muries. I had never seen anything printed in this sort of format.

My photography skills here are pretty bad, but they give you the gist of what I've been turning up. Of course most of the material I'm working with are not artifacts like these but simple paper materials. The majority are letters, speeches, or articles.

There were some really nice days this week so I took advantage of one to walk the "around the world" trail here at the ranch. It's a three mile or so circular trail that begins and ends at the back of our property and runs through some pristine little areas. You lose sight of anything resembling civilization a few turns in, and the trail is only minimally upkept. Sometimes you can see a wear in the ground, sometimes dead wood has been arranged as a sort of curb, and sometimes the only thing indicating the right direction is a little orange tag hanging from a branch. I managed to wander off the trail twice, but the area is safely hedged in by road and water, so I was unconcerned and managed to find my way back easily.

I didn't see many animals during my walk. A chimpmonk and I had ourselves a staring contest, and I certainly found evidence of animal life, mostly in the form of big piles of elk and moose poop, (and some poop that looked a lot more carnivorous, which kept me on my toes.) I don't know if these guys poop so much that there will naturally be a ton landing smack in the middle of the trail, or if they're planting land mines on purpose, but I ended up stepping into one at least once. Luckily it's all dry. Ahem. Sorry for the TMI.

Another ubiquitous sign of animal life was in the ground squirrel tunnels that spread out like veins in the soil. When I got here spring was just grabbing hold and there wasn't must going on on the ground, but now everywhere you go there are holes and little mounds indicating tunnels. On the ranch there's one tunnel that's nothing more than an entrance on the side of the path and an exit on the other side two feet away. You'd think at that distance the little critters would just decide to run it.

While I didn't get a peek at many mammals, I did see a ton of birds, including a predator of some sort. It was probably a little under two feet tall and was perched at the very top of a pine, screeching.

Spring is taking it's damn time getting here, and even now the flowers are only just begging to bloom with any seriousness.

The path was still relatively brown, although at some parts the grass had taken over so much you couldn't see the wood placed down as guides. There were some beautiful little openings in the trees where the Tetons stood as backdrop for a beautiful little creek. The trees themselves were a little less impressive. Some sort of moss seems to be eating up the entire evergreen population, so there's a ton of fallen wood, and the threes that are standing are sort of naked from the bottom up for a good number of feet.

At one point in the path the little branch guide turned left into a marshy area. The path literally disappears into still water that's covered in slime, and the only way through is to walk across this fallen tree. At first I thought I had taken a wrong turn, but the little orange trail marker was hanging over the water like it was no big thing, so I pushed forward. The tree was rotten and barely as wide as my foot so I had to make my way sideways, and the branches that touched the water, along with the land all around the side of the submerged area, was covered in this thick white stuff. When I looked closer it looked like spiderwebs of some sort. So as I'm walking along this log I have the image of an infinite number of water spiders sleeping under the surface, just waiting for me to trip and stick my foot in.

The best part was that this dead tree did not even have the courtesy to be long enough to reach the other end. So once I got to the tip I had to make a leap onto a far bank, and then push through some dense forest before coming out where I was supposed to.

It was worth it though. At the other end was a clearing covered in blooming larkspur. Quite the colorful little reward. And the ranch turned out to be only a few feet away.

I didn't take my camera on my walk as I preferred to just soak things in without thinking about shooting, but when I go again I'll take a few pictures as illustration.

Speaking of pictures, we had a group in this week that spent the last three days getting up at 4AM to shoot in the park, coming  back for lunch, and then leaving at 5 to do it all over again. It one of the many programs the Murie center has, and was led by a professional photographer local to the area.

Turns out when events happen we employees get to enjoy some major perks. We were allowed to go out on the shoot, which I didn't take advantage of because I value my sleep too much, but we also got to eat with the group. This didn't just mean I got to munch on free pizza. They bring in a professional gourmet chef (and awesome guy) who makes delicious food and saves leftovers for the employees. I have been eating like royalty for the last few days, let me tell you. Pumpkin pancakes with orange icing, some of the most tender pork I've ever placed on my tongue, and yesterday night was this:

Buffalo meatloaf stuffed with mozzarella, some sort of green, and pepper. It was soo good. Desert was a lemon cake and chocolate mousse made with kailua creme, and topped with strawberries and whipped cream. There are leftovers in the fridge so I am set for days.

I really should update more, considering how much is going on and all that I'm leaving out for the sake of brevity, but I suppose that's enough for now. I'm going to grab some meat loaf and chill for the night.

Wild Archival - Day 6

Look who showed up to the ranch a few days ago!

I was sitting down to have some lunch when out of the window I see this cow moose who has decided to do the same thing. She was munching on greens on the ranch right next to the path I take to go between cabins, so I decided to let my soup go cold and grab my camera.

We're literally inside the national park, with no barriers restricting access by wildlife, so anything can walk right up to our cabins, and they often do. There was a cabin just to the right of where I took this picture, which was my go to shelter if Miss Moose decided I was being annoying. As it was, she just looked at me in that, "I really don't want to run but if you move I will," way that beasts of prey do, I took a few pictures, and then snuck back to my soup. By the time I had finished she had disappeared.

As far as moose are concerned I guess she was pretty small. Maybe a few hands shorter than a horse. She still looked big enough to beat me up though, so I kept a respectful distance.

Whatever it is that is living in the roof of the archive building doesn't seem to like my taste in music, because every once in a while I'll have a song on and he will start chattering incessantly until I turn it off. Everyone's a critic.

I've settled into the archives as much as I can really. It's hard getting my bearings in there, because I don't have all that much experience with management (read: none) and there isn't any documentation on how things were done before. So I've kind of been playing detective, looking for clues about what was happening before I came onto the scene. This isn't easy when all you've got are some scribbled notes and a few files on old projects to work around. Plus, I get to play with this program called Past Perfect, which is enough of a topic for its own post later.

The most exciting part about this week is hands down the flooding warnings. One of the first things that happened when I came up here was a notification by the national park service that they had moved all of their archival material to a secure location on higher ground in anticipation of flooding, and that we should consider doing this too. So I got a little crash course in disaster preparedness, calling people and getting them to agree to house material if need be, trying to figure out what would need to go and where it was, and realizing that we had no means of getting most of this stuff out of the building if flooding did happen. Most people at the ranch are not very concerned, so I'm taking my queues from them, but it would be really nice to have some boxes available. That's first order of business next week, assuming the icepack waits until I get boxes delivered before it decides to melt all over us.

This is our adversary right now, the Snake river. It's been raining on and off all week, and as you can see the water is already high and a little angry. If the snow on the mountaintops melt suddenly, we are going to have a pleasant little flood. So far so good. I'm am crossing my fingers so hard that it stays that way.

Today was the start of my first weekend up here, so I took advantage of that to take a trot down to the river by way of a small hiking path. The path is wonderful. You still have a view of the road through the treeline, but cars go down that particular path so rarely you might as well be deep in the wilderness. Wilderness up here in WY is much different than the forests I'm used to. The land is a little rocky, and peppered with shrubs and clusters of flowering plants. The trees here are a good mix of pine and birch and others that I'm not familiar with, and are not particularly dense, so you can see quite a ways through them. The path itself is nothing more than a little land worn down between the shrubbery, but it's well kept. A few fallen trees have gotten themselves hacked in half for committing the crime of impeding foot traffic.

Just past the river you can step off onto another foot path that goes through an open plain and spits you out a couple hundred feet at a small retail cluster. I had myself a delicious lunch of pulled pork sandwich, onion soup (NO CHEESE! I was a little put out by that.) and hot cocoa (which made up for the cheese issue.)

I would say the view from Dornan's is great, but the view from everywhere is great. It's particularly nice here, because you climb up to get to the area, and get to enjoy the mountain range free of interference from the treetops. At some point I might have the myriad peaks memorized, but at the moment the only peak familiar to me is Grand Teton, and then only from the ranch. I know some people can point out each individual peak like the faces of old friends, but they still all look the same to me. Well, I've got a month.

Wild Archival - Day 1

There are things they never tell you when you begin your training as an archivist. One of those things is this: you will spend as much, if not more time, protecting the archives under your charge from weather, mold, and pests as you will playing with all the tresures in their boxes. Sure, the material you get to work with makes everything worth it, but dealing with that material takes about 10% of your time. The rest of it is spent chasing grant money, inspecting shelving for the teltale signs of critters, convincing the public that yours is a collection worth valuing and preserving, and chasing after chaotic data.

It's all fun of course. It can just be exciting in ways you don't at first anticipate.

Today was my first official day on the job. I've bitten off quite a chunk of work for the next few months, and don't anticipate being able to swallow quite all of it, but I'll do my best. And I can't help but enjoy the perks of my position in the meantime.

I'm living up in the mountains, literally inside a national park. My commute at the moment is a one minute walk from one cabin to the other. The living quarters I've been given is a little room on the end of a larger log cabin. The nights here are still cold, but I've got a little space heater that keeps things at a pleasant 65 degrees through the night. And the view is pretty much ideal. There's a large open space in front of the cabin where guineapig sized gophers chase each other, and I've already seen elk wander out of the tree line and graze about. The mountains poke out of the treeline, and I've got a direct view of Grand Teton Peak. Yesterday was so warm and pleasant I spent most of it reading and writing on the porch in the company of a particularly loud bumblebee. At one point a humming bird buzzed by, hovered a few feedtfrom my head, took a moment to ponder my existance, and then flittered away. That's my life right now.

It's not all play and pristine wildlife though. Yesterday I brought a few visitors into the archives to look around. They were inspecting the bookshelves when one of them said, "There's a mouse in one of your traps." I hadn't even really started work at this point, and didn't even know there were traps in the building, so my immediate reaction was, oh great, I'll take care of it tomorrow.

Well, today is tomorrow, and as I was going through my predecessor's work I found a folder on pest control in a museum setting, complete with survey forms and replacement sticky traps. Welp, I figured, I guess I should get this done with now and put it behind me.

I go to where the guest pointed out the first trap, and sure enough there's a little tail poking out of the cover. At least it's not moving, I think to myself, and lean over to more closely inspect it. Turn out there was more than a mouse in that trap. The entire thing was covered in little brown spiders. Immediately the archivist in me is thinking, "Is that a bad thing?" while the wuss in me is thinking, "Oh God, I have to touch that don't I?"

What's more, there were 11 of these traps, including one with a second, bigger mouse in it. I spit out some four letter words to steel myself up, put on some archival gloves, and got to work collecting them. Once I had them all in a neat little line in the middle of the room the really fun part started. I had to inspect every trap for signs of species dangerous to organic material such as books or artifacts. That meant opening every trap up and counting every ant, spider, and whatever else managed to get itself stuck.

These traps had been set over a year ago. There was a LOT of dead things to count. The spiders were probably the worst, and they also made up about 90% of the count. Spiders = ok for the archives but kinda creepy for me, particularly since there is a slight chance that a majority of them were brown recluses. However, none of the 100+ insects that I had the pleasure of inspecting were noted as particularly dangerous to collections, so all in all the trapping meant good things. The mice were worrisome, but two in a year didn't tell me much. One was bloated and the other looked like it had deflated, so they were probably at different stages in the grand circle of death, but beyond that I could tell little else.

For a moment I considered taking a picture of my gruesome little collection so other people could share in the disgustingness of it, but I decided to spare people. Instead I wrote up my tallies, threw all the traps in the garbage outside (far away from the archives), and then scrubbed my hands three times.

When they said these archives have been neglected, they really meant it. Every corner is covered in cobwebs and dust, and I've spotted more than a few spiderwebs and sacs of whatever it is spiders put in sacs. Lunch and babies most likely.

And even as I type this there is -something- going about its business in the roof just above my head. there's white stuff that I'm going to assume is insulation starting to come out of the holes in the boards up there, so that's going to be something we have to take care of real quick.

While I think most of the material in here has escaped damage so far, I haven't actually taken a good look at the books that occupy a quarter of the space. I'm kind of dreading the discovery of mold, or silverfish, or maybe a nice pile of mouse poo, but that's the job.

On top of all this, there's some concern that the area will experience flooding in the next few days. This means I'm bumping up my disaster preparedness project to tomorrow.

I haven't even had a chance to go through the collection itself yet. I have no idea what's in these cabinets right now, which means I have a lot of exploring to look forward to. I'm just hoping I've seen the last of year old dead mice.

And now, what everyone is waiting for: the pictures.

The view from my window.

Mardie's porch. A lot of history was made here, and it's now used for events and speakers.

My workplace for the summer. This picture was taken right near the porch.

The interior of the archives. I'd take a picture of the file cabinets but they look like file cabinets. That big black thing is a heater.

Bear Casts. The Muries made hundreds of different casts, but we only retained a few.

The view from my porch. J told me the names of all the peaks but I don't have them memorized yet.

What's this?

A Radio/Turntable!

I can't even be mad.

My rat has apparently learned how to pull the keys off my laptop. I went to get a drink and when I came back two of them were gone. So far I've only found one. It's obvious now that Cleptoferret was the appropriate name for this little trouble maker.

Two days until I'm off to Wyoming, so they'll be full of frantically packing, purchasing whatever I need, and trying to clean the room so I don't walk into a roach house. Cleo is going up with Austin for the two months that I'll be away.

I'm super pysched and at the same time super nervous. I feel pretty unprepared, but I always feel that way and things usually work out.

Furry Scurry

I am so sore today. Yesterday was spent doing manual labor, starting from 5AM when I helped set up for the Dumb Friends League's Furry Scurry, and I hung around the event until 11, where I helped take everything down until 1:30 PM.

It was a little chilly in the morning, but nothing oppressive, and once work started we warmed right up. The beginning was a little bit awkward, as I was grouped up with 8 sorority girls doing projects that required an even number of people, so I felt like the fifth wheel for the first half hour or so. But once I started helping out where I could either do something by myself or the other volunteers acknowledged my presence things picked up.

Once setup was done I had 3 hours to myself before I had to report for take down, so I got myself lost in the park and explored the neighborhood. There are some very nice houses in the Washington Park area, some of which might be considered mansions, and a number of them were open to visitors for a special open house event. I wanted to check them out after the Scurry, but by the time take down was over I was exhausted, sore, and my knee was acting up. So I ended up taking a shower and falling asleep instead. Can't say I regret that decision, though next year I'm going to pick either setup or take down and use the spare time to see me some houses.

No More April

I've written something like 6 blog posts in my head this month, but never set down to actually commit them to the site.

There was the time I almost ran over a 5 motorcyclists because they were doing 100+ miles in extremely dense traffic and weaving between cars where there was only enough space to fit their bikes and their elbows.

There was the time I failed to see Noam Chomsky in person and was angry for the rest of the night.

And there's a ton of stuff I've already forgotten about this month.

And now I've cut my hair. I donated a little over two feet and got a free haircut out of the deal. It's pretty short now, and I have bangs, which is something new. I like it. It's a little less fuzzy and a little longer than I had expected, but I may put something in it and tussle it up.

Only one month until this year is over. And then Grand Teton. I'm starting to get nervous about that, but I'm preparing as best I can.

April!

The frequency of blog posts here is a pretty good indication of my mental state. When I'm tired/bored/overwhelmed and so on the updates drop like a rock. March was quiet because I was trying to get started on the right foot for the new semester and not quite managing it, what with my itchy fingers and a workload that I still struggling to keep in check. I thiiink things will be better this semester but I'm not quite sure.

The classes I have this semester feel like the first jump from LIS 101 to more in depth topics. This is great. It also means a more difficult workload and readings. And, none of them are really focused on the sort of skills I will be needing for my internship, which means I need to do a lot of independent work over the next two months to do as effective a job as possible up in WY.

The skin thing is pretty much resolved, and my rat is now officially adopted and I'm not allergic to her, so that's two problems gone. I've also finally gotten confirmed for my insurance, so here's hoping that that all goes smoothly too.

I saw Sucker Punch yesterday with some LIS buds, and it turned out to be a mash up of Inception and 300 that didn't quite work as either. The shame was that the first scene was -great-, and then the rest of the movie completely failed to live up to the quality the intro promised. Oh well.

I'm moving the "Awesome Archival" stuff that I used to post here to a dedicated tumblr, here. For short, drive by content tumblr is a better platform, but anything substantial will still be posted to this blog.