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.

Yay!

Straight As for the winter semester. I have NO idea how that happened to be honest, because by the end of it I was really struggling. But either I got my shit together or my teachers pitied me or some combination of the two, because my GPA as not nearly as ruined as I expected it to be. Maybe it's true what they say, that failing out of grad school is a feat in and of itself.

This semester is going to be better though. I can feel it in my toes, or that could be the itching from the hives I've managed to develop over the last few weeks. I also managed to pick up a head cold yesterday, and the rat is sniffling too which makes me nervous, but THIS WILL BE A GOOD SEMESTER.

Before I go off and do my homework to ensure that THIS WILL BE A GOOD SEMESTER I need to do a quick recap of my visit to the Murie Center up in Wyoming. I drove up on Tuesday, spend a brilliant Wednesday helping the people up there with a small project and otherwise lounging and napping, which was brilliant, and then drove down on Thursday. Everyone at the center was extremely hospitable and their enthusiasm for the Center's mission was contagious. The center itself was beautiful. The buildings themselves have existed for almost a century, iirc, but they've all been renovated on the inside so that even in winter they're warm, dry, and comfortable.

The archives themselves are very small, and already relatively organized. It looks like most of the work will be with a little policy and then developing reliable finding aids, and maybe cataloging the many books scattered all over the various buildings. I have homework ahead of me, but it shouldn't be too bad.

The bed I was given. There's like 4 comforters on that thing. It was heaven. The cabin itself is pretty big. There was another empty bed out of the frame, and a dresser behind me.

One of the spidery walkways between cabins. The building in the picture is the bath house, which is quite modern and very comfortable inside.

The door to my cabin. You can see the snow piled up past the window.

 Where it fell naturally it only came up to my thigh.

And a random photo of the rat that I will be adopting. 

She's a terror and I love her, but man has she given me grief. She's already tried to steal my homework to make herself a nest.