I actually got all the work done that I'd been asked to do. It seemed time was running out faster than the drawers full of records, but I managed to edge ahead and won the contest by a nose.
The last job I completed before I leave for the upper Midwest tomorrow to see my kids and grands was to make finding aids for eight file cabinet drawers' worth of records, which turned out to be 18 linear feet. A finding aid is nothing more than an inventory and it can be as detailed as listing every single thing found or as broad as listing just folder headings. I was asked to list every item from every folder and to put the folders into a different organization from what I found them in. It's a tiring process for a few reasons. One is I've had to think in a new way, sorting materials in a system that's new to me without any real training other than a couple pages of instruction. Another reason is because of decision fatigue. I had to decide which category each record belonged to and there can be a fine line between categories. (Does Night Sky go under Air or Climate?) And a third reason is some of the stuff is just dead boring. I spent two full days organizing and listing everything you never wanted to know about invasive species control.
But it's done; it's all done. The product is eight cabinet drawers reduced to seven, organized in a hierarchy with 98%, more or less, of the records listed at the individual item level on a 40-page finding aid.
Two large recycle bins went out with duplicates and general useless trash and I freed up two piles of file folders. Each category of record has its own color of hanging folder - when the color changes, so does the topic. I'm OCD that way.
I went back to the library to get the final photos taken. I took a van load of books to a local school district a few weeks ago, and a pickup load to a recycle center in Flagstaff. So all the discards are gone and the place looks like it's supposed to: clean, organized shelves. I discarded about 25% of the beginning shelf list and identified about 11% of the collection as Missing.
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I also labeled shelves in the library, wrote directions on how to shelve books, sent about 100 records off to the Seattle librarian for cataloging, inventoried stacks and stacks of periodicals, scanned about 70 miscellaneous items that looked interesting, dug out and transplanted 119 agave plants, and recruited a volunteer to work in Collections.
During all the work, I took photos of some interesting books and other items I came across. Cover art, fonts, illustrations - they're all fodder.
Here's a great font from one of the Triassic Library scans I did (I counted 912 scans). It's just the 'Letter of Transmittal' part, but the swishes on the capitals and the inverted 'v' for the cross bar on each 'A' sets this apart.
And another one from a German publication. Again, it's just the title that's special, made so by the tiny curls on the letters 'r', 'a', and 'c'.
Ever since I worked at a medical museum in Washington, DC (no, not the Smithsonian), I've had a liking for medical illustration. It can be unexpectedly beautiful. This one gets a bit lost in translation, but it has a level of detail that catches the eye.
I found this book plate in one of the library books. From the CCC written on the bottom, it dates to the 1930s, when the Civilian Conservation Corps worked building roads, culverts, waterlines, bridges, and other structures in the park, much of the work being done by hand with little mechanical assistance. I believe I read somewhere that the CCC did 50 years' work in fewer than 10. It's a fascinating part of American history.
A little bit of library humor. I have no idea if whoever came up with the Library of Congress cataloging system did this deliberately or if it just fell into the scheme, but check out the number associated with snakes: 666. That's pretty funny for librarians.
My desk, at the end of work yesterday. It was never this clean, even when I started work. The boxes in front are videos I didn't convert to DVD for a variety of reasons, and files I didn't have time to get to, a real shame, because they were the interesting, old ones. Maybe next time.
And here's me, waving goodbye to the Painted Desert. It's more like so long, because I'm headed back here in February when I return to clean up their server.
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Thought of the day:
Just keep plugging away. (me, to my kids when they were faced with an overwhelming task, and they hated hearing it)
A while ago I picked up one of those glossy Arizona tourism magazines somewhere and dog-eared pages all the way through it. Lots of dog ears for all over the state. But one place was pretty close by and it involved food, so last week a friend and I made a trip north to Hopi Land, on Second Mesa. Just an hour and a half away, pretty much the same distance as going to Show Low, but worlds and cultures apart.
What drew me there was mention in the magazine of the Hopi Cultural Center's restaurant, which served blue corn pancakes. You might think that based on the photos I took of meals at La Posada in Winslow that I make a habit of photographing food, but that's not necessarily true. I'd love to do it all the time when there's a great meal in front of me, but I usually forget as soon as the plate hits the table and all I think of is digging right in approaching my meal with ladylike gentility. This is the case even when I've taken the camera out and put it in my lap as a reminder. And, alas, it was the case when blue corn pancakes were placed in front of me.
I had an idea they would be coarse, like cornmeal-coarse, but they were not. Light and fluffy and just delicious, they didn't stay on the plate long. Our server told us of two ceremonies involving blue corn that are practiced still, with young women celebrating puberty and their marriage. They are given a quantity of blue corn and it is their duty to grind it into flour. They stay in a room with no outside light until the task is complete. They may have assistance from their mothers or aunts, and they don't have to grind it all by hand, but it must be finished before they can leave the room.
I also ordered blue corn dumplings. Pass on these if they're ever offered to you. I tried hard to like them, adding a little Splenda, but they were more like marbles than dumplings. When the server asked how I liked them it was apparent not much because there were still plenty in the bowl. Then she told me people usually smother them with sugar because they're not flavorful at all. I knew I'd been missing something - lots of sugar.
After pancakes we went to the museum, just across the plaza. Wonderful, wonderful museum. The main attraction was scores of black and white photographs of Hopi at their daily life, taken decades ago, some by Edward S. Curtis. But there were also pots and baskets and kachinas and jewelry. I seem to go into a blackout when it comes to Native American jewelry because, just like at Hubbell Trading Post, I didn't take one photo of the gorgeous silver work on exhibit.
Here's an interesting tidbit that has no particular significance at all: Fred Kabotie was the Hopi artist who painted murals and designed patterns to be painted on sky light panels at the Painted Desert Inn, and he was also a silversmith. He was part of a group of returning WW2 veterans that was taught silver work, as a way of making a living. Photos of this group were on exhibit with the silver, the first time I'd seen a photo of Fred Kabotie. The interesting part is that in the late 1980s I took a silversmithing class from his son, Michael Kabotie. At the time I didn't know his father or his father's reputation and it wouldn't have mattered anyway, because Michael was an accomplished artist in his own right in many media, and a poet. I have one of his books packed away somewhere. What a coincidence. Even more so when one day a few years ago I happened across Michael's obituary in a section of the newspaper that I rarely read. He'd died of pneumonia and was just in his 60s.
Back to the museum. It's small and focuses just on Hopi naturally, but it's so worth the drive from the park.
There are several cases with many different kinds of Kachinas, which serve different functions. This article is interesting and explains their importance to the Hopi and how they fit into daily life. Here's an excerpt:
Depending
on what the Kachina represents determines the type of clothing it
wears, the color and the designs that decorate the face and body, what
it carries in its hands, the time of year it appears and the ceremonies
it participates in.
Pottery was also well represented. It's amazing to me that the designs are drawn freehand and yet are so perfect. At the same place I took the silver class with Michael Kabotie, I watched a Navajo artist decorate a pot with a complex design, entirely without any tool but the brush in his hand, and it met perfectly when he'd gone all the way around the pot.
The yellow paint on this bowl is from clay and will fire red. The black is a mineral paint and it will remain black. Different clays will fire different colors. Gray clay will fire orange-yellow, while yellow clay will fire red.
Having seen this exhibit, it gives me an appreciation for a project one of the archeology interns started while she was here this summer. She collected clay samples from areas around the park and was analyzing them to determine whether any of them could have been used to make pots that have been found here. If not, of course the pots would have been brought in from elsewhere so the next question would be, where? She packed up all these samples and they went back to school with her.
This bowl is a Kayenta (a place north of here) polychrome and dates to 1250. Imagine! It's not in pieces.
More examples of the pots on exhibit. We really liked the display of pot sherds on the platform around the intact pieces and using broken pieces as an exhibit stand in the second photo below. I've never seen that before.
Here's another exhibit, much older. The second one from the left was probably used as a chimney top. The one on the right is remarkable for its uniformity. These pots were made with the coil technique - remember clay snakes? - and I don't know if that would make it easier or harder to maintain a consistent 1/16 inch thickness. In relation to its size, the thickness is eggshell-like. No pottery wheels, no tools other than their hands and stones, and they were able to turn out utilitarian objects of such beauty.
My favorite item was a photograph that I would have sworn was a charcoal drawing. I couldn't get a decent shot because of reflection and I've cropped it to remove a lot of the glare but it's still noticeable and distracting. Isn't she beautiful anyway?
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Thought of the day:
The purpose of our ceremonies is not entertainment but attainment. Namely, the attainment of a good life. (from a placard at the Hopi museum)
The moonrises the past two nights have been glorious. Wide open skies here allow the moon to be seen as soon as it breaks the horizon, when it's at its largest and warmest. It rises among clouds in a darkening sky, beaming silver bright, enough to drown out stars all night long.
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Thought of the day:
I SAW THE MOON
I sit beneath the cliff, quiet and alone.
Round moon in the middle of the sky’s a bird ablaze:
all things are seen mere shadows in its brilliance,
that single wheel of perfect light…
Alone, its spirit naturally comes clear.
Swallowed in emptiness in this cave of darkest mystery,
because of the finger pointing, I saw the moon.
That moon became the pivot of my heart.
(Han Shan, Cold Mountain Poems: Zen Poems of Han Shan, Shih Te, and Wang Fan-chih)
Hubbell Trading Post is a National Historic Site on the way to Canyon de Chelly. It's been selling all the necessities of life to the community of Ganado, Arizona since 1878. I've been there twice now, the second time just a couple of weeks ago with my friend Summer from Tucson, who I stayed with for a few days when I first came to Arizona.
Although it was sold to the National Park Service in 1967, Hubbell is still a working trading post and has managed to hold on to the charm of the past.
I couldn't find reference to it, but the profile over the door must be in honor of the Navajo people on whose reservation the trading post sits.
The front room of the store has utilitarian items, mostly, but includes these tiny soft-as-butter baby shoes and boots.
The two back rooms are my favorite, though. One has cases full of silver and turquoise jewelry (I must have been busy drooling because oddly enough I don't have any photos of that) and a ceiling full of baskets like stars in the sky.
The remaining room has a wall lined with old books and is stacked with Navajo rugs. Oh, my.
Don't see any you like? Just start digging through the piles.
Imagine the work involved in this. No automation here; it's all done by hand.
And here is my favorite. This beauty nearly leaped into my arms. The colors and pattern pulse with life and it would have been perfect thrown over the foot of the bed.
But not for me. It was the month to render unto Caesar and my coffers were dry. Maybe next time.
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Thought of the day:
A living spark of tension exists between object and [observer]. (Traditional Japanese philosophy, Sojourns magazine, winter/spring, 2010)
I can't get enough of the sky around here. Well, except for a couple of weeks ago when it was gray for about three days and I started crawling the walls - it felt so much like the Pacific Northwest and that was depressing beyond belief. But we've had some stunning sunsets lately, just like this one from the other night. Right, these are all from the same evening, just different parts of the sky, and within about half an hour. I love this place.
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Thought of the day:
You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather. ―
(Pema Chödrön)
A couple of weeks ago, I watched out my window as the traffic on I-40, about a half mile away, came to a stop and stayed that way for a couple of hours. I found out the next morning that my boss, Pat, of the "Oh, Pat!" fame, was in that accident. She was coming back from Flagstaff with a load of plants for the park. It was a minor accident that turned disastrous when her vehicle was hit by a truck after she'd pulled off to the side of the road.
I don't know the particulars which doesn't matter, because nothing can change the fact that she's in the hospital in Phoenix and it appears she will be for some time.
Being able to do just about nothing else, this past Saturday a few of us got together to stitch a quilt together for her.
Here are the blocks being previewed for placement. We'd already spent a couple of hours putting them together.
Swapping out blocks, turning them this way and that, to make the best arrangement.
The finished top with all the blocks sewed together and pressed flat, waiting for borders.
Route 66 fabric will be used for the outer border of the front and the backing.
And the thing that makes it all come together, Petrified Forest panels scattered across the top.
Someone else will do the quilting and then off it will go to Phoenix. I wish it was so easy to get her put back together. If group effort was all it took, she'd be here already.
If you're of a praying mind, please keep her there. She can use all the help we can give.
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Thought of the day:
I'm touched by the idea that when we do things that are useful and helpful - collecting these shards of spirituality - that we may be helping to bring about a healing. (Leonard Nimoy)
