Nero fiddled while Rome burned

Spoiler alert: this is a bully pulpit post.

I've been holed up with kids and grands for more than a week but am back on the road, headed to my next volunteer gig at Andersonville National Historic Site in Georgia after short visits in Kentucky with my sister and brother. Headed to Andersonville if, that is, Congress collectively grows a spine, quits its self-serving, posturing malfeasance, and puts this country back to work.

I've been a federal employee, was married to a federal employee, have lived paycheck to paycheck, and grew up in a strong union town, Detroit, so I know what effect this nationwide strike (that's been imposed on everyone by 535 people, by the way) is having on people all across the country. The games Congress has been playing for almost three weeks now are unconscionable, but (and here's where I'm going to make some people mad) I believe it should be an all-or-nothing proposition: no one but absolutely essential personnel and services should be allowed to work or be open, which rules out Congressional staffers, its lunchroom, barbershop, and gym, no Social Security or Medicare, and no federal retiree and VA disability checks. Because these last two categories affect me I'm willing to include myself in the drastic and painful belt-tightening that's affecting hundreds of thousands of people and businesses around the country. Don't even get me started on foreign aid.

What's prompted this rant, although I've been ticked off since the shutdown began, was reading about national parks that have reopened due to special deals their states have negotiated with the National Park Service. I can't blame them, and during my five months at Petrified Forest, when I also had the privilege of visiting many other parks, monuments, and historic sites, I developed a really soft spot for our parks and the people who work there. But until the festering impasse being played out in Washington is resolved, until all federal employees are working, until all services are restored, I think it's a good idea for every possible American to feel the kick this shutdown is administering and when they tire of it, tell Congress to grow up and put this country back on its feet.

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Thought of the day:

The buck stops here. (Harry S Truman, and where is he when we need him?)

Get the hell outta....

One of my goals when I set out in March was to see a lot of museums, the good stuff and the oddball places. Last week I stopped in Dodge City, Kansas, and it was one of the good ones. I expected tacky and didn't get it.

Most of the items in the collection came from Charlie Beeson, who apparently had them piled here and there around his house before moving them to the Beeson Museum. I can only assume his wife said to get all that junk out of the house. Boot Hill Museum acquired many of the 60,000 items in the collection, which date from the 1870s through the 1920s, from the Beeson Museum when it closed in 1964.
 
A nice row of store fronts, maybe the original strip mall, has working sections such as the saloon, the photo parlor, and the restaurant. Other stores have museum exhibits of such things as farm equipment, dry goods, a barber shop, and a tooth-drawer.

The apothecary has a display case of tonics and patent medicines, including Canadian Hemp, Persian Pills, and Cramp Bark. No idea what good they were supposed to do.

Another section of the store fronts displays a bank teller's cage with a marvelous safe.

Here's something I can identify with, having peeled bushels of apples over the years with an automatic peeler, but nothing as formidable as this.

The Union Church:

This is from the Boot Hill museum's website:

"The interdenominational Union Church, which our church exhibit replicates, was built in 1874 or 1875 at First Avenue and Spruce Street, north of the downtown. It cost $1,000 to construct and held at least 100 worshipers.
"The Union Church used circuit preachers and hosted a wide variety of community functions. Dodge City had a reputation in its early days of being a place so wild and sinful that even God did not venture into her city limits. The Rev. Ormond W. Wright sought to change this when he went to Front Street saloons and gambling houses to solicit funds to maintain this church as a place where cowboys and settlers alike could join together to practice their faith in Christ.
"Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson were deacons of this new church. The Union Church was the first building constructed in Dodge City dedicated to the practice of religion. With the construction of this building began the taming of the 'wickedest little city in America.'"

These communion cups fascinate me. Catholics used nothing of the kind and never got wine at all until after Vatican II.

A separate building had an impressive exhibit on the Plains Indians. I was especially taken with how the arrowheads were displayed, which reminded me of the head of a stalk of wheat.

Imagine the skill involved in knapping arrowheads like these. Just think of working for a couple of hours and dang! the final strike turns it into rubble.

Lamp posts around town are flagged with historical scenes such as this one. Dodge City has made the most of its history in a very nice way. I'm glad I stopped.

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Thought of the day:

What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which 
    runs across the grass 
       and loses itself in the sunset.

(Crowfoot, Blackfoot Warrior and Orator)

It's a long, long way to Tucumcari

(But only when you spend two hours at Costco in Albuquerque.) (And, yes, I know it's supposed to be Tipperary.)

It was good to be back on the road again yesterday, and I spent the first night out in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Tucumcari is a Route 66 town that's kept a lot of its charm. I'm a sucker for old signs and this place has an abundance.


Just $15 a night at the Cactus RV Park, a bargain, and a really nice office lady to boot. That's not the office lady; it's me.

The motel that used to be part of the RV park. I'm pretty sure, from the looks of it, that no one stays here anymore.

 

The Route 66 sign at the edge of town.

Lots of old motels are still open and have kept what look like the original signs.

 

The Blue Swallow Motel is the prettiest, and has refrigerated air.

I had dinner at Del's. Before I went in I got on the Character Readings scale in the lobby. I must not have any character, though; even though I paid all of a penny, nothing showed up in the little window. Oh yes, the machine could show my weight, no problem, but no character.

 

 Quality food at the Drive-Inn.

Eyes on Route 66. I thought this was an optometrist's office but it was just a Route 66 mural. Not sure I get the connection.

 
La Cita Mexican Foods is now a florist who had the sense to keep the sign and the architecture.

 I think Rubee's is still open.

The Texaco station is now an antique shop with a great paint job.

 The Welcome Center has a great George Jensen Jetson arrow/boomerang/space-thing going on. (Who is George Jensen?)

 

Trails West has an unmistakable arrow pointing the way.

Not too many of the neon signs are still lit, but Tepee Curios is in perfect working order.

What I would have called the Thunderbird Lounge is instead called the Lizard Lounge. Don't ask me.

I'm fairly certain the Drive In part does not refer to getting a tattoo.

 The truck might be Art. There's no other explanation.

After leaving Tucumcari, the road took me through a small part of the Texas panhandle. When I left Texas in 1987 after four loooooooooooong years, I swore I'd never set foot in the state again. Yet here I was. You just can't say never.

This accordion building was next to where I stopped for a break, somewhere near Dalhart, Texas.

Nowhere but Texas. Really.

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Thought of the day:
I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list. (Susan Sontag)

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

So long, adios, au revior, aloha, sayonara

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.

Before

After

Before

After

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)