29 Jul A Reason to Wear a Fleece Jacket in the Nebraska Summer

Every year, the museum needs to do an inventory of a portion of the items in the collection, to make sure that everything is where it is supposed to be, and that items that are on display are not damaged. It took three of us a full day and a half to find and look over everything. The first day we were just looking at items, so it was fun to visit the one-room school, the cabin, and both museum exhibits and to locate everything. Many of the items I’ve seen around, but never knew exactly what they were called or what they were for. (That was mostly the old farming equipment, which we have a lot of.) Thursday, however, we had to do inventory of the accession forms, in the cold, windowless collections room, without the breaks of walking outside in the heat like I had the day before. It went a lot faster, luckily, but I spent my lunch break trying to defrost my fingers from feeling like popsicles. We still had to find a few of the items that had been added more recently and hadn’t been cataloged yet, like a creepy build-your-own wooden clown doll. It was kind of a crash course in how the museum collections here are cataloged and stored.

This week I’ve also spent some time getting ready for a living history program I’m taking over for a ranger while she’s out of town. The first day I’m putting my high school ceramics class to use and doing pottery, so we’ll make little coil pots. The second day I’m doing toys and games, so I’ll bring out the corn husk dolls again, and other games like blind man’s bluff, button toys, hoop and stick, and chain tag. I even have to dress up for the program, so I found a white blouse and a gray skirt in our living history stuff, the only thing I found that fits me, even if it’s not completely accurate to wear it with a bonnet.