Observatory Hill

Went for a hike with Auree today!

The weather was decent this evening, right around 80 and not too humid, so I decided to take Auree for a drive to get his road legs for our upcoming long car trip. We headed towards Observatory Hill, a state natural area that was apparently frequented by Muir back in the day. I wasn't sure if I would actually take Auree on a hike at all, but once we arrived I figured it would be a nice short hike to the top and that he would enjoy it.

Observatory Hill is the highest point in Marquette County, and in order to get to the trail entrance you need to follow a lot of random back roads, finally ending on a Dead End street. There are no signs leading you there, so it's a wonder anyone ever gets there at all.

There is a small gravel parking area (about enough for 2-3 cars) in the middle of an open prairie lined with trees. Through the tall grass is carved a narrow foot path, which winds up a slight incline into the trees. Luckily, I had left Dad's coveralls in my back seat, since I was wearing a dress and not anticipating walking through tall brush. I pulled them on and tucked in my dress, tying the arms around my waist as a makeshift belt. Luckily this place is mostly abandoned, because I'm sure I looked like a huge weirdo wearing half a pair of coveralls with a dress tucked in, covered by a long sleeve top and toting a chubby cat.

I decided to carry Auree through this first portion since the brush was pretty tall and I figured we'd make better headway if he wasn't sniffing every gosh darn plant. I figured that once we got under the cover of the tress, there would be less brush and he would be able to walk along easily. I was wrong.

Auree scoping out the path

The entire path looked like it had not been trodden on in weeks, and the wild raspberry/blackberry brambles were taking over the whole forest. I ended up sticking Auree in the sack I brought specifically for the purpose of carrying him. It was given to me by Travis' second mom, Marla, and it is from Peru!

Auree in the sack.

The bugs were buzzing around my ears (mostly flies: I had put on bug spray which kept most of the mosquitoes at bay,) and I was getting sweaty so I half-jogged up the incline to get there quicker. We made it to the summit in about 15 minutes, and it was pretty awesome. The outcropping faced south, and we could see for miles, the only downside to this being that we came just before dusk and the sunset was hidden behind trees to the west. Auree made himself at home, looking like Simba on top of Pride Rock (which is funny, since his brother's name is Simba...) It was really nice up there, no bugs and a very nice temperature. We sat up there and enjoyed the view for about ten minutes.The sun was going down, however, so I decided we'd better start making our way back down before I ended up twisting an ankle and being eaten alive by coyotes (we did hear a bit of howling, but maybe it was just a dog?) The walk down went pretty quickly, and Auree was a great hiking partner. He was content once we got back in the car, and drove home in the darkening night with only one deer sighting. Below are some pictures of us on the summit.

Shoes Take One

We started the shoe project today! I was only able to be there for about 2 hours so we didn't finish the project, but it shouldn't take much longer to get through it. We started by laying all of the shoes out to see what we had (not a lot) and then began cleaning them. Then we stuffed them with acid-free tissue paper. I entered their data into my spreadsheet (their ID number, color, material, etc.) and took photos of them. We then lined two plastic boxes with acid-free paper and added shoes! I also wrapped a sheet of cardboard in the paper so we could have two levels of shoes. In one completed box, we had three pairs of women's shoes on the bottom, and one pair of women's boots (on their sides) on the top layer. In all, we finished six pairs of shoes, and have about 8-10 more pairs to finish next week. Once we finish the shoes, we are on to the daunting task of doing the same with clothing- except we aren't sure where to begin! There is clothing of all sorts, located all over the house and museum. We could start with just men's clothing, but we would still have to go through every single box and container to locate it all. At any rate, we have a ways to go and I only have 3 more weeks left to help them!

These white wedding shoes date to 1908

These are typical women's boots from the early 1900s

These shoes date to around 1920

The Hats Are Done!

Today at the Marquette County Historical Society, we finished our hat project! After approximately 20-30 hours of work, all of the hats have been cleaned up and put into their new homes. Our final task today was to label and record the final hats, and then sort and box every last hat.

Once we had recorded all of the hats, we sorted them by color. We figured this would be an easy way to find hats for future use because if someone is looking up a particular hat in the book, they will easily be able to locate the hat based on color. After sorting, we stuffed the ones that needed stuffing with acid-free tissue paper, as well as lined the acid-free boxes with that paper, and the placed them inside. We tried to make sure there was only one layer of hats per box, but in some cases we needed to set one or two on top of the others. In the end, we had three boxes of black hats, two boxes of blue hats and of tan/beige hats, and one box each of red/orange/pink, white/off-white, brown, and floral.

Our second task of the day was preparing for a hat exhibit that will be displayed in the museum. We found 30 hats we wanted to display, and cleaned out a big glass display case. We decided to keep some of the old hat boxes that many were stored in, and will be putting them in the storage space under the glass case for when the hat display needs to be changed. The rest of the hats are currently being stored in a closet in the exhibit house.

After we finished, we cleaned up the space, threw out some hats in poor condition as well as the remaining hat boxes, and began gathering items for our next phase in the project: shoes! Hopefully we will be able to finish the shoe project tomorrow, as there aren't nearly as many shoes and we have the process all figured out. The only problem we will have is with storage, since we only have so many acid-free boxes and they need to be used for the clothing, we are going to settle for storing the shoes in the plastic bins they are currently stored in, although we will line them with acid-free paper. For the mean time, please enjoy some more hat photos:

That Photo

Here is that photo I mentioned a few weeks ago, me in the paper! I finally got a hard copy and just scanned it. I'm the one closest to the photographer.

Hats!

My project at the Marquette County Historical Society has officially started: with HATS.

Yesterday and today, Joanie and I have been working on getting things organized for the project. We decided to start with hats because there are a ton of them, they were easily accessible, and they don't require as much effort as trying to sort through all of the clothing and rearrange that. So yesterday, we cleared out space in one of the upstairs rooms of the exhibit house where our organization project will mostly be taking place. Then, we sat down and discussed our game plan: what we needed to get still and how our project would move forward.

Today the real work began. We started by going through the boxes of hats and determining if they had a label or not. All items should have a label that looks something like "A-73-9-2-1", the "A" standing for "artifact", the first number being the year it was recorded, and the other numbers referring to month/day and the number of the item that day. The problem with the hats is that many of them (more than half of about 100 hats) do not have labels. We put all of the ones without labels into separate boxes to go through later. The ones that did have labels, we had to determine whether or not the label would stay on. For the ones that need their label attached better, we cleaned and photographed them, and then set them into a box for re-labeling. For the ones that the label was sewn in or properly stuck on, we cleaned, photographed, and recorded into a spreadsheet. This last group is almost ready for storage; all we have left to do is wrap them in tissue or cloth and box them, labeling the sorted box.

One big problem we have run into is that many of the hats have been damaged due to improper storage. As the historical society is volunteer-run and they rely on donations of community members, there have not been the appropriate resources for storing many of their items. Hats that we deem "questionable" have been placed in a separate box. These hats have either been damaged by bugs, been crushed beyond repair, or are in a general state of disrepair that cannot be fixed. One very cute hat had a mud dauber house inside of it, and was all full of holes.

Below are some of the photos I took today. Joanie will be touching them up in Photoshop to get rid of stuff in the background and weird shadows.

Jim's Birthday

One of my very good friends Jim turned 24 last week, and since I wasn't going to be able to make it out this weekend for his party/outing, Travis and I went on his actual birthday to take him out to dinner.

We went to Buca di Beppo and split three dishes and a big dessert. Jim's girlfriend, Kate, and our friends Matt and Nikki all joined so we were able to eat most of what we ordered. Travis picked a seafood pasta dish, Jim wanted spaghetti and meatballs, and Nikki picked a creamy chicken pasta dish. All three were very good. The dessert was a brownie/ice cream thing, but it was served in an oversize martini glass and was definitely enough to feed 6.

There isn't a whole lot else to say about it, but I thought I would post the photos.

Fourth of July

I went to Madison on Monday to see fireworks with Travis, and we ended up getting together with my best friend Jessie and her boyfriend Dan, as well as Travis' classmate Kelsey.

On my drive down to Madison, the highway was packed with 4th traffic, mostly FIBs who were driving like maniacs. Once in town, Trav and I went to the Great Dane at Hilldale Mall, which is a great bar & grill with it's own brewery. Since Travis has class everyday, however, we had to go back to his house so he could do homework before we were to see the fireworks. While we were waiting, Jessie said we should meet up and get a drink, and I said we should get desserts, so we headed right back to the Great Dane for cocktails and desserts! The dress I'm wearing in the picture is the one grandma bought for my birthday this year, it is super cute and I wish I had a better photo of it. Travis' classmate met up with us there, and we all headed to the Blackhawk fireworks.

Blackhawk is a country club and golf course in Shorewood Hills, and it is where we always went to see fireworks growing up. We parked by Jessie's mom's house, and walked through the golf course. We got there just as they were starting up, so we got a great spot in an open area where we had a good view of the show. They had a ton of fireworks, but we all agreed that they should have dispersed them differently because they would shoot off like four yellow ones, then four green ones, etc. instead of mixing them up. The finale was also kind of awkward, it seemed to have gone off in the middle of the show and then there were still 7 or 8 random fireworks that went off after it. All in all, though, I thought it was a fun time.