If 4th Graders ruled the town

So I was subbing a class of 4th graders today and they had a writing lesson to work on for next week... the prompt was "If Kids Rules The Town" they are instructed to list one reason/thing that adults are doing wrong, why kids would rule it better, and what changes they would make. We started the work time by having a brainstorming session... which yielded some intersting results/ideas...

Real Ideas from the Class:

There will be no school.... except for GUN SCHOOL!

Everything will be free for kids

Kids will teach the teachers

Pizza will be free

There will be better food choices...other than subway

There will be kid marines

There will be a kid SWAT team

Kids will get Slaves!

Kids will get submarines (so they can look for suken treasure)

They will design a flag

One girl wanted to "fill the town with cats" and then "get some frogs and sing with them"

There will be indoor hot tubs

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I hope these kids don't rule the town/world anytime soon...

Life Before Electricity

Last Saturday as a kickoff to the Museum's new display "Life Before Electricity", we held an event in conjunction with the Greensburg Fall Festival to hi-light what life was like before electricity entered homes in Decatur County. In each of the rooms we had live interpreters dressed in costume to explain how each room in the house would have been used, and what types of household chores they would be doing. Each interpreter had a part to plan in an overall script for the day which revolved around the preparations for a wedding. This was an ambitious project for us and I'm glad it went well. As always attendance could have been a little better, the rain combined with the fact that the fall festival blocked off our view of the square with trailers and port-o-pots didn't help. But the day was successful and I think everyone had a good time.

I played the part of Reverand Lathrop in the prduction, though I didn't have a script so it was a small part. This was good because I spent much of the day running around capturing the show with pictures. My family brought in two pieces for the display, an old ice box and a rug loom.

As well as having our narritive script, we also had quiltiers and a woodcarver set-up in and outside the Museum preforming their trades.

Pictures!

Museum:

























Craftsmen/women:







Also the Friends of the Library Group got together with us to host a Pie Sale as a fund raiser in our front lawn. So here our some pictures of that. I will say the Pumpkin pie I purchased was good.

Student Art #2

Another Picture Drawn by a student for me while I was subbing....

Wierd Dream File #5

So another installment of my weird dreams! It's been 10 hours or so since I woke up and even though I tried my best to commit it to memory its getting a little hazy so I'll post what I can remember from last nights adventurous dream.


The dream started with me hanging out at Kris and Katy Jones house with them and Scott... (should note I haven't talked to any of them in 6 weeks or so... thus it was strange they would be in the dream) There house was interesting to say the least... the downstairs was one big living room, and the bedroom was just a bed hanging about 10 feet above the leaving room like a swinging bridge... pretty cool.

Anyway we were going to go to Walmart together because they were starting some huge Christmas Sale and we wanted to be there when it started... Now the Walmart we had to go to was in Indianapolis... and they were living in Shelbyville in the dream, so we had to drive there.

Now that doesn't seem that eventful of a drive, straight up I-74... but in my dream Shelbyville had turned into some black-light carnival/fair town with a strange voodoo/skull theme... there were rollercoasters and fortune tellers all around. It was strange... in some parts of town your car got picked up by a roller coaster and spun around to another part of a road. Also their was purple fog machine smoke everywhere. None of this was scary... just sort of confusing to navigate, but everyone seemed to just accept the fact that Shelbyville had turned itself into this funland/carnival tourist attraction.

We get to the Walmart and its like 8 in the morning and we rush into the store with everyone else who has been waiting for this mega sale. I guess we split up right away because I'm by myself looking at these boxes of movie candy that are for sale for 28 cents! Boom I know that's a deal so I grab 4 boxes and then decide I need a cart, that way I can hit up big deals in electronics and other parts of the store. So I hurry back to the front of the store. I notice that their are huge lines at the checkout... even larger than what you would expect at a walmart... like 30 people at each checkout... they got their for the big sale at 8... but Wal-mart I find out, for whatever crazy reason isn't operating the checkouts till noon... so really their is no reason to be in a rush.

I have to fight my way up to where the carts are when this walmart employ who looks like she is a meth addict sees me going for a cart and knocks the boxes of candy out of my hand with a cane. (sidenote: the cane was an old dirty one like I used to use for showing pigs in 4-H) She is being nasty so I get upset and go to complain to a manager... but when I find one she goes over to the lady, takes her cane and starts poking me with it and calling me names, as does everyone around. So I get upset throw my stuff down on the ground and walkout of the store deciding that the place sucks and I don't need their deals.

I get in a car (I guess we drove separate to Walmart) and somehow am able to easily navigate my way back to Shelbyville and its giant amusement park atmosphere and end up back at Kris and Katy's waiting for them to get back. I remember walking around their house and checking out the cool bedroom setup they had. Only problem with the swinging suspension bed was that you only had a 12 inch walkway around the outside of the upstairs room to squeaze around. Eventually they showed back up and started to show me the good deals they had found.

And around that time I woke up... so I'm not sure where the dream was heading too next.






(Hit the Tag - "Dream" to view previous entries)

AAGPBL Panel

So last Sunday was the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Panel! I've discussed the League on this blog already so I won't go into a whole bunch of detail about that, this will just cover the event itself.

At first I was really worried we were going to have a horrible turnout and the whole thing would be an embarrassment to the historical society, library and myself. As up until five minutes before the program began the speakers and their guest outnumbered the visitors we had attending! Luckily more people showed up at the last minute and we ended up with 42 people having signed in. I will say it didn't seem like that many, and the event was overall saved by a couple families bringing the majority of the crowd.

I was a little disappointed by the lack of support I had from my own board on this event as only two of them showed up, and this was something that they genuinely expressed interest in. I wish I could have had a bigger crowded but I don't know how I could have better promoted it. I had it announced on the radio and the newspaper ran a front page story on it a couple weeks earlier. I also had fliers out and around places, for the resources I have available I covered as much as I could. I'm not going to lie it would have sucked if a handful less people had shown up after I put so much work into this project.

Luckily those people did show up and the panel was great! They were a fun group and I feel that everyone who came left with a great experience and feeling good about the event. The Newspaper did a great two part write-up on the day so I'll leave you with that and a few pictures to finish the recap.

http://greensburgdailynews.com/local/x94879815/All-American-Girls-reminisce-in-Greensburg



Our Panel!


The Crowd


Next-Up.... Life Before Electricity this Saturday

How many chairs can you fit in a Soul?

So today I was setting up chairs for our event at the museum this Sunday... the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) panel. We have at least 2 former players and an umpire coming to the museum to speak about their experiences in the league. I'm hoping for a big turn out (last weeks Archaeology Day blew me away, so I'm hoping this is a let down) and needed to borrow chairs. I borrowed them from the First Presbyterian Church next door and had to haul them over to the museum this morning.

As you saw the title of the blog was "How many chairs can you fit in a Soul?" and the answer is....

More than 30!


Pictured above is 28 metal folding chairs stacked in the back, you can't see from this view but two more are stacked sideways in front of them.

I then had to move all of the chairs upstairs to our gallery and arrange them, so here is what my set up looked like when I had completed it all.








I hope we have a good turn-out and can fill all of those chairs!

Student Art

When you substitute teach sometimes kids will draw you a picture... the first time I had one of them draw one for me last year I made the mistake of trashing it at the end of the day... the kid noticed so I had to pretend it fell into the trash can and then wait until they were all on the bus before I got rid of it. So lesson learned... never trash a picture a kid gives you when you are teaching.


Here is a picture I got last week.... I didn't know what it was because I was looking at it sideways the whole time. (In my defense the girl handed it to me sideways) So its a lovely pink Mermaid.

Archaeology Day - DCHS Museum

Yesterday we held an Archaeology Day event at the museum as part of Indiana DNR Archaeology month. We are fortunate enough to have as one of the museum's volunteers a retired national parks service archaeologist, Ben Morris who came in and helped make the event possible by spending the day identifing artifacts and answeing visitors questions about Native American culture from the surround area. Explaining how the different points and tools people brought in were used by the local Natives long ago, as well as dating the artifacts.

The day was a major success! We planned to run the event from 10-2 but it was close to 3 before the last visitor had left. We had over 100 people attend the event and now how to run something similiar to this next Spring due to how sucessful our Archaeology Day event turned out.

The Greensburg Daily News was their to cover the event so I'm looking forward to seeing what they had to say about our exhibit. I'll admit I am very enthused as to how well this went and hope that the rest of our September events do just as great!


Now on to some of the pictures I took:


Busy at the very start of the day!


Ben Looks at an artifact


Looking over some more items


Explaining how this particular piece would have been used




Crowd listening to Ben Morris


Looking over our exhibit of locally found points and artifacts


All kids who came in were welcome to take one of these broken points to help start their collection


Examining a particularly impressive collection


These two little girls had a great time looking over the entire exhibit


Ben called this "Thebes" point the most impressive piece brought in during the day

Wake Up

Random Thought for today:

Don't you hate it when you wake up like 30 minutes before you need to... and then want to keep laying in bed, but you can't sleep well because you know how soon you need to wake up again. So you lay there in bed drifting back and forth between sleep and waking to check the time every few minutes.

Thats what I did this morning as I needed to go into work for our Archaeology Day event (will post information and pictures on this later). I woke up at 8:30 and drifted back and forth between sleeping and being awake for the next half hour before I rolled out of bed and got ready.

I knew that laying their for those 30 minutes wasn't going to make me feel any more well rested, but I couldn't resisit trying to get a few more minutes of sleep.

September Thoughts

September Thoughts


So I was going to kick off this month with one of those month long challenge things were you fill in something for each topic on a list, but really didn’t find one I liked so I’m pushing that back for some other month. Erin is supposed to make me a challenge sheet so if she does I’ll do it for October.

Right now I’m sitting in a coffee shop at IUPUC while Erin is in class, ( I rode along with her today, knowing I could just play games online while she was in class) and since I haven’t blogged in so long I figured I really needed to post an update of some sort.

Work has been very busy, the Museum just made the front page again yesterday for our upcoming Archaeology Day that is taking place this Saturday. Next Sunday we have our All-American Girls Professional Baseball panel, and the weekend after that we kick off our Life before Electricity exhibit. So things have been very busy, but that is good. Sometimes it seems like an impossible struggle to keep a small nonprofit museum going now with everyone’s money tightening up and what seems to be general apathy for local history… outside of facebook groups, which are free but don’t have any physical items/presence to them. I really like the job though, just sad I can tell it will never expand to more than the part-time position it is…. And sometimes I wonder how long they will want to pay someone to do my job if money gets any tighter.

Erin has again floated out the idea of me returning to school to get what I guess would be a more worthwhile* degree than History. I guess I’m stuck on the thought of how much money it cost to go back to school, I’d have to spend everything I saved by working to get government aid and then I’d have to pay off those loans… just seems like a step back and that I would be admitting defeat with my History degree…. Though I will concede that I’d try to steer my kid away from a History degree when they go to college… and that I’d probably make more money with an accounting degree and still enjoy it. I guess its something to put more thought it… and I probably should set up an appointment with an advisor at IUPUC or something, take in my transcript and be like here…. How far away am I? That way I could give the idea a legitimate chance… my current job is flexible enough it wouldn’t be a pain to go back to school currently. Or maybe I should just check out University of Phoenix Online?

I guess I have been thinking about all of that because everything is going so well with Erin right now. I feel comfortable around all of her family and feel they like me. We hung out with them twice last week, them being her grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, and their two kids. Also her Mom and Step-Dad want us to drive down to South Carolina and visit them (Don’t know when we will be able to fit that into our schedule though). If Erin and I want to move any further in our relationship (and we have been talking about the future a lot recently) then I’m going to have to make some more money or figure out something different. She still has 2 years of school yet so neither of us has much money nor will for awhile… but someday I’m going to have to up my salary and who knows what my job prospects will be in a couple years if they nonprofit world keeps getting hit like it is currently.

I sold a few of my old books on Half.com... I pretty much only sell books this time of year when people are heading back to school. They will sit all winter/summer/fall but move during this time. One of them apparently had the envelope get ripped open in the mail though and just the empty mailer arrived in Arizona... ugh so I had to refund that money, and lost the book to the post office.

I recenlty got the full discography minus their newest album, of one of my current favorite bands... Black Rebel Motorcycle Club... I wish they would come to Indianapolis I would totally make Erin go with me to see them.

In other news….

Purdue won their first football game… looks like it will be a long season though.

Dad is planning on starting to harvest the crops around the 15th of this month, so I’ll be helping him some soon. This doesn’t look to be that good of a year though.

Casey has been in Europe for one week visiting Pasqui… she’ll be back next Wednesday

I will try my best to do some sort of mini blog series this month… though as it is already the 7th, I will need to get on the ball!

That’s about all I have to blog about right now so hopefully things are going well for everyone.

*I guess the worthwhileness of a history degree can be disputed… one of the regulars at the museum, who is a retired university professor has talked to me about how I should look into a Master’s degree or further into History.

Handing Out History Awards

These pictures were recently in the Greensburg Daily News of me Handing out awards plaques to the top History Jr's from North and South Decatur. We didn't get them handed out during awards day so we did it over the summer and recently got them in the paper...