After months and months, the Civil War website at work is up and running!
http://shs.umsystem.edu/civilwar/index.html
It's got a lot of content and we've been working on it pretty hard for over a month now, so I'm glad it's finally public. There are still more collections and newspapers to be added in the future, but it's nice that the large part of the development and design of the site are finished. Huzzah!
I'm glad Friday is here. This hasn't been a bad week by any means, but this afternoon I'm really feeling the antsy feeling of the weekend nagging me. I'm also kind of in an organization mood. It doesn't happen too much, but the other evening I managed to re-organize a lot of my Pinterest boards. I'm still doing some clean-up. I realize you don't care about this, but Pinterest is a big deal. Whereas some folks are hooked on websites like Facebook or Twitter, I'm hooked on Pinterest. Simply amazing. I saw a job vacancy for a librarian-esqe position with Pinterest in Palo Alto, actually. Hmm.
I did some archival fieldwork in Mexico this week (Mexico, Missouri, that is). Mexico is a bigger town than I thought. We got lost. It was fine though. The people I met were really nice to work with, and what I love most about this fieldwork (aside from the people I get to meet) are the cool old homes and historic sites I get to visit. For whatever reason, I've lived in this area all my life, but I've not spent much time just exploring the region. Mexico was a big deal for showing American Saddlebred horses for over a century. One of the world's best breeding of that one type of horse. And for a number of Olympics in a row, there were Mexico citizens who were on the equestrian jumping teams. It's all changed now. The lady I was talking to said that all the breeding organizations have shut down. They're re-furbishing one of the oldest stables in the middle of town, but I can't remember what they're turning it into. The Audrain County Historical Society is where I was doing my scanning and it's housed in a historic house that has a Saddlebred Horse museum attached to it. There's also a one room schoolhouse and a cute small church on the grounds. I went into the schoolhouse. The lady at the Historical Society told me that the teachers used to bring their fourth graders to the schoolhouse one day each year and hold class in there to try to give the kids sort of a "living history" lesson. The budgets apparently have gotten so tiny that the schools don't do that anymore. That's a shame. The schoolhouse was pretty cool. I was remembering my fourth grade class and we were kind of a big group. I'm not sure that 30+ kids would have been able to fit in that one room school, actually. But, it still would have been fun to try. The church was locked up, but I bet it was kind of neat as well. When I was in school in Texas all of my classes were inside a museum. And behind the museum building was our historic village and it included a really cute old church that I liked to go and wander into and sit sometimes. This old church in Mexico reminded me of the one in Waco.
Next week I head just down the road from my home to Osage County for a couple of days to do some fieldwork. More places to visit!
Spotify is having a pretty good day today. If you use Spotify, have you used the Filtr app? I've come to really like it. It's like Pandora in that you type in an artist or song and it creates a playlist around that sound or artist, except you can see and manipulate the playlist that it comes up with pre-listening. So there are fewer awkward moments when you type in The Andrews Sisters and for some reason Pandora gets off track about 4 songs in and starts playing Katy Perry. There are still some head-scratchers on Filtr, like when I put in James Taylor and it threw up Carrie Underwood, but I was forewarned, you see? I knew what they had done and was able to tweak it. I like my robot-made spontaneity with a touch of human-control.
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