Happy Thanksgiving!

The museum will be closed tomorrow so our staff can celebrate Thanksgiving with our family and friends. We will re-open on Friday for our annual Day After Thanksgiving festivities, including Jeff Risher's reptiles, open hearth cooking samples, and more!

It has been a tough year for me, personally, but I actually think it is easier to be thankful for what you have when you've been through something tragic or sad.

Since last year at this time, we have lost both of our beloved kitties, and our dear friend John.

But I still have so much to be thankful for! Here is just a partial list:

1. The joy our new kittens Snickers and KitKat have brought to our lives. They are both unique kitties, but they share the best qualities of the two we lost this year. Since we adopted them on September 11, both have wrapped their tails around our hearts...
2. The museum continues to thrive, in spite of the floundering economy, because of all the great work we're doing. And we're doing it for YOU. So thank you all for continuing to support us. Schools continue to come on field trips, and our admission numbers are holding steady. There are MANY museums in this country that can't say that right now.
3. A year of successful programs, including our Tea with the Curator, Coffee & Crafts, and Soup at Six series; and our list of annual events like McKinley Day, the Bridal Show, the Car Show, Summer Science Splash, the Halloween Party, and our new fall fundraiser.
4. All of the generous donors who have given to our 2010 Capital & Replacement drive -- the staff truly appreciates all the extra goodies we can purchase through that program that just aren't in our budget!
5. The wonderful comments we've received for our Keller Gallery exhibitions this year, including the dollhouse exhibit Life in Miniature, the quilt exhibit A Stitch in Time, and The Victorian Age.
6. The opportunities I've had to serve my community at the state level through the Ohio Historical Society's statewide internship pilot program and the National Digital Newspaper Program in Ohio.
7. Opening a new storage building has been a long-term goal -- and this year it became reality! We are so very thankful to have the space to properly house our collection, and to have some room to grow.
8. The opportunity to teach. I recently found out that my museum studies course is a go at Mt. Union this spring! There is still a chance students might drop it between now and the beginning of the semester, but I am hopeful that we will still have enough to run it when classes start.
9. Gary Brown at the Repository for his continuing support of our programs, events and exhibitions! Let's face it -- we could do the best work possible here, but what difference would it make if people didn't know about it? We're also thankful for all the other newspapers in the region that have started to run stories about us in the past year. THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
10. And last, but not least, MY HEALTH! I had one of my salivary glands removed in July and am now free of pain when I eat! Since I love food, being able to eat without stinging pain is a miracle that I am thankful for each and every day. I will never, ever forget what it felt like, and I will always be thankful that the pain is gone.

We hope to see you all sometime during the holiday season. The museum is fully decorated for the holidays, and we have lots of great special events coming up in December!

Happy Thanksgiving!

1960s artifacts

I have just finished sifting through 839 catalog records for artifacts from the 1960s!

Now, keep in mind that not all of the items are actually FROM the 1960s. I did a search in the description field for "196," which meant that any item with that sequence of numbers would come up. That would include serial numbers, death dates, etc.

We have some really neat stuff! I'm excited about this exhibit -- it's going to be a lot of fun to put together!

The White House Garden

Can you believe The Victorian Age is closing in a few weeks? How fast the time has gone!

I heard from SITES yesterday and The White House Garden is shipping out on November 22 from DC. It has been on view in the White House Visitor's Center. It will arrive here that day or the next, depending on DC traffic!

The exhibit will open the evening of our Holiday Open House on Friday December 3. The event is free for members, and guests are $5 each.

The exhibit is going to be fantastic!

Since we will have some extra space in the Keller Gallery, I am also exhibiting recently donated McKinley artifacts from the past 10 years. Even though the President was assassinated more than a century ago, we still receive McKinley donations from time to time. I thought it would be fun to showcase the ones that have come in since I started back in 2001.

Simultaneously I am working on Celebrate the Sixties, our next Keller Gallery exhibition, because The White House Garden will only be with us for 8 weeks. I have chosen the panel and label design, and I am assembling a list of artifacts from our collection, as well as items individuals are loaning for the exhibition. It will be a fun one!

Halloween Party a sucess!

The numbers are in and we had more than 700 guests at the Boo-seum last Friday night!

We are thrilled with the turnout, and thankful for all the wonderful volunteers and staff who helped make this event a success.

I also wanted to mention that my computer is preventing me from blogging as much as I'd like to. The "hijacking" thing is all fixed, but the software that allows me to NOT jump to google analytics also prevents the photo uploading tool from working on Blogger. SO, I can't add any photos from my work computer. Bummer.

If you haven't already, please join the museum's Facebook page. There are no issues with that site, so I can upload whatever photos I want.

I'm still going to keep this blog, and hopefully down the line we'll figure out how to NOT get hijacked AND use the photo and video uploading tools. Right now, I can't post a link either.

Very frustrating.

Next up for the museum is the Day After Thanksgiving. We hope to see you there! For regular admission, you will get all kinds of extra activities. Bring your out of town guests!!