It's Friday! And I have two days off. Everything's going well but it's nice to have a break especially after all the heat. I thought I was getting away from crazy heat and humidity but this past week was just as bad as what I left in Virginia. I guess I'm still better off though because the news was reporting temperature above 100 in VA! Keep cool and drink lots of water everyone!!
Wednesday we greeted buses again. The staff are very happy to have the access road to museum education open after the tornado. In the afternoon we were trained for camp. I'm both nervous and excited. Camp at Sturbridge is going to be very different from what I'm used to so it's going to take some adjusting but I think it'll be really fun to try something new. Cheri, one of the camp leads, explained the basics of camp to us and what's going to be expected of us but I still feel like I won't really understand everything until I see it all in action. My greatest fear is that I'm just going to be sitting around playing fetch for the teachers which is a possibility I'm getting the impression of from the training. Hopefully that won't be the case though and I'm just nervous about nothing! I think I just need to remind myself that I'm the intern now and not the staff and remember what that means.
Oh and did I mention Cheri in my last post? Cheri's great! You know how some people are social butterflies? Cheri is a social humming bird, she's everywhere and talks a mile a minute! I also met Amanda who is one of the camp leads I'm assigned to assist for a week of archaeology camp. In our first conversation she forced me to eat pudding while asking all about school and my future plans, what a meanie right? :) We've been planning to make layered "dirt" (you know the dessert with chocolate pudding and Oreos etc?
) to show the different strata for the archaeology kids. See what I mean about worried for no reason?
Yesterday (Thursday), was my first day of training for interpretation. I was so excited! Oh, side story... my day started at 5 AM with Heidi telling me that Tim Tam (my cat) had fallen out of a window in the night and was missing. Luckily he hadn't gone far and it only took a few minutes to find him. In the meantime Benny (my other cat) fell out of the same window and was so scared he jumped straight back in! Needless so say, we're now keeping that window shut. Anyway... I was so excited that I couldn't fall back asleep. Stephen had the day off so he drove me to work and I was feeling very cute in my costume. Now for the bad news: I didn't need to be wearing it for training! I felt kind of silly but the good news is only one girl knew that so most of the other girls were in costume too. We spent most of the day in the staff break room/office building so it wasn't too hot for us in costume and when we did go out it was fun to have people asking to take pictures of us! I think it must have been hard to resist a such a big group of pretty girls all in different colored dresses and big crazy bonnets since the staff don't normally walk in groups.
We learned all about the history of the Freeman farmhouse, the Freeman family and the other people who lived in the house. We learned about life on a farm and the way responsibilities were divided by gender and time of year... We learned a lot! Which brings me to a question: What do you want to read about? Do you want more of the facts and content that I'm learning or more of the type of me stuff I've been writing? So far I haven't felt like I've learned much that would be interesting for everyone to sit and read (not that I'm not earning TONS of interesting info). My current plan is to hold off on lots of history trivia until I'm learning more active kind of stuff like how they cooked etc. For example yesterday I learned about the ways people preserved food to sustain themselves year round. Did you know that root vegetables like carrots have a two year life cycle? In the first year, energy is spent to grow the root. Then the plant kind of hibernates and in the second year the energy stored in the root plus new energy is used to grow the part of the plant above soil and produce seeds. If you pick the plant before it goes into the second year of the cycle and store it in sand in a cellar it will stay crisp and fresh all winter, a heck of a lot longer than it will in a refrigerator!
Sunday: Hearth cooking training!
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