Survived My First Day!

Today was our first full day! It was kind of overwhelming, but it was fun. Started with having our pictures taken for our IDs, which was kind of hilarious. The woman doing it had all of this wonderfully professional equipment that was clearly meant for photographing objects & museum pieces. But she was really friendly and did the whole “point your shoulders one way and your face in the other and smile” so the pictures will either be great or hysterically bad (I felt so awkward I don’t think I could smile like a normal person if my life had been on the line – I’m willing to sacrifice my dignity, though).

Then we were released to go visit parts of the Village and do some tours and stuff. I toured the baby blue house – the Wells Thorn House – with a great guide who was very different from the people I had when I was here with Jess. I liked the house as well as the lady, although a good guide does make a world of difference. Also saw the Apprentice Exhibit, which I guess is supposed to be self-guided but the man there showed three of us around the whole thing. It’s geared towards little kids, and broken into three parts – textiles & weaving, pottery, and woodworking.

Lunch at the Allen House. Sandwiches & leftover pizza from last night.

After lunch, we had an introduction to the Memorial Libraries here, which is where we’ll be doing most of our research for our projects. The people seemed nice, the collection was impressive, between both Deerfield & PVMA’s libraries being there. So there’s Historic Deerfield, where I am, but there is also the Pockumtuck Valley Memorial Association. I know I spelled the P word wrong. There’s also bound copies of all the former Fellows’ projects there, which we got to look through. We’re supposed to be coming up with a topic. Egads. I got nothing.

Then we had a seminar discussion, recovering the history of Deerfield the town and then the museum. It’s interesting how it just kind of segwayed from a town into a tourist attraction without doing any of the middley bit.

Not sure what I want to do my big project on yet, I'm hoping to have that figured out soon because it's kind of weird not having that. There's so many choices, and this is kind of a big deal. I feel like I'm picking my thesis topic all over again. AHHH.

I have many more thoughts, but I have to get to the library to use their wi-fi to post this and then back here to do more reading.

Send me emails, I’ll read them when I can!