An Exhausting Day

Oh my goodness, today was SO LONG. Not necessarily because it was uninteresting, but because I was so very tired. This morning we had a lecture with one of the women about guiding. However, she is an educator, so she brings a new perspective to the interpretation of exhibits. She gave us advice on different ways to invite our visitors to interact with the objects and in the houses in order to learn something. It was very interesting. I'm actually very excited about guiding, even though I know I'll be a little nervous. We get our guiding assignments on Friday and get to shadow the guides this weekend. I'll let you know how it goes. After that, we went to the Ashley house for a house study. The Reverend Ashley's house is actually right across the street from my house. We only got through two rooms, which was unfortunate. We focused a lot on the furniture (as usual); especially since we read about the Rococo style. Basically, Rococo uses curves and sexualizes everything. The furniture, paintings, etc. reflect Greek mythology as well as female sexuality. There were some pieces in the Ashley House that reflected this style. Everyone is very tired, though, and these house studies can be brutal, so it was a long hour and a half.

After lunch we had two more lectures. One was with the collections manager about textiles, and the other was with the curator of ceramics and house interiors about ceramics. Both people are very fun to talk to, so the lectures were interesting, but yet again, we were all dragging by that time of afternoon. Fortunately, Josh recognized how exhausted we were, so we didn't end up having seminar this afternoon. Since we have a field trip tomorrow, we talked about logistics of the trip, then left. I also talked to Josh about my object paper. He is going to help me figure out what frame I need to look through so that my paper will be the most help to the museum. I know this is going to turn into my final paper somehow, but hopefully I will have some idea of how by this weekend. Of course, this weekend I need to do most of my research, if not start writing my object paper. I know it will get done, but I would feel better about it if I had more research done. I've just be so exhausted after doing our homework, that I haven't done as much as I could have. I'll be hyper-productive this weekend. I promise to have pictures posted sometime this weekend. I took some pictures in the galleries today, and I'll go around to some of the houses. Okay, I am going to do some homework and research, so I'll write tomorrow about our first field (to New Hampshire).