Work

So I keep being told that I never speak of what I actually came to Virginia for—to work! Although my blogs might not indicate it, yes, I am still interning for the park, just with some eventful weekends here and there! Last week I just got done with a project I had been working on for about a month. A bunch of old historic architectural drawings and park maps had been left in the basement of headquarters, so I just got finished sorting them, dividing them into groups, and then going through the formal accessioning process of cataloguing and labeling them before they could be put in our museum database and then stored in our collections building. I’ve also been working on transcribing some oral histories of previous park employees, park families, and summer camp counselors to add to the collection. Sometimes we get relatives of park families who want to see old family cemeteries so we take them to those and other times we go search out locations of supposed cemeteries to see if we need to add them to our database with the other 40+ cemetery locations in the park. We’ve also been working on GPSing some of the ruins of a pyrite mine that was here so that maintenance can come along and clear vegetation and better maintain the historic sites. Two weeks ago we went out with the regional archaeologists from headquarters again and found (in addition to a new cemetery) a civil war cannonball (it was this day that I also got my first and hopefully last tick, but don’t even worry because it wasn’t a deer tick so I won’t get lyme disease or anything)! We try to get out in the field a couple or three times a week and other than that we’re doing work around the office. I am still really liking it and am learning a lot—I can’t believe I’m already 2/3 of the way done with my time here! This weekend I was very excited to just relax and lay around (well yesterday I went shopping all day) after three very busy weekends. On Thursday I fly back to Tulsa for a long weekend to go to a Chi O sister’s wedding!!!! After that only a few weekends left before Aunt Sally, Grand, Sam, and Whit visit and then JohnnyBoy heads out here for a cross-country road trip with his favorite daughter!!