Chris and Theresa Update

I think with the arrival of Sunday, I am exactly one week late getting to this--sorry! One reason is our internet: besides our generally miserable service, we've spent the past week or week and a half at barely usable speeds. I was going to check to see if our connection was being throttled for having exceeded our allotted data, but I couldn't even get that page to load.

Theresa is semi-happily interning at the museum. The "curator" at the museum is understandably feeling threatened by the fact that we're asking her to share her work with Theresa and two other interns; she's long had a monopoly on the "system" she's used to catalog things, but that system has been totally inadequate. It's only recently been digitized, artifacts have been lost, and their storage is also of questionable quality. The interns are supposed to help catch up on a backlog of uncataloged objects, but the curator hasn't always been helpful in helping them. The two boys Theresa is with are also unused to office work and look to her as the adult in the room so she splits her time between mothering them to do their work and doing her own. On a happy note, she and the erstwhile director are planning a women in aviation exhibit (work she's been enjoying) and we've been trying to keep the interns out of the office for a day or two a week to give them a break. So she's gotten to physically explore the aircraft and help with various projects. Recently, she's learned how to drive a scissorlift like the one pictured.

I've been busy at work myself, not with formal education work (like tours and lessons) but refreshing and improving the museum's display on the former Liberal Army Airfield. This involves preparing the gallery for painting (fortunately I had a very dedicated volunteer working off community service hours to power through a lot of pre-priming prep work). I've sifted through old images and information to decide what the display will actually be, and I've got a volunteer captioning those images while a very talented local artist is going to paint me a full-scale B-24 for a background. The artist is also one of my favorite volunteers, a very sweet lady who reminds me a little of Nancy Shears.

^ Before

^ After

On a related note, the museum board agreed to finance the purchase of a turbocharger I found with a vendor in England. It's from a B-24 or B-17 and was made by Allis Chalmers for GE. It'll be the largest B-24 component the museum has on display when it arrives. To get it here I'm also learning a little about import laws and the process of importing items.

Finally a reminder that we occaisionally post pictures to our own blog at www.TeamGivan.com/family. We've been distracted from that recently (between some very frustrating car repairs, the internet speeds, and our immersion in work) but should have some more pictures for it very soon!