Week 2: Bagpipes, Floods, Facebook, Auctions, Bread and Breakfast

New Bedford puts on all these fantastic citywide events on a regular basis. I love this little town. Walking downtown yesterday afternoon, I encountered a whole marching band of bagpipes, and an entire temporary skatepark set up in a nearby parking lot. All of this was fun to watch, but I was just out to hit the farmer’s market for fresh bread.

Yum. This lady makes such good bread. I make it into toast everyday for breakfast.

Cereal with banana, bacon, grapefruit juice, bread and strawberry jam—now that’s a breakfast you can be excited to wake up for! I’m going to ask her to make me honey bread for next week. I’m thinking French toast.

On Monday, a huge storm dumped five inches of rain in about an hour. It completely flooded the Museum’s library basement, which is a huge problem from the standpoint of humidity and mold issues for priceless stores of original whaling journals and literature one floor above. This meant lots of helping move stuff out of the basement—damage control. Not to mention the internet and phone systems were down all last weekend and through the middle of this week, adding more trouble to the organization of flood-control efforts. I did get to adopt a bunch of neat books that got soaked. Thankfully, nothing historical was damaged, just a small portion of the bookstores overflow storage.

I also was invited to sit-in on the planning committee for redesigning the Museum, which was absolutely fascinating with regards to their goals and philosophy when it comes to setting up exhibitions. I made some suggestions about marketing the museum on facebook, redesigning the website (something which has been in the works for a while), and advertising the NBWM to all nearby major universities in order to see if any American History and Literature professors might want to incorporate a fieldtrip to the NBWM into their curriculum. I’ll write more about all this later.

We’ve also been in a discussion at the museum about forgery in artwork, which has lead to some conversations that nerds like me really enjoy. I’ll post on that later, too.

Last Saturday was the Over the Top fund raiser and auction at the Whaling Museum, where I went around and got the names of all the people the photographer was taking pictures of, and I even got a few pictures of myself!

It was really pretty fun: I had a good excuse to meet a bunch of NBWM patrons; there was delicious food and catering; and I really enjoyed being at a party under an enormous blue whale skeleton.

This Sunday, I’m bussing up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire for the North Eastern Maritime auction where I’ll be shadowing the Senior Curator while he does whatever he does at auctions. This is definitely going to be really exciting.

I'll close with the following, a more whaling museum-appropriate watercolor of a Madonna and Child: