Happy New Year, Happy New MOHAI!

In one week it will be Grand Opening Weekend at MOHAI. In two weeks I'll be in New Orleans for a history conference. I'm gonna be busy, so chances are the blog will be quiet for a while. But before I send you off into the new year, here are some tidbits to tide you over:

-The Miss Universe pageant happened, which means its annual parade of bizarre national costumes also happened. I would put together a commentary for you, but it would be hard to top the one available on Tom and Lorenzo. You can read the three parts here, here, and here.

-On Thursday we had an all-staff training for grand opening (aka: "Grand Opening" as it is written in all our internal emails, or "GRAND OPENING" when it is spoken). I found out that I am a "lead" in my section and will be issued a headset for which have to memorize a list of rules and information about what channel to be on for different kinds of conversations. I'm kind of stressed about it, so a few of my co-workers have offered to radio me constantly with fake code words and crises to fix.

-During Grand Opening training I found out that one of my volunteers will be the fabulous older model from the New Day Northwest segment. She was the one bringing a little white-haired fierceness next to the poor girl wearing the bow/veil "fascinator."

-For Grand Opening we are supposed to be "dressy" but should also factor in comfy shoes for standing a long time, pants or skirts with pockets, and the fact that we will all be wearing "aprons" which will be holding a kiosk's worth of MOHAI brochures and publications. I fear that is not a clothing brief that my wardrobe supports.

-On Friday we unpacked a large box of textiles, all of which have to be frozen and vacuumed before being put away. As I checked off their accession numbers I turned to one of my co-workers and said "is it weird that I'm kind of excited to vacuum all this stuff?" She said, "For you? No."

-And to conclude 2012, here is my favorite photo of myself from the artifact install process at the new MOHAI. I am in the middle of the Grand Atrium, half way up a ladder, sewing Black Bart into his shirt, and proving that skirts are no hindrance to bizarre manual tasks.

See you in 2013!

Odds and Ends

Here are some weird work-related things I've been up to:

-We recently acquired one of the original driving consoles from the Seattle Monorail. It is a pretty cool artifact, which you can sort of see in this picture here. Basically it is an L-shaped metal thing with a bunch of dials and knobs and a chair. I was charged with cleaning it. My method of choice? Q-tips and a jar of mild metal cleaner--wielded while crouching on the floor and trying to keep my skirt in some sort of modest configuration over my legs.

-Another new accession was a 1930s doll that was purchased from a Seattle toy store. As I started cataloging it I realized that I was going to have to put a number on every single piece of clothing she had, no matter how tiny. Hard objects (plastic, metal, wood etc.) usually get printed numbers that are adhered with a removable resin, and those numbers can be made quite small. Fabric usually gets numbers written out on twill tape and sewn in--but the twill tape we use is pretty bulky. These clothes were so small and delicate I needed another solution. So I wrote numbers on Tyvek as small as I could and then sewed it down on one side. It turned out pretty well

Note the printed number on the doll and the tyvek tags on the clothes

And before anyone gets up in arms about the fact that I am touching the object with my hands: Clean hands are actually recommended instead of gloves when doing something that requires a lot of dexterity--like trying to make tiny, tiny stitches.

-Do you remember Black Bart? Well, he is out of his crate and ready for action! On Friday I had to hang out with him while the mount makers prepared his mechanized mount. Unlike other projects though, which are done in the privacy of our artifact staging room, this was happening in the center of the grand atrium. So as people came into work and donors passed by for tours, I was there authoritatively guarding a shirtless man in tight pants, lying flat on his back on a table. Then, when we lifted him up to test the mount, I noticed a bunch of scratches so I dutifully took a picture to document the issue:

Yep, just fillin' the work camera with inanimate artifact butt pics.

The Beefy Arms Brigade

On Monday at the new museum, I had the exciting task of monitoring the moving crew while they worked with some of our larger artifacts. Basically that meant I was supposed to watch them with a steely, judgmental stare that says "under normal circumstances I would rip your head off for touching an artifact like that, but that thing weighs 1400 pounds so I suppose I need your help to move it." The project included taking the wheels off of a cart and reassembling it in a gallery, and moving our famous racist fish-gutting machine into place.

After watching for a little while, I realized I was actually having fun witnessing the whole process. It was just so different than my normal workday. I work mostly with women, and manual tasks are completed slowly and methodically. Fabrics get vacuumed with brush attachments that aren't much bigger than a quarter, and an entire canoe can get cleaned with a q-tip. But here was this pack of tough guys hammering axels into place, bracing things with giant pieces of wood, and using exciting tools like "winches" and "bottle jacks." For both projects they had ingenious, well thought-out plans for how to move the objects carefully and methodically, but there were still a few moments where the best option was "hand me the hammer," or "let's just see what happens if we push it really hard."

Later that week, as I was sewing padding to male mannequin arms to make them look beefier, I was struck by the bizarre presence of the faux men I have in my work life. And no, that isn't some cruel comment about the dudes who work at MOHAI-- I'm talking about this house of horrors:

That would be the mannequin that I made the aforementioned beefy arms for. How would you feel if you turned on the light in your office one morning and saw that? 

Eventually, he will have hair and hands, and will be wearing a hat, vest, tuxedo jacket, pants, and shoes. But right now he looks like some sort of pants-less, nubby-handed Frankenstein monster. 

This then brought to mind my other favorite creep-tastic collections photo:

This is Black Bart, a quick-draw cowboy arcade game from the 1962 World's Fair. Here we see him back from the conservator (where he got some face-work) and tucked into his packing crate. His shirt was removed so it could be replaced with a prop shirt.

But seriously, the whole scene with the plastic, the covered head, the tight pants, the bare chest, and the gun at the ready, it looks like he was the victim of some sex game gone awry and now his killer is trying to dispose of the evidence.

Nice arms though.