A Helping Hand and Future Fun

My day off will start busy, but good. Last week my friend Cindy phoned asking if I could help her remove curtains and curtain rods from her living room. This is my friend whose husband passed away last year in April and her mobility is quite limited due to MS. I'll be happy to climb up with screwdrivers (and possible power tools) in hand and get these pulled down for her. She'll be moving to Indiana soon to stay closer to her remaining family and her daughter. I think in the long run that will be a great decision for her and despite her reservations, it will end up with positive results.

Yippee - power tools. Gotta love them!

A customer had mentioned that the Field Museum in Chicago was holding an exhibit on the Lascaux Caves while I was going to be in Milwaukee attending the Bead & Button Show in June. I emailed my roommate to see if she had the day free to go down to Chicago and attend the exhibit, but she has classes scheduled for each day. So I decided to go on my own, as I have done several times in the past. Yesterday I had a chance to go on-line and purchase my train tickets and my museum tickets. It will be a long day because I'll have a scheduled event at the Convention Center that evening from 8:00 pm until 11:00 pm and I catch my train in the early morning at 6:15 am (very long day), but it will be SO worth it.

The bulls are so beautiful - such economy of line yet holding
strength and motion.

So many of these amazing Paleolithic caves are being closed off or severely restricted for visitation because of the damage that people unintentionally bring with them. People's body temperatures slightly raise the temps as they look at the paintings. People breathe and their exhalations are warm and moist, also leading to degradation in the quality of the paintings. This exhibit offers an opportunity to actually see the cave paintings in true reproduction - as close to the actual caves as I will ever be able to get. I'm over the moon that I get to attend this.

Horses and other animals chase each other across the upper walls/ceilings.

I hope that they have a great gift shop with pictured catalog books of the art available for purchase. I know my DH would love to have been able to attend with me and unless the exhibit travels to the Twin Cities, this may be as close as he can get. A good catalog can make up for some of this and can join our other catalogs in our bookshelves.

If I'm correct, the exhibition will actually have the cave replicated and I'll
be able to walk through as if I was discovering them for the first time. How
amazingly wonderful!

I also heard of a book cataloging software app this morning that I'm going to look into. I have thousands of books in hardcopy that we have always wanted to be able to catalog. I'll look into "Book Catalogue" this afternoon and see if it might work well for our collection. Maybe technology will come through for me one more time.

I remember card catalogs similar to these for libraries. I searched for books
for hours when I was writing school papers and my Master's thesis. Now
these can be electronic instead of index cards. If this program allows me to scan
the bar code or just enter the ISBN, I'll be in 7th Heaven!

And one last note. I had written a revision of the Rumpelstiltskin story for Untold Press for an open call for their next book. Unfortunately the story was not accepted because it didn't quite meet the undead criteria that they were shooting for. Oh well. It's still a good story that I'm very comfortable with. I'll start looking for a few other venues to submit it to before either keeping it for a possible future story collection of my own or putting it out there in my archives for all of my readers to enjoy. I'm actually happy to have an opportunity to shop it around a bit and, possibly, to add to my virtual rejections wallpaper. Two steps forward and one step back still results in forward progress.