Good news! Kyle got a job. On an awesome kind of coincidence, he’s taking a one year contract at Northwest Missouri State to be a full-time professor of communication. It just so happened that he e-mailed the department chair to inquire about adjunct positions back in May when I was first invited for this job. About three days before we moved, he got a response, hearing that it was likely that they’d have something available for him. It turned out, they had a position available because a professor was possibly leaving a post. We got confirmation that the job was open and they needed Kyle to fill it this past Monday and Kyle went in to fill out paperwork the very next day. It’s so quick to adjust to him having to work, but it’s fantastic news for us and I know he’s glad to be there.

I’m still really liking Savannah, but now that I’m used to working 8 hours and then having the evening or weekends ahead of me, I’m looking for a new hobby. By which I mean, I most likely need to revive an old hobby. Or I guess I could learn to sew. But given that I knit, design websites, geek out on design, et cetera, I need something to occupy my time a little better. So far, I have been reading a little (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon) and Kyle and I have been enjoying the end of our summer tv shows, but I need something that keeps me away from a too-early bedtime.

Plus, I’m a firm believer that if your job title is the coolest thing about you, you’re doing it wrong. And my job title is “curator” so that’s a lot to compete with.

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We’ve been in our new house in Savannah for exactly two weeks today, and I’ve been making appearances as an official employee of my museum for two weeks tomorrow! I think we’re settling in pretty well. I really like my job a lot. I still feel like I spend most of my day running around trying to find the time to get something done, but things should be calming down a lot now because my high school and middle school volunteers are going back to school and I’ll only have the high school volunteer in on Wednesdays after school beginning this week. Hopefully, I’ll have some time to get things sorted out and start feeling like I’m working and contributing to the museum more than usual.

The good news is that I feel pretty qualified to be working this job. So far, all of the many many many future tasks of the new curator that have been thrown at me seem manageable and like something I’m really capable of doing. But, it’s still a little overwhelming. There is so much to do that I can’t quite always figure out where to start. It seems pretty clear that the museum’s theory of collections for the last little while has been to tell people that we don’t have a curator and so the donor should wait until their was a curator. Sound advice, but now I’m flooded with donations. That hypothetical in grad school where “someone walks into a museum with a box” is my every single day. I’m hoping that slows down for a while until I get a collections management policy written. Gracious.

In other news, the dog I posted about in the last entry was kept at the vet’s office and adopted a few days before we moved! She’s living a good life out in Matador, Texas!

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I think we found a house. Hopefully. Kyle’s parents are going out to look at it tomorrow or Friday, and they’re going to make sure it’s a decent neighborhood and send us pictures of the place. This time, we’re asking for his dad to basically take photos of every inch of the house, because the last set of photos didn’t give me a very good idea of how the house went together and I like to obsess over how I might arrange furniture inside. I think it’s a combination of my career involving planning exhibits, my love of design, and my constant search for an excuse to find a reason to use Google SketchUp. Though, honestly, I’ve been designing houses on computers since MS Paint was the only software I had that could facilitate this hobby. So now that it’s a real one and I’m about to be living in it (as a renter), I’m crazy for planning.

Today, I bought boxes with the full intention of sorting through our belongings to determine what can go with us and what can be packed and then packing something. My hope is that we’ll get some things packed so that when my mom comes to visit next week we’ll be part of the way done. If I had my way, I would pack a bag and then a troll would come pack everything that wasn’t in my long-stay bag. Unfortunately, trolls are undependable. So, I want to finish packing

• the bathroom
• both hall closets
• the office (except for books)
• the clothes closets
• the kitchen (except for necessities)

Hopefully my next attempt is more successful than todays.

Mostly, we got distracted today because Kyle was out at Levelland playing disc golf and came across a stray dog. She’s so cute! She has a pinkish collar on and apparently she’s been hanging out around that park for the last couple weeks. We posted an ad on craiglist with a photo of her and then took her to a vet to surrender her. I wish we could take another dog, especially such a cute and well-behaved one, but with the move coming up, it would be way too much stress on Oats and Logan. As it is, neither of them are going to love being in a new house right away, but adding another animal would probably mean that Oats would never be nice to another dog. Plus, she kind of seems like she only wants to visit with other dogs but doesn’t actually want a dog sister/brother/roommate. So we’re going to follow up with the vet tomorrow and the animal shelter later to see what’s going on with this little girl. And hopefully, we find something. If anyone knows of any rescues or any people around West Texas (or the Midwest, for that matter) looking for a cute pup, let me know. She was really good with the little girl we met at the emergency clinic.

Honestly, the whole experience just made me even more ready to get out of Lubbock to a place where people are a little better toward animals. Even if you have one that your’e trying to help here, it seems like no one is willing to exert any effort. It’s so frustrating. We’ve rescued, attempted to rescue, or helped someone else rescue seven dogs in the time that we’ve been here. Isn’t it ridiculous that there are that many strays that just go unconsidered in this town?

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Now that I have a job, we’re on the hunt for a house. They want me to start at the museum during the week of August 9, and our apartment complex wants us to get out of our place here by August 7, so it seems pretty perfect to get moving as soon as possible. As it turns out, house hunting is not all it’s cracked up to be. Too many factors make it difficult for us to find exactly what we want and we’re on such a short time frame that it’s even more stressful.

We want to live in the county where I will work, if at all possible. Unfortunately, this seems to be pretty close to impossible. No one is willing to rent to us in the county with our dog, and besides that, all of the rental properties are apartments without yards and we are definitely looking for a house to live in. Though that stipulation doesn’t seem to matter much at all because not even the apartment complexes will take our pets. We’re also interested in possibly buying, but it will take us more than a few days to get financing together (plus, we would like to see a place before we buy it) and we need to move in August 9. So, we’d ideally like to be able to rent something month-to-month and it would be even better if we could do a super short-term rent to own where we start going on buying a month or two after we move in.

We do have a couple almost-promising leads, so hopefully very quickly I will have some good news and can start day-dreaming about furniture arrangement and interior decorating instead of worrying we’ll be technically homeless come a month from now.

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I am very excited to announce that I accepted a position as curator of the Andrew County Museum and Historical Society in Savannah, Missouri on Friday. I have been in the process for interviewing for this position for about two months, so I’m glad that the whole journey ends with my receiving the job. Not only is it nice to have any job, but this is also a great job for me as I begin my museum career.

The museum staff consists of a director, an administrative assistant, and a curator—so you can imagine that my work is pretty well cut out for me. The job description puts the curator in charge of developing a temporary exhibit program, starting a public education program, continuing collections management activities, supervising volunteers and assisting the director.

The temporary exhibit program builds on their permanent exhibition, “A Rural Way of Life,” that opened in October 2009. The exhibition tells the story of Andrew County as a market town in Missouri through 2001. While a lot of rural history museums I’ve visited focus solely on farm life, this museum focuses on life in town and on the farm and covers a lot of ground. Some of the ideas the director and I have for temporary exhibits would fill in gaps not in the exhibit, such as exhibitions of Andrew County history related to specific time periods (World War II, etc.), pre-American indigenous settlement of the land, and ecology.

Public programming will focus on the Rural Way of Life exhibit and likely will involve the creation of travelling trunks that allow the museum collection to visit schools, retirement centers, nursing homes, or hospitals to do educational programming for people who can’t make an on-site visit. We also want to reach out to the home schoolers in the area to find programming that can meet their needs.

While this is certainly a lot of work for anyone, I am excited for the challenge. Plus, I really like to multi-task and stay busy all the time, so I work better when I have a lot going on. It’s awesome that I get to start my career working on education and exhibits. It seems like most of the curator/educator positions I’ve found want 3-5 years experience after graduate school. Likewise, most of the entry-level positions are fairly collections management heavy and, to me, not that exciting. It’s not that I don’t like collections management so much as that I get bored if it’s all that I’m doing. So I’m glad that this job will let me use, and polish, all of my skills in museum science.

I start the week of August 9 (with a long first weekend as I have the minor interruption of Kristin and Stephen’s wedding in Dallas on the 15th!) so we’re in the process of housing hunting (to rent or to buy) and I am dreaming about paint colors, DIY decoration projects, and … having an income. Awesome!

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