Weeknotes: 02/18/24-02/24/24

weeknotes museum family teaching

This Week:

It was Oneonta Schools February Break, plus President’s day, so I had one or both kiddos with me every day. It was a complicated dance, but we made it work.
At the Museum, we held an afternoon program for kids called “World of Water” with games, crafts, activities, and snacks. We had a great turnout and a lot of fun. We were lucky to be joined by educators from Hanford Mills Museum, and we’re happy and appreciative that they could come out and share in the fun.
I finished reading China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station”. What surprised me most what that, despite being a fixed point in the micro-genre of “Weird Fiction”, and filled with bizarre and bewildering imagery, the story is a fairly conventional urban noir, with a small ragtag band of city dwellers caught up between powerful and unknowable forces. What didn’t surprise was that the ending sucked. I couldn’t get over the grand reveal of the brutality of one of the main characters, with whom readers are set up to build a powerful emotional attachment over 800+ pages. It felt disingenuous,like bad character development, and a sour note on which to end an otherwise decent and interesting book.
In Collections Management, I taught the students about environmental conditions, and collections management policies.
In the few spare moments I had, I worked on some forward planning for an upcoming program.