Suburb of Heaven

Bemo and I met up with some friends in Wilber, NE (The "Czech capitol of America!") for their annual Czech Days Festival. It's a really nice event - one of those small-town things where they're happy to have you there spending your dollars on funnel cakes and touring the tiny museum, but they'd be there anyway, with their giant range of polka bands (from little kiddies to oldsters), dancers (ditto), electing the queen, prince, and princess of the festival, and eating kolaches, the traditional danish/jelly doughnut-esqe pastry that the town is very proud of.

Their little town museum is also a fun place to wander around. It's full of scary department store mannequins dressed in historic costumes, odds and ends that townsfolk have donated, period-rooms-of-a-sort (complete with listening stations consisting of a cd player and headphones), and a woman weaving rag rugs sitting in the storefront.


A display of wrenches

One of my museum-coworker friends said that it made her feel great and sad at the same time - it was awesome that the townsfolk could come in and point out a dentist chair to their kid and go, "I sat there when I was your age! It was so scary!" But we both feel sad about the fact that nobody there knows how to preserve most of this stuff long-term, and it's deteriorating before everyone's eyes. Generally, these museums are run on a budget of minus five, and have a volunteer staff who love their collection but don't know how to care for it in the slightest. I think there are publications geared towards these sorts of museums, but they may not know about them. Perhaps we could find a way to send them over, but sometimes it doesn't matter if you know how to preserve, for example, a heavily beaded dress (hint - don't let it just hang off a regular hanger and don't pin post-it notes to it with straight pins) if you don't have the storage furniture, staff to store it, money to buy acid-free tissue paper and the training to know how to pad it out carefully, mannequins that will hold it without stress, etc.

( surprised stuffed bunny is surprised )

We then went to the Wilbur Hotel and ate duck with dumplings (and sausage with dumplings, and pork with dumplings) and really incredible sauerkraut that I surprised myself by scarfing up with great enthusiasm, and rye bread, and the aforementioned dumplings with were little extruded tubes that looked a lot like string cheese and had gravy on them, and applesauce and onion rings (Bemo insisted) and more kolaches and lemonade.

( hot men holding swords from days long ago )

And then we all waddled over (sauerkraut and those dumplings made for a pretty heavy meal) to a nearby quilt show. At this point Bemo and I bid them farewell and headed off to Omaha to look for a dress for me (they apparently went off and found a tank, judging by a photo I just saw on Facebook). I found a dress in Von Maur (a chiffony purpley pretty thing) that will work as my Best Woman dress for mom's upcoming wedding, and I'm glad I found it because I was feeling discouraged about the poor selection of dresses I had been finding up until now. (PS, am feeling discouraged about my weight and my eating habits again, which is funny to say after a description of eating sausage and dumplings, but it's mostly my day-to-day eating that I'm fighting with again, and so am feeling particularly unattractive and not in the best frame of mind to buy a pretty dress.)

And then we bought cat food and dish soap and diet soda and cleaning products because I am going to try and not leave my catsitter a filthy apartment to face. And we came home and did laundry as a giant storm rolled in, all yellow sky and ferocious winds and a few tree branches down in our front yard right as it started, and also the power flickered but thankfully didn't go off. It's cool and I have the windows open, much to the delight of the cats. Ratchet is particularly chuffed as he's been permitted to escort me to the basement laundry room a couple of times (he's good about not getting stuck anywhere or running off and evading me, so he gets to trot down the two flights of stairs and howl at the doors of the storage areas down there. I do not know what is in his tiny cat brain.

Tomorrow will be spent cleaning, I think. And lazing about, that too.

I have nothing to say right now. Here are two Instagram shots of lavender taken at the local rose garden.

Actually, here's something more cheerful. A co-worker (and friend - she's the driving force behind the playreading group) snuck off and got married last week. Once we discovered this, we had this little tableau waiting for her in her office when she got back.





Museum people know how to make their own fun.

Taken on Sunday. The day was gorgeous - warm with blue skies...until I got home from work and then dragged Bemo out into it, whereupon a cold front rolled in and it got super-windy. Anyway, I love these columns, as do many people from the area.



( More things in my city )

Downloading free brushes is dangerous, because I don't really know how to use them. These are two experiments (read: near-random pushing of buttons) I've been playing with.

The question then becomes: what the heck are they good for?

( The bases were my own photographs from Paris )

Trying to teach myself a little more about Photoshop by following a tutorial. Here's an unaltered photo I took in Paris and what it looks like post-tinkering.

( Faffing about )

A sculptor from Venice during the High Renaissance.



Sculpture of a Warrior Saint



I love his lion armor.

There were thunderstorms rolling through all weekend, and rain falling almost continuously, but the first flowers at the Sunken Gardens are putting up a lovely show.