Ocotillo Testicle Festival

Yesterday was a busy day at the museum.  Our newest intern, Jacob, arrived on Friday so Saturday was his first day at work. Two volunteers from Imperial Valley College, Phil and Ivan, came over and helped us with curating artifacts. Saturdays are my day for curating instead of archiving.  I'm working on the Percy Palmer lantern slide collection- cleaning them, re-housing them, cataloging them, and eventually they will be digitized.

Lazy Lizard Saloon, one of Ocotillo's  main tourist attractions

Right at 3pm we closed up and headed into town to the Lazy Lizard Saloon to attend the last part of the Ocotillo Testicle Festival. It's held by the Ocotillo Optimist Society and all the proceeds go to supporting local children's education- backpacks of school supplies, scholarships, playground equipment, haircuts, etc. I was a little skeptical of the Festival at first. The flyer described a BBQ with "Lizard Testicles, Lizard Tails, Lizard Parts and much more. The real thing (testicles) this year compliments of the Lazy Lizard." The festival was from 1pm "until the lizards come home" (which meant about 4 when the raffle prizes ran out.

Jessica tells the story of last year's BBQ when the locals convinced her the RoadKill BBQ really was roadkill (turned out to be chicken) so you can see the kind of humor we're dealing with in Ocotillo. This time there was potato salad, hot dogs, and other normal BBQ fare (including some awesome homemade chocolate chip cookies). There were also testicles. Not lizard, but bull. Jessica, Ivan and I manned up and tried them but Phil and Jacob declined. I don't know if that says anything to the psychologists out there or not.

Lazy Lizard Saloon

Let me just say up front: if anyone ever tries to tell you that bull testicles taste like chicken- they lie. It was actually pretty disgusting. I don't know how much of that was a mental thing, but frying them did not help. But I can now say I've done it, and that's pretty much the point right? It's always an adventure.

The Great California Shake Out

Yesterday was the museum's first time participating in the Great California Shake Out.  It's an annual chance for people and organizations to practice what to do if an earthquake were to hit the area.  It's a great time for going over emergency preparedness plans, kits, and drills, to make sure everyone in your family knows what to do in an emergency, and to make sure your home/car/business is stocked with up-to-date emergency supplies. The ShakeOut had over 9 million participants this year from all over California, and many other states participated in their own ShakeOuts.

For a person born and raised in New Orleans this seemed like a great idea to me. I know what to do in case of hurricanes, but with hurricanes you have some advance warning.  What do you do for earthquakes, which can strike at any time?  I got to spend a few weeks doing research on the ShakeOut for drills and procedures, and also for what the museum should have on hand for emergencies.  I talked with people from FEMA, NEDCC, various California agencies, and local museums to create a list of all the supplies the museum should keep at the ready.  Of course, many items (stocked food and water, crowbars, etc.) are really for worst case scenarios.  But as we learned from Katrina, it's better to be prepared for the absolute worst case scenario than be taken by surprise.

The day of the ShakeOut, at exactly 10:18am we had our earthquake drill. We practiced Drop, Cover and Hold On, getting under the tables and listening to the ShakeOut's recorded earthquake sounds (which were for a much more urban area than we are in, but we got the idea) and imagining what would be in the most danger of falling.  Afterwards we did a building inspection, making sure we knew the most likely problem areas and where to turn off the water and electricity if we needed to.  The big part for me was when I tested our Emergency Preparedness Plan.  We have a binder with a list of phone numbers of who to call in case of emergency- both museum board members and other museums who participate in maintaining a container of emergency supplies.  Happily the plan worked, and I was able to update several phone numbers and contact names during the process.  What amazed me was how few other organizations in our area were participating in the ShakeOut.  Several people I talked to had no idea what to do in the event of an emergency of any kind. Maybe because there's no official 'earthquake season' the way there is a hurricane season there isn't a concentrated push at certain times of the year to prepare people the way we do in New Orleans.  Maybe many people are just waiting for the problem to hit and then they'll figure out what to do.  Or maybe I was just talking to a minority and most people are prepared.  I certainly hope that is the case.  But the Imperial Valley Desert Museum is as ready as possible for the next earthquake to hit Imperial Valley. Now we just have to finish preparing for the apocalypse.

Photography 101

Sunset behind the Coyote Mountains, 10/13

One of our mottos at the Imperial Valley Desert Museum is that if you have to go to work- you should enjoy yourself. If you are going to have an event at work, you should really enjoy yourself. So this Saturday we enjoyed ourself at work by holding a Photography 101 class. A photographer from El Centro came out and talked to seven eager students about photographic tricks that can help out even amateurs like me. Most of us had the little "point and click" type of digital cameras that we thought meant we couldn't do more than point and shoot. Well, instead we started experimenting with all the buttons and options on our cameras that none of us had ever played with.

Sunset with the 'night' setting

Coyote Mountains with some gold, even though the purple didn't go through

                                                                          One of my regrets is that I can never get my pictures to show people what I'm seeing here. Especially when it comes to sunsets. I can't get the colors to mimic what I see when I watch the sun set. The purples and golds just don't come out. And I'm not a visually artistic person so it never really occurred to me to try for the more artsy, close up type of shots you see some people do. So I experimented with some of the different settings: landscape, dusk/dawn, sunset, close-up. My little Nikon doesn't seem to have setting controls for speed, just light, and I decided that while I can use practice (because let's face it, my pictures aren't that good)- the different settings don't always make much difference to the picture quality. But the class got me thinking and interested in experimenting with my shots.

Our geoglyph sculpture at sunset

Check out our museum's Facebook page and blog to see some of the cool shots other students took:
http://ivdesertmuseum.blogspot.com/2012/10/sunset-photography-event.html

 Today Jessica and I decided to take our new found willingness to mess around with our camera settings and headed out into the desert for a hike. There are some things that can still never be replicated. The panorama of desert and mountains. The jackrabbits that went running off when we came through and went way too fast for us to catch any pictures of them. But other things worked out. The sky came out amazingly blue. We played around with angles and close-ups to get different and cool views of cactus. I experimented with framing windmills with cacti in shots the way I did with the full moon a few weeks ago. Plenty of the shots came out badly but that's the great thing about digital photography isn't it? You hook the camera up to the computer, look at your shots and delete what you don't like. No waiting, no wasted film. And the only ones who suffer are you guys, because I post way more pictures than before and you have to look at them and pretend they are cool.

Barrel cactus and ocotillo on a ridge

Artsy cactus angle

Windmills and cacti

Cholla flowers

Windy Season

Windmills along the highway.

We have officially entered the "Windy Season" in Imperial Valley. When I first got here and looked at the windmills that were being built, I couldn't imagine they would actually collect much energy because there was never any wind. Then this last week something magical happened in the atmosphere and the winds have come to the valley.  They tend to range from 7-20 miles per hour all day and you can hear them whipping around the trailer all night long. Now I understand why people think windmills were a good idea here!

 The Ocotillo Wind project has been putting up windmills since before I got here and it is amazing to see how fast they go.  Three or four can go up in a day. I imagined they were big, complex things that took days to put up just one. But the main parts are built elsewhere and trucked in, then put up in a few easy steps. Base, pole, turbines. On to the next one.

Ocotillo Wind Project, in front of the Coyote Mountains

The wind project here is hugely controversial. I have yet to take pictures of my two favorite examples so you'll have to check back here later and I'll add them in.  One is a painted sign on a fence with the Grim Reaper and the message is along the lines of "Death to Windmills". Right across the street is a small market that put up a very large sign: "Wind Project Workers Welcome Here". That pretty much sums up the way the town is divided. Some are in favor of wind energy and argue that the project creates jobs. They point out that the area has been an energy corridor for over thirty years and nothing has been done until now, and say the people who are against the project should have spoken up sooner because it's a done deal now. Those who are against the project range from environmentalists (tearing up the desert and disturbing animals as well as digging up the Ocotillo cactus) to Native Americans (the land being built on is really close to sacred grounds, and may actually be on some of them) to townspeople who don't like the change in the view. They argue that no one hires local people to work on the project and while local resources go to supporting it, the energy actually goes to San Diego. Ocotillo won't see any benefits and gets all the problems.

Windmill, in the process of going up. 

In general I am in favor of green energy. Getting away from oil, fossil fuels, coal, etc. and moving towards clean, renewable, earth-friendly energy will always get my vote.  But last week Jessica and I went on a hike in a wash across the road from the windmills. There were cactus all over the place, river rocks and fossilized algae from when the area used to be a lake, and it was much more green and alive than you usually imagine a desert being.

 But as we were walking back we came across some huge, heavy machinery tire treads that had torn up the ground.  And just beyond that was the base of a new windmill.  We were really surprised to just stumble across one like that- we hadn't known they were coming onto the other side of the highway.  And it was a really great example of one of the reasons people don't want the windmills to be put up. The area was so different it was sad.  Lawsuits have prevented the company from starting up the standing windmills, but apparently don't prevent new windmills from being built, and in the end they will have only slowed down the inevitable.

UFO? No, just the base of a new windmill.

I'm not necessarily going anywhere profound with this post, just thinking about the changes in the desert and how even something I support, like green energy, is not always a completely good thing.

10/14 Update: Finally got the photos of the signs I was describing:

The downside of adventuring

Whenever we decide to do something, if we're smart, or overly cautious, we weigh the pros and cons. The ups and downs. The risks and rewards. Then we make the best decision we can make for ourselves with the information we have at that time.  There were not that many things in my "Con" list when I was debating coming out to CA, but leaving my family behind topped the list. As most people know, I'm lucky enough to be very close to my family- especially my parents.  One of the (only) pluses of not having a job was that I was living at home with my parents and could try to make their lives easier. Although not being able to drive, I'm not sure how much help I every actually was to them. I think emotional support was probably the only thing I was any good at, and until recently they didn't seem to need that much support from me.

When my grandmother got sick with cancer, everyone chipped in to help everyone else as best they could.  When I was offered the chance to come out to Ocotillo, the idea of leaving my parents to handle things without me and leaving my grandparents without knowing exactly how things would go for the next three months, was one of the biggest things to slow down my saying yes. But the doctors were so sure that some radiation treatments would help.  The right nutrition, plenty or rest, and when I came home my grandmother would be doing better than when I left. But that is not what happened. The change was fast, and I don't think any of the doctors saw it coming.  But it did, and today my mom not only lost her mother but had the hard task of calling and telling me. Because of how far away from the airport I live and my roommate/supervisor being out of town this week and into next for a conference I will not be able to fly home to support my family and attend the funeral. I will be here, keeping the museum open and pretending that everything is ok.

This is not the first time I've been on my own to hear news like this, and usually it comes to me over the phone. I've almost learned to associate phones and loss, and recognize the fact that it will be a small miracle if I can every actually be present when my loved ones need me to be there for them. Or to say goodbye. I don't know if that says something awful about me or just brings home the point that as we- friends and family- spread out in life and begin to have our own adventures, sometimes the only way we will be 'there' for someone is in our thoughts. On the phone. Email. Facebook. Maybe the frenzied popularity of social media is our reaction to how far away from our core of loved ones we become when we follow our own road.  There are loved ones we can always count on to say the right thing, to drop everything and come to us when we need them. I have always thought of myself as one of those people. But this week I have been reminded that while my family is full of people who would drop what they are doing to help in any way possible, they are also the kind of people who want, and expect, us all to do what we need to do. Even if that means not coming home.

Freezing temperatures and earthquakes

Today contained two important milestones for me. The only problem (if you want to call it that) is that I missed one of them.  At 1:30am a 4.1 earthquake hit about ten miles northwest of us.  Fortunately, based on our site check this morning, it appears that nothing at the museum was damaged.  Sadly, I slept through it. Does this mean it doesn't count as my first earthquake? Jessica promises there will be more where that one came from.   Hopefully not for a little while yet, since one of my current projects is to prepare a list of supplies the museum should have on hand in case of earthquakes.  I've been doing research online, contacted several local groups through email, and tomorrow morning I have a phone appointment with someone from FEMA for some more brainstorming.

IVMD's off site storage containers

The second milestone was as much for the museum as for me.  Today we brought our first couple of boxes up from the off site storage and put them in the museum's freezer.  All my library/archive friends are probably quietly clapping while the rest of my friends are wondering if they read that sentence correctly.  Papers in the freezer?  Yes. You read that right: papers went in the freezer.  Why the freezer you ask? Well, freezers are good for more than just ice cream in the archival world.  Papers that have spent the last thirty years of their lives in a non-climate controlled off site storage container do not get to go right into a nice, clean, climate controlled archive.  Who knows what sort of insects, insect eggs, etc. the papers are carrying? So they'll spend the next three days in the freezer, two days out, and then back in the freezer for three more days before we sit down with them and sort the papers into specific series and folders.  Jessica and I were happy to learn that the freezer can hold more than just the two boxes worth of papers we brought up.  So things will hopefully go a little faster in the future and I may start dividing my time more between the museum lab and the off site containers instead of being off site most of the time.

 

Imperial Valley Desert Museum Internship

The Imperial Valley Desert Museum, Ocotillo, CA

While I was attending my first Society of American Archivists (SAA) convention in San Diego this August I met a Simmons alum named Jessica Brody. She invited me to do an internship at her museum, the Imperial Valley Desert Museum, establishing an archive for the startup museum.  I thought about it for awhile, since moving to the California desert for three months had never really been in my plans, but in the end decided that it was an opportunity I couldn't afford to pass up.  How many people, especially new archivists, get the chance to be involved in building a new museum and archive?

 On September 12 I flew back out to San Diego and, an hour and a half by car later, was in Ocotillo, CA. Population: roughly 200.  Mere miles from the Mexican border and in fact, closer to Mexico than the nearest town with a grocery store here in CA. Literally in the middle of the desert.  Imperial Valley is said to be officially the second hottest place to live in the USA- beaten only by Death Valley. Temperatures ranging from 103-110 are the daily norms.  I've seen cloud cover once since arriving.  Needless to say it's a dramatic change from New Orleans, where everything is green;  let alone Lake Forest, Huntington, or Boston, where I discovered seasons and snow.  I currently live in a trailer with Jessica as my roommate, we walk over the desert ten minutes to get to the museum, and I'm learning all about hiking and desert survival.

While I am learning how the museum operates and how to take care of everything in it, my main focus will be establishing a paper archive for the museum.  The museum was originally established thirty years ago in connection with the archaeology department of the Imperial Valley College.  But the college no longer has an archaeology department and so a small board of trustees is opening the museum to celebrate local history all on their own.  What does this mean for me? It means a large number of documents that haven't been looked at in thirty years, with a lot of information connected to the IVC.  Many of the people who worked to build the museum worked with the college and I'm finding papers for them- classes they taught, archaeological surveys they performed, articles they wrote. My current job is to survey and catalog all the paperwork I find in the museum's off site storage so that I can begin deciding what will go up to the museum for conservation and more detailed organization.  It's a daunting prospect, and much more than I expected to start my career doing.  But there is a real opportunity to make a difference here and establish something meaningful.  It is truly an amazing opportunity to begin my adventure as an archivist.

Starting a blog

For perhaps the first time in my life, I'm doing something that other people might actually want to hear about. I'm on an Archival Adventure in the middle of the California desert.  In order to give friends who are interested a better idea of what I'm doing out here I've decided to bow to social media and try writing a blog. Be warned: I've never done this before. When asked, my friends were about half for Blogger and half for Wordpress, and I decided to try Blogger.  While I'm figuring out how Blogger works I expect the site to look pathetic for awhile. Hopefully I'll figure out how to make background images and photographs work so this is a little more interesting to look at as time goes on.  I welcome all suggestions, especially on the technology front.

Anyone who knows me will laugh at the title I've given this blog. I'm one of the least adventurous people I know.  But this is a favorite saying of several of my best friends, and my new roommate, and I decided that it was a sign. Life is an adventure and I need to start approaching it in true mustelidae fashion. Like a ferret, assume everyone will get out of your way- no matter how much larger they are. Like a wolverine, don't avoid the mountain. Don't go around the mountain. Go over it. Face life head on and expect to come out on top. It's how all members of the weasel family approach life and anyone who knows me knows how much I love ferrets.  So here's to trying to live life like a weasel. Wish me luck!