Importance of Visual Aides

Researching history, learning more about the timeperiods I am interested in, or just more about the way people work, is always exciting to me. You can keep psychology, anthropology, I like learning about people and the world in which we live in a historical context.

At the moment my historical obsession is visual. Blogs like Shorpy put up more historic photos every day. a bunch of awesome museums have photos of items in their collections online and A Stitch in Time does a good job of letting us know when new museums come online. and then there is Pinterest. I admit, I'm really enjoying having a place to store all the images of historic things. I have spent many a lunch break going through museums and blogs and pinning away, making the historical world I portray richer by adding to my own knowledge. Feel free to take a look at what I have been pinning, and let me know about your own boards. Read this entry on entry page

Remotivated

While I always love LH there are some times when I spend more time thinking about it, and others when I spend more time thinking about laundry.  Last weekend was reunion weekend at the college where I work, and I did a pretty dismal job (in my own opinion) of organizing the weekend. But I’ve got to put it behind me, finish cleaning up the messes and get back to the everyday tasks, and back to dreaming about a day when I can spend most of my time and energy on LH.

A couple things have brought LH to the forefront of my mind. One is Stephen quitting his steady full-time job to become a consultant, so he can pick the engaging projects that best use his expertise. I am behind him 100% and a bit jealous, though I think I might find it a bit more nerve wracking than I could handle. We’re helping Alysa with her college planning and having conversations about how one finds one’s passion and how one gets motivated to do things like get up every morning and go to work. I’m getting the itch to finally do something definitive about getting a master’s degree in some sort of history field.

 I’ve started down that path twice but never gotten beyond a few classes. I took some classes in Public History at UMass just after college, and I’ve taken some classes in Museum Studies at Tufts a few years ago (which was the prompting for this blog.) My dad has been encouraging me to think more seriously about a masters and I’m inclined towards that end myself. I’ve been making spreadsheets of the public history programs out there, tracking the teaching locations of prominent authors in the field (okay, anyone in academia who has written on LH) and dreaming up dissertation topics but I have not yet found the perfect program. Especially not one within driving distance that will accommodate a full-time work schedule. But since it is unlikely I’m going to win the lottery, I can’t quit my job just to go back to school. So the search is still on.

Meanwhile we’re halfway through the run of the Connecticut Renaissance Faire’s fall show, and our last LH event of the season. We’ve got two weekends left, this one is a three day weekend (the faire is open Columbus Day) and I’m in charge of cooking for the weekend. A couple of good friends are also getting married at the faire on Sunday, so that should be fun. I’ve got a half-finished project that I’m going to try and make real progress on for these final weekends, before we get to pack all of it up until April. But before then we’ve got a series of meetings and workshops on our newest venture: we’re heading into the 12th century!

And this morning on my blog feed was a series of portraits of the Yeoman Gaoler at the Tower of London  that included this brilliant photo.

Alan Kingshott, Yeoman Gaoler at the Tower of London, Photo by Martin Usborne

Someday, I’m going to have an office in an old tower and a uniform that was popular many centuries before this one.

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Double Life, Professional Life

I recently decided to join LinkedIn for professional networking reasons. But as soon as I did I was up against one of the realities of my life. I have two different professions, two different networks, with two different job histories. I spend a lot of my effort on Living History ventures and I do make a little of my money that way, but most of the past 10 years I have also held down other jobs that pay the bills and spark my interests in different ways. They seem incredibly separate sometimes, but I am really a whole person, I have a lot of skills that I use in all aspects of my life, a lot of my interests in history overlap with my interests in working in the non-profit field. Right now my interests seem to be as close to overlapping as they have been in quite a while since I currently work at an educational institution (in fundraising) and a big driver of my involvement in Living History is education. So I've come up with a vague sort of statement that talks about education in the broadest sense, and hopefully covers as many of my bases as possible.

LinkedIn is also a place to put up your resume, so I've been updating that document (which always seems to me like a chore similar to doing one's taxes.) I don't want my resume to look too cluttered, but I've done a lot of very different things in the past ten years, especially if you count all the different LH things I've been paid for (or at least held responsibility for.) Lucky for me a lot of them were work done under the umbrella of Autumn Tree Productions and I always include that on a resume, I guess the other stuff will have to get lumped in under general LH pursuits.

The other big part of LinkedIn (like all social media) is connecting to to other people. I've been trying to locate past co-workers, former bosses, and professional connections, but it seems like most of my connections are with people in the RenFaire and LH world. Another mixing of my two sides. At first I was worried about mixing the two, but from the different types of people that have accepted my "connection request" I guess the practice is not all that uncommon.

Are many of you on LinkedIn? Do you include your LH stuff? How separate is the LH stuff from the rest of your life? Read this entry on entry page