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I almost decided to take my car to school on Friday with the travelling that I had to do. I'm glad I didn't. It may have more to do with what I've had to compare it to lately, but the weather was just beautiful! That, together with the new tire made the ride feel like flying!
I finished my first class, then biked two thirds of the way home to the Kenosha municipal building. I made some scans of some documents there that the public works director kindly made available to me, then biked back to school. I got there just in time to cook a frozen burrito and get to class. Then, after finishing at school, I biked home. Altogether I rode twenty-seven and a half miles.
Since this is a Kenosha weekend, I dug into my work last night and have been going since. I did a chunk of reading last night and made some notes. This morning, I got up earlyish (for a weekend) and rode to the library where I spent five hours looking at microfilm. Yes, five hours hunched in front of a black and white, intermittently blurry screen, scrolling up and down the filmstrip because it was too wide to see in its entirety in either direction. Oof.
I found some useful things, but even with the dates from the common council minutes to orient to, it still feels like flailing. I feel like I may, in the end, either write a half-assed paper just because the source material is so inaccessible, or ask for an incomplete. I've been tracking the total time I've spent researching both for my own interest, and to make an argument for my own diligence. *smiles*
After finishing there, I was hungry and needed a break so I checked with local people to see if anyone wanted Chinese buffet. Serin and Todd were already making dinner, but my brother T came with. We stuffed ourselves, then hit the Goodwill, where I picked up a copy of a history of rural wage-labor in the American Midwest called "Cutting Into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest" by Debora Finch. Not only does it look interesting, but the cheapest used version on Amazon is going for fourteen times the dollar I paid for it!
I also picked up a nice folding shelf set. About three feet high, solid wood, and collapsible. Even if I don't find a place for it right now, it doesn't take up a lot of space and it will store well until I move out. That was a real deal at $6.
And now, I need to clean up my work space here and get back to reading. I have about two or three hundred pages to get through for next week. As for the historical research, I'm hoping that when Professor G and I meet with the former Kenosha News archivist, she might be able to give me information that will let me do a more targeted search in the microfilm.
I finished my first class, then biked two thirds of the way home to the Kenosha municipal building. I made some scans of some documents there that the public works director kindly made available to me, then biked back to school. I got there just in time to cook a frozen burrito and get to class. Then, after finishing at school, I biked home. Altogether I rode twenty-seven and a half miles.
Since this is a Kenosha weekend, I dug into my work last night and have been going since. I did a chunk of reading last night and made some notes. This morning, I got up earlyish (for a weekend) and rode to the library where I spent five hours looking at microfilm. Yes, five hours hunched in front of a black and white, intermittently blurry screen, scrolling up and down the filmstrip because it was too wide to see in its entirety in either direction. Oof.
I found some useful things, but even with the dates from the common council minutes to orient to, it still feels like flailing. I feel like I may, in the end, either write a half-assed paper just because the source material is so inaccessible, or ask for an incomplete. I've been tracking the total time I've spent researching both for my own interest, and to make an argument for my own diligence. *smiles*
After finishing there, I was hungry and needed a break so I checked with local people to see if anyone wanted Chinese buffet. Serin and Todd were already making dinner, but my brother T came with. We stuffed ourselves, then hit the Goodwill, where I picked up a copy of a history of rural wage-labor in the American Midwest called "Cutting Into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest" by Debora Finch. Not only does it look interesting, but the cheapest used version on Amazon is going for fourteen times the dollar I paid for it!
I also picked up a nice folding shelf set. About three feet high, solid wood, and collapsible. Even if I don't find a place for it right now, it doesn't take up a lot of space and it will store well until I move out. That was a real deal at $6.
And now, I need to clean up my work space here and get back to reading. I have about two or three hundred pages to get through for next week. As for the historical research, I'm hoping that when Professor G and I meet with the former Kenosha News archivist, she might be able to give me information that will let me do a more targeted search in the microfilm.
