I have a pretty green tea kettle, but I don't often use it anymore. When I make coffee in the morning (Maxwell House International Coffees, I lurve you!), it's faster just to nuke the water for 2 minutes. So, can someone please explain to me why on Earth I was lighting the front burner on the stove this morning and getting ready to set my mug of water on it?
Fortunately, the brain engaged before any actual flames appeared. Yeesh.
Putting a little random in your life since 1963....joined 20 years later by Keely.
Last Friday, I went on a tour of some of the conservation and storage areas of the museum where I work. Henry Ford started collecting things long before any appropriate space for them was created. Some of our storage areas are state of the art. The rest are waiting their turn.
The conservators are the staff of advanced-degree chemists that do CSI-level stuff with artifacts, in order to preserve them as well as possible. One of the most famous artifacts we have is the chair Abraham Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot by John Wilkes Booth. Somewhere on that chair is the blood and DNA of Abe Lincoln, but it has not yet been verified to the level required for certainty. Blood has been identified, but not yet DNA matched. The whole chair has been covered with an extremely fine mesh, hand-sewn into place, to protect the surface of the textiles from further deterioration.
Yesterday, I was part of a tour of the Benson Ford Research Center. The education department is housed in this building, and we share office space with the archivists who maintain the collection. There are five miles of shelving in this building, some of it temperature controlled. Among other things, I saw Josephine Ford's (Henry's only granddaughter b.1923 and d.2005) shoe collection (which rivals that of Corazon Aquino), a baseball autographed from Ty Cobb to Henry Ford, the country's most extensive collection of trade magazines, and the over-3000-box collection of Henry Ford's business papers that had been stored in his home office.
This hasn't really been very random, has it? Come back next Tuesday, and I will be as schizoid as ever. Now go visit Ms. Keely. Take your passport with you, she's in Canada!
Ed: Although I am employed by The Henry Ford, this post, in no way, reflects the opinions of The Henry Ford.
