Time Passes to Quickly
The great work-from-home debacle of 2020 - working with pets.
It seems time has slipped past me, as this is my first blog post in over three years. I created this blog during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic while working from home. Perhaps I started it to put down a record of my life with all of the unknowns that were swirling around as far as infections, death rates, etc. Perhaps I had some extra free time for introspection. The primary reason for creating this website was to have an outlet for testing writing for the planned biographies of my museum’s founding curators. Well, that did not quite work since the pandemic sapped every ounce of motivation out of me. The pandemic affected people differently; some became uber-focused, their outputs increasing with zest, while others came to a grinding halt. I am part of the latter group.
So much has happened since I began this blog it would be difficult to provide a recap of activities. A few highlights follow: I finished moving all of the collections (~50,000 objects) from my museum to an offsite storage facility in preparation for renovations and construction of our 45,000 sq ft expansion project, lost my stepfather to Covid, my wife and I decided to move to England to be closer to her family, we sold our house, shipped all of our belongings to England, moved into a small garage apartment, and now will be applying for my UK spouse visa so we can move across the pond in November. It was a difficult decision to leave the job that I love so passionately and have to start all over from scratch career-wise. It is also hard to leave my wonderful work family, particularly my curator and friend, Dr. Daniel Ksepka, especially with whom I had the pleasure of working for nine years. I will miss the collections and archive material I have built up relating to the museum’s founding curators, Edward Fuller Bigelow and Paul Griswold Howes. I have been researching the pair for over eight years. Much time has been spent in archives tracking down info, finding objects of theirs' like a bloodhound, on auction sites, having lunch at their graves, and being given personal mementoes from their family and friends. It will be hard not to have this material so close at hand.
However, I will still be researching and writing their stories soon. I will also continue to collect material related to the pair and guide the museum on objects and archives it should acquire to continue building on its collections.
