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Rambling OSV-style
I'm still not getting quality sleep, some better over the weekend, but not what you'd call primo. And I'm trying to resist getting into a cycle of taking Tylenol PM to fall asleep, and then have to take in some caffeine in the morning to wake up fully... which makes it hard to fall asleep at the end of the day, increasing the tiredness the next day....
So not good. Take it from me, chronic fatigue sucks, and mine isn't even a very severe case. For instance, it really isn't dependent on how much I exercise... if I'm tired, I won't make the exhaustion any worse by pushing myself within reasonable limits.
Anyway, it was a push-y weekend, but one that I enjoyed. I took the day off on Friday, and took my visiting friend Trudy out for a long day at Old Sturbridge Village, which was so damn enjoyable for the both of us -- I've been many many times, but this was her first, and she was so taken with the place for the same reasons I am, only with all the first time wonder to appreciate it with all over again. (She mentioned I was one of the few people she'd gone to a museum with who didn't get impatient waiting for her to finish looking at Stuff.)
She was so enthusiastic, and full of the right questions about what we were seeing. We were also blessed with truly perfect weather, and a quiet Friday at the village where there seemed to be no tour groups and the interpreters were more than happy to take enough time to answer every question we could throw at them. For instance, Trudy asked the cook in the Fenno house about what she'd wear for undergarments, and the woman led us into another room where she opened up a bureau and displayed the shifts, draw-string pants, bodice and other parts she'd be wearing if dressed from the skin out. There were toddler's aprons (really, overgrown bibs) to keep clothes clean -- since you only did laundry once a week usually, you depended a lot on not getting stuff dirty in the first place.
We sat in the kitchen at the farm house and discussed dietary strategies, discussed currency with the banker over at the bank (who was a real banker for 37 years), discussed chewing tobacco and spittoon usage (very popular at the time) over at the general store, heard about "current" Massachusetts religious politics from the parson of the Congregational Church over at the parsonage, watched at the shoemakers as he used wooden pegs to resole a shoe.
It's a living history museum is what it is. You walk around between the houses and other buildings, you walk into the houses and meet the interpreters who portray (in different degrees of roleplaying, some completely in character, some matter of fact about being modern people displaying old techniques) the inhabitants, or meet them outside doing outside things like caring for the (very real) livestock or gardening.
You can touch lots of things, or ask questions about what you're seeing (I pointed out all the Windsor chairs in each of the houses. In the days before TV, much of your amusement was other people, so you had to provide seats for everyone who might be coming over. It isn't unusual to go up to one of the second floor bedrooms and see six or eight chairs lined up against the walls -- and given the degree of research that most everything there has, you can be sure that they checked out many wills to see how many chairs were left when the typical owner of a house like the one you're in passed away.)
I made sure that Trudy saw one or two of my very favorite places, including the carding mill with its intricate wooden machines -- driven by leather belts -- dating from 1810-1820 and still running fine! And made sure she noticed how the entire mill building thumps when the wheel is running, like a heartbeat, and then took her around the back, where you can see the strange horizontal paddle wheel inside a big bucket -- not what you think when you consider a mill wheel, but this too is a well-researched variation.
We finished up with viewing the milking at the farm, where we heard the personal history of the cows, and Trudy got to work through her fear of chickens with the help of the 'farmer,' who let her hold a small one, and coached her through feeding the flock so that we could hear the rooster give a call to gather in his hens to feed, and discussed much in the way of animal husbandry, with a practical demo by the rooster in the middle of all that. ("Don't look!" the interpreter said in mock revulsion.) I learned that fertilized eggs keep longer than un-, which I hadn't deducted, even though I know that fertile eggs can wait a decent interval before brooding starts, so that a bird can get all her baby birds to hatch at nearly the same time.
(According to the farmer, btw, geese can live to a hundred years old, which I'd never heard. I need to look this up -- I know some birds are very long-lived, notoriously parrots who can live 80 years or more. He also said that you never want to kill a goose in the presence of other geese, as they will remember and fight you to the death when it's their turn to go.)
We finished our ramble through the village by heading back over the wooden bridge, and on the way we were gifted with the sight of an incredibly huge Great Blue Heron, which flew by overhead and then landed on the peak of the sawmill by the mill pond, where it looked cholerically down on us. We still had a bunch of exhibit buildings and a quick stroll through both the herb garden and the gift store before we sat down to an early dinner in the very nice restaurant. It wasn't until we got up that my legs even began to complain.
There was more to the weekend, but hey... I've written on long enough now.
So not good. Take it from me, chronic fatigue sucks, and mine isn't even a very severe case. For instance, it really isn't dependent on how much I exercise... if I'm tired, I won't make the exhaustion any worse by pushing myself within reasonable limits.
Anyway, it was a push-y weekend, but one that I enjoyed. I took the day off on Friday, and took my visiting friend Trudy out for a long day at Old Sturbridge Village, which was so damn enjoyable for the both of us -- I've been many many times, but this was her first, and she was so taken with the place for the same reasons I am, only with all the first time wonder to appreciate it with all over again. (She mentioned I was one of the few people she'd gone to a museum with who didn't get impatient waiting for her to finish looking at Stuff.)
She was so enthusiastic, and full of the right questions about what we were seeing. We were also blessed with truly perfect weather, and a quiet Friday at the village where there seemed to be no tour groups and the interpreters were more than happy to take enough time to answer every question we could throw at them. For instance, Trudy asked the cook in the Fenno house about what she'd wear for undergarments, and the woman led us into another room where she opened up a bureau and displayed the shifts, draw-string pants, bodice and other parts she'd be wearing if dressed from the skin out. There were toddler's aprons (really, overgrown bibs) to keep clothes clean -- since you only did laundry once a week usually, you depended a lot on not getting stuff dirty in the first place.
We sat in the kitchen at the farm house and discussed dietary strategies, discussed currency with the banker over at the bank (who was a real banker for 37 years), discussed chewing tobacco and spittoon usage (very popular at the time) over at the general store, heard about "current" Massachusetts religious politics from the parson of the Congregational Church over at the parsonage, watched at the shoemakers as he used wooden pegs to resole a shoe.
It's a living history museum is what it is. You walk around between the houses and other buildings, you walk into the houses and meet the interpreters who portray (in different degrees of roleplaying, some completely in character, some matter of fact about being modern people displaying old techniques) the inhabitants, or meet them outside doing outside things like caring for the (very real) livestock or gardening.
You can touch lots of things, or ask questions about what you're seeing (I pointed out all the Windsor chairs in each of the houses. In the days before TV, much of your amusement was other people, so you had to provide seats for everyone who might be coming over. It isn't unusual to go up to one of the second floor bedrooms and see six or eight chairs lined up against the walls -- and given the degree of research that most everything there has, you can be sure that they checked out many wills to see how many chairs were left when the typical owner of a house like the one you're in passed away.)
I made sure that Trudy saw one or two of my very favorite places, including the carding mill with its intricate wooden machines -- driven by leather belts -- dating from 1810-1820 and still running fine! And made sure she noticed how the entire mill building thumps when the wheel is running, like a heartbeat, and then took her around the back, where you can see the strange horizontal paddle wheel inside a big bucket -- not what you think when you consider a mill wheel, but this too is a well-researched variation.
We finished up with viewing the milking at the farm, where we heard the personal history of the cows, and Trudy got to work through her fear of chickens with the help of the 'farmer,' who let her hold a small one, and coached her through feeding the flock so that we could hear the rooster give a call to gather in his hens to feed, and discussed much in the way of animal husbandry, with a practical demo by the rooster in the middle of all that. ("Don't look!" the interpreter said in mock revulsion.) I learned that fertilized eggs keep longer than un-, which I hadn't deducted, even though I know that fertile eggs can wait a decent interval before brooding starts, so that a bird can get all her baby birds to hatch at nearly the same time.
(According to the farmer, btw, geese can live to a hundred years old, which I'd never heard. I need to look this up -- I know some birds are very long-lived, notoriously parrots who can live 80 years or more. He also said that you never want to kill a goose in the presence of other geese, as they will remember and fight you to the death when it's their turn to go.)
We finished our ramble through the village by heading back over the wooden bridge, and on the way we were gifted with the sight of an incredibly huge Great Blue Heron, which flew by overhead and then landed on the peak of the sawmill by the mill pond, where it looked cholerically down on us. We still had a bunch of exhibit buildings and a quick stroll through both the herb garden and the gift store before we sat down to an early dinner in the very nice restaurant. It wasn't until we got up that my legs even began to complain.
There was more to the weekend, but hey... I've written on long enough now.
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