This is Thanksgiving Week, a time of rush and bustle to beat all and is only the beginning of the holidays. We went to Hannafords Grocery store yesterday after the Archives, and I was surprised to see how many people were in the store. It looked like Fry’s supermarket on Senior Citizen Wednesday and they ran into you with their shopping carts just as easily at Hannafords as they do at Frys….and they weren’t Senior citizens……………aarrggghhhhhhh!
There are a lot of people here at the Archives who are retiring before the end of the year. Some are retiring before they lose their retirement benefits under the old system and some are retiring and taking left over vacation days to be counted before the actual retirement date in December. So we are operating on a somewhat skeleton staff. At retirement there is a definite skill and brain drain and information that has been accrued after years of work at the same job, walks out of the door and the head archivist, Mr. Cheever, has not been given the go ahead to hire any replacements or get new people in here to benefit from the experience and knowledge base of those who are retiring. It is a difficult situation to be sure , but perhaps the new people will catch on quickly and the place will get up to speed soon. One man was going to retire on Wednesday but because of the forecast of snow fall for Wednesday, he is leaving today and counting the last few hours of today as vacation time.
I took some pictures of Augusta when we first came. One of them I have as the wallpaper on my desktop and I showed it to Anne in the other office. She loved it, so I sent her more pics from my days when we first came plus a few others. She has put the picture of Oliver’s flying geese quilt on her desktop. It looks wonderful. That made my day. I was feeling down because they sent back 4 re-works for this weeks effort. Pretty discouraging to say the least. We had worked really hard at not jiggling the cradle etc. But to see my quilt on display on the government computer my spirits were lifted to the sky.
We are on the downward side of the Penobscot records. It seemed like we would never be done with these crumbling records….and our efforts are geared to preserving what it left.
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