Otherwise, I know I've also been eerily silent these past couple of months and well - most recently - I've simply been buried in preparations for staff training coming up on April 15. On top of all this... I had a less than favorable month of March during which I endured a debilitating upper back and neck injury that left me bed ridden for 2 days and a hastened move from my former home in Wallingford back to my "new" or rather former (and first) home on Capitol Hill a week later. The former, much to my dissatisfaction and the latter much to the opposite =). These two events set me back quite a bit, leaving two unsightly blemishes on my record: Tuesday March 30th was the much awaited demo/Q&A session with Kevin Bromer for the up and coming Salesforce database for the Vera Project and I missed it and on March 31st (the date for the main part of this post) I was supposed to schedule a group check-in, but did not. While I'm certainly not pleased with this temporary derailment, I feel like I have a reasonable excuse and have since double-downed to pick up the slack.
Speaking of which, detailed in the pictures below are my most recent activities at ZAPP! I have finally come out of the storage closet (ha!) and am now out in the open having moved on to a more ambitious project: planning and coordinating the rearrangement of ZAPP.
Pictured here is Emily Van Der Harten: the new interning archivist at ZAPP and me. Emily has been a delight to work with and I am entirely confident that ZAPP will remain in good hands after I've departed. What? departed? How could I say such a thing?!? Of course I'll return to visit and volunteer often... I mean now that making a visit has literally become a "walk in the park" how could I not?
So Anyway. As you can see here we are troubleshooting the new layout with utmost pertinacity and enthusiasm and to such a degree that, judging from my hair, it appears as though I've been working away at this for several days without a shower! ...I knew I should have kept my hat on for this photo op.
Uh oh... it looks like the mood has suddenly taken a dive. After long and grueling hours, tensions have run high and oh oh I almost destroyed the Floor plan I drew up - to scale with all its amazing little construction paper furniture! - but thankfully, the team all swarmed upon me and fought me for those scissors. Sure, I was irate at the moment: threats of legal action from my team of blood sucking lawyers that I can somehow afford on an interning archivist's "salary," but later I thanked them for it.
Below is the much coveted floor plan for ZAPP and the new arrangement that Emily and I brainstormed. As you can see it enormously opens up the area around the entrance, which will make for a spacious browsing area much like the original ZAPP setup in the basement. The Main desk will move over to the kitchen area along with the Rare Zines cabinet. This way, we can still have an obvious point of greeting near the entrance without partially blocking the storage closet (the original location of the main desk). Otherwise, the last part of this new arrangement worth mentioning is the work table. Now, the one pictured here is currently where Emily and I propose we move the Rare Zines (in the kitchen). It is considerably smaller than the existing work table, which didn't even make it into this new arrangement. So, instead of using the work table pictured below, we are considering getting two round tables to put into this space. This once again, will very much capture the essence of the original ZAPP arrangement back in the basement. Well, lest I drone on and on about this exciting rearrangement (I really am excited about this) I had better end this post here as it is getting rather late and I could use some much needed sleep.
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