I took this film clip of Tori's Christmas band concert. The eighth grade band at Clark-Moores playing "Hark the Herald Trumpets Swing."

Political Campaigns in Lincoln's Time

The history department arranged for the Kentucky Historical Society's History-Mobile to be on campus this week. Local elementary and middle schools were invited to bring their students to visit the History-Mobile and the archives was asked to create an exhibit that would be on display for the same days.

In conjunction with this we decided to create an electronic display that would add information to what was available in the display case. Even though I've drooled over some great online exhibits (my favorite being Not For Ourselves Alone), I hadn't tried to do one myself.

I've been out of the web site creation field for several years now (maintaining a created page doesn't count), so I had a big learning curve to make this page do what I wanted it to do. Fortunately Dreamweaver made it fairly easy to do a cascading style sheet even though I had very limited experience with them. It took several uninterrupted hours of trial and error trying different properties to see what each one would do and how it worked, but overall Dreamweaver made it easy.

The image below shows the physical exhibit and clicking on it will link to the online version which includes more information about each document, including biographical sketches on key individuals of the era, information about the political climate and events and external links to other information. We also scanned some speeches in our collections to OCR to add as links.

Baby Chicks and Hunters

Baby chicks came in last week and they are so cute. We got Araucanas/Americanas (they lay colored eggs) and brown leghorns for eggs and a few Buff Orpington roosters to fill out the order. Yes, it's late in the season, but the idea was to let them grow over the winter and then they would be ready to start laying in the spring. Now to build a chicken coop.

The girls went deer hunting this weekend. The fact that they didn't get anything didn't keep them from having fun. Ashley wouldn't clown with them, so the picture is one girl short.

Historical Census Browser

The University of Virginia Library has developed a historical census browser that lets the user pull out statistical information found on the US Census from 1790 to 1960 down to the county level.

It will pull up multiple statistics, for example the total population in a location and the number of individuals attending school to allow users to compare statistics. It will pull the statistics over a period of years for comparison. Then it will map the results for you.

The statistics cover topics such as ethnicity, literacy in different ethnic groups and ages, farm and home ownership among different ethnic groups, employment, housing and more depending on the census year.

What you won't find are the names of individuals on the census, this browser is strictly for demographic information and it is outstanding for that type of information.

Harry the Hamster

Sometimes I feel like Harry going round and round in his wheel all night and getting nowhere.

And then sometimes my kids do something so awesome that it just makes me stop that wheel and cry.

Living 12 miles from town and being carless makes me feel trapped and desperate. Not a good feeling to have when car shopping. That said, if anyone has a good, used, car that gets good gas mileage to sell, come see me. Desperate buyers are good for the seller, right?

In the middle of worrying about that and everything else, last night my youngest daughter left a note on my bed. On the top it said "Do Not Worry." Below that she had copied the entire text of Matthew 6:25-34.

Fact or Fiction - EKU Trivia

One major project down only a dozen more to go.

The "Fact or Fiction: Test your EKU Knowledge" slide show has been uploaded to slideshare.net for those of you who really wanted to see it. In Powerpoint there were links to external information and a couple film clips that no longer work.

Maybe I can figure out how to upload the actual presentation with all the bells and whistles.

Fact Or Fiction

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

When Life Gives You Lemons...

make lemonade. Ok, that's all fine and good, but just what are you supposed to do with a car that looks like this?

Unfortunately, Melissa has been driving the car while I've been carpooling and apparently it really isn't cool to be a high school senior and ride the bus to school. She is more upset than I am that we are temporarily carless.

All I can say is thank goodness that when I was trying to pare down insurance costs, I didn't drop the comprehensive. And a special thanks to the Good Samaratin who made a u-turn to help with his fire extinguisher.