Atlases, Austen, and Ancestors- What More Could a Girl Want!?

Hello, and welcome to 2012 and the best blog of this apocalyptic year.

I am referring to our collective blog, not this particular post.  I know my post will fall behind some of the Austens, Mitchells, Woolfs, and Brontës of our group (yeah, I picked all female writers for a reason.  Ovaries rock.), but I’m comfortable with sitting in the back of the pack blissfully unaware of all the grammatical and social faux pas I commit.  I am the college student who crochets and gets good grades.  I have not been to a club, I have not started smoking or drinking (well, the occasional soda hath passed my lips, a dietary choice I regret deeply), and I go to bed only slightly later than I did in high school.

But everything’s okay because I get plenty of excitement working in the library (sarcasm, but work does come up several times in the near future).  And tomorrow is Devin and I’s anniversary.  Yay, us (not sarcasm)!  The break was awesome with him; it was funny being home for so long.  I really enjoyed it.  I taught him how ride a bike!  And we did a fun alternate winter formal.  There are pictures on facebook.  We decided that K1 was a more attractive location in theory than in practice, since there’s a lot of sweat and only one race course and thus an expensive night spent waiting in line.  So we went to this Italian restaurant called Prego, then to Color Me Mine where we made this epic mug.

When I was bored at work today, I went on ancestry.com and poked around for a while.  After some work, I ended up researching all the way back to my great-great-great grandpa, who was born in 1821 in Scotland.  It was pretty awesome.  This is a photo of the 1880 Maryland census with my great-great grandfather, John, Jr. (also from Scotland), my great-great grandma, Clementine (love that name), and my great grandpa, William.  That’s pretty flipping awesome.

This is the Atlas Folio section after I had organized it.  I'm awesome!

Some more working adventures: as promised, I’ve included a photojournalism section that I hope Derek will like.  As a reminder, I work in the Library Reference department, which means that I have a lot of boring tasks but also some exciting ones like wrestling with giant atlases.  Included are some pictures of the more interesting atlases I encountered.  I looked like even more of an idiot than normal taking these pictures, so humor me.

 

 The picture to the left is the casing for many Parisian maps, one of which I included on the right because it was colorful.  It's on its side because Blogspot, genius website that it is, won't let me rotate it.  Awesome.

Giant Atlas of London!

Cool Greek Atlas! Look! A foreign alphabet!!

Alright folks, well, that’s it for this week.

-Rachael