When I was about 10, my mom used to work a lot over in Baldwin County. Now, I have plenty of older siblings, but by that point, they were all old enough to be off on their own. That meant that, during the summers, she would have to take me with her to work. Which was all right by me: I had a Game Boy and an extensive imagination. For her part, she tried to keep me out of the way of the more caustic elements she had to work with, but these houses weren't always the biggest. What I'm trying to say with all of this is that there's a reason that the smell of laquor thinner has the same nostalgic appeal for me that other people associate with things like "baked goods" or "soul food" or "No, seriously, Chris. What is WRONG with you?" The answer to that question is "a lot", but that's between me and the voices.
The point is, I don't notice a lot of strong chemical smells, mostly because I grew up around them in some form or another. So, when I was half-way through varnishing a bench this morning, it was honestly surprising to me that people were bothered by the smell on the other side of the building.
"Wait, wait," you must be thinking. "First, you were pressure washing; now, you're varnishing furniture? Are you sure you're actually working for the museum and aren't just being tricked into doing someone else's DIY projects?" ...Maybe. Regardless, the bench is part of the exhibit I'm working on, so it's not that out of line for me to be working on it. And work on it I did. See, I've never actually varnished something before, so this was an interesting experience, mostly because Jacob had other work to attend to, leaving me to take care of it once he showed me what I needed to do.
I don't know if you've ever had to teach yourself to varnish, but there's nothing more nerve-wracking then when it starts to dry. Suddenly, you see all of these spots that are still shiny versus all of the parts that have grown dull, and you're suddenly filled with this gut-wrenching terror: "Wait, is it supposed to be drying unevenly? What if I was too hasty and those are the spots it was too thin? Oh, no! What if the shiny spots are where I wasn't broad enough with my strokes and I put it on too thick?! WHAT IF IT'S BOTH?" It's horrible, and I only would wish it upon people who come up behind you when you're walking and they're on their bikes and they don't bother letting you know they're coming because, clearly, all pedestrians have cat-like senses sufficient to hear a bicycle chain at a distance.
...That last part has nothing to do with my internship. I just wanted to use this public platform to let you know that if you do that, you are an awful person.
Anyway, varnishing occupied a solid chunk of my morning, largely because Jacob didn't realize how fast it would dry, so I went ahead and put on both coats. Which I apparently had done correctly, which is a good thing and almost makes up for the half-hour of anxiously staring at drying varnish hoping I didn't screw up the bench. Regardless, varnishing done, I finally got to do something actively related to exhibit construction: assembling panels.
See, because the fort is (a) harder to monitor than the main museum and (b) a permanent exhibit unto itself, the exhibit plan calls for the graphics and text that's going up on the walls to have a layer of plexiglass over the surface. This way, it's protected against both anyone who might toy with the text panels and (to a lesser degree) the forces of nature. And the exhibit we're working on calls for a ton of text panels. The exhibit plan Jacob showed me calls for 28 major panels and a number of minor ones, all of which need to have this protective cover bolted onto them.
Fortunately, we had help on this from one of the other museum employees: a gentleman by the name of Cheston. You ever meet someone and can tell right away that they're able to work twice as hard as the next guy's best day? That pretty much covers Cheston in a nutshell, except he probably also out-friendlies the guy you thought of. Jacob had us assemble three panels, all three of which deal with an interactive display about the fort.
It's actually really neat. The center-piece is a table with a picture of the fort on it (behind a protective sheet, of course); on top of this goes a wood-block puzzle so that kids can learn the different parts of the fort's structure to a combination of handling models of those parts and a convenient guide placed up on the wall (which were the other two panels we assembled). We spent the bulk of the afternoon on that, owing to a combination of the screen being slightly too big for the table's frame, having to manually drive the screws in by hand, and a slight misalignment in part of the wall that threw off our efforts to mount the wall panels.
However, at the end of it all, we had a lovely little corner finished, complete with paint touch-ups to the table... the floor... my hands...
...Yeah, never put me behind a paint roller if delicacy is required unless you have the patience of a saint. Have I mentioned that Cheston is a terrific guy?
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