Cataloging my museum is going to nuke my summer. And my wallet. And my sanity.
I guess one perk of having the floors redone in my house is that it has forced me to actually photograph and catalog my fossils. I originally had a hard copy book (yes, entries done by hand, yes, I am that old school in some respects), but that stopped at about specimen number 450.
I’m at 742 now. And I’m not done. I’m not sure whether I should be laughing or shrieking obscenities into the void. I know for a fact that I have a box or two missing, as I don’t have photos for some of the items on the spreadsheet. Meaning, I get to dig through my basement and find them. They are here somewhere…just a matter of rooting them up.
I am finding out just how many specimens I missed cataloging over the years, though the pattern that I’ve picked up on is that the most lapses occurred right around the births of my two kids. From a medical standpoint, neither went well (in fact, my former doctor uses the birth of my first as a ‘worst case scenario’ story for the medical students). The second involved having my abdomen unzipped because a certain SOMEONE didn’t want to come out and had to be served an eviction notice.
Good times.
Maybe in a week or so I’ll have my museum back in proper order, and maybe even fit to recieve visitors. It’s just in my basement, and there are probably over 800 individual pieces. I have some of them lumped into one accession number. One in particular, the Carpocyon lot, has over twenty bones and bone fragments in it. If I gave each thier own number, I’d probably hit a thousand. I suppose I should thank a former student of mine for suggesting that I modify my original cataloging setup. I originally had it as JPNHM-001. This student pointed out that I would have to cap my specimens at 999 with that numbering system. So, I changed it to JPNHM-0001.
See?
Now I can got up to 9,999 specimens!
Special thanks to that student for feeding the beast and making it more monstrous than it already was.
Maybe once this is done, I’ll be able to concentrate on Moonstone Wish again.
Hilary