article swap
I've been sitting here working on a Burr Oak map. I started it a few weeks ago and got frustrated with the look of the "slanted" town block outlines, so I shelved the project for a while. I'm sure there must be a reason towns are laid out at a slight angle. De Smet is 15 degrees east of north; part of Burr Oak is west of north. I appreciate the fact you can draw Walnut Grove using only horizontal and vertical lines!

It's hard to get back to maps after a while away from them; I have to be in the mood to work with them. I had actually drawn a Burr Oak Township map and forgot why I drew it. There were little red squares that I finally figured out were 1870s' schoolhouses, but it's not like Laura Ingalls Wilder mentions any schoolhouse but the one she and Mary attended, and that only in Pioneer Girl. I guess at some point I felt the need to point out the other schoolhouses in the area.

But just now, I stopped and decided to look through the pile of Burr Oak folders and refresh my memory about Burr Oak in general. And I found something that was totally unrelated to Burr Oak, and it made me smile.

It was a summer 1998 letter from Gina at MUMPS headquarters, only that was pre-MUMPS, discussing the RWL articles we were in the process of copying for each other. I hadn't realized that we'd been swapping articles for that long! What made me laugh was that I've now got so many LIW-related things of Gina's here that I keep them in a plastic storage container. [It's the "in case I die, everybody knows these aren't mine" box...]

I'm not a very organized person; I'll admit that I do best when there are piles of papers around me and stacks of books on the floor and about a half dozen projects in the works. It's probably a good idea to be going through folders. No telling what else I might find.
- posted by pioneergirl at 1:25 AM