Taking Inventory

This will probably be my most boring blog post to date. Hang in there. I don't like this either.

For the past few days I have been taking inventory of all of the merchandise that we sell in our gift shop. That pretty much just means counting things. First I counted everything in our backroom. Ken, our voluneteer and ex-accountant, gave me a list. The purpose of my doing this was to make sure all the physical merchandise matched up with what we have on record that we sold. Some of the things were easy to count. Thet were big, there were only a few of them. But then came 495 Daniel Boone Homestead lapel pins. It became tedious. When I finally finished up the back room there was more for me to count. I counted t-shirts, hats. Then I went to the DeTurk building and counted more stuff that we couldn't fit in the back room. Riveting.

Some good things did happen today though. I gave a tour to a group that was pretty interested in what I had to say. The one kid even asked me good questions like, "was this the house that an afluent person would build in the 18th century," and "could John DeTurk have built this house himself?" Most of the time I get questions about particular objects or on things I just went over a few minutes before, so it was refreshing to see someone who was making connections.

I also got to watch the sawmill run, and I took pictures, which I will post tomorrow. Jim brought up soemthing about the sawmill that I never thought of today. He said that your average farmer with an ax did not have the expertise to build a mill. Someone with mechanical skills and metal working would have to do it. I always assumed that if you wanted something built in the colonial era you just had to do it yourself.