TGIS

I spent the better part of today working at the museum gallery, delaying the start of my weekend by just a bit. I knew I wasn't going to get a chance at a lot of outdoor photography, so I figured I'd walk around a bit and see what caught my eye.

First I went upstairs to our research library. Even though I knew the sunlight coming in would result in the windows looking almost white, I liked the effect of the reflection of the half-moon window behind me appearing between its twin on the wall I was facing and the window to the right:



Next, I went into the exhibition gallery to take some photos. These panels were created by Mary Orvis Marbury, daughter of Orvis Company founder Charles Orvis, for the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, and feature a wide variety of flies alongside photos of the regions in the U.S. where they were most commonly used. When the Orvis Company was just starting out, they were often frustrated when trying to fill orders for flies, particularly those invented in America—a given pattern could be referred to by one name in Vermont and yet have a completely different name in, say, Colorado. It was Marbury who took up the monumental task of gathering and documenting information about various flies from fishermen all across the country. The result was the book Favorite Flies and Their Histories, the first definitive list of these new American patterns, published a year before she took these panels to Chicago:



The flies are all behind glass and the lighting isn't ideal, meaning trying to take a good close-up shot of any of them proved to be fairly difficult. So I'm just happy this one at least came out in focus:



We also have on display this line braider once used by the Cortland Line Company; the thing nylon it created would then be coated to help it float longer and move through the rod's line guides more easily, among other things. Our machine is set up so that if a visitor puts in a quarter the braider will run for about 30 seconds; the steps are to allow kids to get high enough to watch the braiding through a magnifying lens:



A closer look at the spools on their tracks; the green one you can sorta see in the back is there to make it a bit easier to follow the way the spools interweave with each other:



Again, photographing through Plexiglas is easier said than done, but this at least gives you a look at the braid being formed:



Finally, after work I joined my parents and brother for our first dinner together since Mom and Dad's return from Hawaii; as you can see, it hasn't taken Kaylee any time at all to get used to sharing her chair again: