Tuesday, December 27, 2016 – Rendezvous Practice, “Pick-up Sticks,” Conservation Artifact Room, Aaron & Mira Daniels

We started today in the Cultural Hall practicing our lines for our vignette of “George & Agatha.” Sis. Johnson  and I practice our lines all the time but we felt it helps us much better if we can practice the lines on the stage. We won’t have another practice with our director until Thursday. We will probably be doing this every morning.

Again today we were on the grounds playing “Pick-up Sticks.” We finished our systematic coverage of all of the grounds and we had another full trailer load of limbs, logs and branches that have fallen out of the trees.

 

When we went to dump our trailer load at the FM burn pile we got to watch an interesting ballet in the sky over the Mississippi River. We watched in fascination as a first year Bald Eagle (still in his juvenile plumage) tried to steal a fish out of the talons of an adult Bald Eagle. The two eagles dipped and bobbed as they did a ballet in the air. My guess is that the adult eagle was the mother and she was trying to teach one of her chicks from her spring brood how to fish. I think the younger eagle wasn’t learning the right lesson; he wanted to steal rather than fish. Anyway it was beautiful, graceful and interesting to watch.

We spent the rest of our work day in the Conservation Artifacts Room with Elder Walker. We enjoy our time in the artifacts room. Elder Walker has a regular job at FM but when he has any spare time he works in the artifacts room. He was given the assignment last spring with the hope that he would be completely done cataloging everything by the first of the year. Elder Walker told us today that he won’t finish the job by Dec. 31^st but he has gotten a lot done. He has processed over 280 boxes of artifacts. He has written over 5000 individual envelopes with site locations, categories and descriptions. He’s done a wonderful job.

This evening we were surprised and delighted to have our old friends Aaron & Mira Daniels come to our “Rendezvous in Old Nauvoo” show. They are here with their family taking the tours and visiting the historic sites. After the show we had a nice long visit with them. They will leave for St. Louis on Thursday.