Eweaver’s UMW Blog

We had a really good group meeting today. I feel a lot more confident now with most everything. We don’t have as much left to do as I thought which is great news. My work for this week includes: Revising the constitution, Writing up a brief description of our group project for the about page, fixing my bibliographies, and doing more scooting around town taking pictures. Amy and I had a leisurely time driving around the city today snapping photos. Hopefully we can cover everything with two more trips out.

I feel so much better about all of this… which is GOOD NEWS!

So I know group projects are supposed to challenge you on your people and communication skills. I also know that group projects are not always fun or as productive as one might hope them to be. I also know that I can be a very intense person when it comes to deadlines, doing your fair share, and communicating…. but I have sort of come to the conclusion that there is a point at which persons like myself can only do so much. I will continue to do my share of the work, but I feel that it is a waste of my energy to constantly remind group members of deadlines and constantly be the leader who is decisive. Amy and I have field work left to do. I also need to create my biographical page for the site. Other than that I need to find some links and pictures and I will be officially done.

So yesterday I sat down to finally read the introduction and factual portions other than the actual markers in the Historical marker Guidebook given to us on day 1. It was pretty interesting and from it I wrote a little something on the importance/a bit of history/what it means to me that I hope we can use on our site. I also compiled some timeline dates of the program itself which will be included in our finished timeline by tuesday night [our deadline]. It is pretty exciting and I am posting all that I have on our blog site as soon as I submit this. I actually feel like we are getting somewhere and making a difference now with this project and that is a really good feeling.

I only have 1 more marker to do… and it feels so good!

I was going to head to sleep now but I am just on a roll, I can’t wait to press Publish on this last one [Grant's Supply Line] and be completely finished with phase one of Historical Marker madness.  I have learned a lot about 15 random historical events and it has been extremely interesting. I also learned how to use microfishe as of yesterday. It was one of the best sources I could have possibly found - a camp newspaper published for every month that Company 2363 was in existence. Awesome. I am glad my first experience with the machine was a fruitful one because it is a pain in the butt to use. Thats all - now back to Grant and his supplies.

So I was sitting down to research today when I realized happily… this really is the home stretch for our group. Once I have researched all my markers by thursday of this week - all I have left is revising and beautifying. I feel really thankful that HMP is something that we can knock the majority of the work out first and then just tweak until the end. This comforts me as I sit here surrounded by library books, running out of post its and simply counting down til my last marker. Good times.

Our group discussed and came to the new conclusion that we would post all but the new ones by class time Tuesday and finish everything off my Thursday night. Good luck ladies… just keep truckin.

So this one goes out to all students everywhere who just had a revelation like me that spring break is over and you just came back completely unprepared for midterm week number 2. GUH.

HMP’s next deadline comes this Thursday night - 7 more markers are due. Because of the extra markers that we just realized existed we will not be completely finished with our research by this week as we had hoped, but there are only a few more for each of us to knock out so that next week we will be home free and only concerned with the technical and beautifying part of the project. This is relieving to me since I don’t have a huge hand in the second half of the project.