Adventures in Accessioning

"Good evening, Accessioner."

This play on the Joker's characteristic line has been running through my head lately. I am accessioning on the CCGS Miskanaw now, which was at first a relief... now I'm not so sure. It's a very slow process, so I'll be in the same room for a very long time. I am certainly worried now that I will not get the boat accessioned in time for the projected public opening of the Miskanaw.

So what is accessioning, I can here you not asking. Well, it's an alchemical process whereby I take any random piece of junk, soak it in a beaker of oils and paperwork, mutter some incantatory numbers, and watch the junk become an artifact.

Or, more accurately, I paint a stripe of clear nail polish on an object, paint a stripe of white-out on top of the nail polish, write a serial number on the white-out and cover that with more nail polish. I then do paperwork describing and categorizing the object that is now labelled. Voila, I have made an artifact. Maybe not alchemy, but it's more fun to think of it that way. Otherwise it's just paperwork.

Also, the Nomenclature book has gaps. For instance, I cannot find anything resembling "POWER BAR" or "BAR, POWER" in there. Does anyone happen to know if there is another name for this object? Also, I have tons of little pieces of paper tacked to a bulletin board which are all under the category DOCUMENTARY ARTIFACT but seem to be lacking an object term. This is somewhat frustrating.

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My adventures in the Lovecraftian universe are getting somewhat more interesting. I enjoyed "The Call of Cthulhu" and "The Colour of Outer Space" quite a bit. In these cases, his tendency to be hyperbolic and speak of "unknowable" secrets which will drive a person mad are more appropriate. Necromancy, for instance, doesn't have the same mind-blowing effect of applied non-Euclidean geometry, I think. If you don't believe me, read "The Call of Cthulhu" (at least juxtaposed to "The Festival"). And either I'm getting used to the adjective-compulsion, or he's getting to be a better writer.

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Geez, that's about all I've got. What a dull day-to-day existence. Hmm, let's see. The dragonflies seem to be out. Oh! I got some more pictures of a tarsands beetle. They were quite good. I'll put them up on my bugs photo post.