Enforced Family Fun Day: Punk Rock, Mystery Cemeteries, and Several Local Barns

I swear that I do not know what these guys would do with themselves if I wasn't around to always be suggesting fun family activities. It's definitely an insidious form of emotional labor, constantly finding and planning stuff to do and cajoling people out of the house to do it when they'd apparently be happy enough just holding the couch down all weekend, but the secret is that it's all for ME. *I'M* the one who likes to do family stuff, and stuff outside of the house, and I'd be bummed to go out alone. 

To be fair, I knew from the beginning that my excellent idea of hitting up the Monroe County History Center on a Sunday afternoon was only going to be a "fun" family activity for me. But hey, there's an exhibit on local barns! AND an exhibit on the local punk scene! And there's lots of bonding to be done in shared misery, but fine, we'll add in a walk afterwards over to the bakery that has delicious milk tea and crepe cakes by the slice. 

See? Family fun for all!

Alas, the teenagers were completely unimpressed by barns and immediately wandered off to gaze at John Mellencamp's guitar and such:

So they missed out on the excellent visual explanation of the difference between hand-hewn and milled timbers. This one is hand-hewn:

The milled one is in the background:

I thought this illustration of immigrants and where they settled was interesting, not just for what it shows about the spread of barn architecture, but also because it perfectly reflects my own ancestors' path from Ireland to Virginia to Ohio:

One of those early 1800s ancestors changed his last name in adulthood and moved far away from his entire extended family and down to Arkansas (of all places), and if you think I am not burning with curiosity about what brought that on then you have seriously underestimated my capacity for gossip.

Anyway, this was a really cool exhibit because it took all the old barns around the county that you always notice when you drive by and it wrote up a whole museum display about each of them:

My favorite part in each blurb is learning what each barn is up to these days. 4-H is POPULAR around here!

I like the Vernacular style best. That style is essentially just something along the lines of, "I need to build me a barn. A plan, you say? Who needs a plan to build a barn?" 

I see this barn the most, because it's over by the post office that's open the latest:

I'd mostly wanted to go to this museum to see the exhibit on the local punk scene. I feel like the punk scene was kind of on the wane by the time I got to Bloomington (although I swear I remember Pretty Pony), but, perhaps thanks to having a stellar music school here, there have always been plenty of indie musicians. My best memory is the time I used part of my grad school scholarship to sign up for a recreational yoga class, then halfway through the first class suddenly thought, "Huh, is my yoga teacher one of the Blake Babies?"

Why yes, she was! And if you think that I did not come to the next class with my Blake Babies CDs (Innocence and Experience is my favorite!) for her to sign... then you would be right, because I have always been and will always be way too bashful for that. 

ANYWAY, I'm super impressed by all the ephemera that the museum has. Flyers and set lists and receipts and zines are all the types of precious things that are so unlikely to make it into a museum, but THIS museum has a bonanza of items:

I'm equally impressed that the museum has such a substantial list of the punk groups that performed in Bloomington. That type of info is more ephemeral than their promo flyers, and yet the exhibit had five lines' worth of band names extending across the entire wall:

I VERY much wish they could have also had listening stations or some kind of way that we could hear the archival music, but I guess that would be a copyright nightmare.

One last very boring-to-everyone-but-me exhibit:

Notice all the cemeteries that are now in the lake. Once upon a time, my Girl Scout troop learned the whole dishy story of how that happened! 

Y'all KNOW how I feel about old local cemeteries!

I've got a couple more to look for now, thanks to this wall map:

This map says that there's another cemetery across the street from the Mt. Salem Cemetery--that's the one that has the 116-year-old guy--but on Google Maps all there is there is forest and an old quarry. Ten bucks says I get arrested this year for trespassing (wearing my high-visibility safety vest, of course, because hunters) in old limestone quarries!

After all that learning, crepe cake and milk tea really hit the spot:

It was the younger kid who first convinced us to try this place; she'd been wanting to try crepe cake FOREVER, and she was so stoked! Joke's on her, though, I guess, because it turns out that she doesn't super like crepe cake, and the first milk tea she got here was kind of weird, too (for the love of all that's good, keep your picky kids away from taro!), so now she's not into it anymore but the older kid and I love it so we keep dragging her here endlessly. 

Thai milk tea and matcha crepe cake is the perfect taste combo!

And what's this week's (Enforced) Fun Family Activity, you ask? Well, last night three of us went out to a local theater production, then we met up with the fourth one for late-night tacos downtown. And tonight there's supposed to be a cabaret-style performance of a selection of songs from Sondheim's Assassins in a downtown bar that claims to be open to 18+ for the show. I have no idea how to act in a bar--do you get to order a cocktail, or are you supposed to stick to beer? If the latter, what beer do you get?--so that will be a fun adventure.

P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!