Painting
Argos discusses last night's painting here. Not bad considering I haven't touched real watercolors in probably 35 years or more.
Gas prices are still cuckoo here. Harvard price as of today is $2.70, Marengo price (same taxes, just 12 miles away) is $2.52. Marengo is a smaller town with three stations in town because it's on US 20. Harvard is three times the population and has more stations, at least five that I can think of. It is on US 14. The two are linked directly via Illinois highway 23. There is no logical reason for this large discrepancy in prices.
While going through some old books in a storage area at the library today, we discovered a box full of canceled checks. These are pretty darned old, half a century to be exact, from 1959 to 1961. The library's monthly phone bill was $7.98. Water was $5. The then-head librarian's salary was $225 a month, with no evidence of taxes or social security being taken out. There were also a lot of canceled vouchers that had been written directing the city treasurer to issue checks in various amounts to vendors and staff. Those would have been paid from library tax assessments, while the other checks came from the non-profit foundation account left by the original benefactor. An interesting bit of history. Too bad we didn't find them before the library centennial, they could have been included in a display. I may push for such a display anyway, since we still haven't finished out the centennial year until May. I also have some handwritten catalog cards I salvaged, and we have some books from the collection that date back almost to the beginning. There are some old ledger books and board minutes too. I wonder what the oldest staff photo we could find might be.
Snow predicted for today did not materialize here. I guess places east and south of us are getting hit pretty hard, though. All we got was a blustery northeasterly wind that blew old snow around and made it hard to see.