Updating the Update

The vaccuuming lasted maybe five minutes. Yay!

It's all worked out, and now that I've had a very good night's sleep, I'm much better able to see the humor. The next room over seems to have a fly problem, and they just can't stand the idea of sleeping with dead flies piled on the floor, so they needed to vaccuum when they got back on Sunday night.

I'm sure within the fifteen or so weeks here, I'll do something at least as irritating to them.

There's a big session on the Abbey today for our students, and that faculty member (and spouse) live in the builder's bedroom, so it's one of the rooms that students are going through today. Thus, they wanted it extra clean and tidy.

The idea is that the students are learning to "read" a great house, to understand more about how the household worked, and how people worked within the household. So the students will be visiting parts of the house they don't normally see, the fancy bedrooms, the builder's office, the governess's quarters, the laundry, and so on. Then they'll have to be able to figure out how to get from point A to B as a servant or as a family member (totally different routes), and understand separated those lives were even under the same roofs.

The session at the Abbey is paralleled by a session at a historical "workhouse" so that students will see how three facets of Victorian society lived, a wealthy householder, the servants of the house, and really poor people. Hopefully, they'll also get a sense of other facets, laborers, medium merchants and shopkeepers and such.