Down in the Dungeon

As some of you may recall, I've been helping out the editor of the Seattle Audubon Society Centennial book (due out this coming Fall) with a little research.  I've been reading through the Board minutes in search of significant actions and events for two appendices.  The Board minutes from the early decades were at the UW archives, which were easy to access.  Later minutes, I was told, were "somewhere in the Society's office basement."

This is the basement.  It is big.  It has many rooms and many shelves and a lot of clutter.

Each area has its own light switch, which took me a while to locate.

After roaming around for a while, I located the archive boxes -- in the very last, farthest-back room against the back wall.  Some of them had content labels, which was handy.

While others did not....

Luckily, the material I needed was in two labeled boxes...sitting on a shelf with a warning sign:  "Remove boxes carefully -- shelf is unsecured."  Oh, joy.

I managed to remove the heavy, notebook-filled boxes without mishap.  I spent two days going through them, hunkered down in my little corner of the basement on a wooden stool.  The office manager knew I was down there, but apparently no one else did, because at one point someone came down to get something (though how they find anything there is a mystery) and on the way back, started turning all the lights out.  As I was plunged into darkness, I let out a loud "Yeep!"  Thankfully, the lights came back on with a shouted "Sorry about that!"

On the whole, this has been a fun project and I've run across fascinating tidbits of historical lore, but I am so happy to have finished with the basement.  Or so I hope!