I was traveling again this week, this time heading to St. Louis on Monday for meetings with the Newman Numismatic Portal project. After a nice lunch at the airport I took a taxi to my hotel, the Knight Center on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Len Augsburger was already there, and I visited his room to review some new books for the scanning queue.

Len had stopped at Dan Hamelberg's house in Champaign, IL and picked up some more great auction catalogs - this time a batch of Thomas Elder sales. I showed Len some items I'm lending from my own library, including writings of Glenn A. Mooney on happenings at the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh Section of Coins, and multiple runs of publications named Numisma.

QUICK QUIZ: How many different publications in the U.S. have had the name Numisma? How many elsewhere?

Later that evening Len and I met up with John Feigenbaum and his developer Greg Bradley for dinner. We first had a drink in the 4th floor lounge at the Knight Center, then Len drove us to a nearby Mexican Restaurant. We discussed the Newman portal of course, but also other of their web site projects, computing history, great restaurants, and Presidential politics.

I got up early for breakfast and was the only one at the buffet when Gary joined me, soon followed by John. While they worked together I went back to my room to work on The E-Sylum a bit. A little before 9am the four of us gathered in the lobby and headed to the Olin Library for our meetings.

A number of meetings were planned. We spoke with WUSTL technology folks about the servers being set up for NNP, and the Archive-IT functionality from Internet Archive that we're exploring for backing up important numismatic web sites. The main event was Len's presentation on progress for our first year and plans going forward.Eric Newman's son Andy represented the Eric P. Newman Numismatic Education Society, and Chris Freeland led the staff from Olin library.

After our meetings concluded Len drove us to the West Campus to visit the new NNP scanning room.I was pleased to see that student Emma Gwaltney was in the middle of scanning my set of the Pennsylvania Association of Numismatists' The Clarion for the portal. Here are a few more photos.

It turned out John Feigenbaum and I were on the same United flight to Dulles airport; he was getting a connection to Virginia Beach - I got off and headed home, since I live just 15 minutes away in the western suburbs of Washington, D.C.

I'd been watching news of an approaching storm and the forecast kept getting worse. I worked half a day and my office closed at noon along with the entire Federal government. I saw my first snowflake on the drive home. It snowed until midnight Friday, often at blizzard force. We hunkered down at home and luckily the power stayed on. When it was all over the storm had dumped 3 feet of snow on our area. Not inches, feet - a total of 36 inches. Here's a view of our sidewalk from about 9am this morning.

I had drawn up a lengthy to-do list for the weekend, but I ended up having time only for The E-Sylum. Between entertaining my younger two, shoveling a space for our dog and taking him out throughout the blizzard, I also shoveled out our driveway, cleaned off my car, and cleaned snow off our brand-new deck out back. Our two strapping teenage boys were a big help; I'm stiff and sore now, and can only imagine how I'd feel if I'd done it all alone. Whew.

Many thanks to the E-Sylum readers from all over who inquired about our situation. We were fine, and especially lucky to have a nice neighbor with an industrial-strength snowblower. He cleared a roadway throughout our cul-de-sac, and we can all drive out if needed. But the whole region will still be digging out for a while.