Here's an entry I'm pasting in:

I'm at my father-in-law's house between Goldsboro and La Grange NC, writing an offline entry. Today we did something I wanted to do last XMas. He has this habit of just driving us around, and last year we were in Smithfield, 2 blocks from the Ava Gardner Museum and we never went. This time we did. I was kind of sweating it a little, because I thought that we might drive 30 minutes and the thing would really suck. As it turned out, the museum was pretty cool! We paid, signed in and then watched a 15 minute biographical video. After that, we wandered amongst the displays. There were panels on the wall showing her at different points in her life, and cases with artifacts like the family bible and such. Several of her gowns were on display, as well as 26 portraits by an artists who painted one each year from 1948 until his death in 2001. I firmly believe in taking advantage of cool local things when you run across them and have regretted for a year not doing this last time. It was really fun and I'm glad we went.