Baby Sign and the Sign of the Times

When Angie was pregnant she told me she had been reading about baby sign language and was going to teach it to her twins. I knew she had taken two years of ASL in college, as one of her languages, but I thought baby sign was a fad and she would never have the time to teach it and take care of two little babies. Well I got to be wrong with this one. What a gift sign language has been, Zoe and Eddie are still just learning to make vocal sounds but have quite a vocabulary of signs. The first picture shows Zoe asking for something to eat, she followed it up with an English word that sounded like pwtpa, which turned out to mean pretzel. The second picture is Eddie telling me there is a bird flying by. Though it looks like he is pointing he is actually making the beak sign that means bird. Zoe is "reading" or "hearing" his comment. He is totally fascinated with birds, and even though a man of few words in any language he will always tell you about the birds.

Another sign of the times: Angie and I gave the babies both a trim. Zoe's is almost unnoticeable, we only trimmed her original little topknot but Eddie lost all his baby curls. We did pretty good,here's his after picture.

And the final sign of the times for this blog, here's a picture of stage one of Angie's first (and maybe only) tattoo. In a couple weeks the color will be added.
I goofed and called it a griffin but she said it is a chimera, to stand for change.

Decisions and More Decisions

My Decisions?

Well, Here's the OMG picture of what the terracotta paint looked like against the old dirty white paint. Of course I started with the closet, and that is an old pink blanket on the floor but I was certainly wondering what it would take to paint the room a different color. It looked horribly dark, and the beautiful woodwork looked like it just vanished against the wall color.

I decided to have faith and keep on painting. After all, what one person paintith another can re-paintith, or something like that. It must be the paint fumes getting to me! So I kept on painting, and found I needed a second gallon of paint to finish the room.


This is an actual wall. The photo you see taped there was my inspiration for the room. My color matches the darker color of the photo, and I had planned to color wash, at least twice, over this base to get something similar to the color in the pic. I have the glaze and the paint but I'm trying to decide whether to leave well enough alone. The finished color is gorgeous, warm, and cozy.

I know I have to decide soon, but right now I'm putting up the new ceiling fan so I'm buying myself a couple days.

Not an earth shattering decision, definitely not politics but then this is my ordinary life.

Decisions 2008

Congrats to Hilary Clinton, she carried this state by a 10% margin. I suspect she knew how important the rural vote could be, we certainly saw a lot of the Clinton family; from Hilary to President Clinton to Chelsea. They brought an excitement to our area that hasn't been seen for a long time. Their volunteers called me at least once a day, and definitely twice on election day. The last of those calls at around 6 p.m. to make sure I had gone to the polls.

Voter turn out was over the top, a wonderful thing to see, especially for a primary. She has an uphill battle until the convention and I realize she is in a do or die situation, needing to do well in Indiana and N. Carolina.

I wish them both well. I think an Obama and Clinton ticket, not necessarily in that order, could win.

We shall see.

And Another One Bites the Dust

There's a new CEO for Blair Corporation as we see another home-grown company figuratively, if not literally bite the dust, Mr. Nandkeolyar comes to Blair as part of the merger/buyout by The Orchard Group. He also cites experience with Martha Steward Living. Interesting. And he comes bearing promises of more jobs (most likely at the distribution center -- manual labor type jobs-- my comment) , possibly a retail store or two to replace the Blair outlet we lost. Hope those bus loads of seniors will like the Norm Thompson collection enough to return to our little city.

In the nine years I've lived and worked in Warren I've watched almost every large business leave town, close, or merge; for a few years there it was very painful. The Forge is now owned by a company in the UK and it 'right-sized', Loranger's is gone, Rexnard moved away. Thank goodness for Northwest Savings, Whirley and the Refinery or we'd have just a few businesses left in town. We have to assume a refinery is doing great with oil prices at unheard of heights.

The new word for permanent layoffs is "right-sizing". It sounds so much better than downsizing doesn't it? However, the end result is the same, lots of people from professional and middle management to upper management got the axe, many of them long time or hometown families. I'm not discussing whether the business had too many chiefs or not, only commenting on the loss of long time Warren residents and supporters of town activities. In addition to the ARM debacle we are seeing lots of homes for sale as people realize there is nothing in their salary range in this small town. Just like we saw with the arrival of Lowe's and WalMart, lots and lots of minimum or slightly better wages and very little for skilled labor or professionals.

When I sit in Rural Development meetings or in advisory meetings I always say we need to find a way to get white collar or professionals into this town. A great idea could be our own community college or university like Lock Haven or Mansfield; a lot of the State Hospital is underutilized and would make a wonderful location for a school. Anyone interested? The infrastructure for high-speed connectivity is in place in town, we have T3 available to us, how about an off-site data storage center for a major East Coast business?

Tourism is valuable to us here in the "PA Wilds". Did I mention I like the new state tourism campaign? Lot's of us, myself included, moved here for the small town living, not being surrounded by crowds and more crowds of people, the availability of great hiking, fishing, biking, ATV trails and hunting but we are seeing more and more professional and skilled labor jobs leaving the region and our young people are having to chose between minimum wage jobs or moving south.

I'm sure this is the curse of many small towns, but some have saved themselves, maybe we can too.

Rural Pennsylvania Politics and Driving Rural Roads

Former President Clinton came to visit our town yesterday, we were part of his swing through northwestern PA. He traveled from Erie (Behrend) to here and from here to St. Marys and Brookville and I hear he then spoke at Lock Haven also. I'm totally impressed with that itinerary, I wonder if the person who dreamed it up has ever driven rural roads. Bet Clinton was exhausted.

He opened his remarks, after thanking some people, with a comment of apology for arriving late -- it took him longer than he expected. A comment from the audience was heard, " That's alright, everyone says that." But it is so true. A state employee drove up from Harrisburg to meet with me yesterday and arrived hours after the 10 a.m. he said he'd be here. I've driven to Harrisburg for meetings, I knew he wouldn't make it by then. His comment, "Mapquest said it was only a 3 1/2 hour drive! I'm so sorry it took me longer than I expected." I'll also never forget the businessman who was to meet with us here, and asked for the most direct road from Pittsburgh. After we got done describing the multitude of back roads after he got off 80, he asked, "Don't you have ANY highways?" I told him the story about when I first moved here and heard a road referred to as 'the two lane'. I was totally confused until someone told me it was where Market Street went to two lanes, the equivalent of a highway or freeway around here. That is, if highways can have 15 mph school zones on them. It's not until you get to 17 in NY or 80 in PA that you see anything resembling a high speed freeway. Of course I now curse a rush hour traffic backup of 13 cars. I've long forgotten the gridlocks in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, or the time it took me 2 hours to get from one highway exit to another in San Diego. Everything has its trade off.

So, the Clinton's have been campaigning hard in PA; polls show Hillary has a good chance of winning here, and Barack Obama has largely ignored the under-populated northern half of this state. I understand he will be in Erie next week but tickets are being issued only at Behrend and at his campaign headquarters. I wonder if he's worried about fallout from his 'guns and religion' remark. We can be very sensitive about comments that even seem to portray us as backwoods rednecks. We can joke about being a part of Appalachia (by definition we are) but others can't infer we are somehow less educated or lacking in worldly knowledge. I work with a group of college-educated people, many with master's degrees, and the comments here have been much as I expected. We would all like to see the full conversation or speech and not be swayed by a statement taken out of context. We realize there has been little mudslinging (thank you both) and both candidates seem to have run clean, professional campaigns, except for small remarks on either side. I have learned over the years that when the campaigns get bitter I tune out the message and usually end up not voting for that candidate. To me mudslinging seems too much like desperation.

Cell Phones and Paint Samples

Quiet has fallen like the Times Square Ball at midnight. Grand twins and Mom have returned to Pittsburgh and I'm walking around with something like post-traumatic stress, looking lost and wondering what happened. Life with children under two years old runs at double the rest of the world and when you slip out of warp speed everything seems to have slowed wayyy down, the hours seem stretched out.

And did I mention quiet? More so than I even expected, it seems my cell phone has gone walkabout, and daughter says it didn't follow them home. Of course I tried calling myself, it usually works, but this time it went straight to voice mail. Wonder when the silly thing will turn up? And how strange it feels to be lost without an electronic device. I don't have a written phone book any more, and have used speed dial for so long I don't even know my kids' phone numbers. So, family if I don't call it's because I can't find your phone number. Call me!

I worked today, setting up the lab for my training class tomorrow: Absolute Beginner's Computing, get it? ABC's of Computers-- so cute. Anyhoo, I'm even ready for the woman who didn't know computers had mice, it should be fun. I finished hanging the blinds today and updating laptops, hopefully everything goes well Monday, I have a full house.

After work I treated myself with a trip to my favorite paint store: Cobbs, right here in Warren. I think the poor man cringes when he sees me coming. Last fall I was looking for YELLOW. I wanted to do a Venetian plaster effect in two shades of yellow. He did convince me that a little yellow goes a long way, and I even read later that one should pick a shade of yellow and then step down two to get the value of yellow you really want. He's responsible for how well the loft looks. So today I show up with a picture I printed from the Internet of what I want to do for the computer room/library/study room. It's a color wash of shades of terracotta. Since this room faces north and east I figured a warm color was the best choice. I was picking up cream-sicle orange samples and he was saying, "Too yellow." He was picking out brown samples and I was saying "Too brown." when we tried to match the picture. Finally, searching for a description I said, " I want a color like terracotta, you know, kind of Tuscan warm. And then I spotted the darkest value of the color I wanted. I said, kind of like this one, what color is this? We turned the paint sample over and the color sample was Tuscan Terracotta. Spooky. So of course I had to buy it. I usually prefer to start with the lightest value and color wash darker values so I'm way out of my comfort zone here. The color is rich, and warm and DARK. I'll post a pic when the walls are done.

Visiting Grandchildren

Today is day 5 of the visit of the alien creatures known as babies. My beloved grand twins have been here making chaos out of order and noise and joy out of peace and quiet. The lid to my spaghetti pan has several dings from a rousing rendition of Na na na na Na na. I never knew babies knew rock music lyrics!! Maybe I have a budding drummer here.

The weather has finally given us a taste of spring and I took the kids out to help me clean up the backyard for the summer. It's hard to believe two weeks ago I still had snow covering the bird feeders and today it is 72 degrees. Our winter skins started to burn quickly and we didn't get to spend a lot of time outside but I did find out Eddie isn't sure about that green squishy stuff called grass and Zoey loved it. He was entranced by all the different birds visiting the yard and his little head was snapping around like crazy to follow the different sounds and flights. He even ended up falling backward watching a blue jay. He knows baby sign but is a little man of few words however the ASL sign for bird is one he was using a lot today, followed by a word that sounded amazingly like CAW CAW.

There's a bit of a rush to get this part of the yard cleaned up, I ordered five new apple trees and hope to espalier them along the fence. I picked all my favorite apples including sops of wine which I remember from when I was a kid, and Miki and Hank's favorite -- honeycrisp. Of course we will all have to wait three years to even taste one but it is still exciting.