Dear Miss Villani

On a regular basis, I think good thoughts and feel deep appreciation for the former owner of my home. She took such good and tender care of this house for years and years after she grew up here. And she planted great flora. Look at those poppies! Oh My Gosh—they take my breath away. And there are daffodils and irises and peonies and lily-of-the-valley and ….

You get the idea: this yard is exquisite.

Thank you!







And here's a close-up from last year.

Writing for a Living

I've been blogging now for a month short of four years. It all started when I met a man I instantly thought was wonderful and who later turned out to be not so. I wanted to document the travails of dating when one is old over 50. This blog has turned into so much more than that.

All along, I've blogged for the sheer wonder of sharing words, sharing thoughts. I've blogged for the love of words, and seen my writing improve as a result. There was never any pay, except when someone said to me, "I love what you wrote today!"

I never had hundreds of daily readers. I think the most I had was 45 or so, when The Gardener told every woman he knew about being featured in my blog. (Now there was a man with too many women and too little time!) Nowadays I average just over 30 hits. I know the identity of about half of them. There's a whole contingent in North Carolina who read regularly and I don't have a clue how they found me or who started passing my URL around.

<Random Thought On>
Is that the on-the-bathroom-wall-with-magic-marker of the future? Will we write URLs instead of "Sally loves Bobby"?
<Random Thought Off>

I recently started a second blog. It's still lying in its crib, but as it learns to walk, it will contain posts about Youngstown, maybe some posts about our clients, posts about writing and Web stuff. It will not contain personal stuff—the stories I love to write about my grandchildren and children and cats and the development of this wonder-of-a-relationship with the Jazzman. Just the professional stuff, so when someone offering a freelance job wants to see writing samples, I can point out that content.

But still, there's no pay for that.

But (she said, grinning), last night I got my first task assignment from the new boss to write a blog post. Yea! Me, a blogger for pay!

Can I say, "I have arrived"?

The View from my Computer

The practice of working from home requires some adjustment. One is responsible primarily to oneself, and that requires a healthy exercise of integrity. I like integrity.

As I'm swamped with work, I realize how little serious and important (to the organization) work I've been doing for the past six months or so. I love my work, and I love sitting here in my aerie, windows open, breeze drifting through, cats nearby.

Several people said to me, "You can work in your jammies." One person even said, "You should wear your jammies for the first three days, just because you can." Jammies to work is so not my style. When I ran to pick up the Jazzman from his cousin's house last night upon his return from a long weekend in the Hamptons, I threw on a robe and a pair of yoga pants—over nothin'. I knew I would see no one, and it was a three-block drive. But still, it wasn't quite my style.

<Sidebar On>
Although, PianoLady would tell you stories of our 8:00 a.m. piano ensemble class forty-one years ago where we learned Mozart four-hand sonatas and Rachmaninoff piano duets. There are stories of my wearing a trenchcoat over my nightgown for these classes. I look back now and can't believe I ever did that. It must just be an urban myth!
<Sidebar Off>

So I share with you today's View From My Desk: Angel dozing in the window, waking with a start each time a grackle or a robin or a blue jay whizzes by.

This beats shivering in an overcooled cubicle any day!

Weekend Activities

We are a family filled with a passion for the arts, both performing and visual, and with myriad artistic interests. We play musical instruments, sing, write, take pictures, and make things with our hands—all sorts of things in all kinds of mediums. We are artists. We create.

These passions have extended to the third generation. Ridley can hardly sit still without having a drawing pad and colored pencil in her hand. In her house and mine, she knows right where to go to find all her art supplies. And Boston is very interested in my fabric and buttons and thread.

I had the babes overnight on Friday, which became sewing and dyeing time. Boston has been wanting me to make him a snake that is hollow inside so he can feed it things. Friday night we ran to Jo-Ann's after supper at Panera and picked out some fleece and some silky lining. Once home, he decided the shape of the snake's head, and we cut and sewed. He had told me the snake would have a zippered mouth and a red tongue that rolled up into the mouth when you wanted to zip the zipper.

Two or three times on Friday night, I threaded my Bernina 1630 and each time said, "Over this, around that, up the right, down the left . . ." On Saturday morning while I was fixing breakfast, he decided he wanted a different color thread, so sat down and successfully threaded the machine. By himself. At eight-and-a-half years of age. With no help from me.

Anyone who sews will tell you that threading the machine is difficult. You must make sure you pass the thread through each of the eight or so nooks and crannies or the machine just won't sew. Well, he got all the nooks, crannies, and the tiny little eye in the needle. I was astonished!

Ridley spent time looking at all my bottles of fiber reactive dye, and chose "antique gold" (although she kept calling it an-tee-cue) and "lilac". Then we dug a silk scarf out of my stash and gave it a base bath of gold, then folded and clamped and finished our mini-shibori experiment with lilac. She said, "It's going to be cold today. I think I'll wear it to my soccer game to stay warm." I had to explain that a silk scarf is something you wear for dress-up, not for warmth.

I love that my grandkids think that I, with a needle and thread, can do everything there is to do. And I especially love that they want to learn to do everything I do.

I said to Ridley, "Do you know how you are like Grandma? Because we both have lots of interests and not enough time." She smiled.

An Accident Waiting to Happen

When I was preparing to buy this house, the home inspector commented about the front steps. They were 80 years old and the mortar was barely holding them together. Someone had repaired them at one (or more) point(s), but it had not held. The inspector said they had to be repaired.

For the past year-and-a-half, I have been living in constant fear of someone stepping onto the steps and falling backwards as the bricks gave way. I was certain a lawsuit was just around the corner.

The Jazzman did some research and called Chuck Hyde of Leonelli Remodeling. Leonelli sent some of their people over yesterday, and I now have beautiful new steps. Next week I will have a beautiful new column (or two) on the front porch, devoid of decades of wood rot.

But I made one minor error. Yesterday was a lovely day—and by that I mean not cold. I threw open the windows in my bedroom and the babes' bedroom. Then I went into the small bedroom my office to begin my day's work. I didn't think about the work that is involved in demolishing aged mortar before applying new mortar.

I heard some grinding and ran downstairs to look out the front door. The air around the front door was thick with dust. Again, I didn't engage my brain and think about my bedroom. Then I heard grinding in the back, and noticed the air around the back door was thick with dust as one of the workers repaired the brick walls on either side of my back stairs.

A couple of hours later, starting to think about the ramifications, I walked into my bedroom and trailed my fingers across the dresser. Oops. Big oops! My dresser and everything sitting on it is coated with dust. I haven't stopped to look at my nightstand or the nightstand on the other side of the bed. Or the floor. Or the armoire.

I'm just grateful for the fact that Monday is my cleaning lady's day. I can stick my head in the sand—er, dust—and let her deal with it.

Oh, and I'm grateful for my beautiful new front stairs.

Obama Comes to Youngstown [Again!]

Busy day today, so I'll cop out by directing you to the White House blog, where there's a post featuring President Obama's visit yesterday to the Mahoning Valley.


Photo credit: WKBN.com

Beauty in the Valley

My new job requires me to research and think and write marketing materials for clients, which I greatly enjoy doing. I feels much more like exercise for my brain than the technical writing I've been doing for the past two years. It's much more like the writing I was doing at IBM in Tucson, which I loved. In doing my research and preparation, sometimes I come across bits of media that are simply irresistible.

In that vein, I share with you a video narrated by photographer Greg Miller. Miller is a photographer who came to Youngstown in April to shoot the images that would accompany the Inc. magazine article Sempre Youngstown. I posted several weeks ago about this article.

I loved Miller's script in this video. He found in Youngstown some of the beauty that we get to see on a daily basis.

Greg, I hope you'll come back and visit us again to meet more of our friendly, upbeat people and see more of our beauty, both man-made and natural.



Photo credit: Greg Miller