June

Let's start with a little something funny shall we? Yeah, there will be plenty of time to get into all of the suckiness that has been the month of June, but I begin with a story of something a little more light hearted.

Friday we had another of our employee forays to the 110 bar across from work. Given how long it has been since we went out, it seemed like a good time to just unwind, plus there has been plenty of crap going on at work, so a little stress relief was in order. So much so that I went ahead and picked that most dangerous of poisons to drink, the Long Island Iced Tea. They really should rename that drink, like Minderaser or something (yes I know, there already is a drink called that) because of the gaps that get left in my memory after imbibing too many of them. Friday was no exception to that rule, I drank many and they were good, but I will be honest, I am not sure just how the hell I got home. I have no recollection of getting on the bus, but I must have because I have a small recollection of getting off of it and staggering my way into Arby's, where I ordered some sort of roast beef value meal. I vaguely remember eating the sandwich, presumably on my walk home because when I woke up the next day, the only evidence that my mind was not playing tricks on me was that the beverage that came with the meal was sitting on the kitchen counter, so I either ate the food on the walk home and dispatched of the rest of the evidence or I was so drunk I went ahead and ate the bag and wrapper as well.

If that would have been my only problem I would have considered Friday a no harm, no foul sort of evening, anything you can walk away from can't be all bad and all that jazz, save for the fact that my glasses came up missing. So I am blind as a bat, or close to it and I still have to go into work Saturday and try to place an order, when movement was one of the last things on my mind, even less so with no vision. I figure the most obvious place to look for my glasses are under the bed. See, I have this bad habit where I will often go to bed with a book or magazine and do some light reading, then take off my glasses and set them at the head of the bed. If I roll around too much I have a tendency of knocking them off the bed, so I was hoping that in my drunken stupor I would have at least followed pattern and set them there and just knocked them off. But after foraging under my bed and through my stacks of reading material near the bed no glasses were forthcoming. Now I used to have a backup pair of glasses but one of the lenses broke and I never went about getting them repaired, so my option was either wear a pair of glasses where I could see out of one eye, or navigate a very blurry world. I opted for blurriness, but took my broken glasses with me to work so that should there be anything I actually did need to see, I could slip them on real quick, get a visual confirmation and then throw them back in my pocket before I looked like a complete and utter moron. It worked and I managed to get the order in and hop a bus back home in short order but it still didn't solve the problem of where my glasses were. I looked in all of the places I could think of that might have been logical, and even some that weren't. I knew when I got home that night I apparently undressed as I went through the apartment, shirt in the kicthen, pants in the bathroom, wallet here, keys there, just a complete and utter clusterfuck and my lack of memory wasn't helping matters. It wouldn't be for another day before I would find my glasses, and they would be half buried in a hamper of clean clothes. Apparently I took them off when I got it Friday night and laid them on top of it, maybe assuming I would get my next days clothes from there in the morning, but it was drunken logic so who can really be sure, anyway they sort of slid down the side and became lost, or were just planning their escape.  After all, they didn't do me any good Friday when I ordered a round of Long Islands for our table, 6 in all, only to realize there were only 5 of us there.

Okay, story's done, which is good because by and large the rest of this month has pretty much sucked.

It all started back with the closing our store downtown and subsequent moving of inventory from the one store to our other locations that I blogged about a mere month ago. Well it turns out there was more fallout from that little project than me getting to do more work. Apparently, as well as the cigarette problem I had mentioned previously, there were some discrepancies with the lottery in that store as well. I know very little of the details, so I can't lay out for you the exact problems as they pertain to tickets and money, only that the books didn't balance. This, on top of the over ordering of cigarettes, led to Ed firing the manager at that store, Patty. I am not going to get all finger pointy here, because I like both parties and like I said, I really don't know enough about the particulars to make an informed opinion one way or the other, so I will just stick with the simple fact that the end result was Patty was let go. Thankfully I wasn't asked to take over, I am quite content with the amount of work I have already, though I did find myself meeting with reps for that store, as Ed was trying to get everything back under control there, including doing everything in a uniform fashion amongst all the stores. That is something I can agree with, all of the paperwork should be the same, we shouldn't have three different stores doing things three different ways, but really I have enough problems with one store without taking on the ordering of another one.

Next was Ed missing time from work, he was going in for eye surgery, he had a detached retina or something along those lines. I was hoping this would give me a chance to blow through some of the back stock that is once again cluttering up the basement at work, between the excess inventory from the store we closed and more bookings Ed signed up for I am finding we are stuck with more crap that we just can't sell. It seems like I spend 6 months out of the year getting everything organized, followed by 6 months of finding room for excess stuff that I will spend the next half year trying to get rid of again.

If work were the only problem then I would guess that life would be okay, but my grandmother has been having more health issues, bouncing everywhere from the ICU to a temporary assisted living place and back and forth for the better portion of a month now. Things go bad, they admit her to the hospital, they start to get better so they release her to supervised care and then the process takes on a whole wash, rinse, repeat aspect. Right now she would like to be home, but at this point unless there is going to be someone there with her 24 hours a day I can't see how that is a plausible outcome. Whether it be a family member or a live in nurse, there is no real practical way she can be home alone anymore. I'll be honest, if it were me I don't know how long I would keep fighting the battle she is fighting, after all, all of her kids are more than grown, hell all of her grandkids, myself included, are almost all grown, yet everytime she is potentially on the brink of something catastrophic there she is fighting back yet again. It is an amazing almost force of will which I question whether or not I, if in the same position, would have. 

I was also kind of bummed out that I wasn't going to spend my birthday with my friends this year.  Not that I make a big deal out of birthdays to begin with, after all I have had 41 of them so far and other than last year's surprise party, celebrating them has been a hit and miss thing, usually miss.  I can remember maybe three of them, and one of them was my 21st, one I shouldn't be able to remember if I have lived up to my newly minted legal drinking status, but by and large, save for a card or two, they really are just another day on the calendar for me.  That being said, this year my birthday was going to fall on a Friday and I was hoping to spend the day with some coworkers having a few pops as the old timers like to say, but as luck would have it, with my grandmother's unsure medical condition, and the fact my cousin Brandi was having her graduation party the following Saturday, so I decided to instead make a trip home for the weekend. 

My mom and her husband picked me up and we decided to venture out to dinner, they wanted to show me a new Mexican restaurant that had opened since the last time I had been home.  Now my family are not much along the lines of cultural eaters, more bsaic American fare folks, so the idea that they wanted to go out for Mexican intrigued me.  There are plenty of foreign places to go in Indiana, PA, but I rarely get to sample any of their concoctions.  I have suggested places in the past, but the cuisine didn't agree with somebody in the party and we would end up getting somethging simple like pizza instead.  So we pull up to this place called Tres Amigos, in a place formerly occupied by a Five Guys Burgers and Fries franchise, and are seated in the dining room and I opted for a steak burrito offering and what do they get?  One gets a chicken breast and french fries, the other gets a chicken salad.  Yes, we went to a Mexican restaurant and then they didn't even eat any Mexican food.  As for what I had, it was okay, certainly nothing special, I wouldn't reccommend them over other places I have been, save for maybe Taco Bell, but it wasn't god awful either.

Saturday we go to the graduation party, being held in my hometown, dot on the map, known as Elderton PA, specifically at vthe Elderton-Plumcreek Area Park, also known as the Jack Quinn Sports Complex.  The thing is, as a kid I actually got to watch the park be built, and it is named after the man who did most of the heavy lifting in getting it done, Jack Quinn.  Mr. Quinn was the phys ed teacher at my high school, as well as the man who started the boy's soccer team, as well as started and coached the boy's volleyball team for the school.  Originally an area that used to be an overgrown weeded area that some people had used to dump garbage, through Mr Quinn's tireless work, both in securing funding for the park and overseeing its construction, he turned it into sort of a jewel for a town that has very little.  It currently has a playground, softball/little league field, playground, two pavillions, 5 outdoor racquetball courts, three tennis courts, a basketball court, a nature trail and a horseshoe pitch. 

Usually I would take the time at a family event like this to take some pictures of the family getogether, but instead I figured this time I would take my camera and take pictures of my hometown instead.  After all, it isn't that big so a quick stroll of some picture taking wouldn't take all that long.  So, let the picture taking begin,

This would be one of the pavillions at the park, the one that the family was gathered under for the most part.  Many of the parts of the park, like this pavillion, were named after people that had a hand in the park's construction, either via contribution, actual labor or both.

Here is the softball/little league field, and probably the crown jewel of the park.  It has played host to playoff games for girl's high school softball and little league baseball playoff games as well.  Originally the fence was actually abot a foot further back, but the outfield wall was only three feet high, as opposed to its current height, which is probably closer to 7 feet or so.  The thing was, the original wall as it neared the left field corner, had a large hill but the hill was held back with with a reinforcement of staggered railroad ties, so if a ball did go out of the park, (any ball that hit above the three foot mark was technically a home run) it could end up getting caught up in the ties, and the ties didn't offer enough support for the hill so eventually they went in and just replaced it with a concrete reinforcement and moved the fence in a foot so no one would go running full speed to catch a ball and slam into a cement wall.   Now I am not much of a baseball player, I played maybe one year of minor league ball (the classification under Little League, not the professional minors by any stretch) and during some summers I would play on some softball league teams that used the field.  The thing was I had never hit a ball out of that park, maybe I was never much of a power hitter, maybe I had a mental block about it.  It wasn't something that ever weighed on my mind all that much, but during the graduation party some of us brought ball gloves.  We didn't play any organized game, mostly just lobbing balls into the kids so they could get some swings and then making half hearted attempts to tag them as they ran around the bases.  Later my uncle Will and I went out to shag some fly balls, each of us taking turns at home plate just tossing the ball up and knocking it skyward in hopes that the other person could get under it and catch it.  The thing is I haven't picked up a bat in about 8 years and yet the first time I tried to hit him a fly ball I accidentally hit it out, smacking it off of the concrete beyond the left field wall.

This would be the playground area of the park and probably my biggest heartbreak to see it had changed.  See, originally the swings at the left side of the sandy area were not there and the playground equipment was.  Where the playground equipment was was actually a sandlot volleyball court.  I know, a podunk town in the middle of nowhere having a sandlot volleyball court.  Even better, the court had lights and there were many a summer night where a bunch of us would show up and start playing a game, no real rhyme or reason to it, there wasn't a phone tree or anything to call people and say show up at such and such a time and play until whenever, we would just kind of show up, I guess there was a little planning involved in when we would get there, but we would just start playing, teams changed in number as people came and went and we would play until 10 or 11 at night, fiuring up the lights when we needed to.  It is sad that there aren't enough young people left in town to continue to do fun things like that and that even if there were there would now be no place to do it.

 

 

This would be the park's concession stand.  I am not sure how often it is open anymore, I imagine it would only be when there is a Little League or softball game scheduled.  I do know it wasn't open when I was there for the party, though we had plenty of food so it wasn't like I would have needed it to be open.  There is a press box on the top floor of the stand, which overlooks the baseball field where an announcer can sit, though I can't imagine anyone making a living calling games there. Just beyond the concession stand are 5 outdoor racquetball courts, another unique feature in that racquetball is usually played indoors, on one of those box type, 6 sided rooms.  The difference with an outdoor court is that there is no wall in the back of the court, and the side walls only come halfway down, just to the end of the server box, so while in the indoor game there are no areas that are out of bounds, on the outdoor courts you can hit a ball wide, long, or even too high since you can hit a ball over the front wall of the court as well.

 

And this would be some of the tennis courts, sadly like some of the park they are falling into a state of disuse.  Unlike the ballfield, there are no tennis teams or leagues in the area that would use the courts.  In fact, while when originally built there were 4 tennis courts, they were used so little that one of the courts was replaced with a basketball court.  I admit that I wasn't much of a tennis player even when I lived there, I like the game and can enjoy watching it, but lack even a modest skill set to compete at it.    

 

This would be Elderton Jr Sr High School, where I spent all of my educational youth.  Since it is connected to Elderton Elementary, I spent all 13 grades, kindergarten through 12th in either this building or the elementary school, which if it fit in the photo would be just to the right of the high school.  The school was closed last school year, as part of a cost cutting plan of the Armstrong School District, of which Elderton is a member.  The school district covers a large area, roughly 436 square miles, or almost all of Armstrong County itself, and many of the communities like Elderton are small little out of the way hamlets like Rural Valley and Dayton to name two and has many schools like Elderton with smaller enrollments where a question of the cost of keeping the school open is a question that has to be asked.

This sign was actually a project that was started during my senior year of high school by our student council, of which I was a member, though I have to admit that I had little to do with it being erected.  I did many things while in student council, I chaired the most successful canned food drive in school history, chaired a successful hosting of a district student council conference, pulling a joint venture between us and Homer Center High School, where our former principal had become superintendent, attended two distict, two state and two national student council conferences, including presenting a workshop at the 87 conference in Buffalo, New York with my friend and coconspirator, Bob and even lobbying to get the first soda machine installed in the high school, thus beginning my long war against nutrition that I fight to this day as I smoke a cigarette while I type this blog.  All that being said, I did relatively nothing when it came to having this sign installed.  'Nuff said.

This would be Main Street in Elderton.  No real particular reason to take this photo, save for the fact that you can notice some of the flags that were made mention of in the Fox News video posting I made a while back. 

This would be a prime example of what I mean when I suggest that all politics are local.  Say hello to HERO, a rather cool name for a group if ever there was one.  The group, Help Elderton Remain Open, was founded when the Armstrong School District opted to close Elderton High School as a group that would try to find a way to get the school board to keep the school open.  Originally their plans fell on deaf ears, the next option for HERO was to see if another school district might take over Elderton.  After going to court against the Armstrong School District, HERO won the right to see if Elderton might be absorbed into another school district.  While there was some interest. mostly from the Apollo Ridge School District, those plans fell through as well due in large part to money, the cost of operating the school and absorbing its current debt load versus the incoming money from the Elderton area as a tax base was not a financial win for anyone else, so nobody opted to take over the school.  The third and most successful venture to this point was the recent school board elections, you know, those elections that get no press coverage because they aren't pretty and don't have the glamour candidates of say, presidential elections,  but where by and large, a huge amount of your tax dollars are spent.  Well the proponents of HERO were able to get enough people to the polls to vote for candidates that wanted the school reopened that when the newly constituted school board revisited the issue, a 5-4 vote determined that for the coming school year the high school would be reopened.  The sad can of worms here is, after seeing this happen in Pittsburgh, is that now this will end up becoming a recurring theme, every election wil result in an open/close/open/close back and forth based solely on whoever gets their people to the polls, and not on an actual realistic and definitive assessment on whether the school should be open on not.  Yeah, you would think a blog like this would escape politics and yet you would be mistaken.

 

Say hello to Elderton State Bank.  This is the epitome of small town banks, they have two or three total branches and were one of the last banks I know that joined on to the whole ATM craze, waiting until well into the 1990s to adopt early 80s technology. That being said, I did have an account with them for years, one that just sat there for ages with little to no money in it, it was a trust account set up when I was a kid, where I could only have access to it if I had my mother's approval, I was not allowed to take money out of it othertwise.  Needless to say, I wasn't about to dump money into an account I couldn't access, especially when I couldn't use an ATM card for it and I didn't want to have to drag my family to the bank when I wanted some cash, so I just let the account fall into disuse until they finally sent me check for the balance that was there after years of inactivity.

This would be the Elderton Post Office, where I was the proud holder of box #23 for many years, probably too many truth be told.  I would pay the rent on the box, something like $5 a year, even though I was living in Pittsburgh and had rarely checked the mail there.  On the bright side, on those few times a year where I did get my mail I always had plenty it was like Christmas morning of the junk mail set.

 

If ever you had a doubt about how small of a town I used to live in, consider that this dirt road is in the middle of town, running parallel to Main Street.  Much like the bank not adopting ATM technology, the town hasn't fully grasped the concept of asphalt either.

Elderton Country Market, formerly Grey's Country Market was the winner of the grocery store battle of my childhood when the town tried supporting two stores, this one and Aiken's Market.  Aiken's had it's charm, it had a candy case and lots of penny candies which are always cool when you are a kid, but didn't have the overall selection of Grey's and eventually would lose the store battle, existing for a while as a hardware store instead, but that veture also failed.  The building sat vacant for a while and is now remodeled and being run as a restaurant, though I question how well a restaurant will do in that small of a town, especialy with two other places already in town and plenty of choices well within driving distance, but at least it is something in a town that has little.

With that being said, you have seen pretty much all of the sites that are to be seen in my hometown, leaving just this picture on the camera, my uncle Fred throwing horseshoes back at the party.  As it turns out, there is a horseshoe story as well.  As you can see, the typical pitch has two pegs, one on each end and running between the two, where the players are supposed to walk are two strips of cement.  Well, later in the day I decided I would throw a few shoes, I am not that good and I really wasn't playing anyone in a match, I was just tossing a few here and there more as a way to pass time when my cousin, Ethan, decided to join me.  Again we weren't keeping score or anything, just tossing them to see if we could get a ringer or two, when Ethan threw one of his horseshoes and it hit the concrete strip, short and to the left of the pit.  The thing was, and I don't know how it happened, but the horsheshoe split literally in half, with one half shooting more or less forward and the other jutting off to the left.  It was the certainly the craziest horseshoe related thing I had ever seen, considering that the shoes are usually made of a cast metal, so if you tried breaking them it would be problematic at best, yet by sheer circumstance it just happened anyway.

And thus concludes my trip to my hometown.  I spent another night and the next day with my family, spending some time with my grandma at her assisted care place and going out to eat at an Italian restaurant where, surprise surprise, my family actually ate Italian food as opposed to ordering something completely different. 

Wow, this is really long, yet I don't think it would be complete without me pointing out that June did prove I was right in one regard.  Earlier this year I had mentioned that the local baseball team was doing a smoke and mirrors act, that while remaining within shouting distance of a .500 record, none of the numbers involved with the team suggested that pace could be expected to continue and after June I think I can say with certainty that I was right.  The Pittsburgh Pirates took to June like I take to relationships, winning 6 games and losing 20 in the month.  Interspersed in that mess of a month were a 12 game losing streak, a 17 game road losing streak and some stuff that would make Comedy Central proud.  See, when you start stacking losses up, the obvious questions start being brought up about whether the team is taking the right direction, if not who is to blame, so naturally questions about the future employment status of the general manager Neal Huntington and manager John Russell were bound to be asked.  Would they stay or would they go?  No comment had been forthcoming from ownership, no vote of confidence one way or the other and with what was believed to be just one year remaining on both of their contracts it seemed plausible that they both could be lame ducks.  Except that apparently ownership extended both of their contracts for an additional year last October and didn't bother telling anyone, hell they even made Neal and John keep a veil of silence about the issue, so that when they were asked about it they couldn't say anything.  Only because someone who works for the Pirates leaked the information to Fox Sports was it actually put out there that the contract extensions were made at all.  To make matters worse, the Pirates run a gimmick during their home games called Pierogi Races, where 4 people are dressed in pierogi costumes (Jalepeno Hannah, Sauerkraut Saul, Cheese Chester, and Oliver Onion) and they race around the field once a game between innings.  It has become a little bit of a tradition, and on the scoreboard they keep a running tally of who wins the most races each season.  Sometimes they are regular races, sometimes the Pirate Parrot or someone else will comedically influence the outcome of the race and it makes for a nice distraction, certainly better than what is taking place on the field most nights.  Well, after the surpise announcement of the contract extensions of the general manager and manager, one of the persons who dresses up in the Peirogi costume wrote on his Facebook page soemthing along the lines of that guaranteeing a 19th consecutive losing season.  The result was, despite the actual team losing 20 of 26 games, it was the Pierogi that got fired.  Of course that didn't sit well with the locals, people called the offices of the Pirates complaining so the Pierogi was then rehired, proving the old adage that you can't keep a good Pierogi down, but a baseball team can be kept down in perpetuity.

Okay, I have officially blathered longer than is enough, and hopefully this makes up for not captioning the photos that I previously posted.  If not, oh well, my fingers are too tired to go fix the pictures now.