Peggy's Jibber-Jabber: 2017 Is Here!

It’s here!
2017 is here!
And something else that is here is the start of my twentieth year writing a weekly letter.
Yep!
Twenty years!
Is that not love?
“Love?” you wonder.
Yes, love. I write for the love of you, who like to read my jibber-jabber.
How about a brief, very few, letter facts for 2016?
I wrote 57 letter blogs last year. Printed, they came out to 659 pages. Last year was the first year I needed two binders to hold all my printed stories. I have a three-inch binder and a two-inch binder. The two-inch isn’t full so I could maybe have gotten away with two two-inch binders but I was hoping one three-inch was enough when I bought it.

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My desktop was a road picture of some sheep in a pasture. Not fabulous, just something different to have up there.

I took the picture on a recent trip to Home Depot. Nothing is close in Pennsylvania, including Home Depot. We traveled almost 50 miles to Johnson City, New York to find a Home Depot store. There is one in Dickson City, Pennsylvania and distance wise, it’s about the same, but traffic wise, it’s easier to go up to New York. So it was to New York we went. Besides, we planned on stopping at Uno’s for a Chicago style pizza and A.C. Moore for me — but I’ll tell you a little more about that later.
As we walked around the Home Depot store, looking for the items to cross off Mike’s work list, we walk past a bin of Inkzall Black Fine Point Jobsite Markers.
I stopped to read the graffiti.
Jesus Saves, wrote one person. Someone else crossed off saves and wrote shaves. Some one else crossed off shaves and wrote saves again. And finally someone else came along and added All day to it.
Someone else loves themselves, another cries out Help me! With another saying they are going to jump. I wondered from where. One person declares they’re hungry and a couple of other people adding that they are too. Some people scribbled and others signed their name.

I checked out the other side of the two-sided bin and that’s were the artists hang out. There were faces drawn on that side and more references to Jesus. All the Jesus and God references surprised me.

Mike had stopped halfway up the aisle and was waiting for me. I pulled out my phone and snapped a couple of quick pictures and hurried to join to him. I was strangely pleased that there weren’t any dirty messages.
“I see one Peg,” you say.
Yeah. I see it too. Now. Not then though.
My favorite posting?
I ♥ MY MOM cause I love my mom too!
After we left Home Depot and Johnson City, we made the short trip to Vestal, another New York city.
At A.C. Moore, the arts and craft store, we went to the jewelry making section. I was asked to make another bracelet, blue this time, so I was looking over the selection of permanent colored copper wire.
“Here are those pliers you wanted,” Mike said from behind me.
I turned around and he handed me the nylon jaw pliers attached to their cardboard backing. “Oh, I want those,” I said with excitement in my voice.
“What else do you want?” Mike caters to my whims.
When we left there I had a new pair of nylon jaw pliers — so I don’t scratch the color off the permanently colored copper wire, flush cutters that are small and dainty enough to get into the tight places my side-cutters have a hard time with, a small anvil and hammer that jewelry makers use, a dark blue copper wire that I’m not crazy about but the only blue they had, and a patina.
“Patina?” you ask.
Surfing the jewelry sites on the internet, one lady was using something called liver of sulfur to give her copper a deep, rich color that I really liked. My bottle of patina doesn’t call itself liver of sulfur, but it does say it’s for copper, so I picked it up. What do you think?

“Peg, it’ll darken naturally on it’s own,” you say.
I know, Mike told me that too. But one nice thing about copper…
You can use steel wool to bring it back to it’s natural luster!
Uno Chicago Style Pizzeria is in the same parking lot as A. C. Moore’s so we made the trip across the parking lot; our mouth’s all set for pizza. When we walked in, there was a 15 to 20 minute wait.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” Mike said not wanting to wait.
Back in the car, we drove down Vestal Parkway and settled on Red Lobster. Mike had a seafood platter; I had shrimp tacos. They were okay but not as good as the ones I got at Wise Guy’s in Lake Ozark, Missouri!
On the way home I saw all these road signs plastered on the side of a restaurant.
“Mike, can we go back?” I asked. By the time I saw it, we were past and I missed the photo. Mike found a turn-around and went back. He indulges me.
“Did they buy them or steal them?” I asked but of course, there was no way for Mike to know the answer to that question.

I took a picture of a barn quilt. There for a while I had collected quite a few different style barn quilts. I don’t know if I have this one in there or not and I’m not going to go look.

And this next picture? Something to make you go “Awww.”

A couple of days later found us on the run again.
Mike sold a flatbed car trailer and we had to meet with the new owner to get the title transferred.
“As long as we’re going out,” Mike said. “Let’s take a couple of more locks up to Lopez and get them keyed the same.”
Way okay by me. I’m always up for picture taking opportunities.
Lopez had a lot of snow on the ground and in Wyalusing, almost all of our snow was gone.

“Will this GPS tell us the elevation like our old one did?” Mike asked.
“I don’t know,” I said but reached for the buttons.
I poked the button labeled Tools and the next menu that came up had a button labeled Where Am I? I poked it and it gave us latitude, longitude, elevation, nearest intersection and nearest address.
“Cool!” I said. “I wished I’d known it could do this before.” There have been times when this would have come in handy.
Mike watched the road, occasionally glancing at the readout, but I gave a running commentary as the elevation climbed.
“2593!”
We dropped off the locks and reversing direction, I called out the numbers as we dropped back down into Dushore, watching the snow fall away. “1450. That’s over a thousand feet of elevation in seven miles.”
“I have an idea,” Mike said.
“Yeah?”
“Since we didn’t get our pizza the other day, why don’t we take the long way up to Towanda and get a Papa V’s pizza?”
I didn’t hesitate, “Sure!”
The route from Dushore to Towanda is not a route that we travel very often so I got to take lots of pictures. As we get into Towanda there is a big long wall painted with a mural. It’s starting to look a little weather beaten and I thought, One of these days, it’ll be gone. I raised my camera and captured the scenes painted there.
Most of the scenes seems to be days of yesteryear…

Except I’m not sure how this fairy fits in with that.

Camptown Races is a scene I do recognize.

It’s a scene from the song published by Stephen Foster in the yesteryear date of 1850. And we do have a town with the same name not far from Wyalusing.
“Historians cite the village of Camptown, Pennsylvania as the basis for the song…The Bradford County Historical Society documents Foster attending school in nearby Towanda and Athens in 1840 and 1841. The schools were located five miles from the track. The village of Camptown has changed from having three general stores, three churches, a grist mill and a creamery, to one store and one church,” says one web page I visited and I have to confess, I always thought that to be true. In fact, there is a historical marker beside the road that says that too.
Then I came across another webpage that says it isn’t true. It says: “There really is a Camptown; it’s in Bradford county, Pennsylvania, and isn’t too far from the Pittsburgh area where Foster grew up. The song, however, refers to ‘Camp Towns,’ which were hobo communities. In the song, the people in these transient communities bet on horse races to try and make some money.”
Both websites seem creditable but in the second instance, who thinks Camptown isn’t too far from Pittsburgh? It’s 262 miles and would take about 5 hours to drive today. How long of a drive would that have been in 1850!
I’m on a new kick now, I’m photographing churches. Across from Papa V’s is the Episcopal Church, a beautiful stone church completed in 1889.

I walked up the street a little ways trying to get a shot without all the power lines in it and I came across a beautiful wrought iron fence. This is my current desktop photo.

The pizza was good, but comes in second to Uno’s in Mike’s book. By the time we’d eaten and left Towanda, the clouds had rolled in and the snow was starting to fly.
This is the Veteran’s Memorial Bridge that crosses the Susquehanna River between Towanda and Wysox. Hard to believe these photos were taken only an hour apart.

We hit a pretty heavy snow squall but by the time we’d gotten to Wyalusing, we’d driven out of it.
These old buildings are along that route and they look pretty dressed in a dusting of snow. I’ve never asked anyone about them, but to me they look like the old time motor inn’s where you get a room with a bed and a window and enough room to turn around in — that’s it.