Whenever I move to a new community, one of the first things I look for is whether there is a good hardware store nearby. Now, I’m not talking about one of those big, warehouse-sized national chain stores–though I have nothing against them and certainly shop there on occasion. What I am on the lookout for is a place that has been there for decades and has employees that have, shall we say, the patina of experience upon them.

You might be led to believe that because a good hardware store is high on my list of hometown necessities, I am some kind of do-it-yourself, remodeling whiz, but nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, I re-grouted a shower stall once, and I can replace a washer, broken sprinkler head or leaky toilet valve when necessary, but that’s about the extent of my fix-it skills. Nevertheless, I have come to appreciate a store that stocks all kinds of interesting gadgets and gizmos even if I don’t know what most of them are, and I appreciate even more a knowledgable staffer who can tell me how to deal with whatever domestic disaster I am currently facing.

Perhaps my fascination with such emporiums began when, as a little girl, I accompanied my dad on his early spring trips to Holland’s Feed Store in downtown Beaverton, Oregon. While he picked up seeds for our enormous vegetable garden, chicken wire, stakes and twine, oil for the rototiller and a new hoe, my sister and I would be draped over a stock tank set on the floor holding the season’s batch of fluffy little chicks and bunnies. I must admit that I was just as thrilled some forty years later when I walked into our hardware store in East Wenatchee one March day and followed the sound of chirping to cages holding ducklings, chicks and even baby turkeys (What is the proper nomenclature for a baby turkey? turkling? goblette?). My younger daughter, true child of mine, though 15 at the time, seemed equally entranced and annually made it a point to find an excuse to visit that store at that time of year.

Cute balls of fluff aside, I honestly enjoy just strolling the aisles from plumbing to electrical to garden, taking in all the thing-a-ma-bobs and doo-hickeys and nearly always finding something that I didn’t realize I urgently needed until I saw it there. The clerks are always helpful and pleasant and seem to be able to tell when I need some serious assistance as opposed to when I’m just doing some serious browsing. And believe me, when I have a technical question, I want to be talking to a grizzled veteran who has clearly worked a lifetime as an electrician or plumber. I imagine this man (they’re almost always guys) retired one day, spent a few weeks around the house driving his poor wife crazy trying to find something that needed fixing, and then was kindly nudged by her into applying for that opening down at the hardware store. Now everybody’s happy!

Yes, I don’t want to live too far from a decent mall, a well-stocked specialty food store and options for cultural entertainment. But believe me, when the toilet handle breaks an hour before dinner guests are expected, it’s far more important to be 10 minutes from your helpful hardware place than 10 minutes from Nordstrom’s!

 Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

I have a confession to make. I can no longer hide in shame, nor can I continue to pretend this doesn’t eat me up inside. I’ve told a few friends, but I shortly lost them after revealing my true self. Yes, it is time for me to stand up and declare with pride: I OWN A DISCMAN!

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when I did have a pink iPod mini. It went with me everywhere. Especially when traveling, I knew if I ever forgot a toothbrush or a pair of sneakers, at least I would have my music to get me through.

I truly dislike how an iPod can force one to completely disconnect from his surroundings, so I avoided taking it everywhere. But it was still a loyal friend of mine. Memories of a bad day can quickly dissipate during a brisk walk through the city with melodramatic melodies blasting into your brain.

Two summers ago I lived in Honduras for three months. I spent many pleasant afternoons napping in a hammock with my earphones in. One fine afternoon I was at a public pool, napping in a hammock. I must have fallen into a deep sleep because I woke up with my iPod underneath me. Without thinking, I got up to jump in the pool, quickly forgot about my pink friend basking in my hammock and left the pool to go home for dinner. It was during the walk home that I realized I had left something behind.

Scrambling back to the pool, I regurgitated some slaughtered Spanish, asking if the staff members had seen a pink iPod anywhere. They replied in Spanish that they hadn’t seen it, but there was a group of rambunctious teens running around the hammock area. Great.

Walking back to my house, I felt like I had lost a friend. One of the things I would resort to during times of despair was now gone forever. And what hurt the most was that someone ELSE had it. Someone was enjoying MY music and MY playlists. It was at this point that I remembered I had brought my discman to Honduras. I don’t know why I did that, but it was one of those last-minute packing decisions that we make just before a big trip that doesn’t seem to make sense at the time. I went home, popped a CD in the old portable CD player and felt my bad day drown in a puddle of overly sensitive music. Since then, my relationship with my discman has been history.

I’ve had friends criticize, ridicule, even YELL at me for owning a discman.

“How could you possibly own a discman?”

“iPods aren’t that expensive anymore; why are you holding out?”

“How do you carry that THING everywhere?”

This is just a taste of the verbal abuse I’ve succumbed to.

Now, I haven’t lost ALL of the advantages that come with an iPod. I can still clear my head with a brisk walk and some tunes . . . I just have to make sure I hold my discman flat on my hand so it doesn’t skip. I can make different playlists for different moods. I just have to give myself enough time to burn a CD before I leave the house. Is it really that bad to own a discman?

Regardless of what I may have “lost” during this significant transition in my life, one thing remains true. I don’t have to worry about my discman getting stolen!

Courtney Centeno, account executive

GT’s big cheese, Fran Gallagher, is heading to China for business. He stated he intended to see the sights and get in some golf before his Monday business meetings. This is something I have mostly managed to avoid on business trips.

Not the sights. I do enjoy checking out the sights of a new city (or the new sights of a formerly visited city). Not the business meetings. A business trip without business meetings is pretty pointless.

No, what I have managed to avoid is golf. Okay, I admit it. I hate golf. I hate watching golf. I hate talking golf. I hate golf in its entirety.

I have golfed a few times in my life. The first time was shortly after I graduated from high school. We got a foursome together and played 18 holes. I shot a 130. The highlight was a frog swallowing one of my errant shots.

I don’t just dislike golf because I am not good at it. I am not particularly good at billiards, but I never pass on a chance to play. At least in billiards the balls are confined to a roughly eight-foot-square area (except for really wild shots launched off of the table).

Golfers tell me how relaxing it is or how addicting it is. I just don’t see it. Smashing a ball at the hitting cages is addictive (and therapeutic). For a couple bucks, you can get 40 chances to smash out your aggressions at the batting cages, and it is done in about 15 minutes. This just leaves more time for the proverbial 19th hole (aka drinks and a meal).

It wouldn’t have to be swings at the batting cages. It could be lots of other sports. If a business associate suggested a nice round of bocce before a meeting, I’d be all for it. I’d bring some cannoli (for the group, not just me) and give the pallino a few practice tosses to get the feel of the court. Now THAT would be a great pre-meeting activity.

I guess I can’t change the whole business world (although, if you’ve read some of my previous blogs, I have some suggestions). However, if you’d really like to talk business with me, I’ll be in a much better mood with a Louisville Slugger in hand than a 4-iron.

John Wroblewski, distribution specialist

Finally in the last few weeks I have had some time to get out and walk around my new town and begin to learn the lay of the land. Work and travel have kept me from getting acquainted with Rogue River, and it’s made me feel a bit out of sorts to not know more about where I’m now living. I noted that there was a small Victorian-era cottage housing the Woodville Museum (incorportating the town’s former name), and I decided that I’d have to make some time to stop in there and learn some background.

Before I took the time to do that, though, I stumbled across the cemetary, founded in 1888. Compared to communities on our east coast or Europe, I realize that doesn’t seem so terribly long ago, but that was only 16 years after the town was established. I figured I might get an initial, albeit rather unusual, history lesson here.

On one beautiful fall afternoon I strolled beneath a canopy of 70- to 80-foot-tall oak, madrone, pine and fir trees. Here the only sounds were the crunch of gravel and acorns beneath my feet and the rustle of dry leaves in the breeze high overhead. I was drawn toward the far reaches of the cemetary where the oldest gravestones stood, and noted as I went that there were no elaborate marble monuments or mausoleums. The majority of the people laid to rest here more than a hundred years ago were from fairly humble backgrounds, and the modest granite headstones generally held the most basic information about those laid beneath. Whereas some carried only a name and the years of birth and death, others revealed a little more about the loved ones lost and the ones left behind to memorialize them. Some of the saddest, of course, where those marking the graves of mere babies and children which spelled out exactly how long the child was on this earth. This one commemorated two children from one family:  Minnie M./Born Apr 26, 1896/Aged 9 yrs 8 mos 16 ds/ Stella Oct 18, 1891 Aged 1 da

I wandered for over an hour, noting the popularity of “Ida May” in the mid-1880s as a girl’s name, the apparent pride in one’s origins when the place as well as the date of a birth was included in an inscription (Aberdeenshire, Scotland; near Logan, Dearborn Co., ND; Flemingsburg, Ky), generations of families clustered together within neat, low, stone walls. Finally, there was one stone which led me to the tiny Woodville Museum to search for some answers.

I learned that this town founded on the banks of the Rogue River, which rises in the Cascade Mountains to the east, has experienced major floods many, many times over the course of the last 125 years or so. Typically the river and several tributaries spill over their banks in the late winter, following a season-long buildup of a high snowpack in the mountains and a lowland snowfall of several inches followed by heavy, warm rains and a rapid melt. Just such conditions occurred in February of 1898, when even the valley floor received an unusual knee-deep snow before the temperature quickly rose and the rains began to pour down. This is the inscription on a tall, plain stone slab at the back of the Woodville Cemetary which led me to search out these facts, its few words telling an entire, heart-wrenching story:

            Olaf P. Randall/Born/Feb 12, 1850/Drowned Feb 13, 1898

            Oleva B./dau. of/O.P. & B. Randall/Born Feb 12, 1891/Drowned Feb 13, 1898

                              How we miss our dear ones!

Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader

I really enjoy Halloween. In fact, I enjoy it more now than I did when my girls were at the trick-or-treating age. Then it seemed as though there was always the pressure of getting costumes put together (with the hope that the idea that sounded great last week will still be a hit two days before the big night), pumpkins carved, candy bought, class parties planned and pulled off . . . I was exhausted before it even got dark on the 31st! It didn’t take too many years before my husband and I were trading off which of us “got” to go on the rounds of the neighborhoods escorting our princesses, cowgirls or clowns. Our enthusiasm for such jaunts waned in direct proportion with our daughters’  increasing stamina in seeking out candy further and further abroad. It also didn’t help that, living here in the Northwest, Halloween was almost always soggy AND cold.

Once Jenny and Sarah grew out of that stage (as well as beyond the teenage “I wonder what they’re up to tonight” stage), I really got to enjoy the best part of the holiday: handing out candy to all ages of kids in all kinds of cute/imaginative/clever costumes.  Of course, the best in my opinion are the ones who are old enough to really relish the evening and love showing off their disguises–usually the four-to-eight year-old range. Younger kids often are too shy (or tired or confused) to do more than stare at you while their parents prod them to “Say ‘trick-or-treat’!” (and I often wonder if they aren’t just using the poor tykes to satisfy their own sweet tooths). Older kids seem mostly intent on getting to the most houses as quickly as possible to be able to brag about getting the biggest haul. At least most of those who are middle-school aged and younger still make a good attempt at costumes and make-up (certainly fueled by dress-up day at school). I admit to being a bit resentful of the big high school louts who show up at my door without an even cursory attempt at a costume, towering over me with often sullenly snarled “Trick or treat”s (and usually well after everyone else has gone home to count their piles of Baby Ruths and Butterfingers).

No, not even they can spoil my enjoyment in interacting with the Ninja turtles, lady bugs, Little Mermaids, monsters, pirates, dirt bikers and Darth Vaders that ring my doorbell. They glow with pleasure at my compliments and comments about their outfits, and they will often drop delightful little tidbits of information that leave me chuckling long after they’ve passed on to the neighbors’ houses. “My sister wore this last year, and she got sick in it, but my mom cleaned it and it doesn’t even smell!”  “I was an angel but my wings fell off so now I’m a bride.” “I’m Alicia and I am a monster and I have three eyes and my brother is . . .” That one is going to be a politician someday.

I hope you had a very Happy Halloween, and don’t get sick from all that leftover candy (anybody got a Three Musketeers bar you want to trade for a Mars bar?)!

Patty Vanikiotis, proofreader