Hi,

Pretty impressive, making an entry just two days after my last.  🙂  Pretty intense storms here last night.  I was on my way back from Betty’s when they hit.  Route 51 was down to one lane in both directions as we fished from passing to slow lanes to find the lowest water levels.  I didn’t have any damage here (other than the TVs in the Carriage House).  Denny from Global Satellite stopped by (this is the second time I called for service and he was working right down the street) and some how the storm fried the switch that splits the signal from the dish to the individual  TVs.

Remember my story a few blogs back about Mod Cloth?  I had some couples sitting at the breakfast table and we were all chatting.  I started telling my story about Mod Cloth naming a dress & skirt after The Parador and I noticed the couple from Canada start chatting among themselves.  Here she’s a fan of Mod Cloth.  How funny is that.  Also, Mod Cloth was in the newspaper last week, they just got a financing package for almost $20 million.  I had no idea they up in that level of play.  Remember, you heard about them here first.  🙂

Speaking of past posts, in my May 2 blog I talked about the gentleman that set up The Urban Tree Forge out in the East End of the City.  He would take City trees that had to be cut down and bring them to his shop and create works of art out of them.  If he didn’t sculpt a statue kind of a thing, he may cut them into flooring, or boards to create furniture out of.  Very cool concept.  I read in the paper last week that he was outside his shop, wearing safety goggles, ear protection and running his chain saw when some people were returning a rented truck that was attached to another truck when it broke loose and struck him from behind.  My condolences to his family.  The main reason I am posting this is I hope people use my blog as a reference for things to do and I don’t want someone try and look him up and find out the hard way of this bizarre accident.

I found this really cool little shop at the entrance to South Park.  Any of you south hills locals, where Route 88 curves around in front of the park and starts up the hill towards Library, there’s Simply Divine.  Years ago it was an ice cream shop, then a pizza place and lastly a gyro shop.  Apparently they tore the gyro shop down to the cement pad and built this new building, when I drove past, I couldn’t imagine how they remodeled that old building to look as it does now.  Any way, they carry all hand made items either American made or fair trade from the third world.  Prices are pretty good also.

Meghan and Mark are getting married here next weekend.  She’s using pineapples as her center pieces and wants me to use them for breakfast.  So my good friend Lisa from Fabled Table is giving me a recipe for a dish similar to the mushroom strattata I make (but with pineapples instead of mushrooms) and we’ll also have pineapple parfaits.

Charles and Kelley visited from NYC a couple of days ago.  Kelley left me some vintage glass bottles.  What’s funny about this is one of the thousands of projects I have on “the back burner” is an idea I saw about natural air fresheners.  I hate those Glade plug in type of scents that smell so artificial.  I saw an idea where you take vintage bottles, fill them with water or oil, depending on the nature of the scent you are using and then place a reed diffuser stick in them to wick the aroma up.  I have the link to the source for the reed diffuser sticks and the recipes on how to set these up.  Now that I have bottles, I guess I better get the lead out.  🙂  If anyone’s interested in the details, just send me an E-mail and I’ll get back to you.

The City Paper, a local weekly newspaper that specializes in entertainment also came out with their summer edition.  The next time I blog, I’ll start covering info from them about summer concerts, etc.

Thanx and bye,

ed