Stuff Portrait Day

This is Friday, Stuff Portrait Day over at Random and Odd.  I haven’t played for a couple weeks because I was busy with other ideas, but today I wanted to show off my favorite framed picture.

This is an old barn on a country road in either eastern Ohio or the upper arm of West Virginia.  I remember the barn, but not its place, when I was a child.  There was a man with a foreign accent, German, I think, and he and his wife, who also spoke with a strong accent, sold eggs and garden vegetables at a little roadside stand.  The white building in the background is the chicken house, and the smell was terrible. 
Everything in this picture is gone now, torn down when the road was made wider.

This picture was painted by the home town school district’s Art Teacher, Roy Reithmiller, and is a limited edition print I bought from him when I went back to the Ohio Valley for my 20th high school reunion.  He is retired from teaching, but still does some painting and selling from a room in his basement.  Actually, I own 6 of his pictures, but this is my favorite because of the autumn colors and the barn.

Next is the household peeve.
The bar across the doorway was originally installed when the boys were younger and their dad wanted them to have a way to get strong. 
Let me tell you, that bar is Anchored within the frame and studs. 
For a long time, when the kids were younger, they had to get a chair or climb the frame to grab onto the bar and do their chin-ups.  Because of the ready availability and constant practice, Oldest Son was the chin-ups champion of 7th grade.
I always have to stand on tiptoe to reach it, and still use it to stretch my shoulders after an hour of Algebra problems.

Like so many pieces of exercise equipment, the novelty has worn off, and it has become a clothes rack.

My peeve is not so much this is where I leave the clothes when they have gone through the laundry, but that they stay there so long.  No one else in the house moves their shirts to their closets! 
This is a doorway, People, some folks like to move on through, or flex sore arms, without brushing against clean clothes!

Last one on the list is magazine subscriptions.  We have 14 in all, I think, but this is a photo of the ones I, myself, read.

 
I know, I know, a town newspaper that comes out weekly isn’t exactly a magazine, but I do have to subscribe and make a payment. 
One of these is the CHINABERRY books catalog, but it has so much good stuff to read that I love it like a magazine.  And I usually end up ordering a book or two.  You should too, they need the business.

Also in the picture is a church newsletter. I get newsletters from 3 churches; my own, and two others where buddies from Husband’s college alma mater are the pastors.  I make a yearly donation to their postage budgets because I want to keep receiving, and because I love reading what the guys write in their minister columns. 
Sometimes I have a hard time remembering that the partner who was across the lab table and doing a dissection on a fetal pig is now preaching from a pulpit.  Or that a minister’s wife needed me to help her with childcare and folding laundry because she was so overwhelmed with her own job as a school counselor and with church duties as the pastor’s wife and was approaching a nervous breakdown .

It wasn’t until I saw a parsonage from the inside that I came to realize that all people are only human.  No matter what someone does to bring in wages, or what we might believe happens after our last breath,  we all need someone to be a friend in all situations while we walk this earth.
 
How did I get going in that direction?  Oh yeah, church newsletters and lifelong friendships. 
Golly, my ADD is going full tilt this morning. 
I’d better find something else to focus on.  Algebra problems will make sure I stay on task awhile.  Prof B went easy on us, there are only 10 problems on the assigned page today.

~~love and Huggs, Diane