My days of hopping a bus or driving the Baltimore Beltway are long gone and for that I am grateful.

When I was younger my days consisted of working a forty hour work week and then some.  Friday nights were spent at a local eating and drinking establishment to blow off some steam.

Then I had my son who became my full time job by choice.  When he was in Junior High, I decided instead of going back in to the work a day world, I would roll the dice and start a small business.

Well, Anthony is grown and gone and I am now left to embrace the possibilities that are there for the taking.  So, for the first time in nine years, it is time to bust a move with this 111 State Street property and open my H Two Oh Tea Lounge.

When we reopen in February, you will be greeted with the usual casual and relaxing ambiance that The Stillroom has become known for.  Only this year, when you come through the door, you will be walking in to the brand new H Two Oh Tea Lounge!

When we are through with shuffling the deck, the gift shop will be expanded into the rest of the first floor of the building.

The progress has been slow and steady.  We have been under construction for the last two weeks with about another week to go. Organized chaos.

I will soon be filling the shelves with fresh biscotti, coffee beans, new tea flavors cool new giftware including vintage this and retro that.

The Stillroom will not be running any ads until March to be sure we don’t jump the gun on any unforeseen issues that might come up during a reno.

I am shooting for February 10th, hopefully sooner.  I’ll keep posting updates.  It’s going to be cool.

You(we) first of all saved money on car insurance and gas. This having no car thing was ok for us as a young college couple. We went from having vehicles when we lived here at home in Pa., straight to busing. We didn’t have money for a car anyway and public transportation turned out to be one of the most memorable times of our lives. If you lived in the city, (which we did) you rode the bus in the down town area free of charge. This was perfect right off the bat.

We saw and met all types of people on the bus and some are still friends to this day. This was in 1978 . We met folks from writers to white collar workers to the local park block bums. We met musicians, students, neighbors and nuts.

Our first strange experience was when the fellow with tourettes syndrome started blurting out really awful words. Now understand, we had no idea what this was at the time and this young man would shout words of profanity like I had never heard before. Naturally, he was sitting right across from us. We called him “the human time bomb.”

Then there was another fellow who every time the bus would roll up to a stop, he would stand up, grab the cross bar in the back of the bus (the thing you hold on to), lift his feet up off of the floor and swing like a monkey. He would not force himself to swing, he would just sway with the momentum of the bus until it stopped and then he would stop a few seconds later. He did not do this once or twice, I mean like every single stop. He was as serious as a heart attack. Did you ever start laughing hysterically in church? You know it’s wrong and suppressing it is so hard. I didn’t know if I should be scared or amused. I’m sure I was a bit of both.

Once, when I was new to bus riding, I missed my stop and I suddenly realized I had to sit there in that giant bus with the bus driver while he took his one hour break. He read the paper, had his lunch, and took a walk. I had no idea where I was so I just sat there. I didn’t want to get off of the bus because I knew I was on the right one, I just missed my stop. I got to where I needed to be two hours late. This also happened to Mike. He was a working student and at the end of his shift, (at this point we lived in a small house outside of the city) he fell asleep on the bus and woke up at the end of the line and had to walk home twenty blocks in the rain.

One evening we ventured (by bus) to the outskirts of Portland to a movie theater to see a late night Grateful Dead movie. Again, not knowing any better and we should have realized by then that Jerry Garcia was well known for three hour guitar solos, we left at the end of the movie. We went to our bus stop and suddenly realized that the last bus came through right before we got to the stop. We got home at four in the morning and had to get up and work at six. It was literally a three hour walk home and of course our jobs required us to be on our feet eight hours.

While riding the bus you could catch up on reading (which now is more awesome with the technology we have), do homework, chat up a friend or just watch the world go by.

So the point I am making to our son is that losing the freedom of having a car is really gaining a different type of freedom. You will have stories to tell. You will stay slender.

We close for inventory, tear the shop apart completely, paint, clean and restock the shelves just in time for Valentines Day.

Since we are having such a mild winter and I don’t have the driveway to contend with if the flag is out, I’m open.  I call it quietly open.  Some days I will be here, some not.  So, please call before cruising out and remember, if there is a coffee or tea emergency, (and there have been)  holler up and we’ll open the shop for you!  Call the shop number at 724-352-0212 or my cell at 412-721-6357.

I am scouting new things for the shop as usual and spending some down time living life!

Have a very Happy New Year and thanks upon thanks to those of you who shop year after year and to those folks who happily discovered my part of the world!

We are doing some pretty cool things including expanding the shop size (woohoo)!  You thought you liked The Stillroom before?  Wait until you see what’s happening.  That’s all I will say.

Both sets of  parents provide the venues and their traditional foods from when they were kids. In the moment, I am in the kitchen contributing the cabbage and noodles with bacon grease and bacon crumbles for the pot luck at my mom’s house.    The findings on my mother’s table still include all of the things that are bad for you to eat.  My mother still makes three kinds of home made pierogies, my dad smokes keilbasa a month before Christmas Eve, there is smoked ham and macaroni salad,  there are dips of sour cream and cream cheese, there are  sweet breads to counter the hot horseradish that is also home made and lots and lots of cookies and sweet chex mix and the list goes on.  It’s a carb lover’s dream buffet.

At our house of now two, it is a matter of dietary adjustment.  WWJD?  He would eat through the giant bowl of citrus cuties on the little table in the walk through room from the living room to the kitchen or He would grab a handful of toasted almonds and that is pretty much breakfast.  Our son, Anthony, will come home for a night or two.  I asked him if he would like anything special for Christmas morning breakfast, waffles, pancakes, again with the bacon and he says “just toast and tea”.  Say no more.  Old habits die hard.

When I have to fry anything, which is rare, the windows have to be open, the kitchen door cracked and the ceiling fan on super high.  I just don’t like that smell.  However, when the pizza shop next door fires up the oven for the morning, the air smells like garlic and that, my friends, is not altogether unpleasant.

I don’t bake for Christmas.  If I bake, we eat it so what’s the point?  We received a  one pound box of chocolates and we mowed right through that.  As we sat there staring at each other and the empty box, we realized why we keep the food part of our celebration to a simple fare.  I did get a Marie Callender Dutch Apple Pie from the store and baked that yesterday.  I figure of all of the sugar based items we could consume, a loverly slice of apple pie would be just fine.  Hey, it’s fruit, right?

In the past for our holiday meal I have made braciole.  I discovered it one year at a holiday gathering Mike and I went to many years ago.  So, for the longest time our holiday meal was more Italian than Polish or Hungarian.  This year, I did not have time to make it so I made turkey stuffed cabbage.  Being raised in a family where women cooked traditional holiday fare, this is one of  the holiday staples that would show up on the table for decades and I can make them with my eyes closed.  I take points from how Mikes’ mom makes them and how my mom and grandmother made them and put my own spin on the filling and voila, a more healthy pig in the blanket.  Ground turkey and brown rice.  The flavor comes from the cabbage so it totally works.  There will be mashed potatoes with that and that will be the splurge.

The gifty thing.  We still buy gifts for Anthony.  When you have one kid, still working hard at work and in college, it’s pretty easy to figure out their needs, and they are basic.  Online shopping was awesome.  I spent very little time in any one store this holiday season and it was great.  We participate in a family gift exchange and coming up with that is probably the biggest challenge the whole holiday season.  Again, not a ton of stress.

I like to think that when anyone bakes, it is for the sheer enjoyment of it.  Anyone who shops Black Friday or Christmas Eve, I hope they do it for the enjoyment of it.  Stress really should not have any place in this, the most special of all holidays throughout the year.  I think the stress that does exist may come in the realization that it is the end of another year and we are another year older.  But, each day is the gift and it is up to us to make it joyful or not.  So, on that note, I hope we all have a peaceful couple of days, inner peace, outer peace, piece of pie, piece of ham, piece of cake.

I have to go air out the kitchen.  Peace out.

Christmas Past

Christmas Past, I mean like fifty years ago when I still believed in Santa was the best.  As a child, my parents never failed to fill a Christmas stocking with mints, nuts and tangerines or get us the latest or most certainly what was at the very top our our list for Santa.  We had Patty Playpal, Chatty Cathy, Mr. Kelly’s Car Wash, Give a Show Projectors with Huckleberry Hound Dog slides, microscopes and chemistry sets.  It was pretty much like A Christmas Story, at least that is how my minds eye still sees it.

Horne’s Christmas display was always decked to the nines and Santa Land was big and glittery and big and like a dream and big.  I am sure that I was just so little…you know how you always think of something as being a certain way when in reality it usually is not.

I remember the year we replaced our live pine tree with an aluminum one and the year the adults used pull tabs on their Black Label Beer cans for the first time. Every Christmas after mass,  ham would go on the table and the traditional foods would arrive with such great fanfare along  with aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandma, cousins and neighbors.  Our house was centrally located so we were the landing pad.  I can’t believe my parents had that much energy to pull off a perfect Christmas every year.  The aluminum tree ran the course over one or two seasons and we went back to real pine. Every year we would go cut a  tree and mom would say that it was the ‘ ugliest tree she had ever seen. Were our eyes in the back of our heads?’  We would make her go to the neighbor’s house and when she came back the tree would be decorated and she would say that it was the ‘most beautiful tree we ever had’.  She would be so happy.  We knew what we were doing she of little faith.

Christmas Present

Here I am.  Here you are.  That’s good.  My mom and dad are still hosting Christmas Eve as they have done every year since I was born.  I will be on the hunt for the dry cottage cheese for mom’s home made pierogies and my dad will soon be firing up the smoker for home made keilbassa.  Everyone brings a dish on Christmas Eve and the fervor of this time of year is as present as the presents themselves!. Our family loves to eat and laugh and tell stories and do a gift exchange that is so much fun that by the end of the evening we are all drunk on how great it is to still be gathering this one evening out of the year. Some drunk on the idea of the gathering, others just drunk. l My parents  are 83 years young and still have the energy to pull off an excellent gathering.  Mom would say they are tired and move slower and it takes longer to do all of the preparation but it still gets done every year to perfection.

Christmas to come

Who knows what the new year will bring?  I have plans like most of you.  Weather or not they come to fruition remains to be seen.  I just know that it is a good thing to think about the future and the promise of tomorrows.  May we all have many more tomorrows.

There was a segment on the Today Show this morning in which they asked what was the least favorite thing about Christmas for these particular guests and they said not being able to wish people a Merry Christmas because it is not politically correct.  So, whatever you celebrate, just know that when I wish you a Merry Christmas, (and I will) I am wishing for all good things to come your way.  Not just on December the 25th, but that you have a good day, a good week, a good life.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Past

Christmas Past, I mean like fifty years ago when I still believed in Santa was the best.  As a child, my parents never failed to fill a Christmas stocking with mints, nuts and tangerines or get us the latest or most certainly what was at the very top our our list for Santa.  We had Patty Playpal, Chatty Cathy, Mr. Kelly’s Car Wash, Give a Show Projectors with Huckleberry Hound Dog slides, microscopes and chemistry sets.  It was pretty much like A Christmas Story, at least that is how my minds eye still sees it. 

Horne’s Christmas display was always decked to the nines and Santa Land was big and glittery and big and like a dream and big.  I am sure that I was just so little…you know how you always think of something as being a certain way when in reality it usually is not.

I remember the year we replaced our live pine tree with an aluminum one and the year the adults used pull tabs on their Black Label Beer cans for the first time. Every Christmas after mass,  ham would go on the table and the traditional foods would arrive with such great fanfare along  with aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandma, cousins and neighbors.  Our house was centrally located so we were the landing pad.  I can’t believe my parents had that much energy to pull off a perfect Christmas every year.  The aluminum tree ran the course over one or two seasons and we went back to real pine. Every year we would go cut a  tree and mom would say that it was the ‘ ugliest tree she had ever seen. Were our eyes in the back of our heads?’  We would make her go to the neighbor’s house and when she came back the tree would be decorated and she would say that it was the ‘most beautiful tree we ever had’.  She would be so happy.  We knew what we were doing she of little faith.

Christmas Present

Here I am.  Here you are.  That’s good.  My mom and dad are still hosting Christmas Eve as they have done every year since I was born.  I will be on the hunt for the dry cottage cheese for mom’s home made pierogies and my dad will soon be firing up the smoker for home made keilbassa.  Everyone brings a dish on Christmas Eve and the fervor of this time of year is as present as the presents themselves!. Our family loves to eat and laugh and tell stories and do a gift exchange that is so much fun that by the end of the evening we are all drunk on how great it is to still be gathering this one evening out of the year. Some drunk on the idea of the gathering, others just drunk. l My parents  are 83 years young and still have the energy to pull off an excellent gathering.  Mom would say they are tired and move slower and it takes longer to do all of the preparation but it still gets done every year to perfection.

Christmas to come

Who knows what the new year will bring?  I have plans like most of you.  Weather or not they come to fruition remains to be seen.  I just know that it is a good thing to think about the future and the promise of tomorrows.  May we all have many more tomorrows.

There was a segment on the Today Show this morning in which they asked what was the least favorite thing about Christmas for these particular guests and they said not being able to wish people a Merry Christmas because it is not politically correct.  So, whatever you celebrate, just know that when I wish you a Merry Christmas, (and I will) I am wishing for all good things to come your way.  Not just on December the 25th, but that you have a good day, a good week, a good life.

Merry Christmas!

On that note (shameless plug)  The Stillroom Gift & Tea Shop was a wonderful discovery for so many new people that came in during the festivities of the last few days.  I am grateful to everyone who came in and enjoyed the evening with A Taste of Heaven Bakery shortbread teapot cookies made just for us by Melinda and the samples of our dip mixes and of course, our holiday tea tasting.

As one woman put it on Sunday when she answered her phone in the shop, ” I am in this cool little shop that I just discovered and they have all kinds of tea and other different little things.”

My Light Up Night hours on Friday, November 25th are 10-4.  I will  reopen again from  6 to 8:30 if you want to shop before the parade which starts at seven.

Come in and register for an opportunity to win one of two $25.00 gift certificates to be drawn on December 1st!

Don’t forget to shop small on Saturday folks.  I will be here regular hours of  10-4.  Have a happy long weekend!

Our hours for the season are now Tuesday through Saturday from 10-3.  Those are my published hours.

I often stay open beyond 3 so if the open flag is out and the lights are on, you must come in and enjoy my cool little shop!  I have plenty of delicious holiday teas, biscotti, vintage this, retro that and some cool new things too!

Everyone is eligible to enter so try and stop by!  What do you have to lose?  The worst thing that can happen is that you will have discovered a little corner of the world that you did not know was here before.  Not to mention a fine cup of tea!