November 2021 – The Parnassus Pen

I have a sister named Katie. We were born two years and five days apart. So, we started off life by always having to share our birthday week.

Then, we just kept on doing a lot of the same stuff. We camped with the same Girl Scout troops. We both won the social studies award in elementary school. We both played the clarinet. (Katie later switched to trumpet.) We both marched in the high school marching band for four years. We both learned about politics at Keystone Girls State. We worked at the same shitty fast food restaurant (the managers were shitty and the customers were also shitty) next to the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Somerset when we were each 17 going on 18. I worked at a library for four years. Katie went and became an actual librarian.

We both blog.

A few weeks ago, Katie quit Facebook and Instagram. She promoted the link to subscribe to her blog. Then, her Facebook and Instagram profiles went away. Katie then reached out to me by phone to ask me how she could subscribe to my own blog.

Here is the blog post that Katie wrote about quitting Facebook and also about finishing her second half marathon. (I have never voluntarily run anywhere in my entire life, let alone run in any kind of race for fun. Here’s one way in which Katie and I are different.)

Katie makes a lot of good points about why she left Facebook. I respect Katie’s decision to leave. I haven’t been able to completely break with Facebook myself. However, I look up to Katie as a role model even though I’m the older sister.

So, in Katie’s spirit, I’m going to stop posting on Facebook. I won’t even post links to my blog. If you want to know when I post new content, you can subscribe to my blog using the box on the top right. Jonathan helped me to set up the “subscribe” option tonight. We just tested it.

After you subscribe to the Parnassus Pen, you will receive emails whenever I post here. These emails will include a lovely avatar photo of me looking out over a canal in Amsterdam, pre-Covid and pre-lockdowns.

Thank you for reading my blog and thank you for your comments and support.

*Mural by Ashley Hodder. Fifth Avenue, Downtown New Kensington. November 27, 2021. (Photo: Jenny Gaffron Woytek)*

Here is a photo of the mural “Shine” by Ashley Hodder.

I wanted to shoot this mural against a blue sky with no cars in the foreground. Maybe I’ll still get to this. However, every time that I drive down this street with my camera, the sky refuses to cooperate. Cars line both sides of the street. I’m lucky that I found a decent place to park today. I won’t complain about a thriving downtown.

I shot this mural once before. As the artist painted it. Here is the work-in-progress on the evening of September 24, 2021, during the September edition of New Kensington’s “Final Fridays.”

*Mural by Ashley Hodder. Fifth Avenue, Downtown New Kensington. September 24, 2021. (Photo: Jenny Gaffron Woytek)*

The building to which this wall belongs housed the former Bloser’s Jewelers. Crews filmed a scene from the 2019 movie adaptation of Maria Semple’s fiction novel “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” inside this building.

The story actually took place in Seattle. The movie producers used Pittsburgh and the towns around Pittsburgh (such as New Kensington) as a stand-in for Seattle. Pittsburgh’s a less expensive city. (New Kensington is even less expensive.)

I read the book. The book underwhelmed me. I guess that that whole story was kinda tongue-in-cheek. Most of the humor went over my head.

I didn’t see the movie yet. I kinda want to watch it just to see the scene that was filmed inside of this building. But – the release date kept getting pushed back. Then, I found too many other ways to waste my time than to watch a movie adaptation of a book that I didn’t enjoy.

My Call to Action: Did you watch the movie “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” What did you think of it?

Month: November 2021

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Mural: Shine by Ashley Hodder