TBW Daily Diary

Happy to have our regular postman, Mark Tamanini, back with us after a month off for hospital surgery . . . According to the signs, a new coffee shop is slated for the building now under renovation at Green and Muench Street . . . Had a phone call from my sister last night who said there hadn't been a whole lot on my health condition in the blog recently and she was concerned. I brought her up to date. She has problems of her own. Her resources planned for retirement had to be used to nurse a sick husband who has since passed away and her only son now is suffering from cancer. She survives by working at Wal-Mart where she has been for 13 years. She has worked all departments and is currently assigned to the garden section, a tent erected on the asphalt near the store entrance. Of course this means no a/c and, at age 69, she must heft those big bags of peat and fertilizer off the trailers when they deliver. Having health issues of her own, she asked the manager to please assign her to another department in the store but was told that there would not be an opening in the foreseeable future and if she didn't like it she could quit. Unfortunately sis needs whatever income she can manage, so that is not an option. I have often heard that Wal-Mart cares diddly for its employees and this might be an example . . . I may have reported this before: as you will recall, Mayor Thompson's first official act (even before spending $35,000 on her office) was an edict declaring that every instance of the Steve Reed name be painted out or pasted over; he was to be a non-person in the history of Harrisburg. Well, I certainly don't want to upset the mayor, but thanks to my morning walks I know of at least two signs which still bear Reed's name as our mayor . . .