To: Governor Strickland, Re: Ohio's Libraries

I just sent a letter to Governor Ted Strickland regarding his plan to cut funding to Ohio's libraries. If you feel as strongly as I do about preserving Ohio's libraries, I encourage you to write him as well at governor.strickland@das.state.oh.us. You only have a couple of days left.

Dear Governor Strickland:

The other day, I took my three young children to the library to get more books for the Summer Reading Program. I saw a variety of people there: toddlers, teens and adults. Some were perusing books or having books read to them; others were on the computer. Most seemed to be making good use of their time at the library.

All of them would suffer if cuts were made to funding for Ohio's libraries.

My love for books and writing is a direct result of my mother taking me to the public library in Campbell, Ohio, every week. I can still see the tall green stacks and the wood file cabinets holding index cards of all the books. I picture the checkout area and the table in the back where I used to study when I was in high school. I can even conjure up the smell of the books. These are warm and cherished memories that I still feel every time I enter a library.

The ability to choose any book about any topic allowed me to read fiction, study about ancient cultures and ponder the accomplishments of great people in history. Without the opportunity to do that, I can't even imagine where I would be today. I certainly wouldn't be a writer, that's for sure.

Please ensure that everyone in Ohio has the opportunity to enjoy books and take advantage of special programs at their local libraries. To deprive them of this opportunity is to deprive them of a lifetime of learning.

Sincerely,

Diane DiPiero Rodio
Cleveland Heights, Ohio

A Great De-Constructive Idea for Youngstown

I sometimes lovingly refer to Youngstown as "the land that time forgot." Driving across some areas of the city and its suburbs, it seems as though the place lies in wait for the steel mills to reemerge.

But right now Youngstown wants to move on in a very positive way. "Deconstruction" promises to remove urban blight through re-use and recycle methods.

A public meeting was held last night in Youngstown with national deconstruction expert David Bennink, who is helping the city with this project. Bennink explained how rather than totally demolishing a home, deconstruction seeks to salvage reusable materials. This of course has a popular green element to it, but deconstruction would have many other positive effects in Youngstown. On his blog, Youngstown Renaissance, Tyler S. Clark Can lists some of the benefits of deconstruction:

* Provides 20 times more jobs than demolition
* Provides skills for workers they can parlay into future jobs
* Keeps Youngstown's legacy of homes at home (instead of shipping it away to West Virginia, et. al.)
* Value-added markets can be created from waste materials

No one would argue that there are many houses around Youngstown that are abandoned and beyond repair, creating an unfortunate eyesore in what is still a welcoming, tight-knit community. For years, residents have asked why such homes haven't been torn down. Now there is an alternative to that, one that removes the blight and in a very productive and potentially lucrative way.

This makes total sense for Youngstown, and I applaud the city's forward thinking! Unfortunately, the public meeting with Mr. Bennink drew only about 50 people, according to an article on www.wytv.com. Such a great opportunity should lure more residents out of their homes to learn how Youngstown is going to turn lemons into lemonade. Hopefully, the City of Youngstown will construct a giant "lemonade stand" in the form of marketing and advertising to let everyone in and around the city understand what good things deconstruction can bring to the Mahoning Valley.

Why I Love the Browns but I Don't Hate the Steelers

We were driving down a suburban Cleveland street the other day, when we passed a house flying not one but two Steelers banners from a giant flagpole. My husband let out a disgusted snort. "That takes a lot of nerve," he said.

I laughed.

My bad. He wasn't trying to be funny.

"No, I mean it," he said. "How could someone fly those flags in Cleveland?"

The idea that someone would live in a Cleveland suburb and root for the Steelers--or worse yet, advertise it--is incomprehensible to my husband and probably a lot of other Clevelanders. I agree that pride in your community should encourage you to root for the home team. But I try to give people a break. Maybe they grew up in Pittsburgh. Or maybe a football player they've admired since his college days plays for the Steelers.

Or maybe they're from Youngstown.

You see, Youngstown is in a very interesting position, geographically speaking. The city lies almost smack-dab between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. People from Youngstown sometimes gravitate to one city, or find themselves going back and forth. My father, for example, would only pick up family members from the Pittsburgh Airport, never from Cleveland Hopkins. On the other hand, he leans toward the Browns rather than the Steelers. Go figure.

When it comes to football, living in Youngstown allows you to take sides in the AFC North without a high risk of injury. You could go to Olive Garden wearing your Steelers jacket and sit next to a guy in a Browns jersey, and there'd (probably) be no chance of you getting socked in the jaw. You could also remain neutral, just happy to see something exciting happening in the area, and not be pressured to choose.

In Cleveland, you see only enough of the Steelers to know you dislike them (like when they beat the Browns). In Youngstown, both Pittsburgh and Cleveland games are often carried on television, so you get a different perspective. It's almost like there are two hometown teams instead of one.

That may be why I don't trash-talk the Steelers, why I don't make jokes about the questionable intelligence of people from Pittsburgh and why I can't help but smile every time I see Terry Bradshaw on TV. The Browns are my favorite team, and I root for them every Sunday. But I don't hate the Steelers.

Because of this, my husband has given me the unattractive nickname of "traitor," and he asks me every Sunday if I'll be waving my "terrible towel." I guess that's what a rivalry is all about. You're not supposed to love one team and kind of like the other. It's like saying (gasp!) that you root for Michigan when they're not playing Ohio State.

I can't get it through my husband's head that my allegiance is with the Brownies. Time and again, I relay the story of my one and only trip to the old Municipal Stadium. I was a junior at Penn State, and my friends and I boarded a charter bus headed for Cleveland. I entered a sea of black and gold, and I guess I stood out in my bright orange sweatshirt. It was a vocal group on that bus.

"Browns fans can't sit in that seat," one guy hollered when I tried to plant myself next to my roommate (who, by the way, was a diehard Steelers fan as well). Everyone else on the bus found this humorous, and during the four-hour ride from State College, Pennsylvania, to Cleveland, I withstood the abuse. "Browns fans can't eat snacks!" "Browns fans can't sleep on the bus!" And then there was the most embarrassing one of all: "Browns fans can't use the bathroom!!"

They laughed as they tormented me, and I didn't feel really threatened. But I got the sense that if I did too much bragging, I could find myself standing alone on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. So I did a few "ha has" and ribbed them back a little, but I tried to stay low-key.

As luck would have it, the Browns won the game. I couldn't wait to get on the bus and give it back to those Steelers fans. But when I sat down, everyone seemed to have their heads lowered, and no one was talking. I tried to lighten the mood. "Hey, Steelers fans can't sit down the whole way home!" Hee-hee-hee... Oops, no one was laughing; in fact, I distinctly remember a couple of glaring stares thrown my way. So I was forced to ride home in silence, rejoicing in victory silently in my head.

My husband probably would like this story better if it ended with me taking all of the "terrible towels" from the bus and ripping them to shreds in front of the amazed eyes of the Steelers fans. Although I felt a sense of Browns patriotism, I still couldn't bring myself to hate the other team.

Now we find the Steelers in the Super Bowl. For the second time since the "new Browns" have been around. The Browns haven't won a championship since I was four months old. I understand the frustration. And the resentment. So I won't be wearing black and gold on Sunday. But as a Youngstowner at heart, I realize that Pittsburgh is as much a part of our region as Cleveland, and anything that brings good news to the region is a plus. As a Clevelander, though, I'll wear my brown and orange and daydream about the Browns in Super Bowl XLIV. Woof, Woof!

All The News That Fits Together

A guy writes about a city he loves for 45 years, and what does he get? A farewell column that has at least two sets of words mashed together in every single paragraph, making it almost impossible to read.

When Dick Feagler reminisces about the good old days of newspaper journalism in his front-page column of last Sunday's Plain Dealer, he might also be talking about the good old days when someone was actually proofreading the publication.

Just imagine, your swan song after nearly a half-century of covering news, politics and life in general in Northeast Ohio, and you get this: "We alwayscarried enough dimes in our pockets to call the city desk." I read it as "We always scared enough dimes..." the first three times I looked at the sentence.

It doesn't matter if there are only six people left on the staff of a major newspaper: One of those people has got to read the damn stories before the paper goes out the door. Sure, there are printing errors that happen at nearly the last minute of publication, but there is always someone on staff with the responsibility of catching those mistakes prior to thousands of people seeing them. Well, almost always.

It breaks my heart when I see errors in any publication, whether in print or online. I've made a few of my own mistakes in published articles. No matter how hard we try, mistakes can happen. Maybe the problem was caught after the early editions left the printer, and corrections were made later in the day. Nevertheless, this latest boo-boo from the PD makes it feel like there aren't any humans left to blame for mistakes such as this.

Or maybe Dick Feagler made the errors himself, purposely, to see if anyone still reads newspapers. I see that the pushed-in words were separated in the online version of Feagler's column. Maybe it's an old columnist's way of saying, "Hell, everyone's online anyway, let's just throw in a bunch of really bad mistakes and see if one fool out there is reading this and will catch them." I checked the comments under his column online; there were several fools who caught the mistakes in the print version.

Newspapers certainly have changed since Dick Feagler began writing 45 years ago. But then they've changed drastically in the last 5-10 years, too. For those of us who still love to read them, it's a difficult time indeed.

Working Mom, Crazy Mom? Part Two: When It's Time to Change, You've Got to Rearrange

Every new mom is a sleep-deprived mom. If you find one who tells you she doesn't feel groggy most of the day, she's either lying to you or she has round-the-clock nanny service.

Part of the problem is that infants don't really have a set routine, no matter how much you try to create one for them. Their sleep patterns can change from week to week or even day to day; they become more active with each passing hour; and you never know what's going to set them off and have them crying and in need of their mothers' arms.

In short, your life is not your own when you're a mom.

When my first child turned six months old, I decided to devote my days to her. Outside of her nap time and the hour she spent in the babysitting room at the YMCA while I worked out, she was my constant companion, and her needs dictated almost every move I made. I still intended to write, but there wasn't time in the day for that, so it was time to make a few adjustments.

The beauty of working from home is that you can do it anytime you like and in whatever clothes you choose. As long as you make your deadlines, you could be working at 3 in the morning in a bunny suit and your employers wouldn't care.

So my workday became my work night. At 10:30 p.m., once the baby and my husband were safely in bed, I would slip into my pajamas and start my writing assignments. Those were my younger days, when there was no internal clock telling me it was way past my bedtime. I would simply work until the work got done.

Some evenings I wrote from 10:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. At other times, when I was faced with more than one deadline at a time, my work night was much, much longer. I distinctly remember several occasions when I dragged my exhausted body to bed, only to hear my husband's alarm sound off five minutes later. Luckily, the baby was past getting up in the middle of the night, and because we put her to bed late, she usually didn't stir until at least 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning.

The work got done, my child's needs were being met, and all seemed right with the world. Except for one thing: If I didn't get more than five hours of sleep in a night, I was...well, I guess you could say mean. Or moody. Or forgetful. Or crazed. Or all of the above. In short, as I look back, I was a mess several days out of the week.

At the time, I certainly didn't see myself as a sleep-deprived lunatic. I was just doing what I thought was natural: taking care of a house and a child during the day and working all night. That sounds completely natural and doable, doesn't it?

My husband appreciated the extra money I was bringing in, but not the extra doses of mania and hormonal imbalances. "No one asked you to stay up all night writing," he said to me on more than one occasion after I had ranted and raved about how tired I was. Well, no, but I had to stay up to get the work done, didn't I?

Who knows. Before we saw just how crazy I could become from my nutty schedule, the situation changed. Another baby plopped into our lives. And then another. And soon I found myself with three children under the age of four, a big house to care for, a husband to keep relatively happy and a workload that would have been doable if I didn't also have the full-time career of motherhood.

Instead of throwing in the writing towel and choosing to focus on the ultimately more important, albeit less financially rewarding, job of being a housewife, I changed my schedule again. And again. And again. Each time a new child arrived or one child developed a new sleeping habit, I adjusted my work schedule to accommodate.

The process worked, for the most part. I made sacrifices in a lot of areas, missing a deadline to care for a sick child, or worse, missing the opportunity to play "Simon Says" with my children so I could complete a project. No matter how I rearranged, I couldn't stay caught up with everything. One thing always managed to catch up with me, though: GUILT. Oh, the guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt.

But we'll save that story for next time.

Working Mom, Crazy Mom? Part One: In the Beginning...

Note: This is an ongoing series of blog posts aimed at answering a question that has been plaguing me, and no doubt other women, for several years: Is it a good thing or a bad thing for a mom to work from home? In this series, I'll explore my own experiences--good, bad and just plain frightening--and hopefully gain insight from other working moms.

"I'm going to keep writing from home after I have the baby," I told a friend of mine nine years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child.

If I remember correctly, she dropped the receiver and made loud snorting noises.

When she finally returned to the phone, slightly more composed, she had only one line for me: "Good luck, honey."

"Why?" I asked, filled with indignation and pregnancy hormones. "I can write from home; I'm doing it now."

"You'll see. It's hard," she said. Humph, what does she know, anyway?

For the first six months of my daughter's life, I praised myself for being the mom who could care for an infant, cook, clean and earn a paycheck at the same time. "I am woman, hear me roar," I found myself happily singing.

Then Mia learned to reach for things, like the computer keyboard, and to grab my attention by yelling at the top of her lungs. Hard to conduct a phone interview with that in the background. And that was the beginning of the end. Mia learned how to push my buttons faster than a fish learns how to swim. She knew how to distract me from my work, and how to get me to throw my hands up in the air, take her on my lap and start to hum the annoying songs of "Barney."

Of course, I had to admit to my friend that she was kind of right. She knew what lots of mommies know: Working from home while caring for young children is both a blessing and a curse.

A blessing because...

1.) You are there to see all the "firsts": sitting up, crawling, walking and talking. You don't have to hear about them from the babysitter or the daycare provider.

2.) You can spend time teaching your child in a relaxed atmosphere. I can remember sitting on the floor and connecting two blocks over and over again. "Together, apart. Together, apart," I'd repeat to help Mia connect what I was doing with the words I was saying. Not that I couldn't have done things like that if I had worked outside the home, but I probably would have been so tired at the end of the day that I would have fallen asleep with the blocks in my hands.

3.) When they get older, you are there as the children get on the bus in the morning and get off in the afternoon. (Except for those afternoons when you are trying to finish up a deadline project and praying that the bus is a little late, but it arrives six minutes early and your children show up at the back door with their hands on their hips asking over and over, "Where were you?" So you make it up to them by plying them with chocolate chip cookies.)

A curse because...

1.) You feel guilty that you are constantly putting the child aside to do work or putting the work aside to take care of the child.

2.) You give up nice work clothes for drool-stained sweatpants, and you can't remember if you brushed your teeth or washed your hair this morning.

3.) No matter how hard you try, you feel that you will never accomplish a single task--from folding the laundry to fulfilling an order for a client--for the rest of your life.

A working mom is nothing if not flexible, and so you find yourself rearranging your days--and your nights--to make things work. And that will bring us to the next post in this series: "Time for a Few Adjustments."

Illegal or Immoral: What's More Important to Teach our Children?

Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz wrote in Sundays' newspaper about the frighteningly popular trend of teens taking and distributing naked pictures of themselves. Eight people between the ages of 14 and 16, all students at a suburban Cleveland high school, were distributing naked photos that were originally taken by a young girl who wanted to show her ex-boyfriend "what he was missing."

None of the kids knew that circulating such photos was illegal. Even more surprisingly,none of them seemed to know it was just plain wrong.

Schultz's column encourages parents to talk about the dangers of circulating naked photos because, if caught, they could be labeled sexual predators, a title that will follow them for years into their adulthood.

No parent wants his or her child going to juvenile court and possibly having a horrible moniker attached to his or her name. So how best to keep this from happening: Do you first explain that acts such as distributing nude photos is illegal, or do you start by explaining that such acts are immoral? Do you stress that it would be unfortunate to be labeled a criminal, or is it more important to stress the disrespect they are showing their own body or someone else's?

Here's the difference between my working class, ethnic upbringing and what seems to be going on today: If I had done something as stupid as distribute naked photos of myself to others when I was a teenager and my parents had found out, they would have slapped me upside the head and told me I had disgraced our family name and greatly embarrassed them. Believe me, I grew up believing that embarrassing my parents was far worse punishment than having to appear in juvenile court.

And if I had gotten tossed in JD or been held by the police, my parents would have left me there for a good long time in order to get their point across: What you did was really wrong and we are really, really, really upset. I imagine that it would have been safer for me to have spent a few days in a prison cell than go home and face my parents if I had committed a crime, especially one that involved exposing my naked body to others.

If my father's sisters did something deemed imprudent by the family, my Italian-born grandmother would say to them, "Non you shame-a youself." It was a simple sentence that, translated from broken English, means don't do something that you'll regret or that will cause others to look down on you.

Is there any action out there today that is deemed immoral or embarrassing? Increasingly, our moral code has been shot to hell. If it feels good, do it. Oh, but it could be illegal, so watch out.

Certainly there will be people who will say that if you tell a girl or boy that it's immoral to be nude then you're also telling them they should be ashamed of their bodies. Please note the difference: The human body in and of itself is a beautiful thing, but when someone (especially a young person) exposes the naked body to taunt someone else or to get a few kicks, that is degrading and demeaning.

Yes, we have to teach our children about right and wrong through the eyes of the court, but what about through our own eyes? What do you think about this?