First ad

The guy from Preservation magazine never responded, so my first advert is actually with the Lititz Retailers Association, www.shoplititz.com. They distribute 40,000 directories each year, and a half-page ad is only $210 (plus $110 annual dues), which seems pretty reasonable to me.
Their deadline was actually last week, but they're waiting for me. I'm both excited and paranoid--I'm a software guy, accustomed to being able to change anything at a moment's notice. Having to commit to a print ad for a full year is difficult. By the time the directory actually comes out next March, who knows what I'll regret...

Notice I photoshopped Dawn out of the picture

Weather

Did you know, the coldest recorded temperature here is -16 degrees? Or that, on average, 139 days per year are below freezing? Yeah, neither did I...

On the bright side, it rarely gets below 20 degrees, and there is historically a one-in-four chance of a white Christmas (although I've never seen one.)

I know there are more hostile places on earth, but I'm not moving there. I am leaving Los Angeles, which will be 70 and clear tomorrow, and moving to Pennsylvania, which will be 32 with four inches of snow. 32! That's the temperature in my freezer, and you don't see me moving in there!

Dawn sent about 80 pictures, but I focused on this one.

110 years ago

This appeared in the "Out of the Past" section of last week's newspaper:

Looking for iron at Speedwell, LancasterOnline.com

Friday Morning's Record
November 29, 1895
Speedwell Forge - Last week two men from Allentown got off the cars here and proceeded to the Speedwell Farms in Elizabeth Township on the site of the old iron forge which was abandoned some forty years ago, where they examined a cinder bank and took some of the cinder with them for the purpose of having it assayed. If there is enough iron in it to pay to have it re-melted it will be resurrected, brought to Lititz on wagons and taken to Allentown to take all the iron out.

A "cinder bank" is apparently what you create from all the waste from a plant. I really liked the reference to "got off the cars," obviously referring to a train. I have no idea if they actually took the cinder bank or not. Today, nothing remains of the forge but I know exactly where it was, because they say ironmasters always built their home so they could see the forge from the front door.

110 years ago, the road apparently was much lower as well
(Why else would there be a drain 12" under the road?)

Marketing 101

The newspaper article came out today ("Dawning of a dream / Couple forge ahead on restoration of 1760 mansion," LancasterOnline.com) and I saw my web traffic spike. Then I realized all these new people were reading a morose dissertation on how unhappy I was last week. Sorry about that! I'm feeling much better now.

I have to say, it's one thing when I write something in an online journal, and quite another when it gets reported in the newspaper. A few comments about the article:

• Dawn grew up in Lancaster, moving to Los Angeles after college. (The article makes it sound like she was from California, too.)
• Robert Coleman did live in the mansion, when he was still a clerk for James Old. After Coleman married James' eldest daughter, Ann, he leased Salford Forge and they moved out. Around 1795, Coleman expanded the mansion, but he didn't live there at that time.
• I wasn't "awed" by the size of the farm or the age of the house; I couldn't conceive of it. There's a difference.
• We weren't "stonewalled" by local officials, they just want to hold us to modern building standards, and I can't do everything they ask without either destroying the character of the house, or bankrupting the project. They've actually been pretty reasonable and helpful as we've negotiated compromises. It's just been a time-consuming and costly process.
• And Dawn didn't talk the county engineer out of requiring us to enlarge the driveway; she asked him to come out and look at the traffic patterns, and he decided that a pull-off would work instead of the two-lane access road required by code.

That said, if you're here for the first time, welcome! Check out the "Favorites" on the right, especially the "Video Carnage" and the last video on "Videopalooza" -- those are a lot of fun. (The video on the clawfoot tub is also in Videopalooza, but if you're from OSHA, please don't view it.) I don't recommend you try to read the entire journal -- there's 190 entries from the last two years -- but if you subscribe by email, you'll get an update every couple of days or so. This project is so big, there's always something interesting going on. (Plus you can easily unsubscribe, and I'm not going to give your email address to anyone.)

If you want to sign up for the tour on December 28, . (Hopefully they'll have the heat on again by then.)

Dawn in the center of operations (yes, that's a shower stall)