Pickleball Comes to Amish Country

Can you believe? Christmas is only three months away! Where did the time go?  Part of it went to COVID, part of it went to avoiding COVID, and part of it was spent eating and sleeping and fixing up your home and finishing up your projects.  

But for now, I’ll work on finishing my coming home story from last week. No, I STILL have no home phone service, only my one cell phone! They never showed up on one appointment and they changed another to a different day after making plans to stay home and cancelling appointments to do so. Well now they are supposed to come tomorrow between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM…no clue as to morning or afternoon, and no way to talk to a human being, yet they have advertisements on the phone while you are waiting for an answer that encourages you to have a landline for better service that isn’t hooked to a cell tower. I guess they mean unless you are trying to reach them! THREE WEEKS I’VE BEEN WAITING! I bet they are going to expect me to pay for all these weeks that I’ve had no service, and who can I talk to about it? They don’t answer phones!  I’ve heard others talk about the same thing. Where can we turn to get good, responsive phone service? Anyone know? If you know, I’d love to broadcast it to people who might be dealing with these same problems. Maybe someone in the upper echelon would hear about this article in the newspaper and follow up and try to fix the problem for all people!   

But on to another subject that really surprised me!! I just got a text with a picture from a Mennonite friend in Ohio showing me that the first pickleball court has been built in Millersburg, Ohio, the home area for the largest number of Amish and Mennonite people in the country! I showed the picture to my friend Carol Caefer from Pickleball for All, and she confirmed it was a really nice court for their first try. I’ll bet you this right now…more will be coming! There is plenty of land around there, and the people in the area love sports! Amish girls play a mean game of volleyball, in their dresses and prayer caps! I mentioned a couple years ago that with their long dresses it’s hard to run, so they tuck the skirts up under elastic around their hips so they can run, etc. And they play hard! I can imagine what they’d do with a pickleball court. By next summer I should be able to see how far they have advanced. The men are as strong as farmers and stronger than most men you see! Right now, baseball is the game men usually play, and they start in grade school during recess. When they have family gatherings, they play baseball, volleyball, fishing, and very wholesome games. No one sits around a computer…of course not - they don’t have them! And although many Amish now have cell phones, they never talk on them at the dinner table or when visiting people or when they are with their children. They pay attention to their children, like that Marco family I told you about last year with the six children, who spend their time with their very well-behaved kids rather than on a phone. But getting back to what I was saying, those who work in shops or sales or wholesale all can work on computers at their jobs. Adding that all up, I bet the Amish will be playing pickleball by next summer. Who knows? They might even come down here to enter into some of the contests. I’d love to have some of their carpenters come down here and build cabinets! They are master cabinet makers! A great deal of their wood furniture can be found right here in Florida in Pinecraft, a tiny suburb of Sarasota, and a place the Ohio Tourism Bureau advertises in their literature. I bought my bedroom set in Pinecraft and they delivered it. I also bought other Ohio made furniture in Ohio and had them ship it down here. SOLID wood, not laminated. Beautiful work.  

*Okay, back on track:  My son, Todd Fiala, came over the other day to show me what he had discovered online for his car’s front head lights that had grown all grimy and yellowed or even brown, and it was so simple a solution and not costly!  You spray some OFF mosquito repellent (or he thinks other kinds can also be used because he used a different kind that he had on hand at home) right on the glass headlight and wipe it off with a paper towel, and voila! The browning is now on the paper towel and off the headlight! So simple and fun to watch to see that grime just disappear! Have fun with that one! And anyone can do it! And it’s cheap and easy.