PITTSBURGH, Pa. It would be spiffy to be able to afford a $4,000 instant coffeemaker to brew top shelf java in any kitchen.

The fancy machine is one of the luxuries on display at a “dream home” installed behind black curtains at the Pittsburgh Home & Garden Show this month at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. Just how dreamy these surrounds are, though, is up to interpretation.

One of the first things that catches my eye is a lifelike sculpture of a tribesman squatting on the floor of what I believe to be the master bathroom. I’m taken aback because it looks as if an unwelcome guest is doing his business on the floor of what turns out to be a mediation room.

I can see myself tripping over this thing in the night, and cannot imagine trying to find my zen in the lotus position with it staring me down.

Moments later, two women pass by with frowns on their faces.

“This is supposed to be a dream home?” one of them says. “More like a nightmare,” the other responds.

This display is the work of CJ Interior Design Studio of Pittsburgh, and it obviously put a lot of work into the details.

Yet, somehow the designers believe it is stylish to put plastic chairs beside a rustic wooden dining room table. That seems kind of cold and uninviting.

Everything else here appears to be rather expensive, down to the high-tech LED television in the bathroom.

This highbrow stuff is genius and pretentious wrapped in one fake 8-room residence. And, this probably is the wrong time for many people to tour such extravagances.

Some of my furloughed newspaper friends have yet to find full time work eight months after they received their pink slips. While this horrible recession appears to be lifting, they say there still are not any good jobs out there for them to secure.

To play it safe, I will keep my auto-drip coffeemaker that leaks from the bottom until the pot is brewed.

(The home show ends Sunday)

An avalanche on Friday night caused the closure of U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass. The snow was cleared off the road by Saturday morning, so it was business as usual for skiers and riders heading for Winter Park. A rockslide in Glenwood Canyon around midnight on Monday morning will take longer to clean up — to say nothing of road and bridge repairs.

Some 20 boulders ranging from 3 feet to 10 feet in diameter and tons of additional debris fell onto Interstate 70, created eight craters and dips, exposing the highway’s underwiring, taking out a bridge and destroying guardails. Both sides of the highway were affected. Fortunately, none came down on any vehicles traveling through the canyon, but drivers were forced to make a 160-mile detour between Glenwood Springs and Denver or elsewhere on the Front Range.

According to the Colorado Department of Transportation, the massive slide occurred on the west side of the Hanging Lake Tunnels,  where two bridges cross the Colorado River and Union Pacific Railroad tracks just west of the Shoshone Dam and the Hanging Lake trail parking area. CDOT says an average of 19,800 use Glenwood Canyon on an average day.

Other than traffic to/from Glenwood Springs, Grand Junction and points between, the biggest affect will be on skiers heading to or from Aspen from the Front Range. In summer, traffic can use Highway 82 over Independence Pass between Leadville and Aspen, but that road is not plowed out until May, and traffic must use 82 from Glenwood Springs that dead-ends in Aspen in winter.

By Scott Beveridge

MONONGAHELA, Pa. The zany Lorys Crisafulli sums up her many successes with a common sense positive attitude.

It comes back to how you treat people, said Crisafulli, 83, of Carroll Township, Pa., who has had at least two great careers and a busy retirement that sent her name around the world.

The retired schoolteacher and antiques dealer is best known for taking off some of her clothes, and convincing 11 of her old female friends to do the same, and posing for a 2008 charity calendar that caught the attention of news organizations from Japan to Washington, Pa.

Shes at it again, in production for a mildly naughty 2011 calendar, one that also will feature a dozen male senior citizens in photographs with the ladies known as the Vixens of the Valley.

The first calendar sold 3,000 copies, earning $15,000 for the money-strapped Monongahela Area Historical Society. It also drew sneers from younger people who think old people are ugly.

Here is one example:

I may be branded a shallow bitch for saying this but there are certain types of folks who should never pose nude old people, a much younger Pittsburgh blogger, Virginia Montanez, stated on her blog, Thats Church, about these models.

Well Montanez branded her personality with that statement, so I wont use this platform to do the same, although she missed the point in a big way.

These women did something good for their financially strapped community, while also having some oddball fun to make a statement that old people can feel sexy, too. At the same time, they brought themselves a lot of happiness through a vehicle that made them global role models for seniors who want to stay active and give back to the community.

Crisafulli has it right when she says success is best earned by treating people with kindness, generosity and spunk. You wont hear her snark rudely, or, tell an unattractive person to hide in a closet from the pretty people. That kind of attitude turns to gold.

Click here to read more about her new calendar project. (The link will not last forever)

When Cininnati-based Republic Aviation took over Frontier Airlines last summer, it promised financial health without changing the name or doing away with the talking animals painted on aircraft tails that inspired one of the better advertising campaigns on television. First, Republic RIFfed the Frontier office in Denver, and more recently, rumors developed that Frontier’s name and mascots would go away too.

The endangered animals are Grizwald the grizzly bear, Benny the other grizzly bear, Montana the elk, Stu the Eastern cottontail, Trixie the red fox, Rudy the other red fox, Mo and Jo the red fox cubs, Ollie the great gray owl, Humphrey the bison, Grace the swan, Woody the wood duck, Sherman the sea lion, Andy the pronghorn, Holly the great blue heron, Sal the cougar, Stretch the egret, Larry the lynx. Flip the bottlenose dolphin and others in menangerie.

Concerned Frontier employees rallied to save the animals and even launched a Facebook page called “Save the Frontier Airlines Brand and Animals.” Nearly 400 people have joined the “Save Frontier” page on Facebook.

Henry Moore was a 20th century British sculpture who is best known for his large, abstract bronzes found in important public spaces around the world, including opposite the British Parliament in London, the plaza in front of Toronto’s City Hall, in front of Berlin’s Kongresshalle, outside of Australia’s National Gallery in Melbourne and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Tutankhamen was a youthful 18th dynasty Egyptian pharaoh who ruled in the 14th century B.C. and inspired some of the most exquisite, intricate bejeweled pieces that the anonymous craftsmen of the Nile ever produced. Both are coming to Denver — the Moore exhibition this week, King Tut’s treasures this summer. I’m excited about both and hope the both locals and visitors to Colorado will see them.

Moore in the Gardens

The Denver Botanic Gardens‘ landmark outdoor exhibition of 20 monumental Moore works opens on Monday, March 8, and runs through January 11, 2011 enabling art lovers to see these pieces in all seasons and in diverse environments, Discover sculptures in the Gardens diverse landscapes including dormant winter gardens, prairie wildflowers, serene reflecting pools and the rugged rock alpine garden.. Moore found inspiration in natural environments, and the Botanic Gardens is (are?) dedicated to bringing and displaying nature in the heart of Denver and also at the Botanic Gardens at Chatfield in Littleton, south of the city.

If you need to understand more about Moore, join a free tour (with the price of admission on weekends at 1:00 p.m. through the run of the show) or special curator-led walks from May through October, $15 (check schedule later). For non-members, admission through May 9 and after September 12 is $11.50 for adults; $8.50 for 65+  and military; $8 for ages 4-15 and students, and free for children 3 and under. In summer, admission for all is $1 more. The main Gardens are at 1005 York Street, Denver; 720-865-3500.

Tut at the Museum

Denver is immensely fortunate, and honored, to be one of the five North American cities hosting Tutankhamun – The Golden King and The Great Pharaohs. Atlanta, San Francisco, Toronto, New York and Denver. It will be at the Denver Art Museum for six months beginning July 1 and closing January 2, 2010. 

The art museum is devoting two large galleries in the Hamilton Building to this touring exhibition featuring more than 100 treasures from Tut’s tomb and other sites. Not quite as large as most of Moore’s sculptures but imposing nevertheless is a 10-foot statue, the largest depiction of of King Tut ever unearthed.  It was found in the remains of the funerary temple of two of his high officials and still retains
much of its original paint. Other artifacts in this remarkable exhibition come from the reigns of other important rulers throughout 2,000 years of ancient Egyptian history, from about 2600 B.C. to 660 B.C.

The exhibition is the product of heavy hitters in the realm of culture and antiquity. It was organized by National Geographic, Arts and Exhibitions International and AEG Exhibitions, with cooperation from the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. A portion of the proceeds from the tour will go toward antiquities preservation and conservation efforts in Egypt, including the construction of a new grand museum at Giza near Cairo.

I visited Egypt a year ago and was captivated. The tombs in the Valley of Kings are open by rotation to try to protect them, and Tut’s tomb was not open while I was there. The tomb was discovered in 1922 by by Howard Carter, and while many ancient tombs had been looted of their treasure, Tutankhamun’s was intact. This is not the first time that priceless artifacts from the tomb have been on tour, but it is the first time they have been to Denver. The Treasures of Tutankhamun tour lasted from 1972 to 1979, visiting the British Museum, museums in the USSR, Japan, France, Canada, West Germany and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Tut tickets are now on sale to Denver Art Museum members and go on sale to the general public on May 14. Click here for the complicated pricing schedule. The museum is at 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway (just south of Civic Center Park and on 13th Avenue between Broadway and Bannock) Denver: 720-865-5000.

New York’s already congested John F. Kennedy International Airport has gotten that much worse with the shutdown of the longest of its four runways for repaving. The Bay Runway, which pilots know as 13R-31L, sticks out into Jamaica Bay. The repaving project started on March 1 and is expected to be out of service for four months. Color me skeptical, but I’d put my money on construction delays. Why should repaving be completed on time when hardly anything else at the airport ever seems to be?

According to reports, one-third of JFK’s traffic, including something like half of the departures, are using the three smaller runways. If you’ve ever flown in or out of JFK, you have seen (and waited in) long conga lines, even under the best of circumstances, and I’m afraid that New York rarely enjoys the best of circumstances. When I fly to Europe, I already try to avoid Chicago’s O’Hare, especially in winter. I was beginning to feel more tolerant of JFK since the installation of a monorail connecting terminals, making plane changes a more efficient and pleasant process. But now….

International carriers using JFK must endure the construction delays, but domestic carriers have more flexibility. JetBlue, American and Delta and perhaps others have cut their schedules while the main runway is being repaved. That means those of us who connect to international flights at JFK might now be forced to us LaGuardia, another miserable, delay-plagues airport, or if they do manage a domestic flight to JFK, the fares might well have increased.

Even before 14,572-foot Bay Runway was closed, the US Department of Transportation ranked JFK a pathetic 28th out of 31 major airports in terms of delays, which the Federal Aviation Administration expects to be the Federal Aviation Administration expects delays to be about 50 minutes during peak times and 29 minutes off-peak. Fifty minutes sounds better than an hour, and 29 minutes better than half-an hour, which is bad enough. In order to make the next numbers sound better, airlines have begun padding their schedules by adding expected waiting times into their flight times so that they won’t go on record as “delayed” or “late.” If you’re flying via JFK, bring a good book.

Sometime at the end of February 1995, I flew out of Stapleton International Airport en route to, I think, Honduras. I returned to the new Denver International Airport, which had opened on February 28 while I was away. If an airport could have had a new-car smell, DIA would have had it. As I look at the photo below, I count 16 small masts or antennae atop the main terminal’s distinctive Teflon tents — one for each year and one for good luck.

After much ridicule and a hiccupy debut, DIA has matured into the fifth-busiest airport in the national and ninth-busiest in the world. Thirty thousand airport, airline and government workers and 140,000 passengers a day are under those Teflon tents and on the concourses. Many modifications have been made over the last 15 years: The central feature in the main terminal has been a dancing fountain and various kinds of gardens. The platforms on both sides of the terminal on the baggage-claim level have been widened (originally it was a challenge to wheel a SmartCart or a big piece of luggage around the concrete pillars,) and a roof now covers the platforms, because the original design didn’t take into account summer’s strong sun and random fall/winter/spring snows.

One thing that hasn’t changed but continues to puzzle me one of the exits from the train level to the terminal, which has not been used for 15 years, always has a human security presence. Why on earth didn’t they erect a gate? Other changes are obvious: a different mix of transportation entities with booths on the perimeter of the terminal, the post-9/11 addition of unsightly but mandatory security checkpoints complete with snaking lines of passengers cluttering the floor of the grand space and the great emptiness of the ticket counter areas, especially on the west side, since many passengers now print their own boarding passes and also checking as few bags as possible. On the airside, there are now six runways taking up just a fraction of the airport’s 53 square miles of land.

There’s a proposal to move security to the current ticketing areas to free up the main terminal space, which would them be restricted to passengers. There’s a debate about whether new, upscale eating and retail in a repurposed main terminal would be a success or a fiasco. There’s also a question as to whether an airport hotel that has been on the drawing board, at least conceptually, from the beginning is viable, and whether a lightrail extension to DIA is worth the cost of construction.

The Denver City Council, airport officials and consultants, who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to study the options, are charting DIA’s course for the next 15 years and beyond.

By Scott Beveridge

SPEERS, Pa. The older guys – those from fire departments and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency – sat front and center today to explain to state officials why some people claim they let local residents down last month in their response to a disastrous snowstorm.

The younger, better dressed executives sat in the back rows at the Pennsylvania House Policy Committee hearing into the storm response with their cell phones in hand, tuned into the live news feeds some journalists were filing from the room.

“We’re following you on Twitter,” one of those technology-minded guys told me after I had just updated the Observer-Reporter newspaper web site with a fresh report on the testimony.

His statement seemed to cement the problems news agencies face in adapting to social media with some staff members who resist the rapidly-changing ways in which breaking news is being delivered. So many reporters are still holding pens to notebooks and then taking even longer time to get their stories to print when that method of telling stories has been quickly losing an audience.

Yet, the comment from the audience member about our Twitter feed spoke to an even broader issue relating to a new “generation gap” facing society.

A generation ago, the big understanding gap existed between young adults who opposed the Vietnam War and their parents who then seemed to be living on another planet.

These days, we are separated in a big way between those who get the Internet and those who still pick up the telephone book to call the local florist. This distance knows no age group.

My 80-year-old mother has better Web skills than do many of my colleagues in the local media. An older friend who lives nearby uses Skype with ease to Web chat with her young granddaughter a continent away in San Francisco.

Those who don’t get it often say Twitterers, Skypers and Facebookers have way too much time on their hands. In many instances they are right when they point to employees who eat up the payroll via their unchecked addictions to blogs and such.

The criticism from the uninformed, however, also speaks to its hesitation to climb out of the modern dinosaur age.

If only those who are being left behind knew how much time, trouble and money can be saved through effective use of the technology at hand these days.

By Colleen Nelson

WAYNESBURG, Pa. When Chris Hardie says, “Gotta Run,” you can believe him.

The Greene County, Pa., Office of Development and Planning staffer is out the door running whenever he gets the chance lunchtime, before work, after work and on weekends.

He is on a mission and the mission has a name Chris Cross the County for the cure.

While many cancer survivors and their supporters walk the track at Central Greene High School for 24 hours for Relay for Life the first weekend each May, Hardie, 32, puts a longer distance face on what he challenges himself to do for cancer in April.

Chris Cross the County takes him from one end of the county to the other, or even across the county line heading for Pittsburgh.

Hardie has been charting a different course each year since 2007 when he ran his first 51 miles for Relay and raised $3,500. His determination to run no matter what the weather attracts the kind of publicity and sponsorship that adds up to thousands of research dollars for the American Cancer Society.

Getting to know the man so many have only seen on the fly isnt easy. Hardie is on the go even when he’s not wearing his running shoes. Its a rare moment when he can be found in his office with enough time to chat and even then, he is answering the phone, making copies, organizing notes or checking his watch for the next scheduled meeting while he talks.

Hes been up since 6 a.m. on the day of this interview, and there isnt a day that he doesnt work out boxing, Pilates, aerobics and weight training.

Whatever Im in the mood for.

And then there is the almost daily running regime.

Out of 365 days Id say I run 350. Im in training year-round.

His shaven head, neat goatee and direct gaze complement his compact muscular build. A white bulletin board behind his desk is neatly gridded with his workday tasks meetings and projects for the county, tucked around his hours as part-time track and field and cross country coach at Waynesburg University.

I have to keep organized theres a lot of things going on here in planning, Hardie admits. Any new construction or business coming into the county goes through this office for ordinance compliance. Storm drains, noise, tax abatement, we deal with it. We plan ahead and connect the dots and make sure its done the right way.

Hardie found his own right way as a high school senior, when he realized his body had found its athletic niche in running.

I have a strong gas tank I can keep going. The name Hardie is mostly German but my dads Cherokee, too. Im built like him and were a lot alike. He has a little gray in his beard and hes more into working out than running, but thats about it. He doesnt think so but hes the one who taught me to be able to do this. He gave me his work ethic growing up.

Hardie grew up in Blair County near Altoona, Pa., on land that his great-grandfather once farmed. He lost a grandmother to cancer, then an aunt.

California University of Pennsylvania gave him a chance to run track and field while earning a bachelors degree in political science and a masters in geography and regional planning. It also gave him another close encounter with cancer.

One of my running partners, Pablo Prego, started having calf cramps. It turned out to be cancer and it spread quickly. He was only 24. A bunch of us college runners had a run in his honor and the idea evolved over time. When I was at Mount Aloysis College in 2003 I discovered Relay for Life and started helping out. When I moved to Greene County in 2005 and saw there was a Relay here, I got involved.

When April rolls around, Hardie is ready to run – rain, snow or shine. He has a stock answer for his commitment that is not lessened by being repeated.

Cancer victims dont get to choose when they have good days or bad days, so I dont care what its like out there Im running.

This year, Hardie has decided to run in circles for the cure coordinating the 4th annual Chris Cross with Waynesburg Universitys popular Mini-Relay for Life from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. April 18.

Ill be running on campus around Johnsons Commons, doing as many laps as I can. My wife Kelley is the sponsor of the Mini-Relay and our goal is $7,000. The checks are beginning to come in already.

Hardie bends down and adjusts his laces. Hes bundled up but his legs are bare against another chilly day a toboggan warms his head. He grins, straightens up and surveys the road before him. Its lunchtime and Hardie just has time for a quick sprint and a bite to eat.

See ya now. Gotta run!

(Colleen Nelson is freelance writer and artist in Holbrook, Pa. She teachers creative writing at Bowlby Library in Waynesburg, Pa. Reprinted from Living in Greene County magazine, a publication of the Observer-Reporter)