Scout Moves

I got to do something really fun the other day. I got to spend a couple of hours with two people who have created the life they want. I had to drive way out there, miles from anywhere, to get to them, but the drive was worth it. After winding around on a farm road forever, I turned onto this dirt road that could not have possibly been wide enough for two cars. Fortunately, I didn't meet any on-coming traffic. These people, Lee and Joy, bought all this land out here more than 20 years ago and decided to build a winery on it. It was full of crap, with overgrown briars and rusty old plows, and Joy said "a dog wouldn't have it." But they cleaned it up, planted a vineyard and built a winery. It's got an apartment in it, so they lived there for a while. There was an abandoned farm house on the property originally built in 1831, the kind that started out as a small house but had room after room added on in a sort of haphazard way. Lee and Joy gutted the thing but saved ...

For a few years I have been enamored with NPR's This I Believe segment. People, some famous and some not, read essays they have written about what they believe. The word limit is typically 500, so you can't blabber on about this and that but are encouraged to stay focused on one thing. I have often thought about submitting my own essay but just never got around to it—until this past weekend. I spent a little time thinking about one single thing I believe in and wrote and polished an essay within the word limit, and I sent it to NPR using the online form they provide. Then, I heard Amy Tan's essay for the segment about how she believes in ghosts (you can listen to it here ). Now, I have learned her essay was the final installment in This I Believe, and after four years, NPR will not be airing any more. I could just break something, maybe my writing pencil, for dillydallying so long that I missed my chance. It may have been a slim chance that my essay would have been aired an...

Last night I got to play in a horn choir, which was a new experience for me. I love new experiences that are fun. Don't you? I don't relish new experiences that aren't fun, like being in your first auto accident or going to your first funeral. I have never had a root canal, but I suspect if I ever have to have one, that will not be a fun new experience. Playing in a horn choir isn't anything like a root canal, though. It's where you sit in a chair on stage with a bunch of other horn players of all different skill levels and life experiences and occupations, and you play together, each one covering his or her part as best he or she can. It's fun. This particular choir was conducted by my horn teacher at Mt. Union College, so there were quite a few of his students in the group. There were also other teachers, and then there was me. This is what always happens in settings like this with musicians introducing themselves—they go around the room and say what they do. ...

Over the weekend, Eustacia updated her Facebook status by saying she wanted to do something "outside-y." We had such a beautiful few days here in central Ohio with blue skies and warm breezes, who can blame her? On Saturday, I decided that instead of sitting around watching The Man Who Knew Too Much on Turner Classic Movies, I would do something outside-y, too. So, after I did some inside-y things like buying groceries, mixing up a pasta salad, baking a loaf of bread and vacuuming up 137 ounces of Mike's fur, I went out to buy herbs. Despite my largish yard, I don't have garden space, nor do I have the inclination to tend a garden, but I can handle a few herbs. I went to Lowe's despite all the local lawn and garden shops because it was right next door to Staples, where I also needed to go. I bought these herb pots—the dirt is held by biodegradable stuff so you don't have plastic pots to throw away. And I bought some girl gloves. I don't mind getting my han...

I went to the Y this morning—do I have to confess I haven't been very disciplined about that, or can you just assume? There were the usual people there who I don't know but recognize as being regulars, and then there was a man I had never seen before. He had a smart-ass face and red hair, and he carried a weight-lifter's belt around with him like he was a serious weight lifter. The funny thing is, his waist line didn't really accommodate that belt, not like the waist line of men who wear those things for a purpose. Maybe that's why he carried it instead of trying to cinch it around his mid-section radial. So, this man, this peacock, settled in on the leg press machine and moved the pin way down so he was pushing lots of weight. And he huffed and puffed and pushed and then let it drop. You really aren't supposed to do that because you could break the weights. Plus, it's startling to people around you who jump when they hear the sound of weights being slammed ...

This morning, I almost didn't make it to the English class where I volunteer as a reader. Through a series of miscommunications, I confused someone I was to interview for an article, and we had to reschedule our meeting for today. I felt bad about missing class because the teacher was counting on me to spend one-on-one time with a particular student, so I rescheduled again and freed myself up to volunteer. I'm glad I did. The current teacher of the class is great with the students, and they tend to look at her as a mother. She doesn't coddle them in their learning, but she defends them practically to the death whenever there is conflict. Today, the teacher had a substitute, someone the students don't really know but someone with some interesting approaches. April is Jazz Appreciation Month, so the woman brought in a children's book about Duke Ellington, and we read a brief biography about him. We split up for a while, and I sat in another room with a very shy woman—...

Was Howard Keel dreamy, or what? It's not his birthday or anything, and he didn't just die, but I'm sitting here for a few minutes watching him in Kiss Me Kate and thinking, "boy, was he smooth." I was supposed to interview someone to day, but I confused them with a phone message they misunderstood, so we'll meet tomorrow instead. That gave me some time this afternoon to stumble on Kiss Me Kate on Turner Classic Movies. I first discovered Howard Keel in Show Boat and spent a good part of my high school years playing songs from that musical on the piano. Then I discovered him in Annie Get Your Gun, and then Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and then Kiss Me Kate. That bit on Dallas was unfortunate, but we'll overlook that. He was pompous and arrogant in every single role, and you want to wipe that swarthy grin from his face. But he was dreamy. No?

Eustacia is in a group in college that experiments with film shorts. They write, perform and produce these little films and then premiere them on campus. Here is one about violence called Pillow Fight in which the actors become the pillows. Eustacia is the girl being challenged and bullied at the computer. and here she is learning about diversity, or something. I don't care to watch my offspring being murdered.

My orchestra performed a concert this past Saturday night, so I'd like to review it for you. I won't review the quality of our performance because all I really know is what happened in my own seat as the 4th horn player. We performed three things—the prelude to Wagner's Die Meistersinger, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto with a guest pianist, and a thing composed by an English guy who was in the audience. As I mentioned, I sat 4th horn because it was my turn. For some reason, the personnel manager alternates another player and me on 2nd and 4th, so for the May concert, I'll play 2nd. Anyway, my part wasn't very difficult this time around and just required me to pay attention to counting and not be afraid to come in when I thought I should. During rehearsal, one of the horn players didn't come in on his cue, and the conductor stopped to determine the problem. The player, normally accurate in so many ways because he's darned good, explained that in counting a ser...

First, my English class had scheduled a baby shower for a woman who was due to give birth next week. Her baby, Ceylee, arrived last week instead, so we decided to have the shower with the little peanut actually present. I knitted a hat and bought a tiny pair of suede boots (they're like finger puppets) as my gift. Before the party, the class sat around the table and read a story about the Octomom, which disturbed the readers to no end. They all have babies, and the idea of having eight was too much for them to comprehend. If nothing else, we got to talk about the prefix "oct" and its similarity to ocho and how octopus is not much different from octuplets or octomom . The mother decided the teacher's cupcakes would not be enough for her baby shower, so she brought a feast from home. We had black beans, seasoned beef, roasted green onions, handmade corn tortillas, and rice with this crazy-good salsa. One of the Guatemalan women explained how they make the salsa so I ...

I'm working on a winery piece for Small Town Newspaper, which means I get to go around visiting all the local wineries and meeting people. I love that. A lot. Yesterday, I visited three small wineries all within a ten-minute drive from my house. Because the Ohio climate is not necessarily conducive to growing good grapes, most wineries here bring in a base from California or Canada, depending on the kind of grapes they want, and work from there. So, they can set up shops just about anywhere without having to be connected to a vineyard. At the first stop, I met a couple who was there for tasting. They hadn't met before, the woman said, so I'm guessing they met on line. When the man was out of ear shot, the woman told me she bought a lace shawl at the winery/gift shop down the road that you can do almost anything with. She plans on using it when she belly dances. We shared a sampling of a dessert wine that was supposed to taste like leather and tobacco. I didn't detect ei...

A couple of years ago, some of us in Blogville played with the I Am From template ( here is what I did ). A week or so ago, I sent that template to my mother, sisters and nieces and asked them all to fill it out so we could compare our results. My mother's will be the most unique because she is from another era and has a different approach to the world. For example, she's still working on the piece, but so far she has said to be "from toil and trouble." And she has written about being from World War II and the return of soldiers, including her brothers. A lot of boys in her high school didn't graduate with the class because they joined the army instead, and quite a few of them never came back. That marks a person, I think, especially a young person who is just forming her view of the world around her when all hell breaks loose, and people she knows die half-way around the world. My father came back from his time in the War with some souveinirs—a couple of medals, ...

I've got a few sites to plug. Sift . First, my new friend Kyle has just started a blog, so I would like to introduce blogville to her, and vice versa. She lives in Small Town, too, but we just met last week. She's a gardener, an adventerous cook, an artist and a conscientious citizen—she's very involved in Small Town's upcoming farm market opening in June. She's also the mother of a six-year-old who promises to be just as talented as the mother. Wait until you see the face they created together. Creatively Self Unemployed . I discovered this treasure of a blog while over at Kyle's. I don't know much about this guy, and he hasn't posted in quite a while. But boy, is he funny. And uniquely creative. Post, strange man. Post. Next, Bent Objects. Dive has linked to it for some time, but not everyone who reads this blog reads Dive's, so I want to make sure to give the Bent Objects guy plenty of attention. The guy's name is Terry, and he lives in India...

So, yesterday...I took advantage of the quiet afternoon by taking a short nap. I like what I call "power naps"—about 20 minutes or so, and all is well. I took this Easter nap on the couch in the living room with the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory playing in the background, Eustacia sitting quietly in the chair with her laptop, and husband downstairs watching the Masters (N0. 1 had already left to go back to school). That was the setting. I woke up from my nap and sat on the couch for a few minutes to get my bearings—you know, let my brain catch up with the rest of me—and that's when what Eustacia calls my "insect radar" set off the alarm. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a centipede at least two inches long crawl out from under the couch and walk across the room. I gasped, which is part of the radar system, and Eustacia and I both tucked our legs under us in case the thing changed course. I yelled, "Get Tiger! Get Tiger!" He likes to toy ...

I know I'm supposed to be thinking about Easter and all that, but I was irked when I wrote THIS . Next week, I think we'll discuss the Angela Merkel Barbie.

It's Good Friday, which has monumental significance for Christians. But since you know all about that already, I'll just keep talking about food. Both daughters will be coming home this weekend—actually, one is already here—and when the house is full, I tend to cook. There are reasons for that: I like to cook, sometimes Daughter No. 1 likes to help cook, and when someone says "what's here to eat?," I want to have an answer. So, this morning I'll be making a batch of cocoa nibs cookies and two loaves of French bread. For the Europeans, what we really mean by that is longish, thin loaves of yeast bread. They may not resemble anything the French ever make, but that has no bearing on what we call them. Because Sunday will be busy, and No. 1 may go back to school early that day, we'll have our big dinner on Saturday, and I have just finished with the menu and the resulting grocery list. I'll start with open-face cucumber sandwiches using today's bread a...

A few people liked the idea of a zucchini-carrot cake, so I'm giving you the recipe. I found it in my favorite spring cookbook— Gardener's Community Cookbook . First, let me say I am not a gardener. I am inept, not just at planting and tending to things that grow, but in tending to your most basic house plant, too. So, I like my gardener's cookbook, but I need other people to grow the stuff. That doesn't seem to be a problem when it comes to zucchini, which leads me to a question. Why do people grow so much zucchini when they end up with too much and practically beg people to take the extras? Why not just grow less? Same with tomatoes. Even in this cookbook, the author thinks people will like the idea of adding zucchini to traditional carrot cake so they can get rid of extra veggies. My dad always had what I considered too many tomatoes, and he practically force-fed them to us at the table. I'm not sure what else he grew, but I remember the tomatoes, garlic and conc...

Yeah, I'm still cooking, and I'm still writing about it. Just so you know in case you hate this kind of thing, so you can come back next week when I've got other things on my mind. My house has been empty of children for months now, and I'm still trying to figure out how to cook for two. Often, I find I cook for three and have the leftovers for lunch. I'm OK with that, but sometimes I find I've got stuff to use over and over again. Earlier this week, I grilled two steaks and served them with leek tarts. I only made two single-serving tarts because they aren't good the next day, but that meant I had a ton of diced leek leftover. That stuff goes a long way, you know, so I stored the bag in the fridge, and now I feel obligated to keep using it. I've decided to use it in place of onions, so on Monday, leeks went in with the sliced zucchini that was baked in cedar papers. Yesterday, leeks went in with the sautéed zucchini with Havarti cheese. Tonight, what...

I'm on a granola kick. I never cared about the stuff before, but when I was in Florida, the cafe in our hotel offered yogurt parfaits. The things were layered with yogurt, fresh fruit and granola. I loved it. So, when I got home, I bought all the ingredients and have been making a sort of parfait for breakfast ever since. But then I started thinking about making my own granola, not because it's necessarily better than stuff I can buy as long as I shop wisely but because I like to learn to make things I don't normally make. Once I bought kits for my kids to make their own chewing gum, chocolate bars and root beer. It was all nasty stuff, but it was a good experiment. I started out with a granola recipe from Alton Brown. He uses maple syrup and vegetable oil to stick everything together (I chose honey instead of syrup), and he includes the usual things like oats, coconut, nuts and raisins. It was OK, but because the recipe suggests stirring every 10 minutes, you end up with a...

Have you ever smelled a rotten potato, or worse yet, touched one? Good gracious. Is there a worse smell on earth? I volunteered at the food bank this morning and was given a variety of tasks. First, while some guys were sorting through chicken parts and putting them into plastic bags, it was my job to tie off the bags with twist ties. We had big boxes of chicken, and we had to put two large pieces—basically half a chicken—into plastic bags for individuals. Then I helped a lady sort through five-pound bags of potatoes. We had tons of them, and some of them had a rotten potato in the bottom of the bag. We had to rip open the plastic, take out the rotten offender, and toss it. Jiminy, that's disgusting. Once the place opened for business, it was my job to offer containers of Tang. I know what you're thinking, if you're thinking what I'm thinking. Tang? That nasty fake-orange stuff full of sugar? But it's not just orange anymore, and some of the people in line informed ...

Now that I’m not a book cover designer by trade anymore, there are certain things I don’t have to worry about, and so I find freedom in deleted emails that no longer pertain to my day-to-day activities. I don’t have to care if there is a new font available, and I don’t have to care if National Geographic has released new stock photography. I can delete emails from agents trying to tell me about the new artist they represent, and I can ignore all correspondence from Getty which owns more stock images than God. I’ve still got my little finger in the business, though, because I will continue to design the occasional cover for a non-profit publisher that sells books to English-speaking areas of Africa. I’m not sure of all the countries where their books are sold, but I do know they are prominent in Nigeria. So, when they give me a project and ask for imagery of people on the cover, I have to hunt and gather for images of people from that part of the world. That’s no easy task in the U.S. I...

I had to run some errands yesterday—little stops like the dry cleaners, the bakery, the library—and I planned on making the grocery store my last stop. I needed just a few things, three to be exact, and I can usually remember three things without making a list. I’m not sure why three is my limit for testing my memory, but I wonder if it relates to the memory test doctors give to people they suspect of having Alzheimer’s. My father took this test, as did my father-in-law. Both men had the disease, but early on when we weren’t sure, they had to test their memory by remembering three words in order. For each man, the three words were shown to them and then hidden, and they had to repeat the words. If they couldn’t remember them, then it was a mark against them and their future. That sounds harsh, but it’s not nearly as harsh as that damned disease. Anyway, it was always the same three words with each visit, and for my father-in-law, the words were TABLE • APPLE • PENNY. When one of your p...