Scout Moves

This week, I found some time to paint because I didn't have newspaper assignments or English class. Schools close with even a hint of snow in the forecast, apparently. To get away from the primary colors stored in my easel, I went to a local craft store and spent $80 on a handful of water color tubes and a little bit of cheap paper, and then I sat down to experiment. I think it would be better for me if I could take my easel out of my house and go see the world outside, but all I would see anywhere within a 200-mile radius and beyond is white and more white. After playing around with some color exercises, I taped paper to the easel and came up with pears: Later, I kept an eye on a photo I took last fall of a sheep pasture, and I came up with this. No sheep yet, but that will be my next experiment. I used a wet brush on a dry surface and got the kind of sky I was looking for, but I couldn't leave the grass alone. I started out with the same technique but kept wanting to add laye...

So, I have this membership in MENSA, and it comes with a card I keep in my wallet. There are benefits to this membership—you get discounts in some places the same as with a AAA membership. You can go to meetings with other MENSA members, and you get a monthly magazine that might print your articles if you submit reasonable ones. I have had a couple of articles included in the Bulletin, but I don't take advantage of anything else this organization offers. I keep renewing the membership only for the card. I call it "The Smart Card." As long as I have it, I feel smart, or at least not stupid. For years I thought I was stupid. It wasn't just an idea I had—I was convinced of it, and whatever opportunity crossed my path, I would shy from it because I was too stupid. It was a concept that was deeply ingrained in me and colored how I saw my place in the world. It colored it with dim shades, in fact. With being accepted into this club of sorts and being given a membership car...

Husband and I spent the weekend in Florida, and I realized I had forgotten what it feels like to sit in the sunshine. It hasn't been a long winter here in Ohio...yet...but it has been a cold, snowy and gray one. We went to Florida because my mother-in-law rented a house there, becoming one of those "snow birds" who vacate the wintry north for the moderate Florida winters who then turn around and move back when the Florida summers become so unpleasant you think you've moved into a sauna, and someone has locked the doors. Only my mother-in-law never intended to move back to Chicagoland. She wasn't migrating—she was evacuating, and she bought a house in Cape Coral. She hasn't closed on the new place yet, so we stayed with her and a brother-in-law who is helping her out in their rental house. This house is on a canal, one of the many that chop up that part of Florida so people can sit by water and keep their boats handy. The in-laws don't have a boat, so they ...

(the shelter named in this opinion piece are in Small Town, but I bet you've got shelters in your own town with discount spay/neuter programs) Tomorrow, February 23, is officially Spay Day as declared by the Humane Society of the United States, and it’s no wonder. The numbers are remarkable—70,000 puppies and kittens are born in this country every day. In contrast, only 10,000 human beings are born in the same 24-hour time span, and this ratio is unsustainable. A few weeks ago, I was tending to my two well-fed and pampered house cats when I spotted a stray kitten in my backyard. He had managed to crawl under the fencing but couldn’t seem to find his way out. When I opened the gate and called to him, the little guy came trotting over to me, meowing like he’d finally found his mother. I picked up the affectionate and purring kitten and was saddened to find he was skin and bone, and he was filthy. He smelled as if he had spent a few nights in another animal’s musky forest den and then...

Yep, art day again. This time, I decided to use color, although all I have are basic colors like what your teacher gave you in the second grade. This turned out to be tall grass. I laid down the yellow first and then the blue. And then on the saturated surface, I added a horizontal strip of green. As it bled down through the water, I saw it as a reflection of grass, so I added that above the water line. This is a hillside with trees. I used less water, so there wasn't as much color blending. I decided I missed random blending here, so to add texture, I stamped the entire surface with a wad of dirty masking tape. And this is an apple, in case that isn't clear. I stamped this with another wad of masking tape, and I like the results. It may not be a great painting of an apple, and it may well fit the second-grade paints I'm using, but I think I've got a good start in figuring out how the paint and water and paper work together. All of this experimenting could go on for yea...

Finally, after weeks of being negligent, I have found time to play 500 Words, blogville's short-story game in which you write a 500-word story around a sentence from literature. This week's sentence is from Little Women : "A pair of silk stockings, that pretty carved fan, and a lovely blue sash. " A House For the Senses Maggie stood in what was once her grandmother’s bedroom, a time capsule that looked as if it had been decorated in 1927, and not one item had been moved from its intended place since. She turned slowly in the room, taking in every corner and memorizing every shadow and layer. The gauzy lace curtains draped over the windows, the satin bed cover, the braided rug woven from scraps from every dress her mother wore as a child. On the dresser was a tarnished gold tray that held a small mirror, a comb with missing teeth and a hairbrush with most of its bristles worn away. Beside the set were once elegant perfume bottles, their contents evaporated into an ambe...

After all of my experimenting with ravioli making from scratch, I finally bought a ravioli form. I found this at Williams-Sonoma, and it saves so much time. I used the pasta recipe that came with the form but used my KitchenAid press to make the sheets of pasta. Then I used the new press to shape the sheets into raviolis. I filled the indentations with a ricotta/garlic/Parmesan mixture and covered it with another sheet of pasta. The shortcut comes when you use a rolling pin to press the two sheets together and cut it all into a dozen individual raviolis. Yay. But here's what I have decided—if all you're going to do with ravioli is fill it with plain old cheese, then you might as well buy the stuff at the grocery store. What making your own ravioli gives you is the freedom to be creative and make what you can't buy—butternut squash filled or sausage and fennel filled or spinach and feta filled. If Husband liked mushrooms, I would make a mountain of assorted mushroom raviolis...

Last Saturday, I spent some time interviewing Dr. Larry Snider. He's a professor of percussion at the University of Akron, and he was in Small Town for a little reunion. He started a steel drum band at the university 30 years ago, and one of our school band directors, Joan, was part of the group. With her own group of students, Joan has started a steel band here in the middle of Ohio, seemingly out of place but a perfect fit. Dr. Snider sat with me for the purposes of a newspaper story, and because I only had a few questions, I let him talk and talk. He was a delight. He talked about how he discovered steel pans in college and how he had to fight for funds to start a band in Akron. He's been so proud of his students, and now one of them is about to perform with a steel pan ensemble at Carnegie Hall. But it was when he talked about the sacrifices the musicians in Trinidad made for steel pans, he actually shed tears. Descendants of slaves made the instruments out of abandoned ste...

When I was searching for a quote to go with today's opinion piece about aesthetic plastic surgery, I found this poem by Emily Dickinson: Beauty—be not caused It Is Chase it, and it ceases Chase it not, and it abides It says exactly what I wanted to say, but I decided not to use it. Then I found this one from Miss Piggy: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. That one was pretty good, too, but quoting Miss Piggy might not add credibility to my column. So, I went with a quote from Garrison Keillor, a mix of seriousness and humor. You'll see it here if you read on. ••• A young Chinese woman named Xiaoqing was recently rejected by her boyfriend, a man who she has described as having an obsession with the American actress Jessica Alba. In an effort to win back this boyfriend, Xiaoqing has chosen to undergo plastic surgery to look more like Alba. A hospital in Shanghai is so delighted with...

One of my Facebook friends posted this video last night—she is the mother of the soloist, Laura Schupbach. Laura is a local girl and is a senior at the same college as Eustacia. She's just brilliant. Sweet, too. Last May, we performed a concert of show tunes, and this is Laura singing Glitter and Be Gay from Candide. She was so good, and the audience was so pleased, I think we played it twice. Enjoy.

I was sent on another interesting newspaper assignment yesterday—I went to a small neighborhood church that has turned its basement into a homeless shelter. We've got an official homeless shelter here, but it has a waiting list for single men, so the overflow goes to this church. In fact, local police departments will pick up willing transients on cold nights and take them to the church. The men sleep on specially designed mats that can be disinfected easily; and they have a refrigerator, a microwave and a pantry stocked with basic food. They do their own cooking, and they clean the place, and they keep themselves in order. There seems to be a pecking order, actually, with the man who's lived there the longest being in charge. The men sign off on a list of rules in order to stay there–the usual stuff like no drinking or smoking on the premises, and I assume no girls allowed. If they break the rules more than once, they're out. This really is a neighborhood church, and so th...

If you've been around blogville for a while, or if you've at least been stopping by here for a while, you may remember Art Day. It was the day I posted pictures of things I made—experiments in watercolor or acrylic, earrings, knitted things, stuff like that. Well, yesterday with all the snow falling around me and with my engagements canceled, I took out the portable easel No. 1 gave me for Christmas, broke out the cheap watercolor paints I got from the class I took on a cruise, and got to work. I have no idea what I'm doing, which is apparent, but as I sat by the window with the winter scene playing out—people doing their best to make it up the hill in front of my house, people shoveling their driveways, the cats being completely puzzled by the cold stuff falling from up above—I didn't care if I was clueless. I was happy to set the brush to the paper. This is the first one I created. I saturated a piece of 140 lb. paper and let black paint make its way down at will. Thi...

I feel a little bit like a school girl who woke up to a snow day. Remember how that felt, like exhaling after holding your breath as long as you could. I remember those dark winter mornings on Lake Michigan when I would wake up in the room I shared with my sister Melanie, and I would listen to the radio in the kitchen. The volume was turned up just loud enough that I could hear the list of school cancellations from my twin bed...please say Chesterton, please say Chesterton, please say Chesterton. A snow day meant I could sleep in. It meant I could watch old movies on WGN and play the piano and sit on the floor with the coloring books and crayons, and I could make paper dolls cut from magazines. I could play outside with the neighborhood kids and make snowmen and build snow forts and throw snow balls—and we got plenty of snow in Indiana. Today, my English class has been canceled, and the interview at a make-shift homeless shelter has been bumped to tomorrow afternoon. So, here I am with...

Last week, I mentioned covering a story for Small Town Newspaper. The sentence from Pericles that was quoted at that event made such an impression on me, I built today's opinion column around it. Here you go : Last week, representatives from the Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank were in Dover to reveal findings from a recent study on hunger in America. During the presentation, Dan Flowers, the CEO of the food bank, quoted from Pericles’ Funeral Oration (460 B.C.), a speech the leader of ancient Athens delivered to mourn fallen soldiers and to promote democracy. The sentence from which Flowers quoted was this: “We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it.” Pericles recognized that in a democracy, especially one with an abundance of resources, the well-being of every citizen counts, and those citizens w...

This is what 11 1/2 inches of snow looks like.

Most of the snow we got awhile ago has melted, so now Small Town looks like an old faded blanket. It's like you opened the place up in Photoshop and moved the saturation slider so far to the left, it's practically black and white, only it doesn't look artistic; it just looks dingy. Well, it is February, and this is what February looks like without snow, I guess. That's why I'm not so bothered that we're in for a snow storm today. It's supposed to land sometime this afternoon and snow until morning, and by the time it heads east, we could have eight inches. Of course, this is a valley we're in, so we might only get a couple of inches, but either way, you won't be able to see the desaturated grass anymore. My pantry and fridge have run dry of some things—orange juice, coffee, coffee filters, anything at all for dinner the next few days—so going to the grocery store is on my schedule for today. When I get there, I expect to have to fight for a parking s...

Yesterday, I covered an event for Small Town Newspaper in which the guest speaker quoted Pericles to sum up the importance of financially supporting the local food pantry. He chose a sentence from the famous Funeral Oration, not that I knew what that was right away. In fact, I knew absolutely nothing about Pericles except a vague idea of how to spell his name. I wasn't able to jot down the quote on the spot, so I went home to look it up and to find out something about this Pericles. No one is perfect, and so of course he has some marks against him, but he has some bright spots as well. Pericles was a prominent citizen of Greece (c 495-429 b.c.). He was responsible for the beautification project of Athens, which resulted in the Acropolis, the Parthenon, lots of theaters and temples and, of course, jobs for the citizens who built the things. He supported the arts and made sure even the poorest of citizens were allowed to see theatrical performances at the expense of those who could a...

I have been cooking pretty regularly lately, and I have come to appreciate sauce as the antidote to blandness. Here are three amazing sauces that have made life so much brighter, even if you don't judge the quality of life by the food you eat. I hate to sound so base as to suggest your belly should be your god, but what's the harm in being happy with food? First, I did some free graphics work for someone living in Italy, and he recently "paid" me with a bottle of Italian balsamic vinegar. Lovely. I followed this simple recipe to liven up some tilapia that was pan-fried in butter and oil for about 2 minutes per side with nothing but salt and pepper to dress it up. 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar 1 clove garlic, minced 1 stick unsalted butter, chilled Simmer the vinegar and garlic in a small saucepan until it's like syrup. This doesn't take long, so don't let it burn. Take the pan off the heat and whisk in the butter one tablespoon at a time until it's all blen...

Harriet Tubman kicked ass. I couldn't very well say that in an opinion piece for Small Town Newspaper, though, so I said this instead in honor of Freedom Day: Today is National Freedom Day, a day President Truman officially set aside to commemorate Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 signing of the proposal for the 13th amendment. The amendment declaring slavery to be illegal wasn’t ratified until December of that same year, but February 1st has remained a day to honor the importance of freedom. It’s a universal ambition. With the historic significance of this day in mind, the U.S Postal Service issued a stamp on February 1, 1978 to honor Harriet Tubman. She was a woman who suffered under a constitution that once excluded her, who knew what it meant to live without the freedom the 13th amendment would offer. Tubman was born a slave in 1822, or it might have been 1820. The birthday of someone considered the property of another wasn’t always significant enough to document. She and her family were...