Scout Moves

Eustacia is a film studies major with an art minor at college, and she has an interest in photography. She likes to take her camera around campus on nice days and shoot interesting images of interesting things. This week, she won a photo competition at school with this image—the girl in the background is one of her friends. Cool, huh?

I had a flashback experience last night over dinner. Husband is away on a golf trip for a few days, so at dinner time, I nosed around in the refrigerator to see what I should make for my evening meal. I had set some salmon aside the day before, so I grabbed that. I grabbed the asparagus in the vegetable drawer, and then I saw it—a plastic container of leftover mashed potatoes. My mother was raised during the Depression, so she never threw out a single spoonful of food. She saved everything and figured out how to use it the next day or the day after that, and sometimes the day after that. I remember one of her rare cooking instructions when I was a teenager, and she thought I needed to know how to make potato pancakes. With this container of leftovers, I followed those instructions from more than 30 years ago. I mixed the potatoes with a beaten egg, some diced onion and some bread crumbs. I formed them into little pancakes, fried them in oil about 4 to 5 minutes per side over medium he...

Look at this magnificent coffee maker. Isn't it a beaut? It's a DeLonghi Gran Dama. It makes dark, rich coffee by the cup, freshly ground and brewed on command. It also makes espresso, cappuccino and lattes with the same ease. We bought the thing at Williams-Sonoma last April and have loved every minute of it. At first, I had trouble justifying the expense because it seemed almost immoral to pay so much for a coffee maker, but I got over that. Good coffee is important. But then in early February, it stopped working, and through a series of phone calls to customer service, I was instructed to ship it to a certain repair shop in New York. They specialize in fixing this kind of coffee maker, apparently. So, I called the shop in New York, and they gave me specific instructions as to how to ship the thing so it will arrive in one piece. They said to take it to a UPS store and have them pack it up carefully. I did just that and shipped it off. We had lost the receipt from Williams-So...

When I was growing up, my mother made a cake from a mix every Saturday, and it served as nightly dessert for a week. We drank Coke with dinner, ate fried everything like good southerners; and snacked from a drawer filled with Twinkies, Archway Cookies, Chips Ahoy and Mars Bars. My father put all of those things in his lunch box, and they were free for the taking. It's no wonder that during my first semester away at college, I lost nearly 10 pounds. Dinners in my own house are much more balanced, and the snacking choices are more moderate, sometimes much to the dismay of the others in the house. While I currently have a cornmeal cake with lemon glaze on the counter, we usually don't have dessert, and we don't drink soda with dinner. Granted, we drink wine, but the sugar content hardly compares. It hasn't always been so healthful here—one summer, the girls were so demanding at lunch time, we had drive-thru fastfood crap almost every day just to shut them up, and we even p...

I was sitting on my patio last night waiting for time to turn the flank steak on the grill, and I was admiring my neighbors' dogwoods. Their backyard is natural with woodsy trees and ground cover with a few dogwoods sprinkled here and there. The blossoms act like speckles among the brown and green with the blue sky as the backdrop. So, after dinner, I painted. Here is the first attempt at dogwoods not using my neighbors' backyard for inspiration. Mmmmeh, I said to myself and tried again. With their yard in mind, I came up with this. A little better maybe, but not quite what I'm looking for. I'll have to work on that. With the paint left in the tray, I created a closeup of a budding plant. And with a photo of No. 1's cat, Nicholas, in mind (left), here is a closeup of a cat. I used frisket to mask out the whiskers and learned something—don't try to remove the frisket until the paper around it is dry. Otherwise, you just dig a big hole with the eraser. I used Phot...

This past weekend, Husband and I flew to Berkeley to spend a few days with No. 1. She's winding up her first year there but had a couple of days free for the old parents. Walking up and down those hills, I did indeed feel old. We spent time hanging around her apartment and tormenting her cat, Nickolas, and we went to Napa for most of Saturday where we toured the Hess Winery and had dinner at a lovely French restaurant in town. On Sunday, we took the train into San Francisco and toured Alcatraz. It's something I've always wanted to do, and we managed to get tickets for an afternoon tour on a clear day. A clear day in San Francisco! We took the audio tour, which is the only way to see this place, because it gives you detailed descriptions from former guards and inmates, and the eerie sound effects give you a slight sense of what it would be like to be held in the prison—whistles, slamming metal doors, metal cups clammering on steel bars. The lesson here—don't break the la...

I like to promote certain causes as they arise, like Earth Day events or cancer awareness events, but I can't quite get behind this idea we should all turn off our TVs for a week. This week has been declared National Turnoff Week to encourage people to do other things besides sit on their fat asses all day flipping channels. But I like TV in its place, and I think we should be encouraged to dip into most things in moderation. So, here is today's opinion piece in Small Town Newspaper: ••• An organization called TV-Free America is asking Americans to turn off our televisions this week—seven full days without a TV—a boob tube—an idiot box. “Chewing gum for the eyes,” is how Frank Lloyd Wright described it. “A vast wasteland” is what former FCC chairman Newton Minow said of it in his speech titled “Television and the Public Interest,” which he delivered to a group of broadcasters. He was chastising them for artless and boring programming that was certainly not developed with the pu...

Very early this morning, we're leaving for a visit with No. 1 in Berkeley. Since I didn't have time to make art this week and don't have time to put something together this morning, I give you this little umbrella that I painted a couple of years ago when I first tried to learn watercolor. I'm not sure if it will be raining in California, but it will be a little chilly.

The closing on the lake house is any day now—it was supposed to be this morning, but it's been postponed. As a pictorial tribute to the place, here are some random things that used to be scattered around. First, this is a closeup of a bamboo thing that stood in the corner. It's over six feet tall and constructed of bamboo sticks tied in the middle so that it stands like a tee-pee, and it has random sticks perched in the center. It doesn't fit the mood of my house in Small Town, so a good friend has offered to give it a home. She loves it. There is a sort of mantel at the house that looks as if it should have a fireplace beneath it, although it doesn't. This is what I had on this mantel, paper flowers and tiny chairs. And I had this one-legged bird on a bookshelf. And this clay lantern that was a gift from a sister. I like random kitchen decorations, particularly chickens, so these were hidden above the cabinets. Because the walls don't extend to the ceilings, you co...

Yesterday I was scheduled to interview a 104-year-old woman for Small Town Newspaper. The woman, Maria (not her real name), is the great-aunt of a friend of mine, and this friend thought her aunt's story would make a good article. She was right, but Maria didn't think so. When I arrived at her house, she let me in and shook my hand, offered a pleasant smile and showed me to a seat in her immaculate living room. I sat down and took out my notebook, pencil at the ready, and that's when Maria said she was not interested in any newspaper articles. She didn't care for the publicity. It didn't matter that I suggested people would like to know how she has managed to live to this remarkable age and live so well at that. No deal. So, I closed my notebook and asked if I could just stay for a chat since I was already there, and she thought that would be OK. Maria told me about how she walks to the salon every other week except during bad weather when the hair dresser picks her...

I went to a middle school that was new and apparently modern in its approach to education, as was its principal. My mother never cared for his new ideas that allowed kids to touch the walls as they walked down the hallway or even skip if they wanted, but I always liked the guy. He had an assistant principal who cracked the whip, which left him free to be more high-minded. The building had educational wings that spread out from the center, and in that center was a two-story, glass-walled library you could see from almost any spot throughout the day. I didn't think this thoroughly when I was 11, but now in retrospect, I believe that library with its transparent walls was a metaphor for education and the new principal's ideas—education should be approachable and attainable and not something kept out of reach of a kid standing on tip-toes. Just an idea. Anyway, that library and the experiences I had there were the inspiration for this opinion piece in today's edition of Small T...

I have discovered frisket, a mask for painting. Using a stylus, you apply it to paper in areas you want to keep white, let it dry, and paint over it. Then you remove it with an eraser. It seems the perfect tool for painting birch trees, which I am partial to, so I gave it a shot. With people, it seems best to travel in a pack with even numbers so no one ends up sitting alone. But with objects, I prefer odd numbers. I don't even think about it intentionally—I just find myself arranging in threes or fives. Here is the first scene: And the second—I think this would look better if I had extended the fall foliage farther down in relation to the trees and had less greenery: Then, I mixed some of the colors in the palette to create a sort of sepia color family and came up with this: Now my head is filled with things I can paint that are white—eggs, my cat where he isn't black, flowers. What else can I add to that list? And for some repair work: I took a painting from last week that wa...

Spring is going on. Take a look: First, here is the view from my driveway after a remarkable snow storm: Now, here is the same view from this morning. Here is my mailbox after that same snow storm and a few passes by an angry snow plow: And here is my mailbox and the surrounding blooming foliage this morning. "It's a blue-butterfly day here in spring"—the birds are singing, the grass is green and the breeze is a warm one.

I was driving Eustacia back to college yesterday after a brief Easter break, and I listed for her all the things that will take place between now and June—three orchestra concerts with related rehearsals, two band concerts with related rehearsals, Eustacia's band concert at college, a dinner I'll be catering (more on that later), planning a trip to Romania (more on that later, too), packing up of the lake house, writing eight weekly columns, visiting No. 1 in Berkeley, covering a few random stories for Small Town Newspaper as needed, moving Eustacia out of her dorm for the summer; not to mention the usual cooking, cleaning, laundry. Of course, none of this has to be done all at once, and plenty of people are far busier than I and under a lot more pressure. But when I verbalized this list, my heart started to beat a little faster, and I had to take big breath for sufficient oxygen. Having a cold doesn't help with proper breathing as it is. In the interest of putting our task...

Last Saturday, my orchestra had its first rehearsal for our upcoming concert that will feature, among other things, movements from Holst's The Planets, which inspired the following opinion piece in today's Small Town Newspaper. I didn't make it to the rehearsal, one of probably only two or three I have missed in my nine years with this group, because I felt absolutely icky. I can't think of another adjective to describe it—sinus pressure, light headedness, slight fever on and off, general lack of interest in being alert. I felt marginally tolerable until I stood up, and then everything ached, and I only wanted to sit back down again. For lunch, I made chicken salad on a croissant with muenster cheese, and I looked at the plate and sighed. It looked fine, sounded great, but I couldn't work up enough energy to be interested—I only made the thing because it was noon, and I thought I should eat. I hated missing a rehearsal, but I'll be fine by this coming weekend f...

This week, I'm in lake mode, so I decided to work blind and create some images that remind me of the view from my lake house. By "work blind," I mean I tried not to look at specific photos because that never works for me. I get stuck in trying to recreate what I see externally instead of what I see internally. Sound fishy? Well, I have quite an imagination. I decided to work on a tree line along the inlet where the water is decidedly green. Things got out of hand, and this is what happened. What the....? I think I like the mottled leaf texture, though. So, I tried again with fewer trees and fewer leaves: And then I got crazy with the water and made this soupy mess. At first, I thought it was a disaster, but the more I look at it, the more I like it, especially from a distance: This is an experiment in texture—mottled trees, flowing water, wispy grass. I call it a river. What do you call it? And finally, I had some time to play with mixing paintings with photos, so I blend...

Every now and then I take a peek at 1000 Awesome Things , a sweet blog that champions awesome but simple things, like laughing until you cry, finding money in your pocket or watching a movie in the basement with your friends. A few days ago, the site paid tribute to junk drawers, and I was reminded that I have not just one junk drawer but several. In fact, open any drawer in my house, and you're likely to find junk, just stuff no one wants to throw away. I am not a hoarder, but you really do never know when you'll need something. So, I show you the main junk drawer in my kitchen. Just on the surface without digging around to see what might be rolling around on the bottom of this thing, here is a list of what I see: • lint removers (2) • an empty box from a cat pheromone dispenser • a Cubs baseball • paint brushes • a label maker • decks of cards (at least 2) • an old wallet • a roll of packing tape • two books about frogs, one in English and one in Portuguese • a Chinese yuan •...