Scout Moves

If you have followed the news, you'll know that Ohio's Senate Bill 5 has shoved us into the fight to protect union rights, particularly union rights for public employees. Thousands of people have gone to Columbus to give strength to the numbers, and when the governor locked the doors to the state house, they stood outside in the freezing winter weather. Former governor Ted Strickland has put the word out to send more "troops" by joining the crowd in Columbus, and everyone with an opinion has a strong one either side or the other. So, it isn't just distant lands making a stink. It's my home state, or at least the state where I have lived for 23 years. In light of the current situation, here is this week's column in Small Town Newspaper.

Allow me to sound like an old fool for minute by saying "the Internet continues to amaze me." It really does. It's so much a part of my daily life now, but I have vivid memories of life before the Internet, so I mean it when I say the thing amazes me still. Here are just a few examples of how I used it to save the day just this weekend alone. 1) I was working on a column for Small Town Newspaper about the virtues of e-books, and I had a Thoreau quote I wanted to use about books being the treasured wealth of the world and an inheritance for everyone who reads them. Lovely idea there, don't you think?. To begin with, I found the quote by googling "quotes books" and following a chain of results to the Thoreau sentence. Not wanting to use it out of context, I googled the entire sentence and discovered it to be lifted from Walden . So, using my iPad, I downloaded the full text of Walden and read the page that contained the quote. I have the book in paperback, ...

We're having some remodeling done in our house, which in one sense, is a nest. We have a large family room that was added onto the house about 10 years ago, and almost immediately after we moved into it, Husband started seeing things we could have done differently. And now we're finally getting around to doing them. We're getting rid of the Lowe's quality window shades and replacing them with plantation shutters. We're painting the walls, going from a blueish-green to a dark yellowbrowntanish color. We're shrinking the size of the fireplace in order to lower the mantel in order to mount a TV above it; and behind this television, we're having a stone wall constructed that will go all the way to the ceiling. We're throwing out the carpet that is now spotted with coffee stains and cat puke and replacing it with wood floors. And we're replacing the furniture, which is showing its age anyway. The problem with the room has always been a lack of focus. You...

Ohio seems to be ground zero for controversial legislation these days, or at least proposed legislation. Between anti-abortion bills and a bill to end collective bargaining rights of public workers, we're on fire. There will be a huge demonstration at the capitol tomorrow to protest the collective bargaining bill, and it's anybody's guess if it will be effective or if some of our representatives will leave the state a la Wisconsin democrats. In the middle of all of this, we're going to set a record this year for the execution of death-row inmates, despite a shortage of the drugs we've traditionally used. Now, we're using a single drug, something like what vets use to put down cats and dogs. Nice, eh? Here's what I have to say about that in today's edition of Small Town Newspaper.

We're doing some work in our family room—painting, replacing floors, sprucing up the fireplace... I should say we're having the work done and not doing it ourselves, but I do have to pack up the little things that will get in the way of all of this work. Yesterday, I removed a ton of books, boxed up some framed pictures and relocated things like vases and whatnot. And last night, I packed up my china teacup collection that has graced the upper ledge for ten years. They live on a high ledge I can't reach without a very tall ladder, so you can imagine the dust that has accumulated in those cups and on those saucers over a decade. Oh, the dust and the lady bug carcasses. Before I boxed them all up, I set them out and had a good look at them to remind myself why I like these things so much. I've been collecting them since I was 12 years old, and I have them from around the world—China, Japan, Occupied Japan, Hong Kong, France, Bavaria, England, Italy, Denmark, Czecho-Slovak...

I didn't forget to say this yesterday. I was just occupied with another topic. So, one day late, here is yesterday's opinion column in Small Town Newspaper . This postcard was one my grandfather sent to my grandmother in the early 1900s before they were married. I'm not sure why I have it, but I think it's lovely.

Really, if you do it right, Beethoven can levitate an entire orchestra and full chorus, and after the timpani finishes ringing from its final beat, everyone slowly lowers back to the floor. But it was nice up in the air for a few minutes. The philharmonic performed Consecration of the House and Beethoven's 9th symphony Saturday evening. We didn't sell out the house this time around, which is a shame, but to all those people who attended our concert in November but not this one, it's your loss. We did just fine without you. Still, it would have been nice if you'd come. I had a sense from my spot on the stage that we weren't operating at 100 percent in the first two movements, but I can't hear everything from the right side. And there was a timpani set directly behind me that may have colored my perspective. The second movement is conducted in one (each measure gets one beat), and there's no room for drifting off. If you count accurately, you play accurately. ...

Yes, the two things are related, or at least they are related in my house for today. Maybe not tomorrow. We'll see. I split up my days by morning and afternoon, with morning activities including things like writing a newspaper column or tutoring at the ESL class or doing laundry and sweeping the floor. And afternoons are spent doing other things like planning dinner, having lunch with friends or working on newspaper stories that involve interviews. This week, however, the afternoons are devoted to Beethoven, specifically Beethoven's 9th symphony. My orchestra is in its 75th year, and as a special birthday present, we'll be performing this symphony this coming Saturday evening. It may seem as though this is a gift for the public, but I actually think it's a gift to ourselves. It's great to play—exhilarating, fun, challenging, dreamy. And for the fourth horn player, it has a solo. Who the ham sandwich writes a solo for the fourth horn player? Beethoven, that's who...

Husband turned 50 over the weekend, and we did our best to make it a special event. Sometimes in our house, someone will try to get away with having a birthday month instead of a single day, milking the anniversary of their birth for all it's worth. This time around, we allowed a birthday weekend. For a while there, we talked about celebrating this milestone in Hawaii, but there was no way to get both girls there at the same time. They have different spring break weeks, of course, and neither could miss more than a day or two of school. We tried up until the last minute last week, with the girls and I going back and forth over the options until we finally had to give up. Husband had talked up the idea of taking ballroom dancing lessons once, so I resurrected that idea and decided to give beginner lessons to him as a gift. That idea morphed into having No. 1 and her Boyfriend fly out to join us for a lesson as a gift enhancement, and that was Plan B after Hawaii was shelved. But whi...

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to serve as a judge for Power of the Pen, a writing competition for 7th-and 8th-grade students in Ohio. Schools send their writing champions to compete against each other, like they would send their swimmers or football players or basketball players, but instead of playing a sport, they demonstrate their creative writing skills. Each school sends a team of six students in each grade, and the kids sit quietly in rooms with prompt readers. The readers gives them an open-ended subject prompt, and the kids get 40 minutes to write out long-hand, and there are three rounds of writing. As a judge, part of a team of three, I helped read through the top ten submissions in each round per grade—that's more than 120 stories—and we chose a winner per round. At the end of the day, we met all the students in the school auditorium and announced the winners. There were other winners beyond those we selected—other judges gave them points for certain things, so lo...

So, one-third of the United States is caught up in a megastorm, and central Ohio is part of the whole mess. Where I live, we didn't get snow, although it's snowing a little at the moment. We got freezing rain instead, and yesterday morning we woke up to a solid coating of ice. Schools were closed, which meant my ESL class was canceled, and I got a snow day like I was a school girl or something. This is the view of a tree top by my house—notice the used bird's nest filled with old snow and encased in new ice: And this is the Dr. Zhivago patio table: In honor of the gifted hibernation day, I baked a batch of brownies using a recipe in this month's edition of Bon Appetit . Brownie ingredients are brownie ingredients, for the most part, but taking the extra step of browning the butter before mixing it in with the rest of the goo is genius. Genius! I tell you. In this pot are the best of it before the flour, and it was all I could do to not lick the spoon: And here is the fi...