Scout Moves

I discovered Manteresting.com the other day—it's a website that launched in February with 5,000 hits the first day and increasingly more every day since. Manteresting is the male response to Pinterest, because the founding men decided Pinterest is too girly. It is pretty girly, although not by design. The homepage and masthead are neutral, and the logo is a red generic font. But 80 to 95 percent of the users are women, so quite a few of the images they post are a little feminine. Not all, but many. You know what would affect that situation?—interesting to note, I just backspaced over the question "You know what would solve that problem" because I realized the feminine bent of Pinterest isn't a problem but a circumstance. Having more men using the site and posting more "manly" images would balance out the feel of Pinterest. But instead of leading the way, two guys started Manteresting because you can't make money or a name for yourself if you're ...

Last weekend, a friend texted and asked if I wanted to go out for dinner and a movie with some other women—our husbands, it seems, were going to be playing poker, so let’s go. We saw a Reese Witherspoon flick that was unremarkable, as all Reese Witherspoon flicks are, but I did find something remarkable in the previews. Next Wednesday, March 21, theaters around the country will be showing Casablanca , the original classic from 1942 in honor of its 70th anniversary. Everything is about marketing, though, so I have to acknowledge this one-day screening is also about promoting the release of the digitized DVD coming out from Turner Classic Movies. I was so excited, I pulled out my silenced cell phone to make note of the event. The woman sitting beside me laughed at me for doing that, but that’s just because she doesn’t understand my connection with classic movies. They aren’t just films. They’re living, breathing things that are woven into my very being. If you cut me, I bleed cell...

Do you ever just get tired? I do. When I reflect on subjects we (and by we, I mean the constipated elements who seem to have missed the first go around) hash and then re-hash, I just get tired. We're really still talking about contraception? At least in the U.S., we decided to make them legal in the 60s, so why are we still even talking about them and whether or not women deserve to have them covered by insurance?  And why, in 2012, do we still need a Black History Month—why haven't we thoroughly incorporated the black race into our history books already? Same goes for Women In History Month, which we're in the middle of as I write. And specifically, today is International Women's Day. Why, for the love of all that is right, do we still need a day to remind the world that millions of women on this planet are just barely hanging on by a thread because the society they happened to have been born in thinks they are of little value and heaps suffering down upon their head...

Months and months ago, Eustacia would say things like, "I saw that on Pinterest," or "I want to make the things I found on Pinterest." I had no idea what she was talking about, and when she described this new website she was spending time with, I couldn't picture it. And honestly, I didn't want to. I didn't think I had room in my day or in my head for another website to check in with every day. But I finally gave in. I was afraid it would become an obsession, a thing to glue me to my chair as I scrolled the endless posting of photographs. At first I would pop in hoping for an interesting recipe, and two hours later, I would find I hadn't blinked for too long, and my jaw had gone slack. I've managed to be disciplined about how I use Pinterest, though, and only stop on the postings that I find particularly interesting. I discovered something yesterday that I hope does not become a trend, because I think it would completely alter the site and ru...

Baxter the Dog has had access to our back patio from day one. He rings a bell on the back door, and we let him out to go potty. Sometimes he also wades on top of the pool cover while he's out there, or barks at the neighbor dogs or climbs up onto the hillside for some mischief. He seemed to need more space than what that area provides, space with grass and views, so we installed an invisible fence for him, and he's practically trained already. My home office is in the basement, and he hangs out there with me while I work. He also rings the basement door bell to be let out where he can roam with limits. Just yesterday I allowed him to roam in the yard by himself for the first time. I can see most of the yard from my office window, and I kept tabs on him. When I would lose sight of him, I'd run out to check, and he was never more than a few yards just around the corner, and if I said, "Baxter, come!" he'd come trotting within view. There is a horse in the ya...

When I travel, I pack a bag to keep myself amused, and I think of it as an Activity Bag. When the girls were little, I would pack Activity Bags for them with fruit snacks, crayons and coloring books, little travel games, audio CDs and maybe a movie if we had a DVD player in the minivan. My personal Activity Bags don't have crayons and fruit snacks—it's a pity. It usually includes a book or two, a notebook and pencil, some Chapstick, some M&Ms, mints, my iPod and my iPad for magazines and Angry Birds. When I get bored with one thing like reading or listening to music, I dig around in the bag for something else to do. Last week on the flight home from Hawaii, I had read and listened and played, and then I went to sleep. When I woke up, the plane was dark, and it was somewhere between 2 and 3 in the morning with a few hours left before Chicago. So, I plugged headphones into the armrest and tuned into the stupid TV. There was a sitcom, and then came a documentary. For a m...

After three years of writing columns for Small Town Newspaper, I've done Martin Luther King day. There isn't much else I can say about it other than what I've already said. And with so many people still living who knew the man personally, it seems best to let them speak to the occasion of MLK Day. But despite all the talk—all the interviews and news stories and columns—I haven't heard anything about one of King's great mentors, Howard Thurman, the man who met Gandhi personally and counseled King decades before the civil rights became a national movement. So, here is my column for today's edition .

No, it's not really. That was Monday, but my weekly columns for Small Town Newspaper don't appear on Mondays anymore. They now appear on Thursdays, so I'm reworking my schedule and thinking in new terms. For two years, I have written with Mondays in mind—what happened on a particular Monday, what Monday holiday are we celebrating, and the like. It's a new day. So, for this first new day with the new schedule, here is my column as written for Small Town Newspaper , the Thursday edition. It's about being messy and about how there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In my living room and kitchen, I'm pretty tidy. My bathroom, my side of the counter at least, is free and clear of debris. But my desk is my space and my space alone, and if I choose to spread out and be a mess, that's my business. It's where I keep the things that belong solely to me. Not only are my music and knitting and a few recipes there, I have little toys—a miniature Etch-A-Sketch...

Microsoft is researching uses for its new camera, a thing they call SenseCam. You wear it like a badge, and it senses your surroundings, automatically snapping photos of what you see all day long. Then, you download the images to a computer and review your day. There really are good uses for such a thing, and I've written today's column for Small Town Newspaper about it. When my father had Alzheimer's, he had trouble recognizing people he knew, and we could gauge the progression of his disease by which people he had lost in his head. If he couldn't remember the name of his neighbor, that was one thing, but when he couldn't remember our names or failed to recognize us as people he knew at all, that was something else entirely. And when he reached the stage where he didn't recognize his own reflection in the mirror, then we knew he was pretty far in the reaches of the disease. For a long time, my mother liked to tell a story about how my father would talk to h...

I love this photo of Charles Babbage because he looks like the quintessential Dickens character, sitting firmly in his chair, hands clasped, mouth set against the rabble that gets on his last nerve. He actually compiled a list of 165 nuisances he encountered over an 80-day period all perpetrated by "the mob," as he called the common classes. He particularly disliked organ grinders, saying, "It is difficult to estimate the misery inflicted upon thousands of persons, and the absolute pecuniary penalty imposed upon multitudes of intellectual workers by the loss of their time, destroyed by organ-grinders and other similar nuisances." So, basically he sat in the chambers of his Better People Societies, glared out the window and barked, "Get off my lawn!" Although, if you look closely, there is a hint of mischievous humor in his expression. It may take mischievous humor to make a list of things that annoy you. It may also take some of that to think aga...

War and defense and national security do not stop for a holiday, even Christmas. It's a year-long, around-the-clock prospect, protecting a nation is. I find that disheartening, but then I learned that in the midst of all of the ominous work it does, NORAD tracks Santa Claus every year, and millions of kids around the world check in to find the big elf's coordinates on Google Earth. NORAD maintains a website for Santa trackers , with games, student videos from around the world, a countdown clock and information about Santa and NORAD. The site links to organizations that help veterans, too, so a kid can play a game and then learn something about wounded soldiers or military personnel who wouldn't mind receiving a card now and then. In the big picture, tracking Santa may seem like just a band-aid, but band-aids are good things. We could use more of them, I think, and so I've written my weekly column about NORAD's Santa tracking and the man who started it all, Col. ...

I am in full Christmas mode these days, between wrapping presents and decorating the tree, performing in a holiday concert and planning for returning daughters—how does one prepare a Christmas meal for vegetarians and omnivores all seated at the same table? In keeping with the spirit, here is my column as it appeared in yesterday's edition of Small Town Newspaper. Please, enjoy.

There have just been a few gift requests I can remember making in adulthood—I asked for a telescope for my birthday one year, and last year I asked for a bottle of Chanel and a camera for Christmas. I remember getting the telescope which is now in the trash, and although I didn't get the perfume or camera, I bought those things for myself in January. I just don't think in terms of what I might want as a gift. That could mean that I buy what I want when I want it—like the perfume and the camera—or that could mean I'm not a big shopper. Or maybe it's a combination of two things. This year when No. 1 asked what I wanted for Christmas, I sent her a link to boots I think I might need this winter while walking the dog out there in the big winter wonder land, and I pointed her to Crabtree & Evelyn's La Source body wash. I don't know what's in the stuff, but I'm hooked. Other than that, I don't want or need or have expectations for anything. Even m...

My mother lives at an assisted living facility these days. When she goes out, people she knows will greet her and tell her how lovely she looks and will then say, "How do you like your new home?" She puts on her best public smile and says, "Well, it's hard to call it home, but it's where I live." She refuses to accept the place as home even though she was desperately lonely in her own house and felt awkward and lonely when she lived with my sister. It's just the way she is. But when I spent some time with her a week ago, I saw how all the residents looked after each other, and they were all so friendly. And I thought how assisted living isn't such a bad idea. Granted, I fantasize about living in a commune or owning a big inn I can fill with people who could use a little help, a little assistance. In response to my visit with my mother, here is today's column for Small Town Newspaper. And if you've got five minutes, watch this video of a ...

Marie Curie at 16 When Husband and I were first married, I would be confronted with certain challenges, tasks to complete or problems to solve, and my first response would be something like, "I can't do that. I didn't go to school for that." And Husband would repeatedly reject my fear of the unfamiliar. But it wasn't so much the unfamiliar that made me balk. It was my feelings of inferiority for not having finished college. I didn't have (and still don't have) a degree or even a certificate of completion, and that lack of experience and paper suitable for framing had me feeling I had no choice but to sit on my hands and watch someone else achieve the things I dreamed of. Despite my achievements to date, I still have that sense. It just lays low most of the time. But then I come across a story like that of Marie Curie's. I don't mean the one about her isolating radium and dying from the process. I mean the one about how she refused to sit on h...

I met the owner of one of Small Town's largest companies the other day, and he was complaining that he has trouble attracting new employees who are willing to live in this town. They'll take the job he offers, but then they buy a house in Jackson or Perry, parts of Canton north of here where there are better restaurants and better shopping. The schools are better, and the atmosphere isn't so inbred. He was actually making his complaint in the context of a conversation about upgrading our high school. If we had a better high school, he said, people would live here, which would do wonders for our real estate market, our general cash flow and the overall growth of the community. In turn, more businesses would be attracted to the area, which would bring more people and so on. We all know that it isn't just the schools that send people north on the highway, and we have a long way to go to be appealing to the outside world, but I saw his point. Start with the schools, and t...

As afraid as I am of spiders, my fear of real poverty tops it. I'm not talking about living on a budget, eating out less or skipping vacations several years in a row. I know how to do that. The kitchen in our first apartment was a renovated walk-in closet with a one-piece oven/sink/mini-fridge unit that looked like Lucile Ball could have used it in black and white. I drove a 1978 Datsun that was given to us as a gift—in 1985. The finish had worn off, and I had to have it tuned up once a month or so (remember when you had to do that to cars?) because it would stall every time I came to a stop. Try driving in New Jersey under those conditions. And we ate Meatless Mondays (and a few other days of the week) before Meatless Mondays were cool. I have a particular memory—in the heat of the summer, we had one window air conditioner that we installed in the bedroom, and we would sit at the foot of the bed eating our spaghetti and watching our tiny black and white TV with the cat, Franklin...

 For a full week after Steve Jobs died, my Facebook newsfeed was filled with tributes from people who either loved Mac products or admired the man's work ethic or were moved by his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. I was about to link to that speech, but seriously, it was quoted so many times I'm surprised you don't have it memorized by now. One of Husband's brothers works at a Mac store in Chicago, and he posted some moving photos of the store front that week—people had plastered the window/walls with Post-It notes like tiny sympathy cards. You couldn't turn on the television without some kind of news coverage about Jobs or the speech or the history of Apple. But then one day one of my more cynical Facebook friends called Uncle. And her comment inspired today's column in Small Town Newspaper . We need a hero, and more than one who innovates and creates, we need one who cures cancer.

My weekly column was in yesterday's edition of Small Town Newspaper as always, but I was focused on introducing Baxter, so I didn't point to it. I'll do that now— Here is my column about International Women's Friendship Month . It's more about my friendships, and not really anything about the fact a sorority started this focus a few years ago and how it has gone international. Who cares about them, really, and how the thing got started? I have men friends who are as important to me as the women I love, and I can say just about the same thing about them as I can say about the women, but they don't fit into the category this month. Just so they know and don't feel slighted. Actually, that's not likely, is it? Women are always so concerned about how each other feels, but it seems to me most men wouldn't feel slighted at all. And on a different note, here is the Baxter Photo of the Day. Yesterday was exhausting, trying to figure out the puppy thing...

Today is the anniversary of the discovery of the Lascaux cave in France, and I think that's worth calling attention to, so I've written my column for Small Town Newspaper on the subject. You can read it here . There are plenty of papers and discussions arguing whether or not these paintings are art or simply drawings, so let me chime in with what I think. This is art. There are such subtle techniques in these paintings of animals and geometric shapes, with thought put into color and style. There is air brushing and stamping and painting done with animal-hair brushes. And among the 2,000 images, there are different styles to suggest different artists. The animals display the variations of their natural character, which took time to observe and intentional planning and execution. Antlers on the deer-like animals are varied and even whimsical, and I can't help but think of Dr. Seuss characters when I look at them. I really doubt the people who painted these cave wal...