Scout Moves

Who knew that adding a puppy to the mix would make life so complicated? People with puppies, I guess, but we had no idea. Specifically, I had no idea that my entire day would have to revolve around the digestive cycle of the puppy. I keep thinking that once he’s house trained, life will become easier, but in the mean time, I’m tired. I took a break with the Wyrd Sisters Tuesday evening, and when I got home, Husband announced that Baxter seemed to have diarrhea. Good night. So, I took Baxter out one more time before bedtime and then tucked him into his crate for the night. The next morning, I got up around 6:15 (the time he goes out for his first pee) and found the little guy caked in poop. I mean snout to tail tip. He had blown up in the crate a few times in the night but didn’t make a peep, so we didn’t know there was a problem. I carefully took him out to take care of business and then wrapped him a towel; and then I carried him straight up the stairs, dropped in the tub and s...

This slop doesn't look so appetizing I'm afraid, but believe me when I say it's tasty, tasty enough to save the left overs for lunch the next day, which is saying something. We throw out our share of mediocre food. I came up with this concoction in another round of cooking with what was on hand and without a recipe. I had bought packaged tortellini and Niman Ranch sweet Italian sausage with the idea of making tortellini soup, but I decided to go another direction with the ingredients. I started with a medium sauce pan where I poured some olive oil and then added about a cup of diced onion. After the onions were soft, I added two cloves of minced garlic, and 30 second later, I added a healthy splash of Chardonnay. I let that simmer a minute until the wine began to evaporate, and then I added two medium cans of diced tomatoes, salt, pepper, oregano, basil, sugar. While that simmered, I boiled the tortellini and grated a bowl full of Parmesan. When the pasta was ready, ...

In our house, coffee reigns. It must be dark, rich and flavorful—and black. Not brown. Not the color of tea. Not the color of stump water. Black. So, when our coffee maker started disappointing us every morning, and we started drinking the coffee it made purely out of obligation, I decided to take steps to fix the problem. I bought a Keurig Special Edition and a couple of boxes of the strongest K-cups my grocery store offered–that would be an Italian roast marked "bold." The machine comes with a sample box of cups, so I used one for the test run, and I got what I was afraid I'd get, which is a cup of what looked like coffee but what tasted like hot water. I know someone who drinks a cup of hot water in the evenings, and I'm telling you she would have enjoyed this. So, for the next cup I used the Italian roast, and it was somewhat better, although when I asked Husband if he liked the coffee, he said, "Is that what that was?" We'll just have to keep ...

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...

The House of Cats has a puppy.  That’s the short of it, and now here’s the longer version. Husband and I have been talking about getting a dog for quite a while, but if you recall my stories of Big Mike the Cat, you’ll recognize why bringing a dog into the house of a neurotic feline might not have been a good idea. After Mike went to sleep this past January, I started thinking a dog might be OK. Husband wasn’t so sure, but in recent weeks, he rethought the idea. He has allergies, so I started looking for the kind of dog that is good for someone with allergies. Poodles fit that description, but we aren’t fond of poodles. They seem too prissy for us. And that’s when I thought of a goldendoodle, a cross between a golden retriever and a poodle. They have the temperament of a retriever and something like the coat of a poodle. They have the bulky body type of a retriever and the graceful stride of a poodle as well. All in all, they’re good mutts. I found a breeder about ...

As I mentioned the other day, I'm on a beer kick, specifically cooking with beer. I have made a pot of cheese fondue with Guiness, Mark Bittman's wheat bread , Bittman's cheese and cauliflower soup, and now Bittman's carnitas braised in wheat beer. Husband says nobody likes pork, but I know that's not true, and I know that pork braised in beer can only be good, don't you think? Or I should say, don't you know that, too? Pork shoulder is the cut of meat you use to make a good southern barbecue, and you cook it all day long so it's tender and flavorful and shreddable. So, when Bittman said to use pork shoulder for carnitas, I said OK. You don't cook the meat whole—you cut it into bite-sized pieces, which lets you cook it for just one hour instead of eight or nine, but here's what I learned about cutting pork shoulder into little pieces—1) cutting a hunk of meat up like that is enough to make a person a vegetarian. 2) I need sharper knives. I ...

I've been in a beer mood lately. I'm not a big beer drinker and would normally prefer a buttery Chardonnay or a crisp pinot to the stuff, but just lately I have opted for a  cold bottle of something or other. With my limited exposure to different kinds of beer and different brands, I can say my favorite is Great Lakes beer—Eliot Ness, Edmund Fitzgerald, Oktoberfest. The other day, though, my grocery store was offering samples of Blue Moon Harvest Pumpkin Ale. The 25-cent swig wasn't bad, so I bought a six-pack to share with my neighbor who has a basement refrigerator filled with different kinds of beer. I get the impression she's a bit of a connoisseur. With this brew-focus guiding me, I was drawn to a recent New York Times article by Mark Bittman about cooking with beer, and one of the recipes he suggested is Ale, Cheddar and Cauliflower Soup, so I made that for Sunday's lunch and served it with shrimp and lobster salad sandwiches. The combination was nice, b...

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...

Where was I ten years ago on September 11? I was at work, designing a cover for a romance book. I don't remember the title of the book or the subject matter, I only remember setting it aside because I couldn't possibly focus on a romance book knowing what was happening in my country. I'm sure I would have had the same reaction no matter the project—it just happened to be a romance book on my schedule that day. I'm guessing all of my coworkers set their work aside as well. Unaware of what was happening, I took a break from my work and walked down the long hall to the rest room, and as I opened the door, Mary from marketing said she'd heard an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. I envisioned a Cessna losing its way and smacking into the side of one of the towers, and I shrugged. As soon as I got back to my desk, though, I learned this was no two-seater plane. 2001 was a tough year financially, and we had made some cost cuts at work, and cable for the large co...

It’s that time of year, time for sweet corn. You know, knee high by the Fourth of July and all that. If you aren’t from a corn-growing state, you might not be familiar with that general rule of thumb that suggests planted corn should be knee high by early July. Ohio had an excessively wet spring this year, so corn growers were late in planting their fields; and in May, they were nervously calculating the millions of dollars they might be losing this season with each passing week. In early June, they were finally granted weather grace, and they scrambled to plant corn. I can see a corn field from my living room window, and I remember watching the farmer of that field planting at night by the light of his plow’s headlamps. This is the same field where goose hunters gather in the winter to shoot geese. Early on Sunday mornings, I can hear gunshots, and I know to look out and watch for their honking targets to fall from the sky. This field offers me a seasonal view of nature i...

I have always said this— I love the change of seasons. And I mean it. But just now I am clinging to Summer by its ankles as it pivots toward the door and leaves the room. Wait! Don't go yet! I call as I tighten my grip around its shin bone, and it pulls me across the floor, bunching up the summer rug beneath me, the green grass, snapdragons and sprawled out oregano now in folds. It's about to drag me through crunchy leaves and spiked acorns and withering herbs. So I plant my feet flatly against the door frame, knees locked and jaw set, as Summer shrugs and shakes me off with a fling of its foot. And empty handed, I reach out with splayed fingers, and I shout one last time, Wait! Not yet! Just one more day. Last week, Ohio experienced one of the hottest days of the summer, and then the next day we woke up to autumn with fall temperatures and rain and cloudy skies, and the forecast for the forseable future seems destined to plow straight ahead with no lookin...

I grew up watching the Chicago Cubs on WGN, but I never paid attention to the games. My mother was the avid fan in the house, the avid fan of just about any professional or college sport, in fact—football, boxing, basketball, baseball. We even watched roller derby, although I may have been the only one camped out in front of the set for that one. As an adult, the only sport I watch on TV with any real interest is baseball, particularly the Cleveland Indians, although once a Cubs fan, always a Cubs fan. That's one connection that cannot be strained by geography. A few years ago, we spent the summer seated right behind home plate, and while Husband and No. 1 followed every pitch and base hit, and while Eustacia and I ate candy and watched people, I became familiar with the players. I also became enamored with the ball park with all of its sights and smells and sounds, the rhythm of the cheering as related to the action on the field like a giant wave or excited outburst or corpor...

Last year, Husband and I bought a new washer and dryer set. After doing some research, we chose Samsung because they ranked highest in customer satisfaction and service, and they look great in the laundry room. They operate as I expected, but what I didn't expect was the chime that comes at the end of the cycle to tell you the machine has finished. The washer and dryer don't just ding or buzz. They play an entire song that I have come to enjoy so that I don't open the door until the final note. Silly, isn't it? Maybe it's not so silly. Maybe it's nice to have a machine that does something as daily-chore-like as washing and drying clothes do more than ding. It's nice to have a machine that sings to you, that offers a melody to let you know it's time to fold the clothes. I wouldn't mind if more machines in my house communicated with me through melody. The washer and dryer play a tune based on Schubert's " The Trout. " I'd lik...

My column in today's edition of Small Town Newspaper is about conquering the deep end. You can take that literally or as a metaphor—either way, it works. The piece is here . When I was a kid, the Knaver family down the street had a swimming pool, an oblong above-ground pool that was probably not more than four or four-and-a-half feet deep. When you're 12, that's pretty deep, but I don't recall being afraid in it. The Knaver girls were relatively generous with their pool and would invite the rest of the neighbor girls to swim, although they learned quickly how to use their pool to their advantage. One day, after inviting Linda and Kitty who lived next door to swim, the meanest Knaver girl told me I wasn't allowed because her mother didn't like my mother and didn't want me in her yard. That made no sense to me because our mothers had never interacted. There was that one time the same girl, who was sort of chubby, called me "fat" at the bus stop...

For the past three years, I have volunteered as a tutor for Even Start, a family literacy program that operated with federal funds, but the program is folding this week because Congress eliminated it back in the spring as part of the Continuing Resolution. Based on a study done several years ago that revealed some of Even Start's flaws, they determined it was a failure and not worth the $66.5 million we put into it annually (our local program operated on just $13o,000 annually). No one with a Yay vote stopped to consider that vast improvements were made to the program because of that early study, and there was no current study to show how effective the new and improved Even Start program had become, but it was a target, and that was that. There are other literacy programs around, but none of them, at least none of them locally, provides transportation and childcare for needy people who wouldn't otherwise be able to get an education. These are people who made bad decisions as...

I was twiddling my thumbs one day when Conductor Eric suggested I might be useful in promoting the Tuscarawas Philharmonic, the local orchestra (its link is in the sidebar). So, I thought about some options and decided what this group needs is a newsletter. I did some digging and discovered it didn't have one, and possibly never had one in its 75 years, although I can't confirm that. Every organization has a news letter these days because email and websites have made them cheap to produce. You can print them and mail them, but you aren't locked into that format, so why not go all out and keep people posted. I have this idea that connecting with fans and supporters and musicians and board members outside of concert performances might strengthen the sense of community of the group. And talking in detail about what goes on behind the scenes and offering insight into programming and personnel might strengthen the interest of people on the fringes. I talked to people about...

For today's column in Small Town Newspaper, I wrote about the birthday of Claude Debussy and what his music has meant to me over the years. You can read it here —I'd be honored. In it, I talked about La Cathedrale Engloutie, a piano piece I first learned in high school when I took lessons from the eccentric Mr. Stevesand, a bachelor with frazzled hair and dirty glasses who lived up on a hill with two cats who ate out of pans left sitting on the stove. Those are the things I remember most about the man, those and that he claimed to have difficult playing complex music because his fingers had grown so large. He was a big man, that Mr. Stevesand. The Cathedrale piece has crazy chords that require you to play two notes with one finger because there are so many notes to cover—six or seven with one hand, even. I would sit at our piano in the living room, and on days when my mother had reached her nutty limit, I would pound as hard as I could on those chords. Very satisfying, if...

I did something new yesterday. Alliance, Ohio has a symphony orchestra, and I filled in for an unwell horn player in its most recent concert. We performed at a park in Alliance as part of its annual Carnation Festival—the town is known as Carnation City. There is actually an interesting story behind that designation—in the 1860s, a doctor in Alliance who grew red carnations in his greenhouse ran for a congressional seat against his friend William McKinley. Before each debate, he gave McKinley one of his carnations, and McKinley wore them all the way to the White House. Now, every year on his birthday, red carnations are placed in the hands of a McKinley statue in Columbus. Well, back to the concert. This town is about an hour from Small Town, I know because it's where I used to go for horn lessons, and I had the route emblazoned in my brain. Still, for this fill-in concert, I often found myself showing up ridiculously early for rehearsals and even the concert—more on that ...

As usual my column appeared in yesterday's edition of Small Town Newspaper—you can read it here , if you want. I found the site, Combat Paper Project while nosing around the Internet a couple of weeks ago, and I thought it was worthy of some local attention. Plus, it put me in mind of the homemade paper projects my girls and I used to do when they were younger and how we took useless trash and turned it into one-of-kind things I think were beautiful. I still have a collection of the paper they made. We had a couple of small kits with framed screens and blotting paper, and on slow days, the girls would take off and let their imaginations go wild with paper. They would rip up scrap paper and throw it in a blender and then add other things—herbs, flowers, lavender from the back yard, ribbon, bits of rope, you name it. Then they would blend it all into a slurry, pour it into a tray, dip in the screen, and pull out something entirely new. You can let the new paper air dry, or y...

The 500 Words game has been revived, monitored by Dive at Small Glass Planet. This month's story is based on the photo here : Jean turned the corner and stepped down gingerly from the curb, letting his stronger knee bear the weight before allowing his age-worn one to manage the cobblestones. He winced in anticipation as he took the next step, but today seemed a good day, and he crossed the street to the café without any more strain than warranted a few winded groans. It was early, and the shops were just opening. A few grazers cased the fruit stand, one or two aimed for the bread shop and Jean set his course for one of the empty tables on the sidewalk. He set his jacket down in an empty chair and eased into the one beside it, and he exhaled with the sound of a man with weary bones. When the server delivered his croissant and coffee, he watched how adept she was at holding the silver tray with one hand, and how she kept it perfectly level without a sign of trembling. “I’d ...