Scout Moves

We're back from our vacation to Hawaii—got home just yesterday afternoon where the sky was gray, the wind was howling through the trees and snow was falling in clumps. We didn't get much more than a dusting in the end, but it looked like it was going to be a real blowout for a few minutes. I've spent the morning running every errand—pet store, post office, dry cleaners, liquor store, grocery store—and now I can catch my breath and reintroduce myself to the puppy. We think he grew in height and weight while we were away. So, we went to Hawaii, Honolulu more specifically, and the Kahala Resort to be exact. It's a hotel on the southeastern end of the island in a quiet residential area. The resort has a private beach, three restaurants, and a helpful concierge, so all you need is handy. View from our balcony. Every morning, we would wake up, open the doors to the balcony and have a gander at the ocean—I was surprised by the view every single day. "Oh yeah, ther...

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 .

I prefer not to walk Baxter, the big puppy, in my own neighbor despite the obvious convenience—slip on the harness, hook on the leash and off we go—because I hate walking the hills, and for some reason, the place seems desolate. Beside the occasional passing car, you could get to feel like you're the sole survivor after a global catastrophe. So when it's time to walk the dog, I'll often put us in the car and drive five minutes to the town park. Beyond the tennis courts, there is ball field after ball field, a wonderful playground funded by a women's group that literally baked cookies to raise money, and then a walking area with a kidney-shaped pond, trees and benches. You can walk up one hill to an access road to the town pool, then take that road down the hill to a little bridge, cross a tiny creek, and follow a path back to where you parked the car near the pond. On some days, I'm the only person walking there, but it never feels desolate. That is to say, I neve...

I made a sandwich for lunch today. Nothing to write home about, I know, but the process reminded me of the way my father would make sandwiches, and there's a story there. Daddy loved food, and I mean loved it. He would get up very early in the morning to pack his construction worker lunch, and he would knock around in the kitchen like he was making a feast for a whole family. He'sdmake two sandwiches, pack some chips, some Archway cookies, an apple, a Mars Bar or a Twinkie or both, and a big thermos full of coffee. It was never a chore for him. It was always a delightful task. On Sundays, we would often have a roast for lunch with the traditional sides, and we'd sit down at the table after church for the big meal of the day. Mama would pack away the leftovers, and later for dinner it was everyman for himself. Daddy would pull out sandwich fixin's from the fridge and lay them all out on the counter. There would be whole wheat bread, roast beef sliced thin, cheese, le...

This afternoon, a guy from Invisible Fence was here installing a "fence" so that Baxter can run wild in his own yard. As it is, the big puppy can only run wild on the patio and in a mulched area so sloped that he looks like a goat when he stands at the highest point. In fact, we have occasionally called him Goat Puppy. An invisible fence is really an electric wire buried in the ground that interacts with a collar that reminds the dog where his boundaries are. That's a polite way of saying that it zaps the dog if he gets too close and ignores the warning beeps. When the guy finished with the wiring, we walked Baxter around the perimeter of the yard to introduce him to the beeps and the flags, and I wore my winter boots and coat and scarf because we were trudging and sliding through what's left of two inches of snow, now less than an inch and slushy and mushy. It was raining at the time and cold and a little windy, and I was very happy to be finished with the exercise...

I have new boots. I've never been one to care about boots and have only kept a dusty pair in the closet for those few days a year when I would shovel deep snow from the driveway. But now that I have a dog, I think I might be trudging through snow and sludge much more often than in previous years—so, boots. I like them. In fact, I put them on today just to break them in a little, even though I probably won't be going out until the current snowfall subsides. Baxter seems content to romp around on the patio on his own, so I'll stay warm and dry for as long as I can today. But when I put on my new boots this morning, a terrible image flashed through my mind, one that might keep me from wearing them inside for much longer, or at least keep me from wearing them while walking downstairs. I have a bad association with boots and stairs, you see. When I was in fifth grade, I lived in a neighborhood filled with kids, and we would invent games to play, like jump rope in the stre...

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...

be bought, maybe? The other day, Eustacia said whadayasay we go to the antique mall? We've got a huge one here that Husband estimated must be 40,000 square feet or some such. It used to be something like a K-Mart before whatever it was went out of business, and someone had the bright idea of turning the space into a central place for dealers to sell their wares. These aren't all antiques by the official definition. Some of it is cool vintage like ladies' hats or a metal dollhouse just like the one I had when I was eight, and some is flea market stuff like a collection of Star Wars juice glasses and Johnnie Mathis albums, and some of it is just old like the chipped dishes that no one wanted to throw away but should have. Regardless, it's all fun to see. The store is set up in aisles labeled as streets, and you start on First Street and walk down, and then walk up Second and back down Third and so on. If you look at everything, you'll be in there all day. Eust...

In preparation for the holidays when both girls were at home, and we would be foraging for interesting treats in the kitchen, I bought massive amounts of groceries. In most cases, I planned correctly and didn't have a lot of leftover ingredients, but in others I went hog wild for no apparent reason. I had bought way too much buttermilk and now have a one-quart container in the fridge—what to do. I'll be using most of it to brine a chicken, but I used some this morning to make biscuits. I also miscalculated heavily on the amount of chocolate we would need, and now I have bars and bars of Ghiradelli dark and semi-sweet stacked up. Good thing it keeps. Yesterday, I decided to use some of that up in biscotti. I had intended to make this the week of Christmas and never found the time, so now I have a batch for no special occasion. Correction—for the occasion of enjoying a biscotti with a mid-morning coffee break all by myself. I love the stuff. Chocolate-Cherry Biscotti ...

I have heard of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater all of my life, so when I discovered the house was just a short drive from where we spent New Year's weekend, I reserved tickets for a tour—just $20 a person. The house is tucked away in the woods over Bear Run waterfall. The Kaufman family (of the department store fame) had a woodsy cottage near the waterfall and commissioned Wright to design and build a more substantial and modern summer house near there. Wright chose to build his masterpiece actually on top of the falls, not just beside it, and worked the house in and around the existing landscape without trying to transform it. In the summer, the family could open up doors in the living room and walk straight down into the stream that was part of the water system. Amazing. From here, it looks as if the house were many levels, but it's actually two houses, the main residence and then a guest house and staff quarters behind, connected by a covered walkway. The flo...

While the girls were with us (still are), we thought we should do something for New Year's weekend. We've done some interesting things for New Year's over the years—a couple of Caribbean cruises, a trip to Disneyland, a weekend in Sonoma, a week in Hawaii. This year, we stayed closer to home and drove three hours east to Nemacolin Woodland Resort in Farmington, PA. I made reservations sort of late, and we all wanted to stay together, so our only choice was to rent one of the townhouses on the sprawling property. There are a lot of good things about this resort, but the townhouses are not one of them—it was like staying at an old Quality Inn along the interstate in a forgotten town in Nebraska where the pool is lined with algae and the doors don't fit the frames and something smells but for four times the price. I may be exaggerating. The townhouses are near a golf course just about five minutes from the main hotel, so we got to know the property pretty well. It'...

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...

JP Auclair Street Segment (from All.I.Can.)Sherpas Cinema on Vimeo . I watched this video this morning and was moved, moved to find ways to make the most of it. Here is this guy skiing down hill, which is nothing spectacular, but he's not skiing down a frosted slope lined with pines, hearing only the sound of his own skis swishing through the snow. He's going down hill in a town dreary from a long winter, surrounded by houses and cars, hearing barking dogs and the noises of small-town traffic. I'm imagining his peripheral vision as a wash of color painted with a wet brush—he sees the smear of grungy snow and ice piled high along the road, carved into at crosswalks and side streets. It's interrupted by leftover Christmas decorations, stop signs, clothes on the line. Under a sky the color of dishwater, he dodges a threatening snowball, maneuvers down steps and over parked cars. He finally gets to the bottom and unclamps his skis, and then he boards a bus headed b...

Usually when the girls come home for Christmas, they only stay a few days, or one will stay for the duration of her winter break while the other will come and go. This year, both girls are here for about a week and a half, the same week and a half. I normally have the house to myself, and I can keep it as tidy as I like, but I've happily given the place over and let them dump their crap wherever. And boy, do they have crap. There are coats on the dining table, dirty glasses on the kitchen counter and shoes just about everywhere. No, wait. Those are mine. I'm no good at putting my shoes away. Here's No. 1 settling into her spot in the family room—books, laptop, iPod, shoes... Eustacia usually sits on the opposing couch with her own paraphernalia, and the puppy runs between the couches looking for and giving lots of attention. Here he is getting some from Eustacia: There seems to always be someone making a sandwich or digging in the fridge for something. There is al...

I realize this isn't really true—Christmas is about different things to different people, things like the birth of Jesus, time with family, the comfort of nostaglia, the joy of celebration—but at just this moment, coming off of a weekend spent largely in the kitchen, it feels as though Christmas might be about food. There were four of us in the house for two days, and that means a lot of cooking, mostly on Sunday. We began with a late breakfast of French toast made with croissants. I wouldn't have come up with that idea on my own, but I found a recipe in Bon Appetit . It was your basic French toast recipe but with croissants cut in half horizontally into this slices of butter, flaky goodness. Then later in the day, we created a vegetarian buffet. No. 1 and Eustacia are vegetarians these days, so this seemed appropriate. I assigned them each a dish to make, and we worked side by side so that all three dishes were ready at the same time. No. 1 made a Parmesan-olive torte—p...

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...

I'm pretty rusty at the piano these days, and my singing voice is even worse, so as a way to wish you all a merry Christmas—or happy holiday, whichever you prefer—here is a repeat of my personal Christmas card to Blogville recorded back when I was slightly more practiced. My wish for us all is that we each have a delightfully memorable holiday, a much-needed rest from the day-to-day and that we get or give at least one gift that makes us happy.

For as long as I can remember—seriously, all of my life—my sisters have gotten together for Christmas. First, the ones who had moved out of our parents' house came back for the holiday, and later we all came back with our husbands and children. Christmas was often the only time we would see each other all year, and we would spend two solid days cackling and singing and telling stories. Fun. Well, this year my family unit has decided to do something different and stay home for Christmas. We did this once before—after 9/11, the Chicago sister was uneasy about flying, so we all agreed to spend the holiday at our respective houses instead of traveling to Georgia. That was the one Christmas meal I cooked for my family, and this year I get to do it again. It's just one meal for one day, but I've been planning, searching for recipes and menu ideas, making a grocery list that fills an entire 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, making a schedule for when to make what. I can make the c...

Now that I'm on the orchestra board, I have to attend its monthly meetings. Yesterday, a friend told me the secretary takes attendance, and there is such a thing as an unexcused absence. You're expected to participate. I've yet to see the full potential as a participant, but I'm eager to find out just what can be done with this thing. The December meeting is held at the general manager's house, and people bring food in to make it special. That's one thing I do know I can participate in, so I made something I haven't made in several years, a Champagne Cream Torte. I used to make this for company Christmas parties when I worked for Husband in his office. The torte is basically a giant cream puff filled with Champagne cream, which is a delight on its own, and topped with something pretty. The original recipe calls for a brushing of corn syrup and a sprinkling of almonds, but I went the ganache route with a sprinkling of pearlized sugar. It goes like this...

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. ...