Author Archives: Kathleen Fox

Go ahead. Spend your vacation time this year at home or close to home. With the high price of gas, leading to higher prices for practically everything else, it’s probably a great idea.

But whether you visit all the attractions within a 50-mile radius or just hang out in your own back yard, please, please, pretty please, don’t call it a “Staycation.”

My suspicion is that scheduling a Staycation is an attempt to make it sound more like a high-minded choice and less like an economic necessity. God forbid, after all, that the neighbors should suspect you can’t afford a trip to Disney World. Or even that you might decide you don’t really want to go to Disney World—or Paris, or Hawaii, or the Grand Canyon, or spend a week with your in-laws.

My second suspicion is that the whole concept of the Staycation was created by somebody, somewhere, for the primary purpose of selling something to other somebodies. Just do an Internet search for the word, and you’ll find a whole mini-industry around it. “Staycation Sales” of grills, croquet sets, and plastic wading pools at your local discount store. Articles with tips for taking a successful Staycation. Advice on Staycation basics like unplugging the phone, pampering yourself, skipping household chores, and not checking your work email more than twice a day. 

As a buzzword, “Staycation” has an annoyance rating of at least 11 on a 10-point scale. In part this is because of its combination of pretentiousness and cuteness. But even worse is the whole create-a-fad, follow-the-crowd idea behind it.

What’s wrong with just saying, “We’re staying home this year,” and leaving it at that? Why can’t we do something as simple as choosing not to go away on vacation without institutionalizing the concept into a Movement?

Right this minute, someone is probably busy creating an organization for people who chose to take their vacations at home. I can just see the slogans on the tee-shirts. “We survived a family Staycation.” “What happens in the back yard stays in the back yard.” “My family did a Staycation and I had to tie-dye this stupid tee-shirt.”

The shirts would be made (in China, of course) exclusively for this association, The Society to Implement Local Leisure Yourself—otherwise known as SILLY.

Scrabble® turned 60 this year.

My mother’s Scrabble game isn’t quite as old as that, but it’s been around a long time. The board is a bit battered around the edges but still readable. The tiles, now kept in a handmade denim bag that she made, are all still there. The original box is still holding together, with a little help from a rubber band.

My Scrabble game is much newer and much fancier. The Deluxe version, it was a Christmas gift from my stepson a few years ago. Its board has plastic dividers between the letter spaces, and it comes complete with its own turntable. (My mother just sets hers on the lazy Susan that usually sits in the middle of the kitchen table.)

Old or new set, plain or deluxe, however, the game itself is still the same. It hasn’t really changed since it was invented during the Great Depression by Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect. He originally called it “Lexico,” then decided on “Criss-Cross Words.” It wasn’t until 1948 that Mr. Butts and his partner, James Brunot, trademarked the name Scrabble and began manufacturing games in quantity.

According to Merriam-Webster, one meaning for the word “scrabble” is to “scrawl or scribble.” Another is “to scratch, claw, or grope about clumsily or frantically.” I’m not sure which meaning the inventors had in mind. I do know that if you draw seven vowels—or seven consonants, for that matter—“groping about frantically” is a pretty good description of your play for the rest of the game.

My family, readers and crossword puzzle fans that we are, includes several dedicated Scrabble players. Dedicated, anyway, by our standards, which are not exactly those of hard-core tournament Scrabble players.

According to the official Scrabble website, if you want to improve your scores, the first thing you should do is memorize a list of 96 two-letter words. Serious tournament players do this as a matter of course. Apparently they also spend their free time going through dictionaries and memorizing new words, particularly ones containing the high-scoring letters such as q, z, x, k, and j. Not wanting to clutter their brains with non-essentials, they don’t bother about the definitions of those words.

This is where my family parts ways with serious Scrabble players. According to our rules, if you can’t define it, it isn’t a word. We scorn the very idea of memorizing a list of obscure two-letter constructions that don’t even seem like real words, at least in English. Where’s the fun in that?

One family member, who shall remain anonymous, started playing Scrabble online a couple of years ago, and she did memorize that infamous list of two-letter words. After that, playing with her was no fun at all. It was a matter of principle; the fact that she consistently beat us had nothing to do with it.

Truly, though, we play Scrabble because we enjoy words. Yes, we’re competitive and we want to win. But if we have to choose between making a really cool word and playing a drab word that will get us more points, we’re as likely to choose the former as the latter. If we can put that really cool word on a double word score, of course, so much the better.

And I must admit that, just once before I die, I’d like to play “quartzite” on a triple word score.

For the last few weeks, we’ve seen in abundance two phenomena that are usually scarce in western South Dakota—presidential candidates and rain.

Candidates generally tend to ignore us. As a state with a small population and a late primary, we’ve almost always been in the “also participating” category. The results of our votes amble in long after the race has been decided and the reporters have all packed up and gone home.

As for moisture, we’ve been in a cycle of drought for the last several years—summers with little rain and winters with almost no snow. A friend of mine who teaches fourth grade said last winter that some of the kids in her class didn’t even know how to play in the snow; they’d never had the opportunity.

This spring, though, things have been different. May started out with a snowstorm that had us measuring totals in feet instead of inches. Then it started raining. By the time the month was over, it had set a new all-time record for moisture—nearly ten inches. It had been so long since we’d seen saturated fields and bank-full creeks, we didn’t know how to act. But, oh, my goodness, we were grateful for the moisture.

In between thunderstorms, we started getting visits from presidential candidates. It had been so long (if, indeed, it’s ever happened at all) since our primary mattered to anyone except ourselves, we didn’t know how to act. But, oh, my goodness, we were grateful for the recognition.

The rainstorms kept coming, and coming, and coming. The candidates kept coming back, and coming back, and coming back. The two phenomena began showing uncanny similarities. Both tended to show up unexpectedly. Both were accompanied by a lot of noise and commotion. Both tended to disrupt the normal course of things, cause some inconvenience, and offer ample promises for future abundance. Candidates’ smiles carried some of the same brilliance as the flashes of lightning—and could disappear almost as fast upon discovering a potential supporter was a registered independent and therefore ineligible to vote in the primary.

By the time May turned into June, both the rain and the candidates were beginning to feel like just a little too much of a good thing. We started looking forward to those rare days of sunshine and those rare days without a candidate’s picture on the front page. I thought I might have to go to the farm supply store and buy a pair of tall rubber boots. What with one thing and another, it was getting awfully deep around here.

But by now, the primary is over. The candidates are gone. We’ve had our moment in the sun—figuratively speaking, at least—and we can relax back into obscurity.

It is still raining, though. Maybe I should have bought those rubber boots.

I know a woman who knows a woman who publishes a magazine about fencing.

When I first heard this magazine mentioned, I was dubious. Fencing? How could there be enough material for more than a couple of issues? Once you’ve discussed the virtues of barbed wire versus woven wire, plastic versus wooden pickets, and wooden versus steel posts, you’ve pretty much covered all there is to say about fencing.

Oh, I suppose you could get into some of the finer details, such as what size woven wire mesh is required to keep rabbits out of your tomatoes. (Smaller than two inches by four, certainly, as I know from personal experience. Maybe I could write an article for the fencing magazine.)

Except, as I eventually figured out, “fencing” apparently has a different primary meaning in some circles than in others. I should have been thinking Three Musketeers rather than three wires, stretch tights rather than fence stretchers, fencing foils rather than fencing pliers.

Oh. Never mind.

Honestly, I have my doubts about whether that kind of fencing would provide enough material to keep a magazine going, either. But what do I know? I’ve never done thrust-and-parry fencing, just post-and-wire fencing.

Which I was doing last week. We transplanted some lilac shoots from a friend’s yard into ours. The deer apparently regarding this as a new and exotic addition to the neighborhood buffet, a fence seemed to be a good idea.

Since the woven wire fence around the small garden spot wasn’t keeping the rabbits out anyway, I decided to use it for the lilacs. I twisted off the pieces of wire that held the fence to the steel posts, dragged the fence out of the raised garden bed, and flopped it onto the driveway, where it promptly rolled itself up and tried to take me with it.

I untangled myself from the wire, rolled it up into a more or less manageable bundle, and hauled it up the hill to the lilacs. I pulled the steel posts out of the garden and carried them up the hill.

I remember as a kid, helping to fix fence, driving steel posts with a heavy iron pipe that was closed at one end. My father would raise the driver and bring it down onto the post a couple of times, and that was all it took. For my sister and I, the same job required thumping away on the post for five or ten minutes, after having struggled to get the driver over the post in the first place.

Unfortunately, not owning a post driver, I had to make do with a small sledge hammer. Fortunately, the ground was rain-softened, and, also fortunately, I got five posts driven without once hitting myself with the hammer.

By this time it was threatening to rain, so my goal for the rest of the job was to get it done in a hurry. The posts, at least a foot too short for the project at hand, ended up driven in just far enough so a strong wind probably wouldn’t blow them over. I fastened the wire to the posts with a hodgepodge of various sized pieces of recycled wire. The ends of the wires were straggly and scraggly and uneven. Yes, I was taught better than that, but I didn’t want to take the time to twist them together properly with the pliers and clip the ends off neatly. This was to be a temporary fence, after all, just to keep the lilacs unmunched until they grow big enough to fend for themselves.

This week's project is to get some more posts and a smaller mesh wire, then build a fence—theoretically rabbit-proof—around the tomato patch.

Maybe it would be simpler just to keep the critters away with a rapier. En garde, you pesky varmints!

According to a source who wishes to remain anonymous (possibly because his conclusion is based on first-hand observation), grasshoppers love pot.

Once upon a time, years ago in another life, this man used to grow marijuana—for strictly medicinal purposes, I presume. At a get-together recently, he was describing to a group of us how difficult it was to get grasshoppers off the plants. They wouldn’t even jump if he touched them, but hung on tight and just kept munching. They were the biggest, fattest, greenest grasshoppers he had ever seen. He said, “I should have tried eating them.”

Better yet, he should have tried selling them. I’m not sure whether sales would have been high—but the marketing campaigns could have been so much fun.

One possible product would have been “Natural High” gourmet chicken feed, for free-range fowl, of course. Sold with the slogan “For a happy henhouse—pot in every chicken.”

But why waste such delicacies on poultry? We’re talking about unique snack items targeted toward the upscale and the environmentally aware. Like pot-roasted “hash hoppers.” Freeze-dried “jumping joints.” Chocolate-covered or yogurt-dipped “pot hoppers.” “Bugs with a Buzz” trail mix.

Pot-laced grasshoppers could make perfect hors d’oeuvres for discerning party-givers—“Put more bounce in your buffet!” They would provide “high” quality protein; all natural, of course, and completely organic.

Just think of the incredible marketing opportunity that my friend missed. Putting the “grass” in grasshoppers; he could have made a fortune. And all, presumably, perfectly legal—at least as long as you didn’t inhale.

Warning: if you plan to drive through Florida in the near future, leave your ornamental male bovine body parts at home.

As the headline the Rapid City Journal used for the AP article on April 27 phrased it, “Lawmakers seek to get vehicles fixed.” It seems some of the legislators for the great state of Florida want to make it illegal for truckers to dangle “metal replicas of bull testicles” from the backs of their semis. At the time the article was written, the measure had already passed the Florida Senate but was deemed to have only a slim chance of being approved by the House.

I didn’t realize this was an issue of such significant proportions. I vaguely remember seeing one of these manly decorations on a truck somewhere when I was traveling. I think. Despite what the truck driver may have thought of his trailing attributes, I didn’t find them all that memorable, let alone particularly offensive.

True, if I were traveling with some of my grandkids, I’d definitely prefer not to have to explain what those funny-looking things were on the back of that semi. But if we’re going to ban offensive truck decorations, how about getting rid of all those mud flaps with the silhouette of the naked woman on them? I’m sure you’ve seen her—that one with the figure so exaggerated she makes Barbie look like a woman of normal proportions.

Are both these traveling displays offensive? Sure. Are they tacky? Absolutely. Should they be banned by law? Absolutely not. It is neither reasonable, desirable, or necessary to pass laws against bad taste. Neither is it possible.

Of course, the idea does have a certain appeal. If tackiness were prohibited, just think of some of the things we could have been spared over the years: Lime green leisure suits. Fuzzy dice. Lawn ornaments of chubby women bent over to show their ruffled bloomers. Sex and the City. Oversized, calf-length shorts that make even skinny boys look clumsy. Low-cut, tight jeans that make even skinny girls look overstuffed. Any TV show with “Survivor” or “Idol” in its name. Mean-spirited greeting cards. Comedians who mistake vulgarity for humor. Facial piercings.

You get the idea; make your own list. And, of course, that’s the point. Your list would be far different from mine. One person’s poor taste is another person’s fashion statement or sense of humor.

So, to the Florida legislature: lighten up. If you don’t have anything better to do for the protection of the Sunshine State, you might as well adjourn early and go home to your day jobs.

To be fair, though, I’m sure this movement to rid Florida’s highways of innuendo didn’t necessarily originate with the legislature. Behind the scenes, I’m sure they’re being pressured by the most powerful public figure in the state. No doubt he would say he’s just worried about offending the delicate sensibilities of innocent tourists taking the kids to Disney World.

But the truth is, Mickey Mouse is just jealous. After all, the only exaggerated attributes he has to brag about are those big, round ears.