Perhaps the time has come to reinstate Home Economics classes in our schools. While we are at it, we should resurrect manual training classes, too.

When I was in middle school, referred to as Junior High at that time, girls and boys alike took both shop classes and cooking. How enlightened.

With the current economic mess in America, knowing how to cook a delicious dinner for pennies or how to fix things instead of tossing them might morph from being extremely quaint to extremely helpful.

I am frankly puzzled at how these domestic skills got so marginalized in the last fifty years.

Abundance must breed a cavalier attitude toward all things home economic. Why bother to cook soup from scratch when you have the cash for endless trips to McDonald’s? Why fix the toaster when Walmart sells new ones for $12.99. And why sew on popped buttons when “the one button missing garment” can be tossed in the Goodwill donation bag?

Our great-great grandparents knew how to build homes in the wilderness and raise almost all of their own food. I can’t even get a tent to stay upright in a mild wind or get a tomato plant to flourish.

I’m definitely not yearning for a return to pioneer times. Making my own soap from fat and lye and butchering chickens are not tasks I want to undertake. But a basic familiarity with cooking, nutrition, home repairs and family finance are good survival skills.

If our skill set gets reduced to sitting stationary and interacting with a computer screen, we may have to wonder whose intelligence is artificial.

Our yard hosts a dinosaur, a gigantic bird holding barbells in his wings, a parade of metal cats climbing a driftwood pole, a four foot tall racing rabbit and a turquoise beastie.

Last summer I added a blue bottle tree, providing an excellent reason for drinking lots of Riesling.

Needless to say, I do not live in a gated community or a suburb with restrictive covenants.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating yard decor of old, rusting vehicles, piles of tires and collections of left over building materials. But I do enjoy living in a place where people are free to have creative yards.

My immediate neighbor, for instance, has a huge flock of flamingos charging across his front lawn. At Christmas they pull Santa’s sleigh. Since I know that the pink flamingo lawn ornament is an endangered species, I consider myself lucky to live beside so many fine specimens.

Thanks to another house in the neighborhood, I will not have to take a trip to Disneyland. A life size Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is just a short drive away.

A former bowling alley owner lives down the road. So it’s perfectly obvious why he has a towering pyramid of bowling balls in his yard.

One of my favorite yards has been totally landscaped with large and small stuffed toys. Dozens of bears, bunnies and Elmos are strategically placed almost everywhere. The weather takes its toll and soggy plush abounds, but so does a wacky charm.

When vernacular artists are driven to transform their entire personal environments, it is called art. Our nearby John Michael Kohler Art Center has made it their mission to preserve the best of these unique properties. Their recent book, Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds, documents the life work of over twenty of these incredible artists.

I recently had the pleasure of watching a movie about another amazing outsider artist, Pearl Fryar. He salvaged  bushes from the trash pile at his local nursery and transformed his three acres into a topiary wonderland. After watching this delightful film, A Man Named Pearl, you will never view a hedge clipper the same way again. Click here to watch a trailer for the film.

My father and his big sister, my Aunt Vi, could never agree on candy. Since I adored both of them, I was caught in the middle of their candy wars.

Fannie Farmer was my dad’s beloved brand of chocolates. Going to the Fannie Farmer store with him was always a treat. The shops were sparkling clean and smelled sublime. Perfect pyramids of candies were displayed in trays in the showcases. My father studiously picked every chocolate for his hand packed box.

When offered a piece of Fannie Farmer, Aunt Vi accepted. But after indulging, she always informed my father that, “Quality is better.”

The Quality Candy Shops were a local chain with their candy kitchen on the south side of town. Aunt Vi would walk miles to the shop nearest her. She, too, would hand pick every one of her pieces. She did, however, consume them faster than we did. No more than three pieces at a time was the rule at our house.

Aunt Vi came into candy glory at Eastertime. Quality Candy made huge chocolate Easter eggs about the size of a tennis ball. These monster eggs came in both whipped and solid creams. Unable to decide which was better, she simply bought dozens of each in a sensational array of flavors.

After I was grown and married, I could always count on Aunt Vi supplying our family with an enormous box of these eggs. Many years an entire shelf in the refrigerator was filled.

I now live in what the New York Times refers to as “The Delta of Chocolate”. Eight unique, family owned chocolate shops dot the towns near our home.

True to my family’s serious attitudes toward candy, I have sworn total allegiance to one of these shops, Beerntsen’s Confectionary in Manitowoc. It is almost time to go and pick up the chocolate eggs. Vi would be proud of me, even though I won’t get three dozen.

My Aunt Lillian worked in a hat factory. Shortly before her untimely death, she was promoted to be a designer. In fact, she had been designing and creating hats for years for all the women in my family. It’s no wonder that I, too, am a lover of hats.

When I was a child, Sunday mass was mandatory as was hat wearing for women in church. I couldn’t wait to see the weekly chapeau fashion parade – intriguing shapes, colors, flowers, feathers, ribbons and veils.

The hat as art form reached its apex on Easter Sunday. The show at my Polish Catholic church was lush, but I yearned to be at St. Patricks in New York. To me Easter and hats were synonymous.

I’ve had my share of great hats through the years. One of my favorites is an elegant purple felt one, a gift from my then teenage son, who picked it out all by himself.

Fashion has become much more casual and so have my hats. For the past decade I’ve been attached to my beloved denim bucket hat which can be rolled up and kept in my purse with no ill effects. It has literally traveled all over the world with me. Last year it took a vacation alone for a month in New Mexico. However, it was miraculously returned by a kind gentleman who found it in the parking lot at my aunt’s assisted living and said, “I knew that was your hat the moment I saw it.”

The big news last week was cheese. A Wisconsin cheese has just been named the finest cheese in the nation at the prestigious U.S. Championship Cheese Contest.

The particular cheese that was voted the country’s best was a Parmesan from Antigo, Wisconsin, my husband’s home town. The Antigo cheese beat out 1,359 other entries.

California has been extremely in our collective state faces about having more cows and producing vast quantities of cheese. This prize just goes to show that adding a few cows to your state doesn’t make you great… quality still counts.

It’s no secret that I am an unabashed cheese lover. I manage to incorporate cheese into almost everything I cook. However, I do draw the line at using cheese as an ice cream topping.

Pine River Dairy, a cheese store that features 100 kinds of Wisconsin cheese, is a short drive from our house. The shop is the size of a large walk-in closet. The folks there also make vats of butter in the back room and sell decent size ice cream cones for 25 cents.

I have been spotted leaving Pine River with a shopping bag of cheese and butter over my arm, a cheese stick in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other. I do not feel a twinge of guilt. I am simply doing what every health and environmental expert is telling me to do… eating locally sourced food.