Gorgeous

WANDERING through any of today's huge home improvements centers, especially ones that are brand new, is like a trip to a Fantasyland just for do-it-yourselfers. The wonders you'll see. Gorgeous kitchen cabinets, set up so you can see how a kitchen might look. Aisles of ceramic tile, some of them with intricate, hand-painted designs. Acres of carpets and other floor finishings. Two dozen different shower heads. Rows upon rows of brightly shining light fixtures and ceiling fans ... the list goes on and on. Maybe it's the influence of Martha Stewart -- we wouldn't be a bit surprised -- or the fact that more foreign travel and a surge of recent immigration is making Americans more sophisticated in all their tastes, but it seems that cheap and tacky are out, and stylish and relatively inexpensive are in. Karol spent a couple of hours recently in one of these giant emporiums, which had been open only a week.

THE INFINITE capacity of people to delude themselves is on display everywhere, but nowhere more than in Hollywood, where it's practically at epidemic proportions. Take this creepy (at least to me) romance between Michael Douglas and mega-babe Catherine Zeta-Jones. As practically everyone in the world knows, Douglas, 55, and Zeta-Jones, 30, are engaged to be married. In fact, Zeta-Jones is reportedly pregnant with Douglas' baby. OK, no big deal. This kind of thing happens all the time in Hollywood.

" TEMP CLOSED," announces the billboard under the Popeye's sign in the 5400 block of Ritchie Highway in Brooklyn Park. "Visit Glen Burnie or Crain Hwy. Reopen March."But the building is gone. There's just a square of dirt in the the expanse of macadam; a pipe sticking up in the back, a twisted piece of metal, broken blocks and an empty beer bottle lying on its side. A large, blue metal shipping container sits in the back of the lot. There's a trash can on its side and a nest of wires sticking up from a hole in the center of the lot.Makes you wonder, March of which century?

Gertrude's, the new restaurant in the Baltimore Museum of Art, is a work in progress. You can see the potential, but it isn't there yet.Give John Shields credit. The cookbook author and TV show host came up with a great idea for his restaurant. Why open just another seafood place when this year we've already seen the arrival of two good ones: McCormick & Schmick's and Legal Sea Foods downtown.Instead, Shields has Gertrude's firmly grounded in the Chesapeake Bay region. When tourists come to Baltimore and want authentic Maryland seafood, are they going to go to chains from the Northwest and Boston?

Making gravy on Thanksgiving Day can be as nerve-racking as a blind date, as painful as a root canal and as difficult as learning Cantonese.I ought to know. I still have nightmares over my first few attempts, murky mixtures with more lumps than cottage cheese. Each time I warmed a canned backup, I vowed I'd master this stubborn sauce and never be so humiliated again.Mastering gravy became an obsession. I devoured cookbooks and food magazines. I confessed my faux pas to friends, who not only commiserated, but divulged their horror stories of Thanksgiving gravy that was as thin as water, thick as paste, lumpy and bumpy, or simply devoid of taste.

THE SADDEST sight of spring has been the row of daffodils that parades against my backyard fence. Last Tuesday, they were gorgeous -- strong, bright, proud. Winter was no match for those flowers. They could conquer anything.Then THE FREEZE came. On Wednesday morning, the row of flowers looked uncertain. They stood not quite so tall. Their blossoms bent lower, apparently trying to protect themselves from the onslaught of cold.After two more nights of too-cold temperatures, the line of daffodils is scarred.

WASHINGTON, VA. -- I don't need much of an excuse to wangle a trip to the Inn at Little Washington, the celebrated Virginia restaurant regarded as one of the best in the United States. Recently I went there to check out the tony establishment's link to a Dundalk factory. In short, I pursued the local angle to feast on foie gras.The inn has put in a new oven. And the inn's oven, like its meals -- $88 per person on weeknights, wine extra -- is far beyond the ordinary. Instead of a big, black hunk of metal shoved up against the kitchen wall, the new oven is a gorgeous mixture of gleaming copper and shimmering porcelain that serves as the dramatic centerpiece for a new kitchen layout.

Within a few weeks, the new library at Carroll Community College in Westminster will be glutted with students getting acquainted with the facility just in time for term-paper season.Workers are polishing and moving furniture in the library. But patrons began using it Monday."It's gorgeous," said David Schaffer, 30, of Eldersburg, as he sat at one of the study carrels made of gleaming cherry-finished wood and teal laminate.This library has brains as well as beauty. Schaffer had plugged his laptop into a convenient outlet.

When Emil Gilels played the piano, you didn't listen to the music with just your ears: You absorbed it through every part of your body -- your feet, your arms, even your chest.His sound was gorgeous and filled with delicate nuances. But for listeners who heard him early in his career, what impressed most about the Gilels sound was its power. In the giant pieces of the piano repertory, he made you feel that the walls trembled with the stupendous bursts of sound that no other pianist seemed able to produce so easily.

I don't know who Peggy is, but they sure named a pretty spit of land after her.Picture a lighthouse sitting atop rocks smoothed by centuries of crashing waves. Peggy's Cove raises that scene to a splendid level. Call it a 10 on a rating for picturesque postcards, maybe an 11.That kind of beauty draws thousands of visitors to this wondrous pile of stone just 45 minutes from Halifax, making it Nova Scotia's top tourist attraction.Somehow, though, the presence of so many people doesn't seem to detract from the superb scenic quality of the place.