Scavenger Hunt

Nearing the end of the Port Discovery scavenger hunt yesterday, John Carreras and his 10-year-old daughter Renee were almost finished with their list uncovering names of African-American inventors. They were in an exhibit called Miss Perceptions Mystery House, where they found a child-sized version of an ironing board and learned that Sarah Boon invented the contraption in 1892. A few steps away was an umbrella stand, and a clue that said W.C. Carter made the first one in 1885. "You learn a lot through the exhibits," said Carreras, who along with his wife, Tina, drove from Severn to Baltimore's children's museum for its "I Have a Dream Weekend" honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which runs through today.

With her school locked down by the sniper shootings, one Prince George's County principal organized a diversion for her increasingly restless pupils: Popsicles and hopscotch. The 712 children at Barnaby Manor Elementary School, near the District of Columbia line, needed more relief than inside recess, so Principal Laura Barbee scheduled afternoon parties this week. The "Shutdown Socials," as Barbee calls the 20 minutes of playfulness, are among a host of activities that principals across the region have instituted as the school lockdowns enter their third week.

Shrek is the fourth entry in this summer's Little Italy Open-Air Film Festival. Here are four reasons why it's especially pertinent to see it tonight: 1. Mike Myers as the title ogre conjures more comic dimensions with his voice and computer animation than he does as his new Austin Powers villain, Goldmember, with makeup and prosthetics. 2. The parody of Disneyland -- with the evil Farquaad (John Lithgow) creating a sanitized court free of warts, smells and wrinkles -- plays even sweeter now that DreamWorks won the first Academy Award for best animated feature.

Less than 12 hours after Amanda Charles and Matt Michalowicz met, they jumped out of an airplane together. In the spring of 2000, Amanda went to Pensacola, Fla., to visit her brother Ben during a college break. The morning after she arrived, Ben took her sky diving along with his roommate Matt, a fellow Navy flight school trainee. "Once you sky-dive with someone, you feel you have this bond with them," says Amanda of Matt. "I really liked him. He was cute." A few months later, Amanda received her bachelor's degree in education at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (she had previously earned a bachelor's in psychology from the University of Delaware)

SPRINGFIELD, Va. - Leon Begeman scurries through the underbrush of a wooded suburban park here one recent Saturday morning, in hot pursuit of hidden treasure. "Three hundred seventy feet to go!" he announces to the small band of treasure hunters tagging along behind. Begeman carries no yellowed map, has no X-marks-the-spot to find the booty. His only guide is a handheld Global Positioning System receiver, which can pinpoint his location anywhere on Earth, and this geographic clue: N 38M-0 45.031 W 077M-0 12.916.

September's gentle light has a way of illuminating flaws in your landscape. Yes, early autumn offers an abundance of fruits and vegetables to harvest, and many flowers keep going strong until frost, but somehow the eye is drawn to the barren space where the hollyhocks never emerged; lawn furniture, looking used and worn; that climbing rose, begging for a new trellis. It's time to embark on what I like to call the Great Fall Scavenger Hunt. Most people obsess over their gardens in the spring, and folks at garden centers and nurseries know it. They stock up on loads of plants, tools, fertilizers and other irresistible items, well aware that we, still partially dazed with winter delirium, will obediently march out and buy tons of merchandise at premium prices.

Young children may scurry around a library with a look of fascination in their eyes during a scavenger hunt - though when their grandparents do the same, it may raise an eyebrow or two. But Sunny Gunther, assistant director of Ateaze Senior Center in Dundalk, says she's happy to see that kind of noisy interaction between the generations. "I felt bad chasing children out of "off-limit' rooms at the senior center." said Gunther, who helped organize a cooperative program with the North Point branch of the Baltimore County Public Library.

JOANNE ROWE WILL BE getting a military-style haircut, thanks to the fund-raising efforts of youths in the New Windsor Cluster Group who fasted for 30 hours to help raise money and food for World Vision. "Last year, Ron Arthur, a youth counselor in our church, agreed to shave his head if the kids raised a certain amount of money," said Brenda Sebastian, a member of Uniontown United Methodist Church, one of two Northwest churches that formed the youth cluster. "This year Joanne said she would get a military-style haircut if they raised their goal of $2,200," Sebastian said.