Vacation

Short takes before vacation ... short takes after vacation. It's not that I've been short of time, just short of any long-term news analysis. The trade deadline is yet another reason why I've grown to love baseball again. Deadline deals in football, basketball and hockey just don't measure up. The football deadline is too early in the season and football trades rarely happen anyway. Too many teams make the playoffs in basketball and hockey for the last-minute trades to have the impact that they can in baseball.

"Let's make this summer adventurous. Let's go camping. " That's what we working poor say when the vacation funds are limited. Actually, our three-day camping excursion has been in the planning for months. For Christmas, Santa brought us a camping stove. Sleeping bags appeared for Mother's Day. A tent and flashlights came on Father's Day. Each holiday over the past year revealed a new piece of camping gear. My husband came home from work one day last spring with a new TV/VCR combo unit for the minivan.

With a son who just graduated high school and another who is about to turn 13, this year's family vacation is all about compromise, Wendy Dahlgreen said. Granted, that compromise is a Dahlgreen family trip to Hawaii, probably a once-in-a-lifetime trip for the family that lives east of Hagerstown, Dahlgreen said. Hawaii has something that will interest everyone in the family, Dahlgreen said. Having enough attractions and activities to meet the interests of everyone in the family is key to making sure everyone in the family is happy during vacation, local families said.

HAGERSTOWN - Falling home values and soaring gas prices might not be the best recipe to put consumers in a spending mood, but for many vendors at a local garden show this weekend, they were a central part of the sales pitch. The reasoning goes like this: If you create a beautiful, relaxing outdoor living space at home, you won't need to drive far away to go on vacation, and you won't need to bother with selling your home to feel like you've upgraded your living space. So say the landscapers, hardscapers and pondscapers who turned Hagerstown Community College's ARCC into a quilt of stone patio displays and bubbling rock gardens for the HCC Alumni Association's Flower and Garden Show.

Jazz a 'vacation' for hundreds at Renfrew

Two Pulse correspondents return from vacation with photos from Thailand and New York City. Here's there story in photos.

Last week's question: What is your best vacation memory? Did you have a good time because of the money you spent or because of the people you spent your vacation with? Definitely the people. My favorite vaction was camping. We spent little money, but had a ball! My best vacation was also camping looking for BIG FOOT. We smelled him but never saw him. I hear he lives near Hagerstown now. He also has been spotted at the new hospital location.

MARTINSBURG, W.Va. - A Berkeley County Circuit Court judge has ordered Kmart Corp. to turn over information needed to determine how much former Kmart employees in the Eastern Panhandle are owed for unpaid vacation benefits. On June 9 the West Virginia Supreme Court stated Kmart wrongfully denied pay to its former West Virginia employees for earned but unused vacation benefits, according to a prepared statement by the Martinsburg law firm of Hammer, Ferretti & Schiavoni. David Hammer, one of the attorneys representing former Kmart employees, could not be reached for comment on Monday.

DALLAS - The holidays are supposed to give workers a break. So why do so many employees open e-mail with their presents? They check gift lists and office voice mails. And they dabble in eggnog and in spreadsheets, all while they're supposedly on vacation. Take, for example, Jeff Chadwick, who enjoys using his hard-earned vacation days but is unlikely to unplug from his many responsibilities. During a trip to Disney World, while his wife and children slept, the Carrollton, Texas, accountant logged on at 4 a.m. several times to slip in some work at his job at KPMG back in Dallas.