Sweet Home

Home, really sweet home For years, local bakery owner Karen Rohde has been donating hand-crafted gingerbread houses to area charities. Now, you can buy Rohde's creations either pre-decorated or ready for decorating with the kids in your home.   For the chopstick-impaired This oversize paper-clip-style chopstick is perfect for adults or children who want to eat Asian food authentically, but just can't quite grasp it. A fun stocking-stuffer.  

With his endless legs and broad smile, Chauncey Nichols does not so much walk as glide through the cinder-block halls of Southern Home Services. You can tell that Nichols, now 22, is doing just fine in this world. He wears several gold chains around his neck, a few rings on his fingers. Nichols has a high school diploma, his own apartment in the suburbs, a well-paying job. "I lived here two years. It was my home," he says. "When I came here, I was trouble, serious trouble. You mention the problem, I had it. " School?

With a tender finger, Jean Zidek stroked the forehead of a 23-inch collectible doll that was sprawled barefooted on a bench in the foyer of the two-story Cherry Hill house that she and her husband John share with their dog, Poupee (which means doll in French), and about 250 dolls and 300 doll molds. "Except for the powder room," she explains with a smile, "every room in our house is consumed by dolls and doll parts, including the kitchen!" Jean and John Zidek are doll devotees.

Don't you dare call Historic Skippack Village a shopping mall. You'll upset the merchants. "It's not a shopping mall," said Craig Bills, owner of the Trolley Stop restaurant and banquet facility. "Everyone here has something to do. Mom can shop and Dad can take the kids and look at the ducks. At the mall, he just stands around with nothing to do. " The shopkeepers say proudly that the winding, mile-long strip along Route 73, between Route 113 and Forty Foot Road, has maintained its country flavor.

Staying home is, of course, the new thing. The 1980s are - didn't Newsweek say so? - officially over, and everybody's just saying no to noisy restaurants and club-hopping and cocaine and greed and blind ambition and insider trading and that whole fast-track, high-energy lifestyle most of us only read about in magazines anyway. Now, the hottest thing you can possibly do is what most of us have been doing all along: stay home, propped up in front of the tube with a bunch of pillows and some popcorn and a good supply of emery boards and, for the commercials (and the boring parts where everybody drives around too fast in big cars crashing into things)

The trees stand 200 feet high and 6 feet thick, their bark turned mossy by time and the nurturing climate that makes these slopes of the Cascade Range the most hospitable places on Earth for Douglas firs. They are the final remnants of the ancient, uncut forests of the Pacific Northwest. Environmentalists see them as great silent monuments to an epoch too quickly passing, the centuries-old linchpins of ecological systems now threatened by the raspy roar of the logger's saw. But around Sweet Home, and dozens of other little lumbering towns like it throughout the Pacific Northwest, most people see the old trees another way: As window sashes, moldings, rich veneers, plywood and pulp.

The elderly couple's 19th-century farmhouse was falling apart, and they wanted a new home before Christmas. A developer had plans for a subdivision and needed some land to build upon. Thus a deal was born in which the octogenarians swapped their field for some cash plus a brand-new, custom-made ranch house. Harvey Garrecht, 86, had lived in the farmhouse since 1916, the year his family moved from Easton to this northern Montgomery County community. For years, he operated a body shop here and raised pigeons.

Kelly Joe Phelps sat for 90 on the stage of Rex's Tavern on Thursday, and the blues rose up out of him. Guitar flat on his lap, his head bobbed in and out of a lone spotlight as the slide in his left hand shot over his knee and up the neck of his instrument, blurring notes with fluid, emotional acuity. His deep voice rolled like fresh water over a gravel river bottom, searching for a destination. "I been looking for a home, sweet home," he sang. "But I can't find one anywhere. " On the face of it, it might seem that the Portland, Ore.-based Phelps is guilty of suburbanizing the blues.

HOME, SWEET HOME - BEHIND PRISON BARS Freedom just wasn't all it was cracked up to be for a convicted armed robber who escaped from an Australian jail after seven years behind bars. The 68-year-old robber welcomed his recapture and told a court that he "wanted to go back to the loving arms of the law. " "He couldn't stand living outside on his own," said the escapee's defense counsel. The man, who was serving a 16-year sentence for a spate of armed robberies committed when he was 61, had been on the run for two weeks after escaping while on unaccompanied leave.

Crew and passengers on Egypt-Air Flight 990, as provided by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and by relatives and friends. Ages and hometowns given where available. Flight crew: Capt. El Habashy Capt. Rauof Noureldin Flight Officer Adel Anwar Flight Officer El Batoty Farouk Tamam Neama Riad Maha Ahmed Janet Fam Amal Sayed Hasan Farouk Hesham Sabry Mohamed Galal Maha Elmahrouky Adel Erian Nonrevenue passengers: Capt.

The last time the Flyers skated on home ice was Jan. 25, when they disposed of the Canadiens for the franchise's 1,000th regular-season home win. The Daily News commemorates that milestone with this power page and invites readers to share their favorite memories of regular-season home wins by sending an e-mail to DNSports@phillynews.com . Here are five chronologically at the top of our list: 1. The First Oct. 19, 1967 Goaltender Doug Favell shook off an ankle injury and Bill Sutherland scored the first Flyers goal at the Spectrum in the 1-0 win over the Penguins.

In July, Chad and Courtney Ludeman left a three-bedroom, two-bath home in a more upscale neighborhood behind and moved to Kensington, a few blocks from Frankford Avenue, where abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and tiny stores sit beneath the Market-Frankford El. Turn east, toward the Ludemans' environmentally friendly 1,000-square-foot home on East Susquehanna Avenue, and a new world of small, well-maintained houses opens up. The Ludemans, in...

Home, really sweet home For years, local bakery owner Karen Rohde has been donating hand-crafted gingerbread houses to area charities. Now, you can buy Rohde's creations either pre-decorated or ready for decorating with the kids in your home.   For the chopstick-impaired This oversize paper-clip-style chopstick is perfect for adults or children who want to eat Asian food authentically, but just can't quite grasp it. A fun stocking-stuffer.  

The Red Sox sell out every game at Fenway Park and are annually in contention in the carnivorous American League East. First baseman Kevin Youkilis is unhappy. "I understand everything's not positive in this world. But . . . I don't even think you can take kids to a game anymore," he told the Boston Globe. "There's so much negative yells and screaming at players. People don't even root for their own team anymore. They just root against the opposition's players. They're so angry at people.

DOUG ROSS lives on the side of a mountain now, separated from a world that moved too fast, used too many things, made too much noise. "He's anti-technology," Jared Ross was saying about his dad after scoring his first NHL goal in the Flyers' 6-3 playoff victory over Pittsburgh yesterday. "No cable. No cell phone. No computer. "He just got an answering machine a couple of weeks ago. " He has a television, though, and 1,500 feet above Huntsville, Ala., his rabbit ears can pick up the NBC affiliate with hardly any snow on the screen at all. "So I'm sitting alone in my front room, talking to my mother," Doug Ross was saying over the phone.

The old wooden bridge that connected Sand Key and Clearwater Beach was so rickety that cars were limited to 5 m.p.h. Crossing the bridge one day in February 1994, I was a passenger in a brand-new, 12-cylinder Mercedes owned and driven by Lenny Dykstra, then the Phillies' star centerfielder. Dykstra's body speed rarely dipped below 100 m.p.h. He was as impatient off the field as he was focused on it. And as he reined in those two high-powered engines - his and the car's - he was cursing out loud, frustrated enough that I feared he might bite through the steering wheel.

NORTHERN UGANDA - Jennifer Anyayo's reunion with her family would have to wait. First, our taxi driver took us from Entebbe International Airport to Kampala to exchange currency and grab breakfast. We sat down at the pricey Speke Hotel - and that's where Jennifer, 16, first flashed some of the attitude she picked up in America. She didn't like the eggs. "Oh, these eggs are salty. Why do they do that? I don't like salt," she said. "My doctor told me not to eat salt. " Still, she finished her meal, and she, Inquirer photographer Michael Wirtz and I piled back into our minivan taxi.

Sen. Rick Santorum ordered a detour. With 10 cars trailing his Chevy Trailblazer through the back roads of Western Pennsylvania last week, Santorum decided to go home - to his childhood home, a shuttered and worn one-story brick rectangle on the Butler Veterans Affairs Medical Center grounds. "They use it for storage now," Santorum called out, his face pressed against a window. Just as his house is no longer what it once was, neither is his home base, a checkerboard of mining towns, farming villages and urban centers that delivered this Republican upstart to the political world 16 years ago. This election year, it seems, a mid-relationship itch has set in. Voters are dissatisfied with the Iraq war and energy prices, but some in this region known for its political parochialism claim a more personal beef with Santorum: Is he still one of us?

When the charter bus pulled in, bringing 25 Pennsylvania Army National Guard members home after a year's duty in Iraq, Marilyn Hennessey jumped up and down, waving a small American flag, and shouted: "Whoo-hoo-hoo! Here they come. Whoo-hoo!" Spec. Jos? Correa Londono's 13 family members and friends, carrying red, white, and blue balloons, took turns hugging him after he got off the bus, snapped pictures, and asked in Spanish how he was. And Sgt. Bobby Walls' wife and two young children were ecstatic to see him after so many months.

"Is this going to be the best one yet?" asked Hannah, my 7-year-old granddaughter, as we began constructing our seventh gingerbread house. "I think so," I said. "Oh, we always say that!" said her 10-year-old sister, Breanna, laughing. Bonding with grandchildren is difficult when they live an airplane's flight away and you see them only a few times a year. After my granddaughters were born, I decided one way to create memories was to build a gingerbread house with them each Thanksgiving when I visit.