Well it looks pretty nice

Things were looking pretty as Ellie B aka Dogamous Pyle raced to do her morning thing off the back porch of the Little Bitty my dear wife Karen and I share in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Syracuse. The sun was inviting. Postcard alluring, perhaps. Vivid skies invited birds to the treetops off in the…

What’s worse, the snow or the cold?

I’ve yet to venture outside this Sunday morning, choosing instead to work on my blogs. Here’s why. At 10:25 a.m., the crawl on “CBS Sunday Morning” proclaimed the temperature in Syracuse, N.Y., to be -4 F. My peering out the side at 8 allowed me the vision of Good Neighbor Tim and Wonderful Wife Lorraine…

You win some, you lose some

Snow and cold, hot Italian food, snow and cold, hot college basketball, cold and snow. A happy Valentine’s Day it was for my dear wife Karen and I in Syracuse, N.Y. We started with a drive through the snow to Carrabba’s Italian Grill in nearby Fayetteville. The 2 p.m. late lunch/early dinner plan was perfect…

Eclectic Corner Fiction: The Bar and The Ring

Justine at Eclectic Odds N Sods throws a weekly party of prompts in which she tempts bloggers to add to her foundation with photographs or words. She calls in I Love Eclectic Corner. You can find the latest installment here. She writes of a painter, a woman at her easel in the field of her…

A Valentine’s Day story about a dog and a bird

My Valentine’s Day started with an Ellie B aka Dogamous Pyle clamor. Bed to floor to French doors to bed to my face. Get. Up. Da! I know the language of our beloved 4-year-old rescue mutt well. The 7:30 a.m. door-open resulted in a quicker exit than usual, and Ellie B scampered haphazardly around the…

Cementing a Bond between boss and writer

Yesterday afternoon I drove to the offices of Syracuse Public Media site waer.org to pick up tickets to today’s Syracuse-Duke men’s basketball game. I was offered the tickets after another blogger saw my story that mentioned Valentine’ Day plans that included taking my dear wife Karen to see the game on the movie screen at…

A party to celebrate 2 years of spreading Syracuse music

Mark Turley and Nicholas Oliver have a passion for the Syracuse music scene that comes from making art their own way. Do It Yourself, or DIY, as the acronymists of the world like to say. For almost 20 years, Turley has played in bands and Oliver has taken pictures, created art and collected vinyl albums.…

Slap a couple steaks on the grill

I hear the boasts here and there from the toughies who claim they’re always ready to burn up a couple of sirloins for dinner out there in their backyard no matter the season. Yeah, buddy, you master of your own universe, captain of the propane flame, king and queen of coal, grillmeister extraordinary. Not me.…

Connecting the dots between Yayoi Kusama, Eddie Murphy

There’s a movie being make about the life of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a woman whom I must report I’d never heard of until I saw that fact that “Life in Polka Dots” was being filmed while collecting items for my weekly Film News blog for the Syracuse New Times. She was a contemporary of…

A jazz singer who seeks discipline and adventure

You can’t always get what you want, right, Mick? But if you try some time, you just might find … Well, as much as he wanted to get me some phone time with rising star jazz vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant for my weekly community blog column today for Syracuse Public Media site waer.com, her publicist…