Never underestimate an imported pickle

My dear wife Karen appropriated the card of the smiling, baseball-holding pickle to the Bialczak refrigerator door hall of fame. Quite the Syracuse honor for the Dill from Toledo via Ann Arbor. Beth of I Didn’t Have My Glasses On sent over a glittering package of congratulations after our bonafide big baseball bloggers wager based…

Mulch to remember on Memorial Day Weekend

My dear wife Karen wielded her mighty little hand shovel to place the two Gerber daisies we’d purchased Friday night — the only color she’d found at the apparently picked-over big box — into the hourglass shaped front garden. I pulled out the bags of red mulch and poured liberally. Karen placed and patted, lovingly,…

The best day to tie the knot

The fall day had dawned gray when we jumped in the car and drove west from Syracuse. I wore my new suit pants but carefully arranged the jacket on a hanger in the back. She changed into her beautiful dress in the bathroom of a Kentucky Fried Chicken down the block from City Hall, earning…

The Polish in me

I look at my father’s face in this photo and I’m struck with two lightning bolts of memory. Frank is happy. Frank is happy because he’s once again brought his family to the tiny Polish resort in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. I’m fairly certain I’m the one taking the photo. I think…

Downtown living continues to bounce back

The resurgence of residential urban living has been on the minds of planners and developers for so long in Syracuse now that the annual Downtown Living Tour recently held its eighth edition. Builders are taking the old, forgotten, historic buildings and pumping new life into them with apartments and condos. The spots that used to…

A wheelie good time at the park

Sometimes when you take a lot of pictures, a really good one can get away. This image from my walk last week at Onondaga Lake Park was among my 100. It shows a woman and children enjoying a wheeled ride on a pleasant afternoon on the fitness trail, front, center and behind. I do believe…

Angie’s back, with a promise to stop fiddling with the password

Friday I told you all about how Angie from Kentucky had given up on her excellent blog because she couldn’t log into WordPress anymore. She’d tried to change her password for security’s sake, it turns out, and that was it for that blog. But instead of giving up, this retired woman with MS gathered her…

Congratulations to a hard-working George III

George Venditti III put on the cap and gown in Oneonta and went up there with a whole bunch of other young people to mark the occasion of receiving that coveted academic degree. As a bunch of proud parents sat around a table at the Retreat in Liverpool, N.Y., during a celebration dinner, my marvelous…

Angie says she won’t be blogging anymore

The email from Angie two days ago did not make me happy. My blogging friend from Kentucky again was having trouble with her WordPress account. That’s putting it mildly. “WordPress hates me,” she wrote. “I’ve had to reset my password two times in the last two hours and none of them are working just like…

Dinner with Daryl and Tony Graziano, too

With my dear wife Karen’s son Daryl quite content working the overnight-and-weekend shift at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino in Verona, N.Y., our dinner get-togethers come on Wednesday or Thursday nights. His late-winter move some 25 miles from Syracuse and closer to the job has further complicated schedules. Last night we celebrated his birthday…