Happy Fourth of July from our colorful garden

My dear wife Karen says she always wanted to have a combination of red, white and blue in a garden for the Fourth. She was sort of surprised when I pointed out that this year in our backyard butterfly garden of the Little Bitty in the Syracuse city neighborhood of Eastwood, mission accomplished. The blue…

If you light them up, please be careful

With three days to set things off, somebody somewhere is going to hurt themself. Or, worse yet, send a bottle rocket or another home firework off into the good night and have it land and turn somebody else’s holiday weekend into a nightmare. For my July Fourth Weekend edition of my Mark It Up community…

Free Advice — Damn copycat or thanks for the flattery!

Free Advice is a periodic feature in which I answer letters sent to me at markbialczak@gmail.com. This question comes directly from BloggyVille, and it has the blog’s name attached. In fact, the question hits close to home because it’s about somebody stealing swiping borrowing copying recently starting a format that greatly resonates with a fellow…

You want my left arm, too, Mickey D?

So I thought I’d be a little healthier than usual that morning last week, on a dead run trying to squeeze some sort of breakfast in between blogging and my vanity appointment and viewing a matinée showing of Ted 2 and blogging some more. I pulled the Chevy Cruze into the inside lane of the…

Wet, those six innings were

We enjoyed the five hours we spent at Citi Field in Flushing, N.Y. this past Saturday, my dear wife Karen and I with our New York Mets-loving friend Steve Vicik Jr. and his lovely wife Kristen. But it was wet. How rainy was it as our Mets and the Cincinnati Reds played to that 1-1…

I show creativity to fellow Syracuse blogger Mitch

A week ago, I was sitting in downtown Syracuse listening to Mitch Mitchell discuss his introduction to broccoli. Growing up military, he hadn’t tried it until his adult life, the fellow member of Central New York Bloggers said. I nodded. And I thought: My citizen mother made me eat broccoli weekly like a drill sergeant,…

Wow, the Mets have memories

You walk into the main entrance of the New York Mets’ Citi Field and into the Rotunda. There’s an elaborate tribute to Jackie Robinson, the first to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball. Many considered these Metropolitans to be a replacement for his Brooklyn Dodgers, who’d left for Los Angeles, when they were…

Ellie B’s big homecoming

For that day trip to see the New York Mets play the Cincinnati Reds at Citi Field on Saturday, my dear wife Karen and I had to drop Ellie B aka Dogamous Pyle off at the Shop City Animal Hospital before we picked up Steve and Kristen to start the journey. And they don’t staff…