We gotta get rid of this gopher now

All those cute and funny names you offered for the backyard gopher my dear wife Karen have been attempting to lure into our humane trap so I can drive it away to a better life? I refuse to call it by a single one of them. I’m in no mood for cute, nor funny. X%$&@?!%^#…

The Writer’s Life — Blog Tour

That photo at right is not a working typewriter. It’s still pretty neat, though, my little remembrance of how I used to take the words from my mind, send them through my fingers, onto paper and onward to the world of readers. First, teachers. Later, readers of newspapers. Later, keyboards linked to computer or laptop…

An old favorite, with plenty of oaks

Sometimes weeks of summer slip by with too much on our plates for KP and I to get that golf game in. I was worried we’d miss the whole month of June, what with that trip to Cape Cod and college graduations and life. We snuck in Olde Oak yesterday. Tater went fishing instead. See…

Let’s be thankful Eli Wallach, quite a character

Eli Wallach died Tuesday, and the actor was 98 years old. He got to work alongside the greats of many generations, in movies that your grandparents and parents and you, yourself, may indeed have loved. Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen and Al Pacino and Cameron Diaz. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Magnificent…

A hairy relationship between the siblings, or, keep your chin up

Originally posted on Mark Bialczak:
My sister Fran and I in 1979. For eight years, I was an only child. Darn that Frank and Dolores. Can’t we get somebody else in this family to take some of the attention off me? When Francine came along, I was the happiest big brother in the land. Two…

A hairy relationship between the siblings, or, keep your chin up

For eight years, I was an only child. Darn that Frank and Dolores. Can’t we get somebody else in this family to take some of the attention off me? When Francine came along, I was the happiest big brother in the land. Two years later, Dory arrived. That made me even happier. Mom loved her…

A dozen brand new houses, all dressed up and open for you

Hello, up there. There. There. There. I could imagine the echo. Yes, my mind sometimes got away from me a bit as my dear wife Karen and I walked through the dozen houses opened up this year during the annual Syracuse Parade of Homes. It was the best one ever. What a gorgeous neighborhood. Come…

I’ll walk you to your car, dear

With working downtown comes parking downtown. A year ago, the company that followed the big daily changed locations, and my dear wife Karen decided after a few months of parking in the old surface lot behind the former building to switch to a new multi-leveled garage blocks closer to the new office. It was good…

For awhile, I was swearin’ at Clint Eastwood about ‘Jersey Boys’

Sure, I knew it wasn’t the coolest thing in the world to be caught humming the catchy melody of Frankie Valli’s “My Eyes Adored You” or “Swearin’ to God” as I was getting out of high school and staring my first year of college back in 1975, but what the heck. My father surely had…

I agree, young man, live in the present

My dear wife Karen and I arrived with festivities under way Saturday to celebrate the third birthday of our little friend Evan at a pretty local park. We put our birthday bag on a table stacked full with similar goodies for the happy little man. Greetings came from mom Julie and dad Aaron, with the…