We’re Number One!

What’s funny is that even with the last few years of what I’ll call “deficient” snowfall, Syracuse was still ranked #3 in the nation according to most polls throughout the country. Of course, this doesn’t mention smaller communities that still crush our amount of snow, but we’ll take what we can get.

With that brief amount of conversation up top, I’ve decided that I’m going to share some of the snowfall images I’ve taken so far this season, and probably link to some of the videos I’ve posted on Instagram… which astounds people who don’t live in the area and has most local people wishing our snow removal people had remembered how to do it… messiest roads services since our general snowfall had diminished.

Enough of the preamble; let’s share some visual stuff:

Unfortunately, I can’t post anymore of the videos I created because the files are way too large to fit in a WordPress blog. Instead, I’m going to share the YouTube video I recorded while I was waiting for takeout food from Pie Guys in Liverpool, NY. As words go, it’s the shortest post I’ve ever written, but for depth it’s the heaviest post I’ve ever created. I hope you enjoy the video and the images; Mitchell’s out!

A few weeks ago I finally went there by myself. I’d been looking at the menu online and I knew I wanted one of two choices. I woke around 6AM, knew they opened at 7, and decided to take my shot at it. Got there around 7:15, mad at myself because I was worried I wouldn’t get a seat. I was wrong; at that time of the morning I was the first customer of the day… yay!

I don’t remember the waitresses name; I’m ashamed of myself. Still, she was very kind and said I could sit wherever I wanted. It’s not the largest restaurant in the area, but they have a loyal crowd and a totally different atmosphere, which is nice when you visit a place that’s not a franchise, a place people talk about often.

view from my booth

The waitress gave me time to decide what I wanted; there were only two choices in my mind. One was Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Pancakes, the other was New Orleans Style Shrimp and Andouille Grits. Because it was early in the morning, and I wasn’t ready for a diabetic crash, I went for the grits, which was the thing I saw years ago that prompted me to want to go there. It only took about 10 minutes to show up, and I wasn’t mad… though a bit confused.

Shrimp and Grits

Although it looked mouth watering, it looked totally different than any shrimp and grits I’d ever had. It looked a bit watery, whereas it’s usually more like regular grits, dryer and without as much liquid. I also asked for the sausage to be put on the side, because the waitress said it packed a punch, and I don’t like spicy stuff. I took a quick small bite, my tongue burned and that was that for the sausage. lol

Well… what can I say except it was tasty. I mixed everything together, thinking that maybe the excess wetness was butter. I’m not sure what it was, but mixing everything together might not have been the smartest thing to do. I enjoyed it a lot, but as I got close to the end, my stomach started feeling like it was bloating; as Han Solo would say, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Still, I liked it, and when the waitress came I said I thought about the peanut butter pancakes but it looked like a monster size. She said patrons can request anywhere from 1 to 3 or more if they wanted to; at my present age I’d have only asked for one, and the next time I go I’m getting that.

I can’t remember how much it cost, but I always tip well, so I paid $30 for the experience. I’m going again one of these days, but I’ve learned one major lesson; unless it’s a weekend, the “crowd” isn’t a problem if you’re there at 8am; that works for me, and I recommend y’all take a shot. Oh yeah, check out the menu on line first, because there’s a lot of choices; you’ve been warned!
 

Me at 13;
I was gonna be a star!

Although my overall quest for fame and glory started when I was 13, I actually started taking piano lessons months before I turned 11. I was living in Kansas City, MO, and my grandmother had an old, un-tuned piano that I loved picking tunes on. We didn’t have any sheet music, but Mom thought I might have the possibility of learning how to play, so she found a piano teacher somewhere in the city near a shopping mall we never went to, and I started taking lessons. They only lasted 2 or 3 months because Dad came home from Vietnam, Mom couldn’t take me anymore because Dad was in rehab (which I didn’t know at the time), but the last thing my teacher told Mom is that I might have talent if Mom could find a good teacher wherever we moved.

In December 1970, we moved from Kansas City to Limestone, ME. The day we got to Maine and had to stay in a hotel because it was late at night, we stayed in Houlton… which began our winter challenges. When we left KC, it was in the low 60’s; when we awoke the following morning in Maine, the temperature was -32°… and the car froze up. It had to be put into a heated garage for 24 hours to thaw it out… that poor car! The day after that we were in Limestone, which was famous for 3 things: Phish, a famous music group that I never heard of until the mid 2000s, started performing there in the late 90s; President Nixon stopped at our military base from one of his last trips to China (months later he resigned in disgrace), and it was the home of nuclear bombs and radar… and if you don’t believe that part, watch the movie War Games, at least the last 5 minutes of it). Who said small communities never get any attention?

Two months later, Mom had found out about a piano teacher who lived on base; her name was Mrs. Maine (I’m not making that up). I hate to say this, but she was the first person I ever met who’d be considered white trash; 12-year old me wasn’t used to someone screaming at her kids during lessons, living in the opposite of an immaculate domicile, and occasionally screaming at me because what I played sounded differently than she played the same songs, even though I had records where the songs sounded like I was playing them. That lasted for 8 or 9 months until her husband decided to retire in the area. I thought I’d been rescued until two months later when Mom said the teacher had been given permission to come onto the base and continue my piano lessons. It only lasted one visit, when Mom heard the teacher yelling at me in our apartment; Mom wasn’t having that, so it was over.

Over with her, because 4 or 5 months later I had another teacher whose husband was an officer. Young, pretty, and a bit picayune; she was horrified at how the previous teacher was “educating” me, and she made it her quest to work on getting me to stop doing all the things the previous instructor didn’t care about (she only cared that I hit all the right keys lol).

I was finally allowed to stop taking lessons totally after I performed at my first music recital. I don’t remember the song I played, and I don’t remember playing it. Absolute truth; once I began playing, I started watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon in my head. When the cartoon stopped, I stopped playing, and I got a standing ovation. The tutor was proud of me, I grabbed a cookie, rode my bike all the way back home (enlisted personnel and officers lived on different sides of the base), walked in the house and said I didn’t want to take lessons anymore, and that was that; whew!

No more piano playing for a long time, but other things were popping into my head. For some reason, I decided I wanted to write poetry; this is the first thing I ever wrote, between 13 and 14 (talented, right? lol). You probably can’t read it, but it says”

“The earth is like a molecule,
Floating in space like atoms in air,
And the earth, stars and heavens,
Might be molecules, somewhere out there.”

first poem

But that’s not the only thing. I started writing stories with my friend Darryl. They were our version of science fiction, but it’s obvious we were spurred on by Star Trek. BTW, my name will be blocked out on some of these things because I don’t want my actual full name in the open; I wasn’t as worried about it at the time:

not the first story, but the last at the time

I wasn’t sitting still; I got into scrap booking because I wanted to keep an eye on history, in case something came up that I could come back to look at and use in some way later on; kind of like this country now, which seems to have gone into a 180° cycle at this time in the United States:

wishful thinking…

In the summer of 1975, Dad was retiring from the USAF, so we were ready to finally leave Maine. We stopped at my uncle’s house just outside of Boston, and my parents left me there so they could come to central New York to find a place to live (Mom wanted to retire in this area because we lived there from the summer of 1966 to autumn 1969, and it’s the only place she ever enjoyed living). My uncle and cousin were good tennis players; I had a racket, but didn’t have a real idea of how to play, so they left me alone so I wouldn’t get in their way. Luckily, my parents came back just in time to watch Arthur Ashe beat Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon, the first black male to do so; guess what I wanted to do next.

the champ!

We moved into a townhouse, which in a way was a lot like living in base housing… only new and much cleaner. It was summer, and I really wanted to learn how to play tennis. But there weren’t any other kids around, and it’s hard to learn anything on your own. Luckily, Dad bought a tennis racket for himself and Mom bought me the same racket Arthur Ashe used, and we played every evening when it didn’t rain and twice on the weekends.

It might be hard to believe, but we got really good very fast; Dad was a champion ping pong player, winning the national Air Force tournament twice (wish I could find that). We played tennis like he played ping pong, and when we started playing doubles against other people who showed up, they weren’t ready for us and we went undefeated. Near the end of August, my uncle and cousin came for a visit to see where we were living, and of course I challenged them to a game. I beat both of them twice, then Dad and I beat them in doubles… and we never played against them again; sweet! I played another 2 1/2 years and stayed undefeated until I lost to the 2nd ranked player at the college I went to, SUNY Oswego. 6-2, 6-2. My streak was over, and I never played tennis again; not because I lost, but because it was hard finding people to play against and it wasn’t worth my time.

This one might shock you…

Manilow music book

Before we left Maine, a radio show came on every Sunday called Casey Kasem’s Top 40… or something like that. I was fascinated, as I was hearing all sorts of music that I wasn’t educated on. I heard a few piano songs by this guy named Barry Manilow, and I loved them. A few weeks after we’d moved to the Syracuse area, Mom and I were leaving a grocery store when we passed by a music store and I asked her if we could go inside and take a look around. I discovered the book above and I wanted to see if I could play any of the songs inside, as I’d never played anything except classical music. It was much easier to play than most of the classical pieces, and I found my love for playing again; thanks Mom!

At the end of my senior year, it was time to go to college. I almost didn’t make it; I’d won some awards at my high school that other students weren’t happy about (who cares lol), along with a couple of national awards, and in February the guidance counselor asked me what schools I’d applied for… and I had no idea what she was talking about. I’d been offered 3 scholarships; one in the Albany, NY area, one in Oberlin, OH, and one somewhere in Florida in a field of study I’d never heard of, so I had to scramble.

I went with my friend Chuck to see the College of Saint Rose, a small women’s college that were taking males for the first time. They didn’t have facilities for men, so they’d bought up a bunch of small houses… Mitchell wasn’t living in any of them! lol We also took a look at SUNY Albany, which was stunning, but we were way behind in applying there. We also visited SUNY Oswego, another place I’d never heard of, but can you imagine driving over a concrete hill and diving into a small city and seeing this:

we didn’t have smartphones in 1977 and hardly
anyone carried cameras around with them

I was immediately in love, but I didn’t have high hopes. As a state university, they had plenty of students who had already applied, but I applied anyway in 3 financial fields, hoping I could at least have a shot at it. I won an invite, and I had to visit the university to take an English aptitude test (glad I wasn’t the only one; I might talk about this particular event another time). My parents were astonished by the lake and thought the college looked nice enough. Eventually I got a letter saying I’d made it into the university, but I couldn’t major in any of the 3 areas I’d picked because they were already filled (I picked finance topics because in my mind I didn’t think anyone would want to do that kind of work; shows what I knew). The letter said I’d have a full year to pick a different major; didn’t care, I was in!

I moved into the university a few days before classes started and a week before I turned 18. Because I didn’t have a major, I had to go… somewhere… Monday morning to select classes I wanted to take. One of those was piano studies; yes! I was scheduled for Monday afternoon to meet him, and… well… let’s just say that he was the first of classical music teachers I’ve met over the years who were kind of snooty when it came to what they were going to raise their noses to.

He asked me what I was going to play and I said the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, which I knew well because Dad and I loved it. I played perfectly, no wrong notes, and when I finished I thought he’d be impressed; he wasn’t. He stared at me for about 20 seconds, then asked “who did you hear playing it like that?” I said Glenn Gould, because Dad had bought his album, being a Beethoven fan. The teacher said “he doesn’t know anything about Beethoven, he only knows about Bach”; okay… Still, he took me as a student, and I wasn’t sure what I thought about it, but I was going to give it my best try.

My best try only lasted the first semester, when he decided I wasn’t up to his standards, and I wasn’t certain what I was going to do. The first teacher I talked to said his student list was full, so I went to the next teacher; there were only 3 piano teachers, and I’d never talked to her before. She was nice; she took me in and… well.. whew! Over the next 3 1/2 years, sometimes I was good, sometimes I was horrible, but I passed… whew again!

So, piano playing in my first couple of years of college weren’t spectacular; however, somehow along the line in my freshman year, I ended up singing in college choir, going on a trip to Washington DC and Baltimore for the first time, and walking through the ghetto in DC, which I didn’t know existed. For the next two years, until the end of my junior year, I did my thing in choir, mangled all of the foreign words, but I nailed this one to a T!

I didn’t steal it; I didn’t know I still had it
until about 18 months after I graduated, when I found
it in one of the boxes I hadn’t opened yet

I started playing songs in the girl’s dorm next to mine, because we didn’t have a piano in mine. I’d bought a couple more pop music books so I had more songs to practice with, and I developed a small following… all girls, so that was sweet!

I graduated in May of 1981, and I made the dean’s list both semesters of my senior year, when the only music class I could take was piano (turns out my original counselor didn’t tell me about electives outside of music; ugh). It worked out well because the thing about taking music is that a lot of what you do is subjective to how teachers like what you do, whereas things like history and science have specific answers. The last year boosted me into the Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges (I got a letter, because I didn’t know it was a thing; I’m probably going to say that a lot here), that went along with Who’s Who Among High School Students from 1977 (it’s around here somewhere; it’s a big house, and I just remembered that I was in it).

I moved with my parents to the new house they had built, and started looking for employment. I learned a few lessons really fast; a college degree doesn’t guarantee you a job, don’t listen to job placement services if you’re already making money at a temporary job, and without “real” money there’s little you can do on your own or with your friends. I still played a lot of piano during the day when I was out of work, but my heart wasn’t into it. Still, I wrote a song that, in my mind, wasn’t all that bad (luckily, I got better):

Journey To The Stars

It doesn’t look like much, but for a first song I thought it was brilliant. I thought I’d take a chance and enter it into a national song contest. I had to record the song on a cassette, and the entry fee was $25. Somewhere between 4 and 6 weeks, I got notified that I finished in the top 600 out of 25,000 songs (I lost that letter; heck!). I was elated, but in retrospect, I think I might have been scammed, but my songwriting career had started. Luckily, just in case I decided to copyright the song, my first:

Copyright of first song

Then I became a member of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, for two years. I knew about them because I used to buy Billboard magazine monthly; it shared all the lists of top 100 or 200 music categories, and had a lot of advertisements in the back pages. Every professional musician, songwriter or producer’s in it, and I wanted to be at the party.

ASCAP

After a couple of years at jobs that didn’t pay well and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere, I got a chance to work at a local hospital, since I passed the math test at 100% and typed 60 words a minute (I got faster as the years went on).

I’d never been in a real hospital before. On military bases, most of them have what they call dispensaries, and they’re relatively small. I guess I was born in a hospital at Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, TX, and maybe I got my vaccinations there before we went to Tokyo, Japan, but obviously I don’t remember any of that. At that point it was the biggest building I’d ever been in, over 650 beds, large halls, and a big cafeteria. I felt out of my element for a week, as I’d never sat in front of a computer before, but I told myself that if everyone else can do the work, I can do the work; self pep talks can work wonders.

After working there a couple of years, I decided it was time to move out to my own apartment. In a way, it was like base housing, and I was a happy guy for a while. I didn’t have the money to go out to clubs, and I rarely went anywhere except to my parents house, so I started playing the piano every nice for 4-5 hours, not watching TV, not doing much of anything else. I got better, wrote a lot of songs, and bowled 4 or 5 times a week (bowling was my other thing). I got promoted twice, which meant being paid more; I was holding nothing against anyone.

One day, the office administrator’s secretary mentioned that she was getting married. I knew the guy she was marrying, and out of the blue I said “Hey, I wrote a long song and I’d love to play it at your wedding.” She wanted to hear it, so I went home, recorded it onto a cassette, and took that and the lyrics to the office the next day. She said she wasn’t sure about the song, but asked if I’d sing at her wedding… gulp!

We Are Love

As you can see, I not only kept writing songs, but I was writing script; I didn’t do it for the first song, but I did it for all the other music I copyrighted, proof that I wrote all of it. However, since she wanted a different song, I asked her to pick one or two and I’d give it a shot. I don’t remember the second song, but the first was Follow Me by John Denver… which started acapella (which means without music), then the music comes in later. I had to go to a friend of mine who was a trained music and voice teacher. The wedding was a few weeks later, I pulled it off, and suddenly I was a wedding singer… half of the time I actually got paid!

The next problem arose when I realized I couldn’t take my heavy wooden piano around with me, because some places didn’t have pianos. So I sold that piano and used the money to buy a professional traveling piano, the higher end of the scale, a Yamaha PF85, because I got a great deal from the music store I used to work at. It was 75 pounds, but I could carry it with one arm; it was a savior for my career, because many regular pianos were out of tune, and I already mentioned that some places I performed at didn’t have a piano.

Me in wedding party; someone else was supposed to sing
with the band but called in sick; you know what I had to do

Over the next 13 years or so, I performed at a lot of weddings, always a singer, but one time I was part of a duet performing Endless Love at another wedding, where I was also in the wedding party. I wrote a bunch of songs, copyrighted a lot of lyric albums… and somewhere along the way my friend Scott and I wrote a science fiction story called Return of Icarus. We submitted it to a couple of science fiction magazines and we didn’t land a spot; one of the magazines told us our science wasn’t correct… those weasels! lol

Return of Icarus

Also, during those 13 years I left two jobs, lost 3 jobs, and decided to become an independent consultant. A week after I got my business license, I not only got a short time gig up north somewhere (I can’t remember the name), but I decided to write a book on leadership. Blogs weren’t available back then, but I bought some IBM software so I could put the book together faster; even though I typed fast, I knew it would take longer to finish the book.

Then the country dealt with September 11th, and I called my wife to tell her I was on my way down to NYC, until I heard that all bridges and trains were being shut down, and I didn’t go; heck! Like most people I pretty much shut down mentally for a while, and unfortunately it took hearing about how sick my dad was brought me back to life and I decided I wanted to finish the book so that maybe he could read at least some of it.

Then, two things happened.

One, I met a guy named Ken Blanchard, who wrote a book called One Minute Manager and Fish!: A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results. A local guy I met at a Chamber meet and greet invited me to be his guest at an event he was putting on in a town called Skaneateles… which is gorgeous! I got to talk to Ken, told him I had written a book on leadership (which I’d finished a couple of weeks earlier), and he asked if I could send him a copy… which I did, on copy paper, because I hadn’t been to a printer yet (which came a few years later). I had to put it in a big envelope, then sent it via a higher level of postal mail. He sent me a letter two weeks afterwards, saying that he thought it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t his style of writing. I was… ecstatic! He didn’t hate it, and that’s all I needed to hear.

Embrace The Lead, table of contents page 1

Two… Dad got much worse, but he was still able to read about 25% of it before he couldn’t go any further. Four months later, on Father’s Day, he passed away in a hospital in Rochester, NY, which was also the last day of a Mitchell family reunion that we couldn’t go to. A weird sidebar is that one of the younger cousin’s I’d never met supposedly said at the same time “Uncle Lloyd passed away” (he didn’t say “passed away”, but I can’t bring myself to say the actual words). I found out about it when I called my aunt 15 minutes afterwards; weird, right?

Before I got my first really good paying project, I started doing seminars on leadership, diversity, motivation and health care billing and procedure coding (don’t worry about the last one; most people have never heard of it). Most were around the city of Syracuse, but I also traveled to other places such as Ohio, Washington DC, Virginia and Nebraska. I was also writing a weekly newsletter on both of those topics and things related to them, which I kept writing for almost 10 years on the dot. In my own way, I accidentally became a professional speaker and writer. It was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t sustainable long term. I never got good at marketing myself, but at least I did reach a bunch of people in many ways, so I’m happy with that.

Embrace The Lead; I made my money back, so I got rid
of most of the books and only have 5 or 6 left in the house

When I got my first great gig, it was paying me enough so I could take my book to the printers and paid for 200 copies so I could sell them at my seminars or from my website and blogs. After all these years, I ended up even, but I still felt good about it. I wrote two other books that I never actually published; one is called Leadership Is/Isn’t Easy, the other called Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool. I put together some smaller pamphlets and other products, which are still listed on my business website.

The last thing I’m going to talk about are all the blogs and websites I created over the years. I started my first blog in February 2005 called Mitch’s Blog, because of course it is. I had to put it back together when the company I was using as a host crashed, and I lost everything. Luckily, I knew where to go to find all those articles, otherwise I might have given up blogging for good. My next blog is called I’m Just Sharing, which I started in December, 2007 (look to the right; you’ll see links to both of those blogs). Then there’s this blog; you know what it’s called because you’re on the page.

Over the years I’ve created and removed 7 other blogs, 4 other websites, wrote for others both for free and for pay. I’ve written over 6,600 blog posts and at least 3,500 articles for others who paid me, on many different subjects. I gave up singing at weddings in 1999, when I not only performed 4 songs (one of which I had to go back to my friend the voice teacher because it was a song from Phantom of the Opera, and it was slightly out of my range), but the last song was We Are Love, which I’d always thought I would sing at my wedding, but I finally got to perform it in public and I got my one and only standing ovation… so I went out on top!

These days I write some blog articles, but nothing like I did in the past. When I finish writing this blog post, I’m going to put a pile together and a lot of old material’s going in the recycle bin. There’s no family or friends to give any of it to that would be interested in getting it. Not married, no children… just me. I’ll keep a few things that I cherish, but it’s time to declutter so it’s not a burden on anyone else… whoever that might be. I stopped playing piano in 2002, but that will be someone else’s decision to make; maybe I’ll sit down one day and try to play some Beethoven… that might be nice.

The final question anyone who reads this might want to ask; why did I go through all this trouble in putting together this particular article? Well… I view this as my epitaph. Even when the blog disappears, it’ll be on the internet forever… or at least as long as the internet is still a thing.

For those of you who know me, I want you to know that as far as I know I’m not going anywhere immediately; I’m still relatively healthy, but age hits all of us eventually. Since I have no immediate plans to leave this earth, I’m not going to say goodbye; I just want anyone who reads this sees that I accomplished a lot in my life that I’ve talked about… and a lot more I’m not getting into, otherwise I’ll be here a week.

That’s it; that’s the article… and I’m still about 1,100 words from my longest article ever. Them’s the breaks; good night and goodbye to all of you!
 

It was a few days before our furniture and stuff showed up at the townhouse so we could finally put things together. Being only 15 years old, I wasn’t asked to do much except stay out of the way; yay! They pulled my bicycle out, and after checking the tires I was off to explore the new place that I’d call home for 6 years.

I wasn’t prepared for what I encountered. First, I was a military kid who moved to central New York after living in Limestone, Maine, for 4 1/2 years. Before that, for about 15 months, I was living in a ghetto in Kansas City, Missouri, while Dad was in Vietnam, and going to an all-black school except for the one Mexican kid named Jose; I’m not lying! lol Before that I was living on another military base, located in North Syracuse.

The two bases were fairly integrated, so in my mind that was the norm of how living was supposed to be; Kansas City was an aberration, a temporary stop. I thought I was going to be living in a place similar to living on a military base. That is… until I started riding my bike around the neighborhood.

I rode my bike around the complex I was living in, and I almost didn’t see anyone; turned out that military housing and apartment living weren’t quite the same thing, as there weren’t a lot of kids around even though it was summer, a week after Wimbledon, which means school was out.

As I rode my bike, I came across a school and decided to check it out, thinking that would be the school I’d be going to. It turned out to be an elementary school, so I knew I wouldn’t be going there. I decided to ride my bike down the street, which I later on found out was called Woodspath Road. I saw a few people sitting in their lawn chairs, and obviously they saw me. The further down the road I rode my bike, the more front doors opened, and more people came out of their doors and were looking at me. I knew things were going to be different than anything I was used to, but figured that if I succeeded in living through the ghetto years, I’d live through this.

Let’s move ahead in time a bit, from 1975 to 2000. I’d graduated from the local high school, graduated from Oswego State on the coast of Lake Ontario in Oswego, NY, ended up in a career of health care finance which involved long distance driving on a daily basis, had been married for just over 3 years, and my ex decided we needed to buy a house, which I never thought I’d have. We looked around Liverpool and a couple of places in the city of Syracuse, but nothing seemed to fit what we were looking for.

After a day where we almost signed the papers for a house we didn’t want, I decided to go online to see if there was something that might work for us, and I came across a home where the price was right, supposedly in a nice neighborhood. Two days later I called the realtor who’d taken us to the house we almost bought, told her about the house I’d found online and we met with her the day after, which means I got to leave work early.

The house was interesting. It’s considered a one floor, 5-bedroom house with a large living room, a nice sized kitchen, and a monster sized properly in the back; nothing I ever wanted. However, what I also realized is that the house was on the same street I rode my bike on and continued riding up that street for at least 3 years, until I got my license to drive. We ended up signing the papers two days later and all felt pretty good; of course I messed up a couple of things, but I might tell that story another day.

The house we moved into had been built in 1960 by a guy who also used to work on cars in the garage. Many of the people who lived on the street when I originally rode my bike were still around, and I found out within a few weeks that they’d all been notified that my ex and I were living in the neighborhood. Everyone close to us was very friendly, but the main 3 people was the guy across the street, the male neighbor on one side of us and the mail neighbor on the other side of my side neighbor, Larry, Russ and Lenny.

It was an interesting group of guys. Russ and Lenny had lived in the neighborhood when I rode my bike up the street in 1975; Larry didn’t move there until the early 90s. They knew everything about all the neighbors close to us, and some information about other people further down the street. A lot of people had moved out, which happens in neighborhoods, but these 3 old guys were great people, and we were happy to live close to friendly people who actually talked to us.

Unfortunately, like life had a habit of doing, things started happening to the older people. Russ was the first one to pass away, around 2013. Larry passed away around 2018, which only left Lenny. Since this is a tribute to Lenny, I’m going to tell a story that involved him; stick around.

Back in 2005, during the State Fair, there was a monster thunderstorm that came through the area. My ex’s father and his… “woman” (I never knew what the relationship actually was lol) were staying with us, and we heard the loud noise, as if something had fallen in the backyard. Since it was early morning, the sun was out, so we went to take a look. A large branch from one of the trees that was in the backyard had fallen, and it was way too heavy to try to move it ourselves. Because of an encounter I had with a branch at a friend’s house a year earlier, I knew I wouldn’t be able to move it until it dried up a little bit.

Living in central New York, we ended up having 146 inches of snow, which means the wood didn’t quite dry up the way we hoped it would. The branch was still heavy and massive, so I told my ex that I was going to one of those rental stores and was going to get a chainsaw and cut it up. To say it was beyond my expertise wasn’t close to my lack of skills, but in my mind I told myself that I could do what anyone else could do. She wasn’t happy about it, but I was pretty resolute that I was going to get it done.

Then about 15 minutes later I got a call from my mother, who asked me if I was thinking about cutting the large branch in the backyard, and I felt betrayed, knowing who’d called her. Mom asked me to promise that I wouldn’t do it; I’d never break a promise with Mom, so I made the promise, but felt embarrassed by it.

But that wasn’t all. My ex told Larry, Larry told Russ and Lenny, and everyone had a good laugh at my expense, which I eventually joined, figuring that if I hurt myself it wouldn’t help anyone. Then, a week later, Lenny came by with his electric saw and said he was going to do it for me, even though I didn’t ask him to do it; I didn’t even know he had a saw, though I did know that he was a lawn guy, who spent every day during the summer doing something in his yard, and every day in the cold months and the heavy snow doing something about the outside of his house.

I thanked him for doing it, but we still had to wait another year for the wood to dry before we could move any of those chunks… after which we had the tree removed for good. I can’t remember what we gave him to thank him for doing it, but I thought it was the most neighborly thing anyone could have done for us.

About a month ago, I came home from work and saw a few police cars around Lenny’s house. I didn’t want to intrude anyone’s privacy, and I’d assumed that something had happened to his wife, who’d been bedridden for years, and who I hadn’t seen in over 20 years. I found out just last week that Lenny, who I also didn’t know was 95 years old, was in his backyard, doing some kind of yardwork, sprucing up the lawn as usual, collapsed, put his arms on the ground and his head on his hands… you know the rest. I learned that from one of the newer neighbors who’d moved in the the house on the other side of his; I didn’t want to intrude on his family, none of whom I’d ever met. The “for sale” sign was put on the lawn last Monday, and there’s already been a lot of visitors. If the inside of the house was as immaculate as the outside, it’s going to move fast, and sell for a pretty penny.

Lenny was a great guy; he put a condolence card in my mailbox when my mother passed away while living with me in September, 2021. I’d talk to him occasionally, but he was a busy guy, taking care of his house and his wife, so I didn’t disturb his peace. His wife’s been moved to an assisted living place that on one else knows where, someone I’d never visit since I never met her. But I felt that Lenny deserved a tribute as the last of the “old men on the street”, who was here the first time I rode my bike, and I know that this is another step towards the changing neighborhood.

I don’t have a picture of Lenny, and I don’t want to mess with someone else’s privacy, so I’m sharing a picture I took that will be the final tribute I can give to Lenny and the others. Rest in peace, y’all!
 

When I wrote that particular article about Great Northern Mall, I had a feeling it was ready to shut down. All of the restaurants were closed. Sears was still open, but they were starting to remove all of their merchandise. Dick’s and Bath & Bodyworks were still open, but only B&B was sustaining itself. Macy’s was closed, most of the other stores were closed, and the mall was renting space to small, local businesses, but that wasn’t going to last long. Friendly’s stayed open as long as it could, but their entire corporation was in trouble, which I didn’t know about at the time.

During that same period of time, many changes were happening at Destiny USA. The covid pandemic didn’t help, but not everything that happened could be blamed on that. For many of the smaller businesses, covid takes the blame; for the larger businesses, it turns out all of them were suffering nationally already, and some of them were anchor stores at the mall.

Let’s see, what stores can I remember? Penney’s, H&M, Lord & Taylor and Best Buy immediately come to mind. Macy’s is probably on its last leg, as the corporation is looking to close multiple stores across the country and it’s not as vibrant a place as it used to be. Many restaurants have closed, both large and small, but Cheesecake Factory seems to be sustaining itself well, and P.F. Chang’s is hanging in there; thank goodness! Other restaurants have given up the ghost, being replaced by newer and smaller restaurants that are probably on pins and needles because foot traffic is a lot lower than it was in the past. I’m not going to mention how many changes the food court has gone through, but it’s easy to see the decline in traffic and how rare it is to see the seating totally full these days.

The decline of malls in the United States isn’t a new thing. A mall called Randall Park Mall in Ohio, which opened in 1976, was once the largest mall in America. It only made it 33 years before it closed, and the structure was demolished in 2016. Mall of America, the current largest mall in the country, declined in sales 1.1% from 2022 to 2023, which isn’t bad. The area it’s in has seen a major decline on its population over the last few years, but the mall is close to its airport and still gets visitors from around the world continually, mainly because it has many indoor parks and recreational facilities.

Destiny had great hopes when it was still called Carousel Mall, but it all crashed when the original builder, Robert Congel, started building it with the goal of making it the largest mall in the country, which didn’t depress me one bit. I was lucky to be one of the earliest people inside the mall while it was being built, but it was unofficial and only one person knew it at the time; I’ll leave that alone for now.

What happened? Way too much information to get into, but suffice it to say that Destiny never made it to the top of “malldom” when it came to size. It also didn’t create a new neighborhood with upper middle class housing, hotels, a golf course and a few other things. If you go by the mall these days, you’ll still see lots of empty space on one side of the mall that no one actually knows what to do with it. In my opinion, that was the thing that started the decline of Destiny, although it was still pretty good for a while.

So, let’s get back to the main topic; is our area close to being mall-less? I mentioned Great Northern already, but what about Shoppingtown Mall, Penn Cann Mall, Seneca Mall, Fayetteville Mall, Tri-County Mall, Camillus Mall, Marketplace Mall, Fayetteville Mall, Finger Lakes Mall… am I missing any? If I’d gone outside central New York, this article could have taken all day to get through and depressed a lot more people, including myself.

Destiny’s going through other issues. They’ve luckily secured a 5-year extension on their outstanding $430 million debt in 2022, even as its value sank 80%, putting it deeply underwater. It’s also become a more dangerous place, with more public shootings and stabbings being reported, along with the attack on former Syracuse basketball coach’s wife in the parking lot, also back in 2022. That, along with many open and empty spaces, don’t sound like the chance of success is great.

Personally, I want to believe the mall will survive, that smarter people will come up with ideas to keep the mall afloat, and that it won’t default on their debt repayment in any way. There used to be shows in the mall that drew thousands of people, but I don’t know if that kind of thing will work anymore. What I do know is that if Destiny falls, we’ll only be left with strip malls… which might have “mall” in the name, but y’all know what I mean.

How do you feel about the potential loss of the last great mall in central New York?
 

What have I been thinking about? Syracuse basketball, of course. I also started thinking that I haven’t written anything specific about the Syracuse area in quite a while; actually, once one article last year, in April, about the specific area I live in, Liverpool, NY.

Mom & I repped the ‘Cuse!

Anyway, it’s basketball season, and the team is sitting at 9-3 as I’m writing this. They’re not quite a top 50 team… yet… because like most Syracuse fans, we’re expecting great things as the season goes on, along with a new coach and a potential NBA star on the horizon; y’all know who I’m talking about.

So, I had a thought. Back in 2014, I wrote a short article talking about my 10 favorite Syracuse basketball players in history. Yeah, I’m a bit behind the times, and I probably should update it; we’ll see if I get there.

This time around, I decided to share what I could in highlighting my favorite last-minute moments in Syracuse basketball history. My initial goal was to list 10, but I wanted to add video into the mix, and there’s not as much “clean” videos on YouTube that I thought would work well. So, I’m sharing 5; if anyone thinks they can find something short and clean that would fit, let me know.

So, on with the show:

Gerry McNamara – game tying shot against Connecticut w/5 seconds left, Big East Tournament, 2006

Tyler Ennis Hits Buzzer Beater vs. Pitt – 2/13/2014

John Gillon: Buzzer-Beating Game Winner vs. Duke, 2017

Hakim Warrick–The Block– vs. Kansas National Title Game, 2003; not quite a “shot” video as much as a blocked shot

Pearl Washington’s Half-Court Buzzer-Beater VS Boston College (I was at this game, sitting behind the backboard where Pearl made the shot (1984)

There you are; which last minute shots do you remember that makes you smile?
 

Back around June, YouTube started testing a message on their site telling particular users that they were using adblockers and it was a violation of the terms of service to watch videos on the site. Initially there wasn’t anything more, and because it was a test many people didn’t see it.

I use adblockers on both Firefox and Chrome across the board, though I use Firefox the most. I have other things I can use to eliminate other things I don’t want to deal with; that’s just how I roll. There’s lots of stuff I don’t want to see; I have a passionate hate for popups and other stuff that intrudes my online life, and if I’m visiting a page I’m never going back to, or one I visit irregularly, I don’t want to be bothered; am I alone here?

Getting back to YouTube, I wasn’t getting any YouTube messages, so I thought that maybe the adblocker I was using was exempt. That lasted until early October, when I started seeing the initial warning message. There was one before the image I’m sharing here, saying you could only watch 3 videos before you were being blocked.

I was irked because I hate ads being forced on me, so I basically ignored it, watching only 2 videos at a time, then leaving and going back later on. Within 10 days or so I was getting the message you see above, and I knew it was getting serious; those weasels! lol

To be fair, they do have a good point. Except for the paid services, almost everything else is free, and there’s a lot of great content out there that most of us who visit have been watching without paying for anything. Some of the people creating videos on YouTube (like yours truly) do it as a living, and even though some of them make thousands of dollars, many of the rest aren’t making the same kind of money, and if they don’t make money then they stop creating, and… well… you know.

The first thing I did was go to my adblocker add-on and whitelisted YouTube. I thought that would take care of everything, but I still got a warning message. They had something added that said to send them a message if you’re not using an adblocker, so I left a message saying I was using an adblocker but I’d whitelisted YouTube, and that should have taken care of everything.

A few days later I got the message above, and I wondered what the issue could be since they were listed. Then I realized I have another add-on I use that lets me change some of the settings and visuals on the YouTube channel that suits my visual sensibilities, and decided to check that out… and I’d set up adblocking YouTube there as well without thinking about it.

Still, I hadn’t thought about that being a problem because I also access YouTube on Chrome, which is owned by Google, who also owns YouTube, and I have the same add-on there, so I didn’t think about it until I got the first warning message via Chrome… and it was the warning above, which means they’d stopped playing. lol

I decided I’d do kind of a workaround. I whitelisted everything so I wouldn’t be bothered by YouTube warnings; what I also decided to do was hit the mute button on my desktop keyboard so I wouldn’t have to hear any ads that immediately started after I clicked on something I wanted to watch. It’s irksome, but at least I still felt like I had some kind of control.

With that said… I mentioned a recommendation. It turns out that there are some browsers out there that block ads automatically from all websites. It’s built into their system, which means it’s not like typical adblockers. I’ve been using Brave as a browser on both my smartphone and my desktop because of its blocking capability, especially when I want to read a news story and that stupid popup comes and won’t let you read anything unless you subscribe to it. By using Brave, it blocks around 98% of those types of things, and all I have to do is select the private window option, and everything’s blocked except the content… which included YouTube.

So, there’s an option and recommendation for you to try out if you’re so inclined. There’s nothing saying Google won’t ever figure it out, but for the time being, if you don’t want to resort to what I’m doing now on Firefox and Google, you have something else to try out; you’re welcome!

By the way Brave isn’t the only browser that will block stuff for you, but it’s the only one I’ve ever trusted and it’s worked great for me over the years. If you decide you want to check out other browsers, I’d recommend you use DuckDuckGo as your search engine of choice; why give Google the opportunity to track you so they can find all the other browsers out there and start picking them?
 

I’m going to talk and share both pictures and videos of things I love about the specific area I live in, which is Liverpool, NY. I moved here in July 1975, after my dad retired from the military, and I’ve been here ever since. It’s a very calming place to live, and even though he does have a few things I’m not enamored with, just like every other community, overall I’m extremely happy with a lot of it.

This isn’t a deep dive into the community though. I’m going to talk partially about where I live, where I used to live, and Onondaga Lake Park. I spend a lot of time walking through the neighborhood, the neighborhood I used to live in, and of course at the park. I live about a mile away from the lake, but it’s not the safest trek to walk from my house to the lake. In my adult years I’ve only done that twice… and both times I swore I was never going to do it again… and I hope to stick to that from this point on!

For instance, the first picture on this post is at the end of the street I live on. As you can see, balloons and words of thanks were around the entrance to the school, thanking teachers for, I assume, being teachers. lol I thought it was a nice picture to take, as I’d never seen anything like this before.

kid’s playground

Meanwhile, the picture just above this paragraph was taken just over 2 weeks later. It wasn’t here when I was younger, only showing up about 7 or 8 years ago, when I was living in the house I live in now. I was almost 16 years old when I moved to Liverpool, so I’d have never had the chance to play on it, but on some of my walks when the weather is bad I love seeing children enjoying themselves.

lived here with my parents

The elementary school sits between the street I live on, another street on its north side, and there’s a short walkway that leads to Grenadier Village, which is both an apartment complex and, these days, what it calls condominiums, though when I lived there they were known as townhouses. As a matter of fact, the above is where we lived, and it was the first building on the part of what was called Grenadier Village back then, as the apartments were called King Park Apartments. There were 3 buildings in a different park before one got to ours, but over the years they built a bunch of them, all in the same style, though they modified things a bit.

I lived behind the building with the flowers

We lived there almost exactly 6 years before moving into a house elsewhere in Liverpool. Just a bit more than 2 years later I moved into an apartment in the Kings Park area that was directly across from where I’ve lived before. I was there to years before I learned that there was a river behind the entire complex, behind the office complex building, which I’d never paid attention before. I didn’t know how big or long it was until years later when they decided to build lakefront apartments, that didn’t work so well in 1993 after we had 44″ of snow drop in the area, which resulted in massive flooding of the river and Onondaga Lake.

I’m not sure what they’ve done since then to reduce the possibility of future flooding, but what they did do was clear out all the brush behind those buildings and add some park benches so people can sit down and watch the river flow, which is between Onondaga Lake on one side and Lake Ontario on the other (you can’t see either from this part of the river, but it’s still calming and enjoyable to view.

I think that’s enough for the day. I was going to talk about Onondaga Lake as part of what I love about Liverpool, but I’ve written enough about it over the years. Instead, I’m going to share this link from almost 12 years ago (ouch!), and possibly share more about the lake as time goes on.
 

Doran via Compfight

Later, upon reflection, I started to think that maybe I’d been a bit too hasty with that decision. When all is said and done, even if I’d eaten 2 eggs by themselves, the cost of my overall meal would have only been 62 cents. Sure, it’s more than the 29 cents those same 2 eggs would have cost me before but really, is that a killer of my finances?

As someone who’s written about ways to save money in many ways, like making big meals on the weekend and storing them for the week, I know the value of spending a little bit of money up front to save big money on the back end. I also know that many of us don’t calculate how much we’re spending per meal that we’re eating at home, thus don’t compare it to the price of meals in restaurants or fast food.

For instance, let’s take a look at hot dogs. The kind I like costs $4.50 for a pack of 10. Up front that looks like a lot of money, but when I break it down, it’s 45 cents a hotdog. If I have 2, it’s 90 cents. If I add bread (my favorite comes with 30 slices of bread and costs $1.99), the cost has “jumped” to $1.03. With the cost of condiments being negligible, at best I get to eat 2 hot dogs for around $1.10. By contrast, the cost of one hot dog was $5.50 when I went to my last sporting event (which was a long time ago, and I didn’t buy it) and I knew what I’d get; a salty piece of meat smaller than what I bought on a stale bun. Heck, movie popcorn is around $15 or so; what’s the better deal overall?

That’s an interesting cost comparison isn’t it?

Let’s look at hamburger next. Right now, a pound of 80% hamburger costs $5.50. If I decided to measure out a quarter pound, each one would cost just over $1.25. If I put that on bread, the total cost of my meal without condiments comes to $1.38; a Whopper costs around $6.50 a shot; at least you can get a full Big Mac meal for around $8; less if you don’t get the drink. Even if I decided to make a half pound burger, the cost is still more than half the cost of a Whopper, and I can get at least 2 meals out of it.

I hear you now saying “but those aren’t healthy foods”. Okay, let’s take a quick look at salad; how about a grilled chicken salad?

First, the lettuce. Since romaine lettuce is a little healthier we’ll start with that. At my store, I can get 3 large stalks of that for $2.50. A pack of shredded carrots costs $1.99. I like shredded cabbage and that costs me $1.99. I love beets on my salad, but since I don’t know anything about raw beets I buy a large jar of beets for $1.29. The last item I’ll pick up is a rotisserie chicken that’s already cooked that costs $7.99 and is a pretty good size (I remember when it was only $4.99). The total cost is around $15.00. By the way, if I went to the farmer’s market I could get all of the vegetables in bigger quantities for less money than at the store, which would save more money.

Prayitno via Compfight

Since I only need one stalk of romaine lettuce for my salad, I’m going to make sure everything else measures out as if I’m making 3 meals out of it. The stalk of lettuce costs about 83 cents. A 1/3rd of the carrots and cabbage is 66 cents each. The beets come in at 33 cents. The chicken comes in at $1.66. This means my salad came in at around $5.50, not including the salad dressing. No matter what kind of salad dressing you put on it, the cost will still be way under $6.00 per salad. The last time I thought about ordering a chicken Caesar salad at a restaurant it cost me $13.99. Based on that, I got 2 1/2 salads at home for the same money and they’re probably bigger than the one at the restaurant.

The main idea I’m trying to get across is that you have to look at how many potential meals you can get out of your investment when it comes to spending money on groceries if you’re on a budget. If you’re paying $8.99 a pound for a rib eye steak (I have no idea what it costs lol), you might save money when compared to going out to a restaurant but that’s still a pretty expensive meal. However, if you bought a slab of beef brisket for $10, brought it home and put it into a crockpot, then mixed a few things with it later on, you would create upwards of at least 7 meals, possibly more.

If you look at it that way, it allows you to calculate whether the cost of buying organic or favorite brands of items instead of generic is really cost prohibitive or, in the scheme of things, more affordable than you might have thought.

Not that I don’t feel your pain. The Wegmans Ultimate Chocolate Cake that used to cost $10 is now around $25; ouch! Luckily that’s not a staple, and if I want some other dessert it’s going to cost me a lot less, and I’ll enjoy it since I don’t buy things I won’t eat. But in the long run, even though the costs of certain things have gone up,. it’s still a good deal in the long run. At least that’s what I tell myself.