Category archive for ‘Happy Trails [Editorials]’ 
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When paupers dine like kings
As a couple, there are a lot of things my wife and I are good at and a lot of things we’re not good at. I’m afraid the latter is more prevalent, but who’s counting? One of the things we’re worst at is using gift cards, especially those credit-card gift cards that are supposed to be accepted everywhere but never work.
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For keeps
Here is something a lot of people don’t know about me. In fact, except for my wife, I really don’t think anyone knows this about me at all. I love tattoos. I even remember when the fascination started. I was a kid, very young, and was washing my hands at a restroom sink when an older man started washing his hands in the basin next to mine.
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Cindarella, Cindirella, Cindurella, Cinderella
By and large, some of the worst email writers out there are professional writers. One of my author friends is being hailed as the leading crime novelist in the country, and when we communicate by email, she abandons all spelling and punctuation rules and practically runs her sentences together like the earliest forms of the written English language. She would have fit right in on the Lewis & Clark expedition.
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On the ‘edge’ of expansion
I’m going share a story with you, Sun Day reader, that until now I’ve only told to Sun Day staff and contributors (and when told, anecdotally at that). When I first presented the idea of starting the Sun Day to my wife, Erika, (a tense meeting to say the very least … the very least), I presented it to her like this: “It will be a small publication. I promise. Just something I can do myself.”
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Better late than forgetful
In some ways, I’m a terrible son. I’m sure I don’t talk to my mother enough (what son really does?), and I’m a repeat offender of forgetfulness.
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That open space, well that’s just room to grow
Living with my wife for 14 years has taught me the value of “waste not, want not,” an adage I genuinely couldn’t make sense of in my youth.
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Color me orange
Technically, I should have written this edition’s Happy Trails last edition, as that was our active edition over Valentine’s Day, which, by its very nature, topics of relationships are suited to. But remember, I was confused last edition, and Valentine’s was the farthest thing from my mind (yes, ladies, shame on me, I know). However, it’s never too late for matters of the heart.
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You’re never too young to be confused
Whenever I sit down to write, and I’m staring at that daunting, impenetrable Blank Page, I make a promise first to myself and then to readers that I will get to the point as quickly, as effectively, and as efficiently as possible. That’s called good writing. That’s called active voice. How many times have you read something that rambles on and asked yourself, Is there a point to this?
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Why eat your cake in a closet, when you can watch it on TV?
On the day that you receive this edition of the Sun Day, you can trust that I’ll be a very happy man indeed. You might wonder why I say this. Maybe I struck it rich in the Lotto (my ticket bought at Drendel’s Corner, of course), and I’m taking a very early retirement (33 is old enough, right?).
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If you keep your resolution in order, everything else is playing for gumballs
Last year at this time, I wrote in my Happy Trails that I didn’t believe in resolutions. I should amend that. It’s not that I don’t believe in resolutions. I just don’t agree with them starting at the New Year, because a real resolution can start at any time.
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‘You’ll shoot your eye out, you’ll shoot our eye out’
In last edition’s Happy Trails, I mentioned the Christmas classic movie A Christmas Story. Despite the numerous holiday movies in which family disaster occurs, this movie came to mind for two reasons. First, it’s one of my favorites. Second, I knew what this edition’s Happy Trails was going to be then, which is a rarity, as I tend not to know what I’m writing about until the day before I NEED to put something down on paper. That’s just a side note, though, to this story.
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感恩節快樂 That’s Happy Thanksgiving in Chinese!
What is it about holiday movies that we like? Is it seeing a family operate a smooth season, beginning with a cut turkey and ending successfully on a majestic winters’ morn, family gathered around the tree, opening gifts (gifts that everyone wants)?
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Um, excuse me, may I interject?
When I think about things that I’m thankful for, I’m reminded of manners. Without please and thank you, we’d get nowhere (at least, nowhere with relationships intact). My oldest (and, of course, “wisest” wink, wink) sister-in-law taught me one of my first lessons in developing good manners: how to gracefully and properly interrupt people talking, which comes in handy being a reporter.
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If the tooth fits…
I recently gave a talk to the journalism students at Huntley High School. Despite the early hour I had to be there (coming directly off a production, which is always grueling), the talk went especially well, the students were interested, I was interested, and nobody fell asleep.
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No fear … sure
October is definitely the scary story month of the year. Gray clouds billow in, darkness settles on us, leafless tree branches scrape against our windows at night, and foliage dies, leaving behind its scraggly inner remnants. For all this, though, October is my favorite month of the year. And I like a good flashlight-under-the-face, campfire scary story as much as the next. But the pop-into-your-everyday-life fears, I don’t like so much.
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Our dog in a nutshell
As this edition’s Sun Day features a story on a proposed dog park in Sun City, now is as good of a time as any to let you in on our home’s best-kept secret, one I’ve only mentioned briefly before: our dog, Ruppy. Actually, Ruppy is a secret only if you consider a secret bold and brazen and barking loud enough to send echoes to Arizona and back.
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The lion’s share is only moderate to other lions
I’m about to do something I’ve not done yet in the Sun Day and voice my opinion on an issue circulating through Sun City like a rampant tornado, an adjective that is a bit superfluous because, by their nature, tornadoes are rampant. But apparently so are property taxes.
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Let’s roll
“Where were you … ?” Without it being said, we all know what follows the beginning of that question because those three words is all it takes for any American to transport themselves back to the morning of September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 Americans lost their lives to the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania.
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All in one, and one for all … really?
Is it just me or are all-in-one, big-box stores, such the ones found on the Randall Road artery between I90 and Algonquin Road, having trouble knowing who they are or what they sell anymore? They’re like teenagers suffering perpetual identity crises.
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The sticky couch
My wife and I were huge fans of NBC’s hit show Friends. It brought us a lot of laughs the ten years it was on. And chief among those came from arguably the funniest scene in the show’s entire history, in which Ross enlisted friends Rachel and Chandler to help him move a new sofa up his New York apartment building’s stairwell. A quick synopsis: the couch was too long for the tight curves of the stairwell, which resulted in numerous failed strategies, and Ross repeatedly commanded his friends to “Pivot, pi-vot, PIV-OT!”
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Party like it’s 1799
I had mixed feelings about power outages when I was a kid. All the rules changed in the dark. Dad said, “Don’t open the fridge,” while Mom lit candles, which were both spooky and mysterious, casting long, flickering shadows on the walls. My home was transformed into an eighteenth-century villa, and I wondered if this was what it was like before there were electric lights. What struck me as most sinister was how dark everything was. Not just dark…black.
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If you can’t take the heat, get out from Under the Oven
I think most of us like to believe we’re clean people. We keep clean homes (for the most part), we take care of our bodies, practicing good hygiene, and we wash our cars regularly to dissuade the neighborhood kids from swiping the words WASH ME on our rear windows. For the most part, to usurp an idea from Stephen King and Peter Straub’s Black House, we try to prevent “slippage.”
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Home renovations. Are you tough enough? Hooyah!
Like many folks out there, my wife and I are so upside down on our mortgage, it’s like living through a polar shift. Today, our condo is worth only about one-third of the price we bought it for in 2001, not to mention how far we are away from what it was valued at five years ago (in Mafioso, all I can say is fuggedaboutit). And since we’re trying to move this year, we’re in a tough position. Well, as tough as any anchor around your neck puts you in.
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I am my own worst critic
If there’s one thing a reporter or editor gets used to real quick, it’s criticism. Whether they can spell the word right off the bat is a crapshoot. But criticism is something we in newspapers deal with a lot, and how each reporter or editor handles it is about as varied as a tiger’s stripes. I knew one reporter who treated them like trophies and hung them on his cubicle wall – the worse the better.
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The day time stood still… sort of
Every other week, the Sun Day publishes the terrific and comedic column Geezer Moments by fellow Sun City resident Sam Geati. For those unfamiliar, which I know aren’t many, Geezer Moments is about those funny little “blips” in the aging memory that make everyone think, “I must be losing my mind.” And this week’s Health & Wellness section features tips on keeping the aging memory sharp and its recall intact.
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CONDO FOR RENT: Eighth Wonder of the World
After ten years and one defunct president, it looks like my wife and I will soon be moving on to greener pastures…but not without lugging with us the mortgage of a 600sq/ft condo posing as an 800sq/ft one. But, hey, you do with what you have to work with, right? It’s not a perfect world, after all. And it’s for certain not a perfect housing market.
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Making news, breaking news, and everything between
Have I ever mentioned the Sun Day is not the first publication I’ve owned/produced/managed? It’s actually the third. The first two, crafty little “zines” called Signature Lit and (the melodramatic) Poetic Thoughts I produced out of my parents basement when I was 18 and 19 years old and probably broke about two dozen copyright laws between the both of them.
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What’s 17 Italians sitting around a table eating Polish food? Easter… in my family
If there’s one thing almost everybody who knows my mother knows about my mother, it’s that if she weren’t a mother, she’d be a nun.
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Riding off into the Sun Day
They say it takes a whole village to raise a child. I think the same is true, even truer, for a business because without the support of the community, the business will not progress.
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Ahhh, who doesn’t like that new … vacuum smell
Do you ever want to weep when you buy a product that actually works how it’s supposed to? It’s like reaching the Promised Land after a thousand years wandering aimlessly through the Wasteland of Faulty Merchandise.
