As a religious follower of “Mysteries at the Museum”, last Friday I naturally tuned in to see what it was all about. Don Wildman was the one who suggested I vi sit Greenwood Cemetery ( http://thequeenoff-ckingeverything.blogspot.com/2012/05/for-entrance-into-pearly-gates.html?m=1 ). I never have any regrets following his lead. It was during that episode where I found the latest topic inspiration for this new blog series of ours. Today we learned the origin of the term/concept of jaywalking.    Like the previous “Find Out Friday” post this topic also did not occur to me until I saw this show. It is pieces of our daily life, like these, which I never seem to examine until it is brought to my attention. The official definition of jaywalking is: “to cross a street carelessly or in an illegal manner so as to be endangered by traffic”. Sounds simple enough. For comparison, I also looked up this term on Urban Dictionary. This is what they had to say: “...

How often are you pleasantly surprised? Surprised that you instincts are accurate? I love the sweet feeling of vindication if only within myself.   Lately my instincts have been even stronger keeping me right on track. Listening to what my gut tells me has been paying off more and more, but not always in dollars and cents. Finding what you need at an unsuspected time and place is money in the bank. After a long morning drive I was eager to have my first meal of the day. I hadn’t wanted to stop to eat earlier instead choosing to hit the road and go with the flow of traffic. That was my first smart move of the day. The second was getting off of exit seventy-four of the expressway.  There was no reason for this choice except that my GPS said I was ten minutes away from my destination but had over an hour to spare. I was starving and finally saw a sign for food that didn’t include a rest stop or a gas station. Without further direction I made a...

Well folks it’s about that time again. Time to talk about yet another pizza place I need to praise. This is hardly surprising considering my last pizza related post was just about a week ago ( http://bit.ly/29yv6we ). Yet here I go again. Frank Pepe’s Pizzeria is renowned by just about anyone who loves pizza as much as I do. Mainly located in Connecticut, with nine stores, there is also one location in Yonkers, New York. I have been to this house of the infamous White Clam Pizza before ( http://bit.ly/29L6iRA ). Naturally I tried that and a regular pie topped with bacon on my initial visit some four years ago. This time I already knew I would be eating something I haven’t tried before. When I arrived I was so hungry I could have literally eaten a horse, you know on a pizza. Once I glanced at the menu it was a no brainer. Lunch/Dinner for two was a medium four-cheese pizza with olives and mushrooms added on. The smell was palpable. I thought I would bust just...

The other day while combing through my New York Times during my lunch hour I happened upon an article discussing the renovations at the infamous Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. The very last paragraph made me laugh at first, but then ponder the question that begins this series, which will now appear every Friday. My first specialized weekly series is………Find Out Fridays! I love the continuity of a series and look forward to many in my favorite periodicals. The Well column in the New York Times Magazine is by far my favorite. It is written by Dr. Lisa Sanders, a notorious diagnostician who was the inspiration for House the television show. Another is “The Photograph That Changed My Life” with a different celebrity featured each month in Vanity Fair magazine. From this point on I hope the fans and readers will post questions they want answers for on Fridays. Suggestions will be taken and whatever question has the most votes’ wins. I hope this is the last week I have to com...

In these trying times there is so much we have to worry about every time we step out of our front door. But one of the places you should feel safe is at your doctor’s office. As many of you probably already know this is not the case. My story of malpractice occurred in 2009 when I had the first migraine attack that I couldn’t break. As a person who had chronic migraine disease and did not know what that entailed, that day was incredible painful and scary. I was away in Philadelphia at the time, luckily not traveling alone, on a journey of torture that was just beginning. At that time in my life I had migraines in various degrees for several years already. But this was the first time I took pain pills that didn’t work. It would be about ten hours before I arrived home, ran into my bathroom, and sobbed for what seemed like hours. The next morning I went straight to my neurologist’s office hanging on by a thread. He examined me, made sure I wasn’t at risk for a stroke (a common pr...

Upon a recent trip to Ridgewood, Queens I followed in my family’s past footsteps. I drove around passing houses, churches, schools, and other significant sites for relatives I have known all of my life. Sightseeing all day made this girl incredibly hungry. So hungry I didn’t care where I ate or what was offered. It was the kind of hungry that leads you to order one of everything, and not just because it smells so darn good. Lunch turned out to be at Corato Pizza, another hot spot for those who lived in the area. It might have looked a little different but parking under the train tracks in the made shift parking lot looked like one of the seven wonders of the world to me at that point. That’s how hungry I was. As soon as I got out of the car and made the twenty-foot walk to the entrance, I was consumed by the aroma of garlic, olive oil, and carbohydrates coming towards me. I got there literally as fast as I could. The place h...