A Man’s Work is His Signature.

Louie Anderson


Smiling with a gap between his front teeth nearly the width of Wisconsin, Louie Anderson signs the joker in my deck of playing cards on a flight back from Montego Bay. 

A friend today sends a text informing me Louie Anderson passed away. I tell him of my experience on the plane with Louie and my friend cynically states too bad he didn’t give you ten cents, that’s worth more than his autograph. 

If Louie simply gave me a dime I probably would have forgotten the humble contribution. I will always remember my encounter with Louie because it’s who he is. As a comedian he is a full-time joker and his signature affirms that.  

My Dad taught me at a young age, “A man’s work is his signature.”  That is why it is important to always do a good job whether you are volunteering or getting paid. 

One of my favorite skits by the comedian was him telling how was carrying out a 55 gallon drum of 7-up from 7-11 and people looked at him like a pig. Unashamedly, he says “What? It was only a nickel more.”

So perhaps if he gave me a dime I would have been able to super size a Big-Gulp a couple of times.

But instead he gave me this story. Thank you Mr. Anderson. Rest In Peace. 

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I Love Cookies!

Leaning up against a concrete wall at Penn Station in Newark NJ a homeless women advanced in her years is trying to extract warmth from the train station as it serves as a bed. It’s just simply too cold to sleep on the ground on a windy Jersey January morning. 

Pulling three pairs of new white socks from a bag I ask her if I can give her some socks and snacks.  

Surrounded with lots of bags and a shopping cart she says yes with no emotion.

I could hardly see her face as the whipping wind had her wrapped in an oversized down jacket with the hood pulled tight and covered with blankets. 

Making small talk I could hardly understand a word she muttered as her inner-city accent was almost incomprehensible yet she managed to say H-O-P-E.

I thought she was asking me for soap, she had to spell it out for me.  She says,  “I have hope, someone is praying for me, you don’t need to pray for me.”

In addition to the socks the plastic bag contained honey cough drops, cheese and crackers, pretzels, breakfast bars, a bag of Cheerios, and a tin of Dollar-Store Cookies.

She graciously received the bag without looking at the contents. 

Walking back to my heated car I yell out to her, “there’s cookies in the bag!”

All of a sudden I saw what was a weather-worn face appear like a little girl smiling like she just opened a present containing a new doll. She coherently shouts back with her happy smile and says, “I love cookies.”

I no longer saw an older woman on the street, in my eyes she was just a little girl that loves cookies. 

I broke into tears when she said that and tears drip down my face now as I write what I experienced on my journey today. 

It was the best five bucks I ever spent.  My heart moved in a way it never moved before.  

This woman was once someone’s little girl that loves cookies and most likely had a bed and now she’s on the hard, cold streets at the gateway into New York City. 

How does this happen? I don’t know and I don’t judge her but my empathy reached a new level today.  

Now that I know she loves cookies my next visit to Newark will entail a visit to the Portuguese bakery or perhaps a batch of homemade oatmeal cookies. 

I never made oatmeal cookies before and I don’t know how but I am willing to learn. 

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180 Days

The weather is cold and the trees stand hollow.

Cheap news year’s wishes and half-hearted resolutions fly the coup almost as fast as a bat out of hell.

Lose weight. Quit smoking. Move the body more. Of course people sputter these words with good intention when the clock strikes a new year.

Many times these resolutions involve giving something up. But can you go all year without an ice-cream cone or chocolate or whatever your vice may be?

Not me. I dread the thought. So I won’t. I will focus on 180 days not the whole year.

180 is also an angle where you are turned around.

I am doing a 180 turn for 180 days and walking away from sugar and foods with added sugar in them.

No sugar for a year. That would be tough. No sugar for six months. No problem.

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6 Idiots

“6 Idiots”
There is a saying hang out with five idiots and you will be the sixth one. Same goes if you hang out with five millionaires, you will be the sixth one.
Loading some desks on a truck recently, my 68 year old friend tells me he did 600 sit-ups that morning.
Guess how many I did that morning, zero. The good news is that was two weeks ago and I’ve been doing 25 sit ups every morning since then.
Tom inspired me and that’s what our friends do. Have you ever heard the saying, “Show me who your friends are and I will show you who you are.” My point is choose your friends wisely, they rub off on us either good or bad.
“As Iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”Proverbs 27:17
Tom’s stomach is like iron and soon so will mine. Six pack belly is being manufactured. Thanks Tom.

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Tune Your Vision


To the left, to the left
To the left, to the left (Mmm)

[Verse 1]
To the left, to the left.
Everything you own in the box to the left
Remember those words to the Number 1 hit song by Beyoncé? Breaking up with her live-in lover she instructs him to put his belongings in the box to the left as they separate who gets what.
Those opening words are the hook to the song and most memorable.
Bursting with determination, I sing the words to the left to the left as I embark on a major weight-loss journey. Being tempted to eat something unhealthy I envision my scale sliding it’s heavy weight to the left.
Rather than think of eating something sweet and highly caloric, I sing “to the left to the left” as I picture the scale close in on the 200 pound mark and my desire for junk food suddenly subsides.
Make your goal into a vision (picture your goal) and anchor it with a catchy tune and you have a good technique to help you accomplish your goal. Visualization is key here.
It’s working for me so I am sharing this creative weigh-loss tip that can be applied to almost anything if you find the right song to tie the vision to. Find a song that is catchy and sticks in your mind.
Hey, I am left-handed so I will write with my left and write down to the left to the left but the true power is in singing it out loud when a craving comes.
What’s your song?

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Happy Memorial Day

Memorial Day Tribute

Happy Memorial Day and remember those that paid the ultimate sacrifice for this great country we live in.

If you care to shop for a home after the holiday feel free to check out http://www.StreamingLiveRealEstate.com

Be safe everyone.

 

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Through What Lenses?

IMG_9489

Through what lenses?

Doing their own thing on a perfect-weather day three people enjoy the summit on a vigorous Sunday hike. 

What are they doing? Do they know each other? Are they in the same awe as me as I take in the New York vista where the peaceful views meet the New Jersey State Line. 

Who knows? Who really cares? They are doing there own thing. 

Placing my glasses on the rocky mountain ridge, I take a shot of the plastic spectacles as three strangers congregate in the background. 

Laying down on the hard rock my camera focuses  on my eyeglasses and the people in the background minding their own business are an afterthought. 

Looking at the picture on my iPhone, I see what would make a cool album cover.  

Did you think the same when you saw this photograph? Did you see an album cover of an unknown band? Probably not and that is because the picture is viewed through my lens. 

What lens do you view people, places, and things through? What lens are you using to view life through? 

An album cover represents accomplishment for hours of hard work went into recording people’s talent. The album cover pose is the celebration. The record is the finished product of many take 1 and take 2’s and recordings after recordings and the picture sums it all up. 

Lots of hard work and painstaking hours go into getting the perfect sound mixed and produced and the album cover represents the full finished product. 

The people on the mountain are simply resting and taking pictures while enjoying a bite to eat. 

IMG_9483

They earned a well-deserved break for they climbed an ascending rocky trail encompassed with a little mud along the way. 

Yet as simply as they stand there I see an album cover, success, a finished product, a celebration,  a portrait of accomplishment. 

We all have different lenses and views. What do you see? How are you viewing things on your journey through life? Do tell.  

 

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Reframing food as fuel. Weight loss for sure.

eggs benedict

Reframing food as fuel.

There are a group of dieters out they are calling their packaged food-bars “fuel”. These bars are simply food but a dedicated group of loyal people call their food bars fuel. It sounds better than food doesn’t it?

They are absolutely correct in calling food fuel because food/fuel gives the energy our bodies need to not only move but to survive.

What I find interesting about calling it fuel is it changes perspective on what is being eaten.

Food satisfies us. Food can taste good or bad. Food is eaten at social events and food is needed to sustain life.

Call it breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a simply a snack. Eating several times a day is not only how our bodies are built but is also part of our culture.

At the end of the day food is fuel.

Eating mindlessly can be a habit and is not thinking of the food as fuel. It is just satisfying perhaps a sugar-craving or fulfilling an emotional need.

Food can also be a treat. After mindfully eating my healthy breakfast of a couple eggs sprinkled with turmeric and served mindfully with uncured preservative-free chicken bacon for fuel, the iron will be pumped in a short twenty minute workout and then I can treat myself to a delicious Italian ice place I found at the Jersey Shore.

I need to call the tasty treat fuel albeit it bad fuel. So if sugar-laden treats are bad fuel, I will be choosing a small brightly colored mango ice today rather than the large for a mere 50 cents more.

I will be aware of my choice for it is planned and not chosen recklessly. A splash of bad fuel in limited quantity shouldn’t do any real damage to my machine. It is still fuel.

The key is to keep the bad fuel to a few ounces to the gallon.

The purpose of this writing today is to point out what reframing can do.

My dieting friends are eating one meal a day and five fuelings. They are paying someone to repackage the name for food. At the end of the day the “fuel” they are eating is still food.

There is great benefit to eating “fuel” as I see my friends shedding unwanted pounds by eating this fuel. They are choosing high-quality 110 octane fuel made of the good stuff and their mindset is aware of what they are eating is not just food, it is energy to their bodies making it fuel.

Call it what it does for you. Food is fuel.

This can be applied to anything in life including relationships. Let’s reframe relationships as to what they do to our being.

Maybe a good relationship should be called joy and you say I am in a “joy” with somebody or if it is a bad relationship you call it what it does for you (like food being called fuel) and say I am in a “torture” with somebody.

It changes things to make good choices when we reframe the things that affect our well-being.

Either way the food (fuel) we choose or the people (joy or torture) we choose to be in our lives is a choice.

Choose wisely. Choose good fuel.

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Erstwhile…?…

Erstwhile.

Erstwhile?? What the heck it that? Is that an SAT word or something?

Erstwhile is the Facebook messenger word of the day. The closest thing I could think of was John Entwhistle the late bass player of The Who.

Erstwhile in case you haven’t heard it either means in the past or formerly. Once upon a time…

Looking for strategies to forget certain hurt from the past, today I am excited to use my new word erstwhile.

Rather than get sad when a certain song pops up on the radio and reminisce, I will simply change the station and say that is erstwhile.

It may take a while for this new technique to set in but I expect using the word erstwhile to describe a former time will be worthwhile.

If it is in the past, it is erstwhile. Gone, history, good bye, erstwhile.

It is our own baggage if we bring it into today. Let the hurtful things or people be erstwhile.

Go ahead say it. Erstwhile and then smile. Doesn’t it change things a bit? I think it may be a powerful new word for me. I like it, had to share.

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Two Hearts are Better Than One.

Coming home from teaching a real estate class just over 10 years ago I hear the classic keyboard opening of “Werewolves of London” playing over the airwaves. A moment later the singer begins to sing and it is not Warren Zevon’s classic song, it is Kid Rock singing All Summer Long.

When is two better than one? There are many cases that answer that question. When chocolate meats peanut butter and creates the mouth-watering Reese’s peanut butter cup is just one answer.

Sometimes two sets of glasses are better than one when the sun is beating down hotter than a gas barbecue grille converting a circle of beef into a hockey puck.

While walking the dogs this morning I find it nearly impossible to listen to All Summer Long by Kid Rock and stand still. The well known hit song with a moving beat was a number one hit in eight different countries.

Kid Rock married the goofy Warren Zevon song Werewolves of London and the iconic Sweet Home Alabama by the legendary southern-rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd.

All Summer Long is a happy song. It is the perfect blend of two songs into one. It is a killer combination of a humorous song tied together with a song about home sweet home.

The combination of these two songs creates a joyful and celebratory new one fitting perfectly together.

I attended a wedding last weekend and two hearts became one. Just like Springsteen said, “Two hearts are better than one.”

I started this story simply by wanting to write about how happy two songs combined together becoming one sounds, but as I write it, I can’t help thinking about two people becoming one will be the moral of this story.

In the book of Ecclesiastes it is written “Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down one can help the other up but pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together they will keep warm but how can one keep warm alone?”

I can only only conclude what Bruce testified in his song Two Hearts-“Two hearts are better than one and I believe two hearts are better than one.”

I believe it too. “I do.” I do believe two hearts are better than one.

And when I say “I do” I will more than believe it, I will know for sure two hearts are better than one.

Two hearts are better than one. Bring it on.

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