Even when it’s not snowing, wintertime can be stressful.
Heating costs are high. Road salt eats away at your car. Your boots leak. You misplace your scarf. Income taxes come due. Potholes pop up everywhere. And you can no longer buy a fast-food burger in the village.
But as an anonymous wise man once observed, “Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”
We Buy
Here’s an idea. Start your spring cleaning early and gather together a cache of old jewelry, a few ounces of gold or tarnished silverware and maybe that trumpet you haven’t blown since high school and take it all down to Dan Stenham at We Buy, right smack dab in the center of the village at 612 Oswego St. at the corner of Tulip; 565-5700.
With the money Dan gives you for your vintage valuables, you can afford a relaxing massage.
Studio 304
Licensed massage therapist Brian Gruninger has set up shop at the Studio 304 salon, at 304 First St., in the Village Mall, at the corner of Vine and First streets. Brian offers a standard full-body massage with oils etc., but also he also performs Swedish chair massages in which the client is clothed and seated in a specially designed chair.
And here’s a deal: you can try it out for $1 for one minute of chair massage.
Brian’s offering a special introductory rate of 20 percent off a $60 full massage.
For info, visit brianglmt.massagetherapy.com/, or call Brian at 935-4127.
OmBoys
First Street’s turning onto a New Age avenue what with the Yoga Center and Entirely You at the east end and Studio 304 at Vine Street to the west.
In between there’s OmBoys Juice & Smoothie Café, at 137 First St., operated by Todd and Michelle Brundage.
Last week a couple friends of mine enjoyed a lunch of quinoa-lentil soup and Dragon jasmine tea at OmBoys. (Quinoa is an Aztec grain, they tell me.) Check out the OmBoys menu at omboysjuice.com; 451-1200.
Two-for-one!
More gastronomic good news to dispel the winter blues:
February is two-for-one month at Heid’s of Liverpool and at Hofmann’s Hot Haus at Northern Lights.
Power hitter
Forget this weird winter. Let’s look forward to baseball!
Over his 16-year major-league career, Puerto Rican power hitter Carlos Delgado blasted 473 home runs while batting a respectable .280. Having spent the bulk of his career with the Toronto Blue Jays, Delgado was a three-time winner of the Silver Slugger Award (1999-00-01), but the honor closest to his heart has to be the 2006 Roberto Clemente Award.
Like Clemente, Delgado is a peace activist. When the U.S. Department of Defense was using the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico as a bombing target facility, Delgado spoke out against the detonations until the government ended the practice in 2003. That same year, he voiced his opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a stance which irked plenty of American baseball fans.
Now 39, Delgado appeared in 181 games for the Syracuse Chiefs during his minor-league career. The slugging first baseman spent smacked 43 career home runs in a Chiefs uniform, primarily during the 1994 and 1995 seasons.
Hot Stove heats up here
Carlos Delgado will be inducted into the Syracuse Baseball Wall of Fame at the Syracuse Chiefs’ annual Hot Stove Dinner & Silent Auction, at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 3, at the Holiday Inn Convention Center on Electronics Parkway. Chiefs infielder Seth Bynum and new Chiefs manager Tony Beasley will join Delgado at the head table.
“It’s a tradition for our manager to attend the Hot Stove dinner,” said Chiefs General Manager John Simone. Last season, Beasley managed the Double-A Harrisburg Senators to the top of the Eastern League’s Western Division. He’s a three-time winner of Baseball America’s Manager of the Year award.
A silent auction gets underway at 5:30 p.m. Friday with the dinner program following at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $55 for adults and $25 for children ages 12 and younger, or $500 for a table of 10; syracusechiefs.com; 474-7833.
