Maybe it’s because I’m on a diet, but today my thoughts are roaming through the restaurants of Rome.

It’s difficult, and maybe a little unfair to pick just one favorite here because Rome has so many good places to eat. However, it’s easy to select my favorite pizza place: Boyz from Italy at 262 W. Dominick St. Why? It’s all about the crust. Not that the toppings there aren’t good because they are, but Boyz from Italy’s pizza crust is the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s light, airy texture is baked to a perfect crusty golden brown.

In the summertime, I like to my pizza al fresco at one of Boyz from Italy’s outdoor tables to watch the people and traffic on West Dominick Street. Downtown Rome is one of those pleasant places where you actually can eat outside without gagging on excessive amounts of exhaust fumes. Unfortunately, I’ve been to lots of other places where this definitely isn’t case, so believe me, I definitely appreciate the ambiance of Downtown Rome.

Tomorrow I will talk about a few other eateries around Rome that don’t involve pizza. In even Rome, there’s places that don’t even pizza.

The other day, I wrote here about some dumb shows that I watched as a kid in the 1960s. Apparently, my tastes became more discrimitating by my teen years in the 1970s because I still watch some of those shows and unlike some of those ’60s reruns, I’m not embarrassed to do so.

Saturday nights on CBS in the early to mid-1970s were the best and still remain unrivaled in my opinion. “All in the Family.” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” “The Bob Newhart Show.” “The Carol Burnett Show.”  What a bunch of classics, all in a row without  having to sift through an list of channels or recording anything. There weren’t any means to record programs at home in those days, anyway. If you didn’t catch a particular episide when it was aired, you’d have to wait until that season’s summer reruns to see it.

Today I do have the advantage of recording these shows when they’re aired as reruns on my DVR that knows better than me when they’re on the schedule. Some things about TV are better today, but the 1970s shows I just mentioned will always hold a place in my heart.

I have to admit though, it’s not just the quality of the shows that I enjoy. I also savor my memories of the time and place where I first watched most of these shows, which was my parents’ living room in Rome.

This photo, taken circa 1945, shows my Aunt Marilyn, right, with her best friend Marion outside of my grandparents’ cabin on Lake George. The girls were students at nearby Hudson Falls High School then and would remain close friends for the rest of their lives.

My aunt died in October 2014, but I remain close to Marion and her daughters on Facebook. In fact, Marion posted this photo on Facebook this morning, which inspired me to write this blog.

There’s a certain beauty to close friendships that endure well beyond youth. Friends like these feel like family because they’re a part of our life history. Marion can remember how she and my aunt picked on my father because of the way his hair stuck out as a kid. Judging by this photo of my father at age 8, it appeared that the girls had a valid point:

Howard’s very bad, horrible hair day, 1939. Maybe it was a blessing that my father lost hair later in life.

Anyway, my father is gone, my Aunt Marilyn is gone, but I’m glad that Marion still is here as my friend today.

From what I remember, I watched a disproportionate amount of television while I was growing up, but I don’t think it affected my brain too badly (although some may dispute this). When I think back on some of the shows I watched, though, I cringe.

For instance, I was a faithful watcher of Gomer Pyle, USMC when it’s initial episodes ran on CBS from 1964-69. For those of you who weren’t around then, this was a half-hour situation comedy based on Jim’ Nabors goofy backwoods character from “The Andy Griffith Show.” This show took place after Gomer left Mayberry and joined the U.S. Marines, all while innocently tormenting his commanding officer Sgt. Carter (played by Frank Sutton).

Evidently, I was such of fan of “Gomer Pyle,” I still can remember a time when my mother made me go to bed without watching it. This was because I spilled a glass of milk all over the kitchen floor right after Mom had mopped it. I was pouring a nice tall glass of moo juice in preparation for watching Gomer and company, but alas, had set the glass way too close to the edge of the kitchen counter. If I still can remember this incident 50 years later, I must have been upset.

I actually watched “My Mother The Car,” too, which premiered on NBC on Sept. 14, 1965 — my sixth birthday — but it only lasted until the following spring. This starred Jerry Van Dyke (Dick’s brother) as the owner of a 1928 car that is inhabited by the spirit of his mother. “TV Guide” listed it in 2002 as the second worst show ever, with “The Jerry Springer Show” taking the dubious top honors. I have no idea why I watched this show, expect that maybe I didn’t like what was on the other two channels at that time.

Not all the TV I watched as a kid was bad. I used to watch Marlo Thomas’ sitcom, “That Girl,” which had it’s good moments. I thought her irate father’s character, Lew Marie, was hilarious. I still like watching reruns of “Laugh In,” even if Dick Cavett once called it “the Niagara Falls of plagiarism.” My favorite “Laugh-In” characters were Gladys the old lady and her ill-suited suitor, Tyrone P. Horni.

At least now when I watch “Laugh In,” I can get all of the jokes.

The word for today, if you haven’t already guessed, is SNOW! In case you haven’t seen enough snow this week — ha, ha — here’s some more Rome snow from winters past.

The top photo shows my mother standing in our driveway in Rome in the winter of the 1969. She is standing next to my father’s old Chevrolet Corvair. I’m not sure why my father took this photo because the scene really isn’t anything out of the ordinary. There always was plenty of snow on hand during the winters I was growing up in Rome. From what I figure, this was right around the time that my father bought his new Kodak Instamatic camera from the Griffiss Air Force Annex and he was itching to use it.

Anyone else have one of these? You know, the type of camera that used flashcubes instead of flashbulbs. That seemed like a big technological advancement at the time because flash cubes were good for taking four photos. Flash bulbs were only good for one.

Here’s another snowy view of our driveway that didn’t require any the use of any flashcubes on our Instamatic because it was taken outside. I’m surmising that this photo was taken the following winter (1970) because the Corvair hardtop in the first photo has been replaced by our Corvair convertible. Next to that is our 1965 Ford Galaxie 500 that my parents special-ordered from Sid Stockholm Ford in Rome.

Not special-ordered was the snow, but evidently, my father still was so enthralled with his camera, he photographed this mundane mid-winter scene outside of our house.

Of course, today I treasure these photos, however mundane they may seem, because they capture a time of my life that I still miss. Maybe taking these photos wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

You know you’re getting older when…

You dread having to reach for something that fell beneath the furniture.

You don’t want to bother to figure out how to use all extra features on the new remote.

That little voice on Windows 10 that’s meant to help you is a big pain because it doesn’t understand what you say half of the time.

You remember watching black and white TV,

It takes too much energy to get really angry at someone, but that’s OK.

You wish you can take back the times you got angry at your adult children while they were growing up.

You don’t know a lot of today’s celebrities and you don’t care.

You finally admit to yourself that you’ll never be as thin again as you were in your 20s.

You are a lot more comfortable with yourself than you were in your youth.

I don’t get thrilled about too many things, but I am absolutely thrilled that my favorite store in Central New York, Herb Philipson’s, now offers online shopping on its website.

Whenever my family camps at Lake Delta each summer, we never fail to visit the Herb’s store on Black River Boulevard in Rome. It’s a great place to buy back-to-school clothing for my ever-growing teenage son at reasonable prices. I enjoy combing through the sale racks for great finds, while my husband picks up whatever camping item we invariably forget on each vacation.

Until now, our forays to Herb’s have been limited to whenever we’re in Central New York, which to me isn’t often enough. So, as I already stated above, I was thrilled to discover that Herb’s website started selling merchandise online a couple of months ago for a reasonable flat rate shipping charge of $5. All orders over $75 are shipped for free.

I just made my first Herb’s online order this morning for my husband’s birthday present. I won’t mention what it is since this might be one of my blogs that he actually reads. I guess I ‘ll just keep it to myself until March 27, but it won’t be easy.

One of my favorite things to do while I was growing up was to read. I read so much as a kid that my father used to tell me to go do something else for a while, like play outside.

Personally, I didn’t and still don’t see what the problem with this was, but then again, my father used to tell me not to read in a moving car because he was afraid that it make my eyes would go funny.

Anyway, my first favorite author in life was Laura Ingalls Wilder, whom I discovered in the Fort Stanwix Elementary School library when I was 9 or 10 years old. For those of you unfamiliar with her work, Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867 near Pepin, Wisconsin. Her litany of books begin when she was around age 5 in Wisconsin and follows the pioneer family as they migrate through the American northwest.

There is something about Wilder’s straightforward, honest prose describing a simpler, yet more arduous lifestyle that still enraptures me. Hers is the sort of writing that makes me feel like I’m right there in the scene.

A few years after I discovered Wilder’s books, Micheal Landon’s “Little House on the Prairie” television series starting airing on NBC. The show was OK, but I think Micheal Landon took artistic license with some of the scripts to cater to a 1970s-’80s audience. For instance, I remember watching one episode around 1981 or so in which Laura’s middle-aged TV mother thought she was pregnant but really was going through menopause. Laura Ingalls Wilder never wrote about THAT in any of her books!

Wilder also wrote a book about her husband’s childhood in Malone, New York. Of course, I found this book particularly interesting because my grandparents lived not far from Malone in New York State’s North County. I didn’t have to use my imagination to visualize the fridgid, snowy scenes described in “Farmer Boy.”

I passed my love of these books on to my daughter Emily. When I bought her Laura Ingalls Wilder books as gifts, they often ended up next to my own bed. Emily is 30 now, but I still have her books. Every now and then, I still take one aside for a good read.

Good literature never grows old.

When I was 9 years old, one of my imminent goals in life was to acquire a pet turtle. I’m not sure exactly what attracted me to keeping a small reptile that intermittently retreated into its shell, but it most likely was because two of my cousins had these as pets.

Whatever the case, the spring I was 9, my mother agreed to take to me W.T. Grants in downtown Rome to buy my long-awaited turtle. Mom said she was doing it  because I had a good report card that marking period, but I suspect she was equally as motivated, if not more so, to end to my pleas for a turtle at every meal.

In great family tradition, I named my turtle Speedy because it was the same name one of my cousins gave his pet.

For about two weeks, Speedy led a relatively quiet life with us in a small plastic turtle dish on our living room end table. That, too, came from W.T. Grants. The turtle dish was set right next to my perch on the couch so I could keep a close eye on him. As it turned out, however, it wasn’t close enough.

One day when I came home from school, Speedy wasn’t in his dish. In fact, Speedy wasn’t to be seen anywhere. For a few days, I held out hope that Speedy would return to his home, but he never didn’t. He seemingly had vanished.

Flash-forward about a month. My father was in our kitchen cooking a pot of spaghetti because was expecting one of his friends from Mohawk Airlines, Ed Capone, to come over for dinner. Dad joked that watching Ed Capone eat “was one of the Seven Wonders of the World,” He was taking special care to make something really good. for Mr. Capone he said. He even made a special trip to Loblaw’s to buy a jar of Ragu spaghetti sauce. Usually Dad left all the shopping (and cooking) to Mom, so this was special.

As I was making my way to the kitchen to watch my father, I was stopped by the sound of our poodle, Mitzi, chewing on something underneath a dining room chair. When I bent over to see what was in her mouth, I was in for a big surprise. It was Speedy — or actually, it was what was left of Speedy after a month’s time.

“Dad! Dad! I found Speedy!” I exclaimed as I ran into the kitchen holding the empty shell.

“What?” Dad groaned with a look of irritation.

“I found Speedy! Mitzi was chewing on him!” I persisted.

“What the hell do you want me to do with it? I’m cooking!” Dad snapped.

“We have to bury him,” I replied.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with it!” Dad firmly stated as he grabbed Speedy’s shell and hurled it into the trash can next to the stove.

I wordlessly stared into the garbage can and decided to leave the room. I instinctively knew to leave my father alone and not to push things any further.

Considering how I found Speedy’s remains inside our dog’s mouth, I guess being placed int the trash can as a final resting place really wasn’t that much more of a dishonor.