Cliffs Riffs - Stuph n Nonsense

In Support of Increasing Water and Sewer Rates There has been quite a bit of buzz surrounding the looming increases in our water and sewer rates. As someone who lives in Lowell and owns a business on Main Street and thereby has three water and sewer bills every month, I can understand why people bristle at the thought of paying more for these services. As someone who just finished five years on the City Council, I can understand the need to raise the rates in order to help fund some very long overdue renovation to our infrastructure.   Julie and I made it through the total renovation on Monroe Street last year. The street was completely dug up between Main Street and the cemetery so that water and sewer pipes could be replaced in addition to repaving the road. It is important to remember that the reason Monroe was done before Washington had to do with a massive amount of rainwater/groundwater coming into the system via cracked and broken pipes which resulted in our water trea...

  Health Insurance – Celebration Day Originally published in the Lowell Ledger 6.7.23 I am writing this on the first day of June. Not only is it a nice, warm day with lots of sunshine, it also happens to be the first day that my health care coverage switches over to Medicare. For a partner in a mom and pop business this is a day to celebrate. Ask anyone who is self-employed or owns a micro sized business like ours and they will tell you how awfully expensive health care coverage has become. Let me spell it out for you. Julie, my wife and partner in our small business, was eligible for Medicare last April. Prior to that, the cost of coverage for the two of us with Priority Health was $1,428.64 a month. The sticky wicket in that equation was that we had a deductible of $9,500.00. Each. Yes, we were paying $17,143.68 a year for health coverage but if we both had something serious happen in one year, we would have to come up with an additional $19,000.00. Once she switched to Medicar...

The Pink Arrow football game was the brain child of our former football coach Noel Dean. Back in 2008 he was casting about for a way to help residents of the Lowell area who were battling cancer. Pink Arrow was born and since then the event has grown to be way more than a football game and the best part is that it has been copied all over Michigan and the rest of the country thanks to some national news exposure early on.  For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Pink Arrow Pride , Coach Dean came up with a plan to have his players (the Red Arrows) play a game in pink jerseys and turn that game into a fund raiser to lend a hand to area residents and their families who were fighting some form of cancer. FYI - the tremendous success of Pink Arrow is the reason that Lowell is home to a Gilda's Club. There is no other town of our size that has one. The  story goes that he floated the idea by one of his friends, Perry Beachum, and asked, "Do you think the team will put on pink j...

  A More Earth Friendly Shave Originally published in the Lowell Ledger 8/13/22 Every little bit helps. Just remember that as you read my story about the pursuit of a way to shave my face every day with minimal impact on the environment. Up until about nine or ten years ago, I would alternate my daily shaving method between disposable razors and an electric shaver. Of those two methods, the electric shaver is by far the more green option of the two, but I would always switch back to disposable razors because it gave me a much closer shave in my opinion. It wasn’t that my facial hair is thick and prolific, but no matter how many times I ran the electric shaver over my face, by the afternoon my face felt stubbly. I would grow tired of that after a couple weeks or so and switch back to lathering up and using whatever set up was popular in disposable razors. When I first started shaving on a daily basis, during the end of the Ford or beginning of the Carter administration, plastic ...

Water Is Life – We Cannot Take It For Granted   Originally published in The Lowell Ledger 6/25/2022   Michigan truly is a water wonderland. As residents of a state surrounded by twenty percent of all the available freshwater on the entire planet, we might take water for granted. Yes, our little mitten shaped portion of the globe gives us access to one fifth of the fresh water available to the world. Let that sink in, will you?   Julie and I recently took a work vacation trip to Las Vegas to attend a jewelry show. We stayed some extra days so that I could check a visit to the Hoover Dam off my bucket list (more on that later). For most of the daylight hours during our six days out west the temperatures were triple digits – the highest was 111 degrees. Sure, it is a “dry heat” compared to Michigan with the humidity levels at 10 to 15 per cent. However, 111 still feels like walking around in an oven and the decided lack of humidity, read WATER, is the subject ...

  Cambridge dictionary defines the idiom “man of letters” as “someone who knows a lot about literature”. Not knowing the extent of his literature IQ, I am exercising some creative license by using this reference for Matt, who can be found most days at Hulst-Jepsen Physical Therapy in Lowell. Their website reads: “Matthew Schmitz, MSPT, OCS, CERT, MDT, CIDN”. Mr. Schmitz has a whole lot of letters after his name. What all that means is that once Matt graduated from GVSU in 1998 with a Master’s of Science Degree in Physical Therapy, he continued to expand his knowledge about the human body and learn new and different ways in which he can help people. He is certified in Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy, and Integrative Dry Needling for pain management, and is an Orthopedic Clinical Specialist. All of this and more are a result of his self-directed continuing education. “I simply love learning,” Matt remarked. “Going a little deeper though, I derive great satisfaction from using wh...

Have you or a loved one been hit with a serious health care issue?  If so, did it put a hurt on your financial situation? Do you receive regular requests to help someone who is sick pay their bills? Have you ever attended or contributed to a any effort designed to help pay medical bills? Are you aware that the #1 of bankruptcy in the US is medical bills? Are you aware that we are THE ONLY developed nation without Universal Health Care? Do you know that people in other countries cannot believe the way we treat illness? One of the recurring songs we get to hear in the discussion of Universal Health Care (or Medicare for All or National Health Insurance - pick your favorite name) is that we simply cannot afford it. Milk shoots out my nose when I hear this tired, bullshit ridden trope. Never mind that we live in one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. How about we boil it down to just the State of Michigan - where I live and where Blue Cross Blue Shi...

WARNING: Styrofoam is one of my Pet Peeves. First off, I want to repeat what I have said and written many times. Good stewardship of the environment SHOULD NOT be a political consideration. Taking care of the planet from which we get everything we eat and drink is just common sense. Yup, I am well known as a greenie - a tree hugging old hippie who walks to work and rides an electric motorcycle. You know who raised me to be one? An ultra conservative, Republican mama - she is the one who had me read "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson when I was in the 5th or 6th grade. Mom taught me about recycling before it was popular. She was a life long user of Amway's SA-8 laundry soap because it didn't pollute ground water. My mom was taught to take care of the Earth by her mom - who was equally conservative and was raised on a farm and taught to take care of her source of food and drink. Can we please put aside politics and just talk about common sense? Here is my main...

Here are some facts about medical marijuana and marijuana in general when it comes to Michigan in general and Grand Rapids/Kent County specifically. FACT 1: In 2008 the VOTERS in Michigan voted in favor of allowing people to seek treatment for a variety of ills using medical marijuana. An interesting side not on this for me personally was that my father voted with the majority. My dad spent most of his life equating those who used pot as "hop heads" - what he called the heroin addicts he saw as a kid growing up around Detroit. His thoughts on pot changed when my step mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer - which took her life. This was before such cancer was being treated with any success and they sought all manner of relief from the symptoms and pain - including getting some pot from a friend of a friend. Seeing the positive use of weed turned my dad around on the subject. In fact, when he was alive he was an advocate for legalizing it in the same manner as alcohol...

Before I go any further, let me make a couple things very clear. This is a post about my experience with minor depression and the use of B vitamin supplements. I am merely sharing how in my particular case, I have found sublingual B12 to be a wonderful thing. I am not suggesting B vitamins are a cure all and that all forms of depression are related to B vitamin intake. Nor am I suggesting that therapy and other methods be forsaken in favor of taking B vitamins. Whew - lotta work covering one's ass, eh? Overheard at a recent meeting of the Sub Substance Group: Hi - my name is Cliff. Hi Cliff. I have been using sublingual B vitamins for about 20 years now. Welcome. I found sublingual B vitamins while channel surfing on a sleepless night a couple of decades ago. I am normally a pretty high energy kind of guy, but I had been feeling out of sorts. Not much enthusiasm for life or projects or or or. I kind of felt tired, but was not really tired. Anyhow, the guy on TV was talk...

I recently had an opportunity to address the Lowell City Council and their consideration of allowing a medical marijuana dispensary to operate in our town. Here are my remarks: My name is Cliff Yankovich. Business owner since 2002 - Chimera Design - soon to be resident, moving to the corner of Monroe & King while we refurbish our 2nd floor. I am here to support allowing a dispensary in Lowell. I am speaking as someone who has benefited from Medical Marijuana. 2013: Diagnosed and treated for stage 4 throat cancer. 7 weeks of daily radiation with IV cisplatin chemo administered at the beginning, middle and end of the radiation. Lost 40 pounds, landed in the ER twice with complications, spent 3 days in the hospital, and had a feeding tube installed when I could no longer eat or drink. I could not eat because I had no appetite and because of the pain. In addition, the treatment killed my sense of taste. My post treatment anxiety was through the roof - hard time sleepi...

Just read a profile/interview on Tim Gill , a software multi-millionaire who has devoted the majority of his fortune to the fight for LGBT rights for over 20 years though the Gill Foundation . Gay marriage was a goal, but now that this has become law, he continues to work toward making equality a reality in all 50 states. As the article points out, what good does allowing a lesbian couple to marry do if either or both of them could lose their jobs simply by putting a picture of their partner on display where they work? (There are still laws in place designed to push back on gay marriage in many states.) The push for single payer health care - even if it was to be AN OPTION or an option that could be a part of a total health insurance package - needs a Tim Gill or maybe a better plan would be to have several Tim Gills. The beauty of what Gill did for the LGBT community was not simply that he threw a lot of money in the effort for equality. He put his logical, computer coding mind to w...

Dr. Bruce Lipton is a great guy to listen to and learn from. He is a cellular biologist who had a EUREKA moment as he was working with cells in his lab. He is a pioneer in the field of Epi-genetics (basically the science that proves we are NOT slaves to our genes). Here is his June newsletter: I thought it needed to be shared with no edits - rather than me trying to interpret it. :-) You can connect with Bruce on his facebook page: Bruce H Lipton PhD  Or snoop around YouTube - he has lots of videos! "June 2017 Newsletter   Now is the  winter   summer  of our discontent”  (… with apologies to William Shakespeare) Dear Friends, Imaginal Cells and Seekers Everywhere, "Now is the winter of our discontent," a line from Richard III by Shakespeare, means that the time of unhappiness will soon end with the coming of summer. However, according to literary scholars, the modified phrase emphasizing the  “summer of discontent” actually means t...