decided to run valgrind to fix memory leaks.  There is still one place where i'm confused why there may be a memory leak, but it's only during clean up, so i will trust in the OS (menu deleting, specifically menu_delete_item during the options clean up...the SDL_DestroyTexture, maybe it's because I use multiple of the same texture for many options?  think i found out...not sure if it's a big enough issue to fix).