Truths For Mature Humans
The woman who forwarded these ‘truths’ to me is ageless. She never hesitated to master the newest technology and the newest systems if it would make her more efficient. She never complains about aging and still has a great sense of humor. 🙂
Truths For Mature Humans
1. I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.
2. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.
3. I totally take back all those times I didn’t want to nap when I was younger.
4. There is great need for a sarcasm font.
5. How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?
6. Was learning cursive really necessary?
7. Map Quest really needs to start their directions on # 5. I’m pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.
8. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
9. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at least kind of tired.
10. Bad decisions make good stories.
11. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you know that you just aren’t going to do anything productive for the rest of the day.
12. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after Blue Ray? I don’t want to have to restart my
collection…again.
13. I’m always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten-page technical report that I swear I did not make any changes to.
14. I keep some people’s phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.
15. I think the freezer deserves a light as well.
16. I disagree with Kay Jewelers. I would bet on any given Friday or Saturday night more kisses begin with Bud Light than Kay.
17. I wish Google Maps had an “Avoid Ghetto” routing option.
18. I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.
19. How many times is it appropriate to say “What?” before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear or understand a word they said?
20. I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars team up to prevent a jerk from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers and sisters!
21. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
22. Sometimes I’ll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.
23. Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, finding their cell phone, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey – but I’d bet everyone can find and push the snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time, every time!
24. The first testicular guard, the “Cup,” was used in Hockey in 1874 and the first helmet was used in 1974. That means it only took 100 years for men to realize that their brain is also important.
What Women Did For Fun
Several weeks ago, AdventureMan presented me with two (large) piles of files, saying that they were mine and needed to be gone through. I spent the day today tossing out old term papers, old manuscripts, old resumes – lots and lots of things that were worth saving, and now, not so much.
One thing I came across was a file with copies of work my departed aunt Helen had done to gain entrance into the DAR, Daughters of the American Revolution (Revolutionary War for America’s Independence). It was like a game, only when she started playing, there was no e-mail, only snail mail. Long distance telephone calls were expensive, and she was a Navy wife, so it was all done by hand.
Genealogy work, too, was painstakingly done, and family histories, cemetery records, lists of people arriving and departing on ships and who married who – all lovingly compiled and typed on manual typewriters by people with a passion for making connections, solving the mysteries of who married whom and for how long:
(“no need to mention the divorce” one correspondent wrote, “it happened in my family, too, and it isn’t relevant so we just won’t mention it” she wrote about a marriage that ceased to exist over a hundred years before)
My aunt had a sure thing, and she had a unique entry, so she was tracking three entries at the same time, trying to prove a new connection, while knowing she had in her pocket an already proven entry.
I lost a couple hours of my life, reading through all the correspondence, trying to decipher her notes and the arcane charts of relationships stretching back to 1690, when one line of the family arrived on these shores. I grinned, thinking how we document our bloodlines, leaving out the pirates and the horse thieves, and (legend has it) the French aristocrat who left his first family in France and started our branch here, without having divorced his first family, LOL.
My aunt must have been a little younger than I am when she started on this search, and I know that she served proudly in the DAR for many years, along with several civic committees, library committees and planning commissions in Santa Barbara, California. I still miss her.
Oh! My Aching Back!
“My back hurts,” AdventureMan complained, “and I am really, really tired.” He slept in yesterday, and I went to the early service alone.
We’ve been helping our son this weekend with the Happy Baby while his wife is out of town. 🙂
It is so easy to forget – a baby is hard work! Especially a mobil baby, able to explore and who moves quickly!
Fortunately for us, he is also a very very good baby, a sweet tempered baby who is easily distracted from his more dangerous attractions, and who is not yet fast enough to catch the cats, who evade him easily.
We took him out for barbecue yesterday, and fed him baked beans, sweet potato and broccoli. He gets this concerned look on his face, but he doesn’t complain, as he explores the new textures and tastes. I also bathed him when we got home, because he managed to get his hands and feet sticky between spoons of food.
It was a lot of fun, and we understand thoroughly why God gives babies to young parents, LOL!
Only As Old as You Think You Are :-)
I found this great story in BBC Health News. The part that cracks me up is that they made these people carry their own bags, and they left all the uneven floors and throw carpets in place and forced them to pay attention to where they walked. . . and the result – they all did BETTER than they had been doing before!
Can You Trick Your Body into Feeling Younger?
Our volunteers were actors Liz Smith (88), Sylvia Syms (76) and Lionel Blair (78), cricket umpire Dickie Bird (77), newsreader Kenneth Kendall (86) and former Daily Mirror editor Derek Jameson (80).
They agreed to live in our time capsule house for a week, during which they dressed in 1970s clothes, slept in replicas of their very own 70s bedrooms, watched television from that era, and talked about 1975 in the present tense.
It proved to be a fascinating but draining experience – for both experimenters and experimentees.
From the beginning we made it clear to our volunteers that they would be expected to look after themselves. Research in nursing homes shows clearly that giving residents control over their own lives and their own choices has a hugely beneficial impact on health and happiness.
In one study, residents who were allowed to choose a plant to care for, and when and where to receive visitors, were found 18 months later to be significantly more cheerful, active and alert. They were also far more likely to be still alive.
Another thing about our 1970s house was that it was full of physical challenges. There were shag pile carpets to trip over, door ridges to step over and lots of slippery linoleum. Research on mice has shown that those who live in a challenging environment live nearly 30% longer than those who in a secure but boring environment.
In this spirit, on their arrival, our volunteers were asked to carry their bags up a flight of stairs to their bedrooms. It was the first time they’d been forced into such physical activity in many years, and they were not happy.
But they rose to the challenge. When they started at the bottom of the stairs, a couple were adamant it would be impossible to make it to the top. Watching from a laboratory close by, it was hard to resist going to their aid.
Slowly, step by step, they succeeded. We had made them question whether, perhaps, they were more physically capable than they had given themselves credit for.
It was a tough initiation, but a core element of Ellen’s original experiment was the idea that our prior beliefs play a huge part in how we perceive the world, and how we perceive ourselves. By immersing our volunteers in a 1970s world, we were hoping to make them think of themselves as younger, fitter and healthier.
For many of them, the 70s had been a golden decade, a highlight of their careers.
We took Dickie Bird back to Lords to relive the atmosphere. As he walked through the tunnel, onto the grounds, he blossomed before our eyes. Dickie had had a stroke, suffered 18 months of illness, lost confidence and come to think of himself as old. By the end of the week, his confidence was back and he showed remarkable improvement across a range of tests, including memory and stamina.
Over the week we gave all the celebrities tasks to do, but we also left them to fend for themselves. For up to 12 hours a day, we observed them through our surveillance cameras and, just as Ellen had discovered all those years before, we saw great changes.
Half way through the week, Liz Smith took 148 steps with the aid of just one stick. For someone who had not walked without both sticks since her stroke – and who often relied on a wheelchair – it was a real breakthrough. She was no longer willing to be limited by the physical constraints she had imposed on herself.
At the end of the week we put our guinea pigs through the same rigorous battery of physical and psychological tests we had at the beginning. Memory, mood, flexibility, stamina and even eye sight had improved in almost all of them.
The results were not uniform, but in some cases they shed up to 20 years in their apparent biological age.
It made a compelling case for Ellen Langer’s argument that opening our minds to what’s possible can lead to better health, whatever our age.
“How Do You Want to Die?”
I had taken my mother to her internal medicine specialist, she had an earache, and as an aside, had mentioned she no longer is taking Lipitor, because it gave her problems with her legs, but should she go back on it?
“How do you want to die?” asked the doctor, and we just looked at her with our mouths hanging open. It seems kind of a bald question, doesn’t it? But the doctor was entirely serious.
“Doctors ask themselves this all the time,” she continued. “Do you want to end up in a nursing home, or living with your children, as your body continues to fail and your money dwindles away and you can do less and less every day?”
“I want to die in my sleep, at home” my 87 year old Mom responded.
“Then you want to have a heart attack,” the doctor said. “That’s what really happens when a person dies in their sleep, their heart fails.”
“That’s your choice,” she said. “Doctors discuss it all the time. Most of us want to go while life is still good, and we want to go quickly. We see too many people prolonging their lives and regretting it.”
I’ve never heard a doctor speak so bluntly before. We’re still kind of in shock. It has definitely given us something to think about.
It’s Easy To Tell a Spy
This story interests me because I grew up in Cold War America, and when I was going to high school in Germany, we were surrounded by propaganda urging us always to be careful about anything we said, in public or even in private.
“It’s easy to tell a spy” the public service announcements would go, and show someone in a cafe, or in line waiting for a bus, or in the library giving out information on where her husband or father was deployed or when such and such a unit was going to the border, and a nefarious person writing it down to send back to their leaders, always the dreaded Russians.
They’re back. Did they ever go away?
NEW YORK -Nine people charged with operating as Russian spies entrenched in American suburbia were making long-shot bids to be released from jail pending trial Thursday, even as authorities scoured a Mediterranean island for an alleged co-conspirator who disappeared after he was granted bail.
Hearings were set for federal courts in Boston, New York and Alexandria, Va., for all but one of the 10 people arrested over the weekend by federal authorities in the United States.
Police searched airports, ports and yacht marinas Thursday to find an 11th person who was arrested in Cyprus but disappeared after a judge there freed him on $32,500 bail. The man, who had gone by the name Christopher Metsos, failed to show up Wednesday for a required meeting with police.
Authorities also examined surveillance video from crossing points on the war-divided island, fearing the suspect might have slipped into the breakaway north, a diplomatic no-man’s-land that’s recognized only by Turkey and has no extradition treaties.
In the U.S., Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, of Cambridge, Mass., were scheduled to appear Thursday at a federal court in Boston. Mikhail Semenko, Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills, all of Arlington, Va., were set for a hearing before Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. Defendants Richard Murphy, Cynthia Murphy, Juan Lazaro and Vicky Pelaez were to go before a judge in New York.
All have been charged with being foreign agents. Officials said the suspects will all eventually be transferred to New York, where the charges were filed.
Not due in court Thursday was Russian beauty Anna Chapman, the alleged spy whose heavy presence on the Internet and New York party scene has made her a tabloid sensation. She was previously ordered held without bail.
Eight of the suspects were accused by prosectuors of being foreign-born, husband-and-wife teams who were supposed to be Americanizing themselves and gradually developing ties to policymaking circles in the U.S.
Most were living under assumed identities, according to the FBI. Their true names and citizenship remain unknown, but several are suspected of being Russians by birth.
Heathfield claimed to be a Canadian but was using a birth certificate of a deceased Canadian boy, agents said in a court filing. His wife, Tracey Foley, purported to be from Canada, too, but investigators said they searched a family safe deposit box found photographs taken of her when she was in her 20s that had been developed by a Soviet film company.
Juan Lazaro had said he was born in Uraguay and was a citizen of Peru; he was secretly recorded by the FBI talking about a childhood in Siberia, according to court documents.
Two, Chapman and Mikhail Semenko, were Russians who didn’t attempt to hide their national origin, FBI agents said, but they had a similar mission: blend in, network and learn what they could.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague said the U.K. was investigating whether Foley might have used a forged British passport. The British spy agency MI5 is also investigating the extent to which Foley and Chapman had links to London, and will likely seek to find out whether either attempted to recruit British officials as informants.
There is evidence that at least some of the alleged agents had success cultivating contacts in the business, academic and political worlds.
The criminal complaint alleges that either Heathfield or Foley sent messages to Moscow talking about turnover at the CIA that was supposedly “received in private conversation” with a former congressional aide. Other messages described Heathfield establishing contact with a former high ranking U.S. national security official, and with a U.S. researcher who worked on bunker-busting nuclear warheads.
Moscow thanked Cynthia Murphy for having passed along “very useful” information about the global gold market and instructed her to strengthen ties with students and professors at Columbia University’s business school, where she was getting a degree, according to the FBI.
Among other things, the Russians wanted “detailed personal data and character traits w. preliminary conclusions about their potential to be recruited by Service,” according to one intercepted message.
Clare Lopez, senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and a professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security and a former operations officer for the CIA, said the alleged plotters might have someday been able to produce valuable information, if left in place long enough.
“Their value is not just in acquiring classified information,” she said. “There’s a lot that goes on that’s not simply stealing secrets and sending them back to Moscow.”
Metsos was charged with supplying funds to the other members of the ring.
Cypriot Justice Minister Loucas Louca on Thursday admitted that a judge’s decision to release him on bail “may have been mistaken” and said authorities were examining leads on his possible whereabouts.
“We have some information and we hope that we will arrest him soon,” Louca told reporters, without elaborating.
Cyprus has for decades been a hotbed of espionage intrigue as spies converge on the eastern Mediterranean island at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and Asia.
More recently, former CIA agent Harold Nicholson, in prison for espionage, recruited his 24-year-old son Nathaniel to meet with Russian agents in cities around the world from 2006 to 2008 to collect money owed by his former handlers. One of those cities was the Cypriot capital, Nicosia.
Truth in Packaging?
I am always skeptical of the products I call “hope in a bottle” (to my great amusement, there is actually a great product line which is now called Hope In A Bottle) but people will buy anything in hopes that it will keep their skin looking young and fresh.
When you live in heat, and when you do water aerobics, you need more. I was looking for something light I could put on often, something for day, and something for night. This is above and beyond the magic elixirs I put on my face that show “amazing, visible results in 7 Days!!!!” although seven days later I wonder what my face might have looked like if I hadn’t been using Product X . . .
So I bought some hope in a bottle to use days and nights, and yes, partly I will admit I bought the beautiful packaging. It is beautiful, isn’t it?
And it wasn’t that hard to open, which is a bonus. But wait! What is this inside? I paid for a lot of AIR!
The next package was the same – beautiful packaging; a lot of air . . .
Maybe, in its own way, it is more true than fiction. After all, when we are buying vanity, when we invest in the hope of beautiful skin, a lot of it is illusion and air, isn’t it?
Sorting Through Our Lives
At lunch, on our anniversary, AdventureMan and I played a game, a game we call “the top three”. He started it. “What are your top three thrills in our life together?” he asked . . .
We came up with contenders, debated relative merits, but agreed on #1 – the birth of our son. Then there were the top three vacations, the top three surprises, etc. It’s always fun; and together remember things you wouldn’t remember on your own.
Every now and then you get a glimpse of what makes life worthwhile, and you are additionally blessed by knowing how happy you are at the time you are happy.
One of those days was today.
Yesterday, we went by to see our son and his wife and our little adorable grandson had a cough.
“Do you need for us to take care of him tomorrow?” we asked.
Oh! If we could take care of him in the morning, that would be wonderful! And so, promptly at 0730, we were at their doorstep, and our morning passed – oh, happily! – taking care of our adorable grandson. He has a bad cough, but he is on the mend, and we had some fun.
He loves his jumpy-thing, which we call a Johnny Jump-Up, but it isn’t, it’s like calling all tissues “Kleenex” or all copies a “Xerox”:
He has discovered his hands and feet; I love watching him, it’s pure motion, every leg and every arm going at once:
Well, he can’t talk yet, not clearly, so he blows bubbles to tell us how much he loves us:
“Oh!” exclaims AdventureMan, “You have to take a picture of him while he is sleeping, he is so beautiful.”
LOL! I had swaddled him, and he tried to tell me I had done it wrong, but I didn’t listen. When I went back 10 minutes later, he was still squalling AND he was no longer swaddled. I re-swaddled, this time, doing it right and tight, and before I even put him in his crib, he was sound asleep.
He did manage somehow to get one arm out:
On the way home, we picked up some roasting chickens for dinner, to roast with fresh rosemary and basil from our own garden. Yummm. AdventureMan will deliver one to our son and his wife around dinner time.
We are happy AND we know it. It’s a great day in Pensacola.
OOops! Ops!
The silence tipped him off.
He had just finished referring to his study as “The Command Center.”
The silence continued, then I broke it, quietly asking “and just whom would you be commanding?”
“Ummm. . . err . . . Ops Center! Operations Center!” he corrected himself.
We both laughed.
We’ve been married 37 years. 🙂
AdventureMan Wishes He Were There
I love our road trips. We always catch up on thoughts and pursuits that may seem to trivial in the activities of our normal busy days. It’s a time to talk over dreams, and hopes, and to sketch out some broad outlines of goals and calendars.
“Sometimes I read your blog,” AdventureMan starts off (and I never know where it will go!) “and I think ‘oh what a fun woman! I wish I were there with her having that adventure!’ and then I realize I was there!”
LLLOOOLLL!
People have told me I can make something out of nothing. I think the gift is knowing you are having a good time at the time you are having the good time. 🙂
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