Archive for April 2023
Dr. Raz in Residence
Therapist Dr. Candace Raczkowski
will introduce her healing service to us at
1 p.m. in the 2nd floor theater
Her knowledge, experience, training and background
treating and preventing problems with
balance,
post-surgical recuperation,
joint inflation and
a wide-range of chronic conditions
will help most us overcome stiffness and pain.
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Married Couples More Wealthy Than Singles
Just like love and marriage, marriage and wealth‑building go hand in hand.
Don’t leap astride your high horse should someone suggest you or a dear friend or relative is marrying for money.
A Purdue University study reveals that marriage has a lot to do with wealth accumulation. Getting and staying married appears to provide institutional benefits that greatly impact long‑term economic well‑being.
A survey of more than 7,000 households that included at least one pre‑retirement person between 51 and 61 years of age indicated that people who never married had only 14 percent of the financial assets that married people accumulated.
Even when divorced individuals and surviving spouses remarried, they still did not make up as much financial ground as partners who were continuously married. The negative effects are greater when a marriage ends in divorce.
Financial potentials that are greater in marriage include home ownership, insurance coverage for spouses, survivor pension benefits, and increased rates of saving. A continuous marriage is more important to acquiring housing equity than other type of assets.
Which leads sponsors of the study to warn married couples pondering divorce to consult with a financial counselor before calling their attorneys.
A financial consultant can help because quickly liquidating jointly held property and establishing two households with the proceeds can be costly to both parties. And spinning off from that is the need to review individually held property before forging a marriage contract, whether it’s the first marriage or the latest in a series. Pre‑nuptial financial agreements should be given as much priority as legally binding romantic bonds.
OK, We’re In . . .
. . . what used to be called a “rest home.”
Sunday is a day of rest,
so what the heck do we do
the rest of the week?
What Would Weekends Do . . .
. . . without Saturdays?
No mowing the lawn,
shopping for Sunday,
packing for the weekend trip
and on and on.
It’s relaxing game time around here.
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NO BOCCE today . . .
. . . bus (and driver) has to traipse to
Goldfield Ghost Town.
If You Don’t Like . . .
. . .tucking your hearing aids into your ears,
put them in your pocket and take them down to
the 2nd floor multi-purpose room
at 3 p.m. to get them
checked and cleaned.
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It’s a good thing I became a wordsmith because
I can’t even count the times I failed math at school.
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Too Sick to Seek Care
Imagine being too sick to get help from becoming sicker. That’s what appears to happening to a lot of the elderly. Poor physical health and disabilities could be keeping older patients from seeking preventive care, such as mammograms and flu shots, according to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for the Advancement of Health.
It also seems that physical-health problems affect the elderly’s health behavior more than mental-health problems like depression. The one exception, according to results of a survey of more than 4,500 individuals aged 65 to 103, is that older patients who reported being depressed were more likely to smoke.
Most people are less likely to smoke or drink alcohol frequently as they age but are also less likely to have mammograms, lose weight, and exercise as they grow older. Minority and low-income patients, as well as those with physical-health limitation, are less likely to use preventive medical services.
On the other hand, elderly respondents taking multiple prescription medications or who had recent falls were more likely to use preventive care and to practice good-health behaviors. This suggests that regular contact with health-care providers encourages better good-health practices. Additional visits also give health-care providers more opportunities to suggest vaccinations, go over opportunities for advance directives, and discuss needs for behavioral changes.
Anyone Still Interested . . .
. . . in writing their life story
can get started in the weekly writing class
at 1:30 p.m. in the 2nd floor multi-purpose room.
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I’ve always felt it’s
better to be thought of as being
abreast rather than behind.
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Getting to Know the British Mind
By Igor Lobanov, Mature Life Features
British dramatist George Bernard Shaw is credited with remarking that “America and Britain are two nations divided by a common language.” But different word usage is perhaps the lesser part of the split. If you’re contemplating a trip to the British Isles, learning about differences in how we and the English think and act may help make the trip more enjoyable.
Pittsburgh native Jane Walmsley, who is married to a Brit and has lived and worked as a television broadcaster, producer and journalist in England for more than two decades, has compiled several different customs and characteristics that set Yanks and Brits apart.
Starting with the way we look at life. Americans, Walmsley notes, think death can be delayed by aerobics, prune juice, and plastic surgery. Britons live life with a certain detachment and let events run their course and are “never be seen to try too hard.” Simply, that means never run for a bus or skip afternoon tea.
Americans want lots of choices, she says, and want the right to substitute a tossed salad for French fries. In short, we like to live life a la carte. The English keep their number of choices limited – “dresses come in four sizes, shoes one width, ice cream in three flavors.” They believe that too many options sew confusion.
She sees Yanks as having a go-for-it mentality and adoring movers and shakers, even flawed ones. Many ask, “If I can have it all, why haven’t I got it?” Brits prefer to relax and enjoy working within life’s natural boundaries and find a lot of satisfaction from small successes.
Then there is regionalism. As Walmsley explains, the British Isles is about the size of Pennsylvania encompassing 11 distinct and potentially warring parts. These include Scotland, Wales, Ulster (Northern Ireland), Republic of Ireland, West Country (Cornwall, Devon, Somerset), North (Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds), Northeast (the Newcastle-upon-Tyne area), Midlands (Birmingham), East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk), South, and Central London.
In summation, Walmsley opines that the only two things that really matter for the British are the Royal Family and the pub, which is the great leveler. What really matters for an American is even simpler, and also a leveler, is ice cream.
In another view, Roger Axtell, author of numerous books/guides on differences in international behavior, points out the really basic difference between the Brits and the Yanks: the way we hold a fork while eating.
In England, they keep the fork firmly in the left hand. By contrast, “We appear juggler-like, cutting the food with the fork in the left hand, dropping the knife, flipping the fork to the right hand, holding it like a pen and finally eating.”
Our zigzag eating style has had its ups and downs. Down (and out) were many U.S. secret agents in enemy territory during World War II who accidentally fell back into their early-childhood table manners.
It’s A Brand New Week . . .
. . .and coming up are a social hour Tuesday at 3:30 p.m.
for everyone marking birthdays this month
followed by an Activity Review meeting at 4:30
then there’s the Talking Stick Casino outing
departure at noon Thursday
and the Goldfield Excursion leaving Verena at noon Friday.
Just some of the goings-on squeezed in between everything else.
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It’s well and widely known that babies are delivered by storks,
but has anyone ever seen a heavy kid dropped off by a crane.
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Save a Buck in Bucks County
“If you can’t find it at Rice’s Market, you can’t find it anywhere,” we were told before we visited this bustling Babylon of bargains in New Hope, PA.
Proclaimed to be “the biggest flea market in the whole world,” it’s within a two-hour drive of Manhattan, Baltimore, Atlantic City and Philadelphia. Among our bargains were a knapsack and several eel-skin wallets (for gifts) for less than one-third the price we had seen in retail stores.
Rice’s Market opened more than a century ago a dozen miles from the New Jersey border in a pocket of eastern Pennsylvania’s Bucks’ County that is packed with pastoral land and crisscrossed by country roads.
This mecca for black-belt shoppers, bargain hunters and browsers is less than an hour away from Reading, the city that is to outlet shopping what Bethlehem is to Christianity.
But Bucks County is more than a magnet for shoppers. It became one of the nation’s first destinations to take aim at the ecotourism market by promoting the environment and tourism in cooperation with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Some of the millions of visitors who flock to the Liberty Bell-Independence Hall complex in downtown Philadelphia take the time to relax out here among the few remaining vestiges of colonial America. While America’s future was charted in the Pennsylvania state house, the nation’s past is preserved in customs, traditions and historic sites throughout this region that has become a getaway for urban-bound residents of such metropolitan complexes as Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C.
Bucks County rolls some 50 miles up the Delaware Valley from the northern rim of Philadelphia County. William Penn made his home here more than 300 years ago. It also features the 19th century residence of author Pearl S. Buck, who won both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes. Bucks County is the sort of place you can spend a jingle-bells Christmas or a sun-speckled summer vacation.
Doylestown, the governmental seat and “capital” of this county peppered with bed-and-breakfasts that remind you of grandma’s house, is the site of the intriguing 44-room Henry Chapman Mercer home. It was made of poured concrete shortly after the turn of the century as a showplace for the exotic and eclectic Mercer-designed-and-made wall and floor tiles that line corridors winding through several floors from the main hall’s dozen exits.
Less than 30 minutes away is Washington’s Crossing, where the general who was to become our first president led his troops across the Delaware River on a cold Christmas Day before the Battle of Trenton.
Another plus for this region is the fact that it’s perched on the edge of Mennonite country, with its eye-catching quilts and home-made mouth-watering foods such as shoo-fly pie.
It’s Good Friday . . .
. . . with Easter over the horizon.
Time to take a break
and pause for prayer,
mellow meditation and
feasting with your family.
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It’s Holy Thursday . . .
. . . better known as Thirsty Thursday around here,
to be followed by Good Friday
and then it’s Easter Sunday.
Don’t forget to sign up for Easter brunch.
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Mature Life Features 