Senior News Line columns
I’d heard that once we seniors reach a certain age, we start losing people — friends, acquaintances, other senior relatives — they start dying one by one.
After a less than satisfactory experience trying to order a treadmill online, I signed up at the rec center with a freebie seniors account to have a safe place for daily walking.
Just about the time that I’d decided I needed a major shopping trip to replenish food and supplies, along came two back-to-back storms.
We need to move more. They call it an inactive lifestyle when we get very little exercise and do a lot of sitting.
It’s time to begin my annual spring cleaning, and this year it’s going to be a bit different. Instead of just sticking with the cleaning and organizing activities, I’m going to concentrate on safety.
It’s very helpful to have friends and acquaintances scattered across the country when I need to do another informal poll. This time, my questions to them concerned what seniors worry about.
Months ago I’d made my resolutions list for 2024. I chose things like adopting a kitten pal for my cat, selling my father’s coin collection and hiring my handyman neighbor to paint the bathroom.
I never thought this kind of thing would happen where I live: A woman was kidnapped in front of a store, in broad daylight, by a man carrying a gun.
Sometimes we need to make tough decisions. We don’t want to. We want to wake up and find the problem is resolved. But we can’t do that, and we know it.
A retiree fell for a scam that drained his account of all his savings. It took a lifetime to save the money and only a minute for it to vanish. All it took was him giving information to a scammer.
“But it’s only” is a phrase I’ve come to dislike. It always involves money and people who don’t understand living on reduced income.
I’ve been reading in too many places about taking steps to hold off memory and cognitive impairment, so I’ve paid attention to some of the ideas we can use to keep our brains active.
Oh, it was so tempting, I have to admit. When a neighbor strolled by on her afternoon walk, we got to talking about how she stays in shape, and she rattled off a list of vitamins and supplements that she takes.
A survey released last month indicated that consumer sentiment was higher than it’s been in quite a while, since the summer of 2021. This is supposed to be a good thing.
In many areas of the country it’s been a harsh winter. Snow, ice, wind, flooding — we’ve seen it all, sometimes several of those at the same time. We need to be prepared for whatever Mother Nature throws at us.
Uh oh, it appears that in my ZIP code the number of COVID cases has doubled in the past week. Not only that, but two close neighbors are sick.
How many daily steps do we really need for optimum health? Ten thousand steps seems to be the gold standard in most of what we read to keep diabetes and high blood pressure at bay.
I’m not the only one who has opted, once again, to stay home. Both the rec center and the senior center are cutting back on classes and hours because of the lack of participation.
One of my easy-to-accomplish resolutions for 2024 was to adopt a kitten, maybe 2 to 3 months in age. After consulting the local humane society’s website and seeing dozens of tiny cats listed, I paid a visit to the shelter’s group kitten room.
Choosing a nursing home isn’t easy, even in the best of circumstances. Whether it’s for you or a spouse, or for your parents, for now or for later, there are things you need to know and red flags to beware of.
This is not the world we grew up in, or even the world we knew for much of our lives. If my informal poll of friends and acquaintances is correct, we don’t like it much.
I’ve been lax lately in terms of my health. I admit it. While I haven’t been at music concerts among thousands of people or riding packed subway cars, I have been going to stores during the daytime when the aisles are full.
There is a movement online among the children of seniors to instruct us about scams we might come across. All sorts of advice is being handed out to them about how to approach us with these scam facts.
Remember that bottle of antibacterial hand soap you tucked into the back of the cabinet when the COVID pandemic first started?
Now here’s a “novel” way to increase our brain function. It doesn’t involve getting more exercise or eating certain foods. It doesn’t include doing puzzles. We only need to grab a book and start flipping pages.
Seasonal affective disorder, also called SAD, is a type of winter depression that can be found in the young as well as the old. The decrease in daylight can affect us, as can the lack of sunshine.
How does a food product get put on the shelves or in the freezers of our grocery stores without benefit of inspection? Inquiring minds would like to know how that happens.
Having stuck with less than half of the New Year’s resolutions I made for January 2023, I decided that for 2024 I need to give much more thought to what I commit to.
What does “vigorous physical activity” mean? Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it means the hard stuff, like playing basketball or singles tennis, or swimming laps or running, ideally for 75 minutes per week.
The 3.2% Social Security increase for 2024 is higher than it has averaged over the past two decades, but it certainly is nowhere near the 8.7% increase we received for 2023.
Here we are in the middle of the holiday buying season, already leery of online purchasing scams and every email we receive that includes links.
If you’ve had a cell phone for several years, you might be tempted to add more functions to it to make it handier and more valuable to you. However, there needs to be a line drawn somewhere.
Oops. I came close to falling for a scam like the ones I always warn against. The message appeared to come from the local pharmacy. The words said they had questions and would I please call.
In the world of scams, just when you think scammers can’t possibly come up with new ideas, they do. One of the worst now is the fake fraud alert for protection services.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a food prices report comparing this summer to the summer of 2022. While it acknowledges that prices of food are continuing to rise, it claims that the rate of that increase has slowed.
Saving money is at the top of many to-do lists, especially for entertainment and groceries. Look at all your streaming services to see which ones you might be willing to stop using.
The course catalog for the winter semester of the local senior college arrived in the mail, and I’ve already highlighted over a dozen classes, talks, lectures and seminars that I’d like to take.
If all the decluttering you did over the summer has now left you with piles of belongings, you might be ready to just have it all gone. And you might say, “I think I’ll hold a yard sale!”
Winter isn’t even close, and already we’re seeing an increase in illnesses. They’re calling it a “tripledemic,” and it includes the regular flu, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, and our enemy COVID.
In the spring of this year, the United States saw a larger prescription drug shortage than we’ve seen in 10 years. And we haven’t recovered yet.
The latest craze in senior scams is surveys. Thieves want to know our opinions about products and services, and we’re happy to oblige — especially when there’s a lovely prize for us if we participate.
How is the air where you live? At this writing, a large part of the country is under summer heat alerts with temperatures soaring above normal numbers and breaking longstanding records.
The Food and Drug Administration recently approved a new drug that is supposed to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s.
We all cringe the day when it becomes apparent that we need to buy a new vehicle. And it’s not only the expense that makes us leery.
How do we go on vacation when we can’t afford to travel anywhere? The answer may be a staycation: Spend time doing something different without leaving your home area.
When do we actually become seniors? That varies, depending who we ask. Is it age 50, when all the AARP ads come to our mailbox? Maybe it’s age 60, when we can get food assistance.
There may come a time when you can no longer immediately remember the 25 telephone numbers that used to be easily recalled. I suspect it comes to us all. When it does, it’s time to start making lists.
Like it or not, sometimes we just have to buy a new cell phone. When the old one won’t hold a charge anymore or it won’t take the newest security updates, we have to cave in and begin a hunt for a new one.
If you’re struggling to deal with all the things you inherited from your parents — and maybe their parents — things you’ve held on to for years, you’re not alone.
Just when so many of us are struggling financially with the rising cost of everything, along comes yet another way to separate us from our dollars: Many businesses are now charging a fee to return items we’ve purchased online from them.