Foggy and Old

The ULV fogger or ultra-low-wattage fogger is a useful little device if you have problems with mosquitoes or insects in your house.  (I've only just realised that the plural of mosquito, in English, is the same as the plural of potato, that is, it adds an extra 'e.'). I'm assuming that the fogger spreads a bit of a haze around, one that will include some pesticide, and the insects will come to a sticky end. 

However, I'm not sure that I'd want to be in the same room as the fogger.  What would it do to the human mind? I have enough problems with fogging as it is, without adding a fogger to assist with the job. 

Which brings me to my other topic, the International Day of Older People. (That's a bit of a mouthful, isn't it?)  It's supposed to be the day when we raise awareness of older people's needs, and show our concern for them.  I'm not sure, however, what constitutes an older person under this heading. Do have to be old or just feel old?  I don't actually feel old, even though by some people's lights I am old. (My grandchildren, for instance.) Do you have to not only be old but feel old as well?  I'm sure there are plenty of people in that category, but I haven't entered it yet. We have a group at our church for the older people which we resolutely refuse to join. And the thought of going into an old people's home as a resident fills me with horror.  I've seen too many people who were coping - for the most part - in their own home who've gone into a 'rest' home, and they've gone downhill very fast. It's something to do with the general atmosphere, I think. The fogginess provided by collective old age.  If you're old, my suggestion is to stay around young people.  They keep you alive much more readily...

Get a life!

Once again the American Civil Liberties Union has stomped all over a host of people's rights in favour of a complaint from one person.  Seemingly in the States, 'father-daughter' dances have been popular for decades, along with 'mother-son' baseball games.   But a single mother came up with the idea that this was somehow discriminatory (to her and her child) and as a result, in one school district these popular events have been banned.  No discussion, no thought as to creative ways to make a single parent feel included, but banned.  Yup, that's the way to go.  It's Political Correctness as its intolerant best.

Got lots of people enjoying something?  Ban it: it must be upsetting someone.

In the Otago Daily Times this morning we had a tongue-in-cheek opinion piece on a similar piece of PC-ness that occurred last week, when a couple of city councillors (themselves not young people, by any means) called themselves (and fellow councillors) slightly derogatory names.  One male councillor referred to himself and others as 'us old fellas', while a female councillor referred to herself and them as 'old farts.'  World-shattering.

In spite of neither of them causing any offence to other councillors, someone at Age Concern Otago got herself into a knot and complained about the 'deprecating comments' - they were insulting old people (sorry, chronologically challenged people) she claimed.  Unbelievably, the female councillor apologised (that's the way these PC folk get you on the downward slide: making you apologise for something that wasn't offensive in the first place), while the male councillor wisely told the ACO person to get a life.

The ACO person said the phrases were ageist.  Yup, that's right: anything with the word 'old' in it is likely to appear on the ageist indicator.  But curiously enough, old people are old.  I call myself old all the time - because I am. That doesn't stop me from behaving like a twenty-year-old when I want.  So what?

We're so concerned about upsetting someone these days that we've lost our sense of humour (and all those great jokes that include three people of different nationalities, or mothers-in-law, or Irishmen, or Australians).  These things aren't insulting: they're part of life.  The ACLU is a group that's widely known for its total inability to see anything as funny; seems like the lady from ACO is leaning in the same direction.

More on Christchurch: doors and old people

This is another post on my recent Christchurch trip, the one we didn't go on in order to sell Bulova watches door-to-door.  See the previous post regarding what we gave away door-to-door, rather than sold.

I actually enjoyed going door-knocking.  I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, and one or two of the group found it a bit hard, I think, but that's part of the training, and the gaining of confidence.  I've probably had plenty of experience with other people's doors, over the years.  I was a Bon Brush salesman at one time, which involved a lot of door-knocking, some of it more successful than others.   (Bon Brush is now gone the way of many good firms, unfortunately.)  And I was a postman, which occasionally meant you had to knock at someone's door to get them to sign for a registered parcel, or to take something that wouldn't fit in the postbox.  And I've done surveys which required going door-to-door until you got enough people to fill your quota.  They had to be willing to answer your questions, and had to be the right sort of age, and right gender and so on in order to fit the criteria required.  That could be tough.  I remember one long, long day trailing up and down streets in Abbotsford and struggling to fill my quota because so few people were interested in responding.  Nothing to do with the fact that I was in Abbotsford; it was just one of those days.

So door-knocking is no problem to me.  And talking to strangers is something I don't have a hassle with either.  Furthermore, because we had a particular reason for being there, people were quite content to stop and talk and answer some questions about the state of things.  And in some cases that even led to conversations about God and church and such, which was fine.

I particularly enjoyed the conversations we had with old people: there was a man and a woman (in separate places) who were both 93 and had plenty to tell us about life and their histories.  The man had a boat, and a number of fairly serious ailments.  At one point he looked rather wistfully at the boat sitting in his backyard and said, "I probably won't be going out on her again."  I agreed, thinking that the fact that he had problems with his knees (he had a fall in one of the quakes) wouldn't allow him to climb up into the thing for a start.  But he was still driving to the supermarket...

The old lady was a delight even though she'd been quite badly injured in one of the early quakes: the fireplace had blown out.  She'd received singeing to her fingers, but that was just the start.  She'd been hit by something heavy and had almost lost sight in her left eye, had had a damaged hip, cracked some ribs and more.  She'd been in and out of hospital several times since.   She would have kept us talking all day, if we'd wanted to stay.  She told us how she used to have a sleep-out at the back of the house - she'd put mates of her son, who was a soldier, up in there overnight, so they didn't have to drive back to the barracks under the influence.  Sadly, people had been stealing the wood from the sleep-out after it got damaged in the quake.

Another old man had so many ailments that just when you thought he'd run out, he'd produce another one: several heart attacks, including one when he was on the operating table having something else attended to, blood in his urine, possible cancer, diabetes (which was a bit ironic, because he was one of the ones we took biscuits bake too - he said he'd sneak a bite or two in every now and then) and arthritis in his hands.  The latter had been made worse by some medication he'd been given a decade or more ago - given by someone who's now a top medical person - and which one of the other staff had noted was basically poison.  Not only did it not do anything for his arthritis, is left his hands looking as though they'd been burnt.  He was given some antidote, but that hadn't helped much.

These three people all lived on their own, which is a bit worrying when you think of the illnesses and disabilities they have.  They seemed remarkably resilient.  Another woman had had her house fall apart around her, and had been taken quickly to her daughter's home where she now lives.  She said all she could remember was grabbing some underwear out of one of the drawers.   She couldn't even recall what time of day it was that the first earthquake occurred; we reminded her that it had been in the early hours of the morning.  She told about her brothers and sisters - she had had eight or nine of them - and how one of them (it sounded as though he'd been one of her favourite brothers) had been killed, along with his daughter, when he ran into a train....                       To be continued....

Big kids

With the huge increase of older people in the world over the next couple of decades, is this video an example of what life will be like? LOL



Here's some info from Wikipedia on the video: "Hoppípolla" Icelandic for "Jumping into puddles") is a song by Icelandic band Sigur Rós from their 2005 album Takk.... It was released as the album's second single on 28 November 2005. The lyrics are mainly in Icelandic, with some nonsensical phrases, a "language" the band calls Vonlenska ("Hopelandic"). Written with spaces, the song's title would be "Hoppa í polla" (the "—a" in "hoppa" is not pronounced). As with many of the band's songs, it was given a nickname in the early stages of writing. "Hoppípolla" was "The Money Song", as the band was certain they had written a song which would have commercial success. It is the band's most successful single, charting at #24 on the UK Singles Chart in May 2006 due to the song's increased popularity as the theme for the BBC's Planet Earth. The single also features "Með blóðnasir", an instrumental coda to "Hoppípolla", which is also featured on Takk...; and a studio remake of "Hafssól", a song previously released on the band's 1997 debut album, Von. The title appears as "Hafsól" on the single.

Age creepeth on

I had no idea what adipex diet pills were, so had to look them up. And I did, and found a 'review' site of them which was sort of positive about them - and sort of not. I think on the basis of this review I wouldn't be trying them, quite apart from the fact that I'm not overweight enough to worry about it.
Which isn't what I set out to write. But my wife went to England (via Auckland and Kuala Lumpur) this morning (no, not all in one morning - come on!) and I'm feeling distinctly unsettled. People go on about 'baching' (as in being a bachelor for a period of time). Can't say it's a state I'm particularly keen to go back to. When you've been married as long as I have (36 years) you're pretty closely tied up with the person you've spent so much time with; at the moment there's a great sense of absence in the house.
And it's been a bit of a week, all up. Some stressful times at work which I won't go into here, but some other stressful things on top of that.
I went to get my driver's licence renewed, for example. You might remember that I had a bit of eyelid surgery about ten days ago. The eyelid's looking good, but the eye itself took a bit of time to recover; in fact I was getting worried that it might have got damaged during the few brief minutes of the op. Don't think it did, but the antibiotic cream I was using for the eyelid certainly blurred things up tremendously, and even when I stopped using it the eye didn't seem to seeing things as clearly as I thought it should. The left eye seems to be doing most of the work, in fact.
To get back to the driver's licence. I went into the AA office here, paid my money, had my photo taken (took them umpteen attempts) and tried to do their eyetest. Crikey, I thought I'd gone blind.
The first lot of letters were an absolute blur, and I only started seeing things more clearly when they upped the size of the letters. And then I was told that there were three columns of letters when my eyes saw only two - and a big black blank where the third column should have been. The girl behind the counter insisted there were three columns; I insisted there were two. Didn't even get as far as checking my peripheral vision.
Felt quite gloomy and began to wonder if my eyesight was going completely. However, a quick trip to the optician's (an old acquaintance outside of his speciality) and it proved that there was nothing more wrong with my eyes than there has been for decades. I've had glasses since I was about nine, as far as I recall.
I could read his charts with ease, and tracked the peripheral light thingee with no problems. Pooh to the AA eye test machine, I say. In fact I later wrote to the AA Head Office, online, and told them that I thought it was a bit of a poor show that they had a machine that doesn't work for most of their customers - it's commonplace for people to wind up either at their doctor's or their optician's surgeries because they're 'failed' the eyesight test at AA, or haven't even bothered to give it a try because they know already how inefficient it is.
No doubt they'll respond by installing up-to-date, brand new, perfectly attuned machines in every one of their offices.
The other 'stress' was that I had to go to Work and Income to apply for my superannuation, which the Government is kindly giving to me after all these years. This shouldn't have been any big deal - people turn 65 every day - but the milestone of it affected me, and I felt quite nervous. And old.
Anyway, thanks to my daughter, who's adept at making sure every i has been dotted and t crossed, the application form was perfect when presented to the woman at W&I (bar one minimal easily-sorted thing) and I had all the right bits of paper to prove who I was, several times over. Notice that my daughter checked all this through before I went. Doesn't that say something about impending age...?

The photo is by Zarko Drincic - he also drew the original picture.

Superannuitant - nearly

This time next month I'll have been in paid employment (give or take a few short patches when I was out of work) for fifty years.

I've already got my form for applying for my superannuitant benefit - which my daughter tells me requires me to produce several original documents proving I am who I say I am. (There's not actually anyone else I'd really want to say I was, I don't think!).

I'm in the fortunate position of being able to continue working at least until the end of the year. And I guess, if there was work available, I might carry on longer.

I don't particularly feel like a 65-year-old. My grandfather died at this age - and looked like an old man - he'd probably worked much harder than I've ever had to. My father was dead by the time he was 63, and he'd not looked after himself in the last years, as far as I can make out. I guess there's still a month in which I could not make it to 65, and anyway it's no great achievement living longer than your forebears; I'm certain I haven't really had a hand in prolonging my life!

The general health of the population in New Zealand is such that 65 is almost getting to the point of not being seen as old, and those 'old' people around who are similar ages all look pretty good.

Well, God willing, I'll let you know when I celebrate my 65th birthday. Or, if there's a grand silence from this blog, you'll know I'll still be in God's hands, just celebrating in a different kind of way!

Up

My daughter went to see Up today with some other members of the family, old and young, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'd heard it was good too, so tonight my younger son and I went. He's great to go to a funny movie with: he just gets on and laughs uninhibitedly, which makes everyone else relax.

And there's plenty to laugh at in this movie. As with all Pixar productions, it's full of detail, and the storyline is satisfying. And it has its emotional moments too. Apparently my nearly-three-year-old grandson said when the main character's wife died very early in the piece: that's very sad, isn't it, Mum? Now this young fellow's astute, but it's still interesting that at his age he picked up on what happened since it's not spelled out.

Most movie buffs will be familiar with the story, even if they haven't seen the movie yet. An old and lonely man, Carl Fredricksen, decides that rather than have his house torn down - and himself carted off to a 'retirement village' - he will tie hundreds of helium balloons to the house and sail off to Paradise Falls in South America, the place where his childhood hero, Charles Muntz - a famous explorer - was last known to have gone. Inadvertently he takes along with him a little boy, a seemingly annoying child looking to get his final Wilderness Explorer badge. Incredibly, they find their way to Paradise Falls, and discover the explorer still alive - but not quite the hero he's been made out to be.

Of course there's humour in such an odd couple, and even more humour when the various dog characters make their appearance. It would spoil the movie to tell any of the jokes, but suffice to say there are plenty of them to suit all sorts of tastes.

The animation is more in line with The Incredibles than the Toy Story series (a third episode of which was being advertised at this movie). The various humans are human enough, but also strongly caricatured (and the bit 'players' have faces very similar to those of bit players in The Incredibles). The dogs are wonderfully done, full of dogginess, and true to their natures. Only the bird, Kevin, seems a little out of tune with the movie. Perhaps it's because it's the brightest creature on the block (colour-wise that is, not intelligence-wise), it stands out against the mostly muted background colours. This is hardly a flaw in the movie, however, and most likely the strong difference is intentional.

When I first saw The Incredibles I was rather disappointed: it seemed overlong, and lacking in humour. Subsequent viewings from our hard drive copy has shown that the pleasures in it grow with each viewing. Hopefully Up, which appeals much more readily on first viewing, won't lose the flavour on further viewings.

I mustn't forget to mention the short film that accompanied Up. Partly Cloudy takes a wonderfully simple idea - storks delivering babies (all kinds of babies, human, animal and scary) - and shows how these babies are produced by some delightful cloud beings up in the sky, including one who seems only able to produce slightly off-the-wall creatures. His stork is constantly in danger of being damaged by whatever new 'baby' arrives. And that's pretty much it. But it's a wonderful idea superbly executed, and if your cinema isn't showing it along with the main feature, complain to the management.

Jesus still loves me...

This version of “Jesus Loves Me” is from Margaret Wood, and turned up in the Rumors newsletter. It's for those oldies out there who think their time has come!

Jesus loves me, this I know,
Though my hair is white as snow.
Though my sight is growing dim,
Still He bids me trust in Him.
(CHORUS)
Yes, Jesus loves me (3X)
The Bible tells me so.

Though my steps are oh, so slow,
With my hand in His I'll go.
On through life, let come what may,
He'll be there to lead the way.
(CHORUS)

Though I am no longer young,
I have much which He's begun.
Let me serve Christ with a smile,
Let me go the extra mile.
(CHORUS)

When the nights are dark and long,
In my heart He puts a song.
Telling me in words so clear,
'Have no fear, for I am near.'
(CHORUS)

Couple of clippings

Two genuine ads from a local newspaper which I found amongst my mother’s cuttings:

Wanted: Woman to assist in country home; 3 children; easy place; only odd men kept. 1557, Times.

Would person in Wakari who took delivery of Willys Back End kindly ring 83-874; urgent.

I also came across the delightful list of statements under “How to know you’re growing older.” I won’t repeat them here, as they’re on the Net in several places. The version at this link adds a couple that weren’t on my mother’s list as well.

Sit Up Straight!

I think one of the things that amazed me, going back into the corporate workforce at the beginning of the year, was the way money was thrown at office furniture and stationery. The budget for these seemed limitless, and the spending on them was helped equally by one woman who thought that catalogues were for ticking off the things she liked, and by the nurse who came in once a week, and could spot a health and safety issue a mile off.
In the old days we put up with a lot of things that people don’t even think twice about now. Yes, I know that sounds like the ‘old codger’ syndrome, but am I alone in thinking that there’s a great deal of fuss made today over things workers of the past would consider trivial?
Certainly the advent of the computer in offices has meant that a lot of people have to sit at desks longer than in the past. But the advent of typewriters must have caused the same issue, and you don’t hear of problems from those days. Perhaps people were taught to sit up straight when they worked (I remember the ramrod straightness of the women in the typing room at my first office), and perhaps, rightly or wrongly, they were expected just to get on with life. Part of the issue today, I suspect, isn’t just that we’re much more careful about people’s health, but that the people themselves are much more fussy. I hate to say it, but I think the women in offices are more the culprits here than the men. Nevertheless there’s a great deal more fuss made over small things than ever in the past – from both sexes.