Just about time to get ready for bed but I thought I would start this while I was thinking about it. Point one: Sunday I went in and activated the educator’s discount on my phone plan. I kept forgetting about it before, which was stupid. I will save 15%, which will be about $27 a month.
Lots of companies and professions have discounts for a variety of things. If your employer or former employer does not have discount arrangements, consider joining AARP or another such organization. AARP is about $12 a year, for which you get a list, as long as your arm, of business offering discounts. For example, Cirque du Soleil tickets in Vegas go for about a hundred dollars, (or much more!) a piece. Buy two with AARP’s 20% discount and you have more than recovered twice your membership cost. (And, yes, they have phone plans, but I got all excited when I saw Cirque.)
That is the memo from my thrifty side. Now we can hear from my practical side.
My practical side says invest in power strips. We have a substitute cleaning person at the office. She unplugs my extension cord every time she cleans! Ahhhhhh!!!!!! That means I have to crawl around the furniture trying to get everything reconnected so I can plug in my CCTV. I will assume you have tried to plug something into an outlet in a dark corner before. With limited vision it is an exercise in frustration.
The answer is power strips! Plug those babies in one time. After that you can pick them up out of those dark, dreary corners and hold them in the light so you can see what you are doing. A thousand times easier to plug in my CCTV.
What else? Well, have you seen the research suggesting baby boomers have less AMD than their parents? And those who are coming after us – we who were born between 1946 and 1964 – seem to have even less.
Of course, it is sort of hard to prove by me with GA (geographic atrophy) in both eyes but supposedly the risk of developing AMD has been decreasing by 60% every generation. Seriously. Cross my heart and hope to die. Science Daily says they got the information from the JAMA Research Journals. JAMA apparently got it from Beaver Dam. [Lin/Linda here: The Beaver Dam Eye Study is a often-quoted research project funded by the National Eye Institute. The purpose of the study was “to collect information on the prevalence and incidence of age-related cataract, macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, which are all common eye diseases causing loss of vision in an aging population.” ]
This does not mean there are fewer of us. There are many more of us. This is because our generation is so freakin’ BiG a smaller portion of us still gives us the bigger numbers. Got it?
There are articles on the web suggesting this is not just happening in the States. The proportions are going down in Europe and in Australia, too.
Why is right now just speculation. The folks who wrote the JAMA article suggested we just may be healthier. Rates of cardiovascular disease and dementia are also down.
Same underlying factors? Different ones? No clue at this point. However, the take home message is this: things are getting better. Keep exercising your good health habits. Encourage your kids in good health habits. We may have no clue what we are doing, but keep doing it!?
Written March 10th, 2018