Category Archives: My Life

Earthquake Weather

When there is a sudden change in the weather to hot, maybe with some Santa Ana winds thrown into the mix, and especially when it is unusual for a certain time of the year, I often remark that it’s “ earthquake weather.” Meaning this weather is strange so it must portend something, like an earthquake. This has been discounted as myth but that doesn’t keep me from continuing to say it.

As a native of California, and having lived in the state my whole life, I have experience with earthquakes. The latest earthquake in Napa has started me thinking about them again.

My first memory of earthquakes is when I was in elementary school in San Francisco. I was in class when it started. Our teacher tried to keep us calm. Then a large chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling and I ran out of the classroom door. Some kids from other classrooms had the same reaction and there was a group of us outside our rooms running for the main exit when the principal came out of her office and got us to stop. This helped me regain control and I quickly returned to my classroom feeling ashamed of my fear. Later that day, at home, we felt the aftershocks and my younger brother and I jumped up and down with each one until my mother told us to stop.

I have been fortunate not to experience any major earthquakes. The last big one in Southern California was the Northridge quake in 1994. We were out-of-town on a ski trip to Lake Tahoe at the time. During that earthquake our front door blew open and a window in the front room shattered. Our neighbors came into our house thinking we were home and possibly injured. One of my brother-in-laws lives near us and came by to check our house and he boarded up the window. Glassware had tumbled out of the kitchen cupboards and he cleaned that up as well.

When we came home from our trip, I noticed all the pictures on the walls were crooked like someone had broken into our house and turned them at odd angles. The medicine cabinet in our powder room had emptied into a nearby sink. The medicine bottles and assorted contents formed a small pyramid. There were a few cracks in our ceiling in some places and on an outside wall but nothing major. We were very lucky. To read more and hear a report about the Northridge quake done on the 20 year anniversary this past January click here.

We did experience the aftershocks from the Northridge earthquake. You could hear them coming before they hit. A loud rumbling sound like a train approaching which you can imagine was pretty scary.

We have had earthquakes occur in the middle of the night. When our kids were little and this happened, I would literally catapult out of my bed and hit the floor running toward their bedrooms to make sure they were all right and not frightened. If they were asleep I would stand in their doorways until the shaking stopped just watching them.

Some thoughts I have during an earthquake:

Could this be the Big One?

Is it getting stronger?

How long will it last?

Is the house holding up?

And then, finally, relief when the shaking ends with body and house still intact.

After earthquakes there are calls and emails to check on other family members to see if they felt the quake and how they are doing. We check the news reports to see where the epicenter was, the damage and strength of the quake on the Richter Scale.

Then, thankfully, it’s back to everyday things.

Napa Image by James Gunn

*Featured Image Earthquake Badge by Dan La Sota

Ice Cream with Lunch Everyday

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When I grow older

I want to

Have ice cream with lunch

Every day

Be in as good shape as

The Sun City Poms cheerleaders

Tap dance and maybe

Fly an ultralight plane

Like the people in Sun City, Aizona

If you want to see what I mean click on the link: Sun City

this story came to me via the EngAge blog

Ice cream image from sugaryandbuttery.com

Navigating the Transition to the Third Stage of Life

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It might be nice if we were born with a user’s manual for our lives. One that has:

Instructions on how to put our lives together
A map on how to get to where you should be going
A troubleshooting section for when things break down
GPS to tell us we’re on the right path
Online access to the manual so you can conveniently check it from your smart phone or computer.

If I had one I must have lost it somewhere. I do think I may have an internal GPS and I just have to practice tuning into it more often. That leads me to what this blog is about:

So much is written about issues that face my generation, the Boomers. About ageing and how to slow it down, the empty nest, reinvention ( a hot topic) and the transition from mid-life to the next stage or what some have called the Third Stage of Life.

Lately I have been reading more on this topic of transition to the Third Stage as I try to determine where I am going in my life. There is a lot of advice out there. Many articles and blogs are saying you can reinvent yourself and have an encore career. Others are saying you can be retired but you have to be sure to structure your retirement so you will not be isolated, bored and depressed. I have read a lot of articles from Next Avenue, a PBS website about mid-life issues, and check in with Huff/Post 50. I get turned off by articles that suggest you only need 5 steps to this or 10 steps to that. I think life transitions take longer than a few steps here or there. And we all do not take the same path. But I do make an exception with one I read recently from Next Avenue, “5 Tips to Find Meaning and Purpose in Later Life” by Ed Merck. He doesn’t say do these exact steps and your life will be wonderful. He does say “…we are all wired differently… and the key is to know what works for you.” He does give some tips about tuning into “your internal GPS” to find out what resonates with you and not finding your purpose but letting it find you. And he admits it took him 6 years to go through this transition not just 5 easy steps.

I know from personal experience it has taken me more than 5-10 steps to get from being career oriented and working full-time to where I am now semi-retired and looking in a different direction from having work be the center of my life. What made it a bit rockier for me is that I did not plan to be semi-retired so soon.

It has been a 6 year journey. I am not quite finished with it. I had to go down a few different paths to discover they weren’t the right ones for me. And found there were doors that were closed to me. I have had to change course a few times until I got to where I am today.

Which is, the beginning of my next stage of life. I don’t have all the details worked out yet. I have read a lot about what I should expect and how I should navigate it. Advice that resonates with me the best says you need to listen to your own inner guidance. Unless you want to live someone else’s life, you have to follow you own unique path. You have to discover your own answers.

Image of Winding Path from shanksart.blogspot.com

Aging with Attitude

Books, Pens and Paper

Tying Notes On The Sagebrush

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I just wrote a blog about going through transitions. Making it sound like that once you go through one it is a done deal and you are finished. I am discovering that you can think you are done with it and surprise, surprise! here it comes again. I think I am starting into another transition. Is it because I did not work through the last one completely or is it because I am making a change?

Since I have started my blog I have found myself lying awake in the middle of the night thinking about my life and where it’s going. Maybe it is the change I am making by writing a blog. Change triggers the transition process according to William Bridges who has developed a theory of transitions.

Geez, do I need this? Not sleeping. Having my equilibrium disrupted. Have I opened a can of worms with this blogging?

I went on the Community Page to get feedback and everyone is so young looking. Can they appreciate my style and humor? Can anyone appreciate my style and humor? At least one blogger was kind and “liked” my blog. Some of my friends and family have been supportive.

All right, take a deep breath! I started off with a bang like my daughter said. I actually got a piece published on an online magazine, BetterAfter50. I was on a cloud. I was over the moon.

Then I decided I can write a blog. Why not? It is a dream of mine to be a writer. But it is hard to put yourself out there. A bit scary. Is anyone reading it or listening?

I was thinking about a film in which one of main characters is a woman living out in the middle of the frontier in the American West. Her husband goes off on some business and does not return. He had died when his horse stumbled and fell on top of him, trapping him. She is waiting for him, and in the meantime, trying to hold things together for her family. She is very lonely and writes notes about her feelings and ties them on the sagebrush. One day a cowboy finds the notes. (The film is “Conagher” with Katherine Ross and Sam Elliott based on a novel by Louis L’Amour.)

Writing a blog is like that. Tying notes on the sagebrush.

Transitions! Transitions! ( sung to the tune of Tradition from Fiddler on the Roof) or Semi-Retirement is Not for Sissies

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I have been reading a lot about life after retirement. How our boomer generation is expected to live longer. That we could look forward to 20 or 30 more years after reaching the typical retirement age of 65. There is a large chunk of our age group who will not enter full retirement at 65. Those of us who have been involuntarily unemployed before even reaching retirement age. I get a kick out of this euphemism involuntarily unemployed. I have seen it used in a couple of articles I have read recently. It is another way of saying your job was eliminated, terminated or you were laid off unexpectedly. This happens to more and more older people nowadays before they get the chance to reach retirement age. They find themselves adrift and scrambling to find another job to get them to retirement. The usual scenario is that they remain unemployed for an extended period and then if they find another job it is at a much lower pay scale or they can only find part-time or temp work. So this makes it hard to prepare financially for retirement at the age of 65 and people then find themselves needing to work for more years.

If you are lucky enough to find yourself voluntarily unemployed or retired you need to worry about what to do with yourself for 20 or 30 years. That is assuming you are lucky to live that long. So another topic that is popular now is what you should do with yourself for those 20 or 30 years. Although you may have looked forward to having nothing to do it can end up being boring and depressing we are told. You could find yourself experiencing “retirement burnout.” So there are blogs and articles that give us advice about that.

For those of us who don’t want to retire there can be encore careers. There is a whole industry out there of advice books, blogs and career counselors that are all too willing to advice us on what to do and how to do it. They tell us we can happily transition into encore careers of great fulfillment and purpose.

Whether you are voluntarily or involuntarily unemployed, you are making a major transition. You are experiencing a loss. A loss of what you thought your last working years before retirement would look like if you were involuntarily unemployed and a loss of your identity as a person with a full-time job or career even if you voluntarily retired. Then there is a period of being adrift emotionally as you try to adjust to the change that has happened. You need to let go of your expectations and past identity before you can form a new one and embrace your new life. Or figure out what you are going to do with yourself. It is a transition we must all go through anytime we experience change that is expected or unexpected according to William Bridges who has written about and had a whole career in the subject of Transitions. He describes the process as occurring in 3 stages. First: Disengagement or letting go of the old, Second: the Neutral Zone, which is where I am now, (Neutral Zone reminds me of The Twilight Zone), Third: the New Beginning where you know where you’re going.

I have found the Letting Go Stage to be a bit sticky. I thought I had let go of my feelings about losing my job and let go of my feelings about not getting re-established in a teaching career. But recently, I found I am still working on letting go or working through the feelings. Bridges says you have to do this before you can go on to the next steps.

I have been in the middle of this transition for the past 6 years. I am one of those who was involuntarily unemployed (trying saying that real fast 5 times) and then unable to find full-time employment again even after getting a teaching credential in an effort to transition into another job sector. I have been working part-time since the age of 60. It has been a journey from losing my job, to getting my credential, to trying to find full-time employment as a teacher, to working as a substitute teacher and not liking it, to looking into healthcare jobs again, and now working as a private tutor. I also volunteer tutor at a local adult school literacy center.

I am now at the place where I am thinking about what the next stage of my life might look like, the New Beginning. I no longer want to devote all my energy to a full-time job even though it would give me a better income. I have weighed how much energy I have and am willing to give to a traditional full-time job compared to how important it is to me to have flexibility and free time to do whatever else I want to do. I don’t think I even have the energy for a full-time job anymore. At least not the kind of job that is 40+ hours a week with 2 weeks off a year for good behavior. I find at the present time I enjoy having a flexible work schedule.

I am not done with this transition period yet though. I know that what I am doing now is an interim thing or only part of what I want to be doing. I feel I do need more. Not just filling my time with busy work either. I want to be engaged in something else. So now to find out what that else is going to be.

Weight Loss Can Be A Losing Battle

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I have noticed that whenever my husband decides to cut back on calories the teensiest bit the pounds start dropping off him. While, since I’ve gotten older, I could eat only 1 pretzel a day and the numbers on the scale do not vary by one ounce. I have done a “scientific survey” of a couple of my women friends and they have had similar experiences.

I have read many articles on weight loss that list reasons why older women have trouble losing weight. It can be hormonal. The thyroid gland may be wearing out or it can be an increase of the stress hormone cortisol. Or I could be eating too much gluten or high fructose corn syrup. I have read even the fat cells themselves resist being eliminated when they notice you are not eating as much and that epigenetics may be a factor.

The way I understand how epigenetics works is that something that happened to my ancestors may influence what my body is doing today. Like, if your ancestors experienced famine it can affect how your body reacts to what it perceives as starvation. I have been thinking that, because I am half Irish, some of my ancestors may have gone through the Potato Famine and, therefore , whenever I try to reduce my caloric intake my fat cells start screaming “FAMINE!, FAMINE!” and my metabolism shuts down.

Speaking of metabolism, according to Web MD our metabolism decreases by 5 percent a decade after the age of 40. So by the time I am 70 my metabolism will be down by 15 per cent. Then I will probably have to live on half a pretzel a day.

Another discouraging thing is where my body has decided to deposit the fat as I have gotten older. My body seems to prefer storing a lot of the fat in my upper arms. That is why I always wear things that have ¾ sleeves or longer. Except for occasional lapses like my son’s wedding when I wore a sleeveless gown. Well, it was July in Southern California. But when I saw the wedding pictures I thought “Why did the photographer take that picture that showed my arms like that? And I should have worn one of those dresses with the filmy ¾ sleeves or a wrap even if it was 80 degrees in the shade.” My mother had big arms when she got older so it is probably hereditary.

You would think that when I diet that I would lose some of that weight off my arms. What happens is, I lose weight off my face and it is replaced by wrinkles so that I look like a prune. My doctor said the face is where people lose weight first. I told him I do not like the look.

Well maybe it’s time to run up the white flag and accept the fact that I am not going to win this fight and learn to accept the heavier version of my former self. Don’t get me wrong, I am still planning to eat healthy. But I have to eat more than 1 pretzel a day.