midlifejourney.com

I prefer to come at this question from the angle of what is not the point… i.e. what’s the harm in sharing experiences? ideas? opinions? and advice from the boomer point of view. Traffic to the site is growing!!!

From our beginnings over a year ago, we have gone through several iterations of the site. We started first as a static website with lots of pages, lots of clicks and subjects… content supplied by a wide variety of specialists in fields from dining to business consulting.

Blogging then became the way to go. The website was transformed to this blog, going through a couple of design transformations… but now it seems to have settled down.

We are always looking for good content: submissions from our readers with an expertise. Christine Phoenix Green has begun to contribute on the Spirit page. Check out her latest article.

Kathy Ekdahl continues her great articles on fitness. And we are beginning to add more articles on dating and relationships, travel and of course, money. Check back often to read the latest.

This morning I woke up as I often do, to the broadcast of Morning Edition on npr radio. The voice was that of a social worker from the Bronx. He was telling how, on his way home from work, he had been robbed at knife point by some young kid. I expected the voice to tell me how angry he was, how victimized he felt… but no.

The story he told was totally unexpected and had me sitting up in bed, listening intently. I can’t do the story justice. You have to read or listen to this for yourself.

Go to A Victim Treats His Mugger Right at npr.org. Let us learn by example to treat each other well.

I don’t know about you, but I have a heck of a time trying to cram in all the things I need to do between the time I get up in the morning, and head to work.

I need an hour at the gym, plus twenty minutes to get there and back, a half hour—at least—to write, 45 minutes to eat breakfast, get in a shower, dress and get out the door. It’s the juggling of time that drives me crazy and if I am not totally disciplined and move quickly from task to task… I’m lost. And it doesn’t seem to matter what time I get up. I need just about two and a half hours from the time I get up till I’m out the door.

I’m sorry, but I can’t move before 6am. Any suggestions?

I dont know about you, fellow midlifers, but I find keeping up with all that is new a pretty daunting task. The discipline of constantly updating, and learning new skills, is exciting yet overwhelming. After 10-12 hours a day on this computer, I just want to chuck it in and veg in front of the TV for a few hours. Thanks to OnDemand and HD-TV Recorders, all my programs are recorded and waiting for me to view (fast forward through commercials, of course) when I finally step off the computer merry go round.

One of the best ways to keep up with everything is an online service I discovered not too long ago: lynda.com. They have experts who present online tutorials on just about every software package out there. It’s worth a look.

Years ago, an Irish woman and I were out shopping. Suddenly she stopped me and said, “I must go spend a penny.” Puzzled, I asked her to explain. She leaned over and whispered, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and off she went to find the nearest rest room.

It turns out that in her home town back in Ireland, anytime you visited a public rest room you had to “spend a penny” – i.e. put money in the door lock of the stall in order to use the facility. Suddenly I remembered. When I was a kid, it was always a pain in the neck to use a public restroom. They had these door locks that required you to put in a dime in order to open the stall door. The reason was to pay for the “electric seat cleaning gizmo” that was installed on each toilet. After each use, the toilet seat retracted into this hole in the wall that was lined with bright blue neon lights. The idea was that the electricity, or heat, or light… whatever it was, would “sanitize” the seat for the next person. The dime in the door was to help defray the costs I guess.

The dilemma for a kid… do you pay the dime to get into a stall? Do you hold the door for the next person, so they don’t have to pay the dime? Do you wait and wait for the one free stall to open up so you wouldn’t have to pay at all? And if you used the free stall that didn’t have the electric blue seat, were you taking a big chance of catching some horrible disease???? These were major ethical dilemmas.

Anyone else have these issues?