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Our parents are gone. With the death of Barbara’s mother in 2020, we both had lost all four of our parents and in laws. We officially became the older generation and being in this new position offered an eerie feeling.  One day when having a conversation about our ancestry, we mourned the fact that we hadn’t asked our parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles certain important questions when they were alive.  We admit that at times, especially as we age, we are consumed with curiosity about who we are, where we came from, why we turned out the way we...

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  It’s gray, cold and gloomy outside, or it was for much of January, February and the beginning of March. Our mood at times has sunk lower than the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth. We hunker indoors and walk less outdoors, frustrated by the cascading effects of climate change—the undulating temperatures, the wet pavements, constant drizzle of rain or snow, floods and the lack of blue sky. On a few days when the temperature has climbed and clouds disappeared, we feel uplifted that good weather is coming…soon.  How we wish these were our main problems. But we know...

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Fun is like a familiar song that warms the heart. It makes us smile, laugh, giggle and feeds the brain by boosting our feel-good chemicals.  And then there are those we consider killjoys who question whether fun is dead as a doorknob to use a cliché. We recently read in an article in the Washington Post by Karen Heller that “Fun is Dead” (Dec. 23, 2023).  We couldn’t resist replying in a blog since we think quite the contrary. Granted, it can seem harder to have fun these days since we’re more distressed with wars raging and hate crimes rising every time...

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We always say each of us has friends for different reasons and have written about this in blogs and in our last book, Not Dead Yet. As we all know, friendships come in a variety of choices like food groups. So, we analyzed who most of us like to hang with and how to categorize them in a humorous way. These are ours:  Flatterers. They tell you what you want to hear. This friend is a balm to our ego. “That skirt that’s up to your bikini line, looks fab. Love it.” They approach you. Check you out. They complement you on...

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Many of us learned a skill as a child whether playing piano or singing, as Barbara and Margaret did respectively, or how to sew, needlepoint, knit, paint, play chess, do puzzles, dance, put together model trains and so on. Maybe as we got older new interests surfaced (such as boys, rock music and swing dancing), so we dropped our interest in some of our childhood pursuits.  Today, we often think, why not pick up that skill again? It’s good for the brain, we’ve read.  Margaret’s mother always said that the brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised. She...

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