Senior News Line

The government has a comprehensive website full of information on how to prepare for emergencies, power outages, hurricanes, floods — nearly everything you can imagine.

Some of the facts are scary: As we age, we lose muscle mass. The more inactive we are, the more we lose.

In a few weeks, those of us on Social Security will be getting an extra approximately $50 in our monthly benefit.

Have you considered what you’ll do with your spare time in the New Year? How about volunteering? There are so many ways we can step up.

Social Security payments are going up 2.5% starting in January, which comes to an average $50 increase for the 72 million recipients. That’s less than the increase for 2024, and the previous year, and the previous year.

The saga of listeria in sliced deli lunch meat continues, month after month. The list of affected items gets longer and longer as there is now an additional company subject to recalls due to listeria.

Here we go again. Another winter, another COVID variant. This one is called XEC, and it’s emerging as a common one right now, taking over from variant KP.3.1.1.

Have you made your Medicare decisions yet for 2025? The period for open enrollment runs from Oct. 15 to Dec. 7, and by now you should have received your 2025 handbook “Medicare & You” if you’re already signed up.

How long can you stand on one leg? This balance ability is apparently a good indicator of how we’re aging — or so say several researchers.

I think I’m ready for winter. I say that with fingers crossed because, truly, around here you just never know, despite what the annual Almanac says.

The scams against seniors are getting worse, if that’s even possible, and the thieves are becoming sneakier and more creative by the minute. We have to up our game to stay one step ahead of them and not fall victim.

The recent listeria outbreak in a certain brand of deli meat was most disturbing because it now makes us hesitant to purchase any brands. Listeria can, and has, caused illnesses so severe that people have died.

Here we go again. Not to be an alarmist, but COVID never did go away. It’s been creeping around, changing its composition, infecting people, staying one step ahead of medicine every step of the way.

I was recently asked to complete an anonymous survey about income. The survey would be used to collect information about how many seniors in our area fall into the low and moderate income ranges.

We don’t always need to have the answers on the tip of our tongue. Whether it’s things we have forgotten, or it’s information about our current world, sometimes it’s enough to know where to find that information.

Animal shelters across the country are loaded with adoptable animals, with more coming in all the time. How did this happen?

When cooling centers are opened up in our town, you know it’s brutally hot. It’s not something that’s usually done around here. But recent temperatures have been shocking for our area.

I’d heard that once we seniors reach a certain age, we start losing people — friends, acquaintances, other senior relatives — they start dying one by one.

After a less than satisfactory experience trying to order a treadmill online, I signed up at the rec center with a freebie seniors account to have a safe place for daily walking.

Just about the time that I’d decided I needed a major shopping trip to replenish food and supplies, along came two back-to-back storms.

We need to move more. They call it an inactive lifestyle when we get very little exercise and do a lot of sitting.

It’s time to begin my annual spring cleaning, and this year it’s going to be a bit different. Instead of just sticking with the cleaning and organizing activities, I’m going to concentrate on safety.

It’s very helpful to have friends and acquaintances scattered across the country when I need to do another informal poll. This time, my questions to them concerned what seniors worry about.

Months ago I’d made my resolutions list for 2024. I chose things like adopting a kitten pal for my cat, selling my father’s coin collection and hiring my handyman neighbor to paint the bathroom.

I never thought this kind of thing would happen where I live: A woman was kidnapped in front of a store, in broad daylight, by a man carrying a gun.

Sometimes we need to make tough decisions. We don’t want to. We want to wake up and find the problem is resolved. But we can’t do that, and we know it.

A retiree fell for a scam that drained his account of all his savings. It took a lifetime to save the money and only a minute for it to vanish. All it took was him giving information to a scammer.

“But it’s only” is a phrase I’ve come to dislike. It always involves money and people who don’t understand living on reduced income.

I’ve been reading in too many places about taking steps to hold off memory and cognitive impairment, so I’ve paid attention to some of the ideas we can use to keep our brains active.

Oh, it was so tempting, I have to admit. When a neighbor strolled by on her afternoon walk, we got to talking about how she stays in shape, and she rattled off a list of vitamins and supplements that she takes.

A survey released last month indicated that consumer sentiment was higher than it’s been in quite a while, since the summer of 2021. This is supposed to be a good thing.

In many areas of the country it’s been a harsh winter. Snow, ice, wind, flooding — we’ve seen it all, sometimes several of those at the same time. We need to be prepared for whatever Mother Nature throws at us.

Uh oh, it appears that in my ZIP code the number of COVID cases has doubled in the past week. Not only that, but two close neighbors are sick.

How many daily steps do we really need for optimum health? Ten thousand steps seems to be the gold standard in most of what we read to keep diabetes and high blood pressure at bay.

I’m not the only one who has opted, once again, to stay home. Both the rec center and the senior center are cutting back on classes and hours because of the lack of participation.

One of my easy-to-accomplish resolutions for 2024 was to adopt a kitten, maybe 2 to 3 months in age. After consulting the local humane society’s website and seeing dozens of tiny cats listed, I paid a visit to the shelter’s group kitten room.

Choosing a nursing home isn’t easy, even in the best of circumstances. Whether it’s for you or a spouse, or for your parents, for now or for later, there are things you need to know and red flags to beware of.

This is not the world we grew up in, or even the world we knew for much of our lives. If my informal poll of friends and acquaintances is correct, we don’t like it much.

I’ve been lax lately in terms of my health. I admit it. While I haven’t been at music concerts among thousands of people or riding packed subway cars, I have been going to stores during the daytime when the aisles are full.

There is a movement online among the children of seniors to instruct us about scams we might come across. All sorts of advice is being handed out to them about how to approach us with these scam facts.

Remember that bottle of antibacterial hand soap you tucked into the back of the cabinet when the COVID pandemic first started?

Now here’s a “novel” way to increase our brain function. It doesn’t involve getting more exercise or eating certain foods. It doesn’t include doing puzzles. We only need to grab a book and start flipping pages.

Seasonal affective disorder, also called SAD, is a type of winter depression that can be found in the young as well as the old. The decrease in daylight can affect us, as can the lack of sunshine.

How does a food product get put on the shelves or in the freezers of our grocery stores without benefit of inspection? Inquiring minds would like to know how that happens.

Having stuck with less than half of the New Year’s resolutions I made for January 2023, I decided that for 2024 I need to give much more thought to what I commit to.

What does “vigorous physical activity” mean? Per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it means the hard stuff, like playing basketball or singles tennis, or swimming laps or running, ideally for 75 minutes per week.

The 3.2% Social Security increase for 2024 is higher than it has averaged over the past two decades, but it certainly is nowhere near the 8.7% increase we received for 2023.

Here we are in the middle of the holiday buying season, already leery of online purchasing scams and every email we receive that includes links.

If you’ve had a cell phone for several years, you might be tempted to add more functions to it to make it handier and more valuable to you. However, there needs to be a line drawn somewhere.

Oops. I came close to falling for a scam like the ones I always warn against. The message appeared to come from the local pharmacy. The words said they had questions and would I please call.