Tag: Me Myself I

Personal stuff

Falling Over

Health

For once, I discovered an interesting article in the ghastly New York Times — motto:  “Other Than That, The Story Was Quite True” — because it has nothing to do with politics, for once:

Public health experts have warned of the perils of falls for older people for decades. In 2023, the most recent year of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 41,000 Americans over 65 died from falls, an opinion article in JAMA Health Forum pointed out last month.
More startling than that figure, though, was another statistic: Fall-related mortality among older adults has been climbing sharply.

I don’t know quite when I started to lose my balance.  I think it was in my early sixties, when for no reason at all, I would stagger a bit when turning a corner (walking, not driving, of course).  I wouldn’t fall over, but it nevertheless alarmed me.

And when getting dressed, specifically putting on pants or briefs, I suddenly found myself unable to balance on one leg without toppling over;  which means that now I pretty much have to either brace myself against a wall with one hand, or else make sure that if I do fall over, there’s a bed close at hand to catch me.  It’s irritating.

Going down stairs has a similar effect.  Where once I could bound down a staircase with no effort at all, I find myself having to grip the banister like my life depends on it, which it does, now.

Of course, I’m very familiar with the fact that we Olde Pharttes tend to have brittle bones, hence the distressing number of said group suffering things like broken hips, skulls or limbs after toppling over. (see:  novelist Jilly Cooper, dead following fall)

The famous expression “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”  is not so funny anymore.

The NYT article suggests this:

The author, Dr. Thomas Farley, an epidemiologist, reported that death rates from fall injuries among Americans over 65 had more than tripled over the past 30 years. Among those over 85, the cohort at highest risk, death rates from falls jumped to 339 per 100,000 in 2023, from 92 per 100,000 in 1990.
The culprit, in his view, is Americans’ reliance on prescription drugs.
“Older adults are heavily medicated, increasingly so, and with drugs that are inappropriate for older people,” Dr. Farley said in an interview. “This didn’t occur in Japan or in Europe.”

Some other guy opines:

The difference, he believes, is Americans’ increasing use of medications — like benzodiazepines, opioids, antidepressants and gabapentin — that act on the central nervous system.
“The drugs that increase falls’ mortality are those that make you drowsy or dizzy,” he said.
Problematic drugs are numerous enough to have acquired an acronym: FRIDs, or “fall risk increasing drugs,” a category that also includes various cardiac medications and early antihistamines like Benadryl.

Which might be plausible, except that in my case it’s not a reason because I don’t take any of the above drugs, or even drugs that are similar.

Of course, we all know that some meds like Benadryl can cause dizziness — FFS, it says so right on the pack — which is why if I do ever take one of those, I take it right before going to bed.

No, I have no idea why I’m suddenly so tottery on my feet, when in the past I always had excellent balance.

It’s also a well-known fact that Olde Pharttes are more likely to experience vertigo when faced with extreme heights or drops.  Just a photo of some idiot hanging from a sheer cliff face by only their fingertips will actually cause my stomach to heave;  I have no idea how I’d feel if facing a sheer drop in person, but I’m perfectly prepared to believe stories about elderly people inexplicably toppling over a cliff as through drawn to it.

I’ve said it before and I repeat it now:  this getting old business is not for the young.

System Update

Housekeeping

Got a new laptop.  Lenovo.  (Hello, my little yellow friends over in Beijing!  Enjoy what you read here!  You fuckers.)

Busy re-installing my entire life, which may take a while.

Blogging will be light today… and maybe even tomorrow.

I haven’t broken anything yet, nor have I felt the urge to throw the thing in the pool;  but the day is young.  At least all the keys respond when pressed, and I don’t need packing tape to keep the power cord plugged in, to mention just a couple of benefits.

Interesting Thought

Drive Time, Old Fartism

Couple nights back I had dinner with Tech Support II, who was in town for some geek convention or other, and in the course of our (long) evening together, I asked him what car he was currently driving, and was not really surprised when he said “Tesla SUV”.

Of course he would drive a Tesla (because he’s a techie), and of course an SUV (because he has a family).

But along the way something really interesting came up.  He’d recently driven the Tesla (with the family) from Florida to Houston (because he’s also a space geek, duh).  The interesting part is that by his estimation, he didn’t drive about 90-95% of the 1,600-mile drive at all;  he simply left it to the Tesla’s auto-drive program.

When I asked why, he said simply, “Because the Tesla is a better driver than I am.”

The thing about the Tesla self-drive function is that every trip made by every Tesla is recorded and uploaded to their system at headquarters (or wherever they store it).  What that means is that Tesla can not only combine all that data into a global “behavioral” database, but they can also create subsets of that to, say, a “Florida-Houston” drive, with all the characteristics of said trip — choke points, places where accidents frequently occur, speed data and so on — all combined to make the next Florida-Houston drive trip all the safer for any Tesla driver because those characteristics are then folded into the Tesla self-drive computer in the car.

All very interesting, especially for an old retired data geek like myself.

But what TS said next is what stopped me in my tracks.  When I asked him why he’d elected for the self-drive, he admitted quite simply, “Because the Tesla is a better driver than I am.”

He’s not a bad driver, just so you know;  in fact, he’s an excellent driver.

I myself have admitted on these very pages that at age 70, I’m no longer as good a driver as I once was when I was, say, 30 or even when I was 50.

And it makes me think:  would I not be better off by delegating the driving to someone (or something) else?

Of course, this isn’t limited to owning a Tesla (because #Duracell car), and in any event in my case this is purely a hypothetical “If I won the lottery dream” because I could afford neither a driver nor a Tesla.

Nevertheless, it’s a different and quite disturbing thought for me, because it goes against a whole bunch of personal philosophies, viz.  distrust of electric cars, not being in control of my driving, losing my independence of action, being spied on as I drive — to name but some.

And make no mistake:  this would not be an action born of conveeenience, but of safety concerns.

As I said, it’s an interesting thought, even if nothing ever comes of it.

Bygone Times

History

Reader Old Texan sent me an email with this enclosed:

…and purely coincidentally, The Divine Sarah published Long Ago, It Must Be, which starts with the hypothesis (not hers) that time stopped in 1999, and everything that’s happened since then has been just a dream.  In that piece, Sarah talks wistfully about how 1999 was a time when some of her friends were still sane, and of other friends since passed away.

Well, 1999 was an okay year for me, I think:  living on the lakefront in Chicago with Connie, doing consultant work and traveling to Britishland occasionally:


(that’s the Bath Weir in the background)

It was a good year, no doubt about it.  But if I look back to my favorite years pre-2000, I’d have to choose 1981.

Oh man, 1981…. I had a job I loved — imagine that — which also involved travel (only all over South Africa, not the UK) and which earned me a decent salary:


(Cape Town)


(just north of Durban:  Umhlanga Rocks, where my Mom lived)


(Port Elizabeth “PE”)


(Kimberly, with its “Big Hole” diamond mine)

In 1981, I was still playing in the Atlantic Show Band — we’d pretty much given up playing clubs and were doing gigs at proms, wedding receptions and office parties etc. — and that, believe me, was a blast.  The music we were playing?  Bette Davis Eyes, Fire, Angel Of The Morning, Stop Dragging My Heart Around, Another Brick In The Wall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Heartache Tonight, You May Be Right… aaah, kill me now.

I was driving a very nippy little Opel Kadett (company car, ergo free), and I was still single, with a very active Little Black Book.

I was twenty-seven years old, and I ruled my world.  If I could choose a year to relive, then 1981 beats all the others, in spades.

Feel free to tell me in Comments which year you’d like to go back to, with reasons.  (Email if Comments are still screwed up for you, and I’ll post it.)

No Joy In Mudville

The Gun Thing

I’ve always loved guns.  Some of my best childhood memories are of taking the Diana .177 pellet rifle out to the backyard, setting up a host of tin cans, and blasting away at them until I ran out of pellets.  At a rough guess, I was shooting about 500 pellets per week.

It was my first gun, and shooting it gave me a wonderful solitary activity that was only rivaled by my love of reading.

Later, when I was about 14, I graduated to shooting my dad’s Winchester 63 .22:

Compared to .177 pellets, .22 ammo was really spendy for a boy’s allowance (even back then), so I probably only shot off a hundred-odd rounds a week.  I did that for the next five or so years, until I bought my first centerfire rifle.

Here, my memory fails me;  it was either an Oviedo Mauser in 7x57mm, or else an Israeli Mauser (the K98k, rechambered to 7.62x51mm/.308 Win in the late 1950s).

Whatever, I had both, and used them in my first forays into hunting, which only really began in my mid-twenties — although I would shoot off a few boxes for practice each month (rifle ammo was really expensive in Seffrica, even though by then I was earning a salary).

Then I moved to the U.S., and after I could buy them legally, my love of guns and shooting went stratospheric, and my gun ownership ditto.

Of course, occasional periods of poverty followed, meaning that during those times I was forced to sell a few, and at one time almost all.  And that hurt, it really did;  but I consoled myself with the thought that when my finances recovered, I could always buy replacements… which I did.

Then quite recently, my desire to own guns kinda tailed off.  Most probably, this came from getting to age 70 and the concomitant realization that whereas in the past my appetite for shooting was boundless, now it was more circumspect.  Was I ever going to go hunting again?  (no, probably not.)  Was I going to take up clay shooting?  (also, probably not.)  I’d long since quit any kind of competitive shooting as my eyesight started its decline, and even the occasional trip to Boomershoot suddenly became less appealing — maybe because of the distance involved, but that had never stopped me before.

So as you all know, when my financial circumstances recently demanded some remedial action, I started selling off my guns to anyone who was interested, keeping pretty much only the ones I could foresee myself using at least quite often (.22 rifles and handguns, etc.) or ones that I might need in certain “social” occasions, if you get my drift.

I at least contented myself with weekly range visits because their senior citizen discount made it affordable, but even those have tailed off, for no real reason.  I don’t know why that is;  I still love my guns — the few I’ve kept, anyway — but the urge to shoot them, other than for practice, has more or less disappeared.

And I’m certainly never going to restock the larder, so to speak.  Those days are definitely gone.

I’ve had many invitations to go shooting with various friends and Readers, and when I’ve taken them up, I’ve enjoyed the range time, but enjoyed still more the after-shoot coffees and so on:  the socializing part of the event more so than the shooting, which is a complete inversion of my enjoyment in times gone by.

So something that has been a huge part of my life has gone, maybe forever, and I mourn its passing dreadfully.

Maybe it will come back — I hope it does — but until then, I’m left with this hollow feeling at the disappearance of something that has been part of my entire life.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read a book.

The Elephant In The Room

Housekeeping

Folks, it’s time to approach this topic head-on.

I refer here to the issues that several Readers have had with the Comments on this website — i.e. email addresses blocked, unable to re-register, etc. all with the end result that you are unable to post comments.

The problem appears to be with WordPress (hic delenda est), and neither I nor Tech Support II have been able to fix it.

I can only surmise that this is being caused by the old version of WordPress that I currently have installed, but I have to confess that I’m really nervous about upgrading because the last time I did so, all sorts of things changed and it took me about a week to fix it all up.

Nevertheless, I’m going to do the upgrade sometime over the next weekend in the hope that this will fix Comments, but I’m not too sanguine that it will.  If everything gets fucked up as a result, please be patient with me.

In the meantime, if you absolutely want your comment published but your access has been nuked, please email it to me and I’ll pop it under the relevant post.  Just put in the Subject line:  Comment for post [title] and I’ll get to it as soon as I can.

I really miss my old website, but that software was compiled from scratch and maintained by Connie, and there’s absolutely no chance that it can ever be resurrected, more’s the pity.

Anyway… wish me luck.