Seniors Enjoy Western Nebraska This senior citizen admits upfront that I had never heard of Scottsbluff, NE until a teaching assistant from Spain was moved to that city on the second half of a teaching assistantship. Juan fell in love with the city and found it to be “his second home” before he returned to [...]
With your stopping to read this column, you will have participated in our moving toward a quarter of a million hits on SCJ. For a small, somewhat unsophisticated, but narrowly defined website, we have welcomed almost that many seniors and others coming to visit us.
Your coming on a frequent basis keeps our numbers climbing. When you recommend us to others, you have opened the door to others who find our articles helpful. When you return, from day to day, you have created loyalty, which we cherish. We hope that we can continue finding topics and ideas that appeal to your needs as a senior. We will do our best to find and reveal travel tips, health information, Medicare issues, aging concerns, tips for use of your money, real estate information, and other topics of general and specific pertinence.
Like fresh baked bread, we try to be current with our articles, coming up with a new column every 24 hours. Today’s routine is being interrupted by weather related outages which have caused outages for our computer connections.
Excuses are not a good way to do business. However, as most seniors know by now, there are episodic events in our lives that are beyond our control. So, today’s schedule has been and will continues to be undergoing interruptions throughout the night. Our apologies for this interference and we will be back up as soon as this rather sever storm alert is lifted or has passed.
Please bear with us.
When we began creating Senior Citizen Journal, we had no idea that it would come to have such popular and consistent readership internationally. Our efforts, while humble, have come to suggest that seniors are curious and concerned for their day to day welfare and productivity. Rightly so. We are pleased that our contributions are so widely and well received. We are hopeful that they will continue to be. We are committed to reflect the concerns and issues which are part of a senior’s on-going adjustments to aging.
It happens that your issues are the very ones that catch us up in our day to day questions, struggles, interests. The fact is that we have a great deal in common. That is so because we are at the very center of the concerns that are tantamount to growing older. Frankly, aging is a process. And that process engages us in identifying all the variety of issues that present
The other day I introduced an older gentleman and his lovely wife, who were just one table over from us in a local restaurant, to Senior Citizen Journal. His appropriate question was: “Well, what approach do you take?”
While I might have been taken aback, I was quickly aware I was dealing with a very astute contemporary senior observer. Everybody is somewhat suspicious these days. And everybody is met so often with some self serving agenda, that such a question is quite appropriate and well deserved.
Senior Citizen Journal is produced six days a week, excluding Saturdays, when most of our readers seem to be off doing whatever it is is retirees do on Saturdays. It is written, edited and produced by Doctors Sharon Shaw Elrod and Jerry D. Elrod. We have been married for 36 years. Our lives have been dedicated to professional responsibilities and positions over those years. Upon retirement our daughter, when asked by Sharon one day, what her suggestion would be to occupy “my” time and interests, replied: “Have him create a blog on the internet.” Thus, our collaborative enterprise was born.
That has been a few years ago now and we are extremely pleased with the results. Our international readership has become increasingly devoted and increases by the week. The formula for this has been the teamwork that goes into creating this daily presentation of articles, opinions, ideas, information and inspiration to help our readers become our “partners in
Many of you are frequent visitors to Senior Citizen Journal. Created out of a desire to offer what we hope is stimulating fare for seniors, we started this venture several years ago. Since then, our traffic has welcomed many from all over the world. It is certainly a stimulating experience for us to know that we visit with people from many diverse cultures, languages and countries.
Much of what we deal with has a slant to the senior citizen, the retiree, the person with discretionary time on his/her hands. That’s who we are. And so, we try to create conversations of subjects and interest that appeals to others somewhat like us. Hopefully, we achieve that and are worthy of your choosing us as a place to visit on a regular basis.
We aren’t McDonald’s yet, but we are on our way. Senior Citizen Journal (SCJ) topped out at over 100,000 hits just this past weekend. It has been a steady climb since our start in August of 2008. We developed an international senior citizen audience. We worked at our credibility and usuability as more and more search us out.
It has been a daily delight to offer information, ideas, opinions, and insights to those who come our way. Sometimes you provide us with ideas that we expand upon, e.g. an upcoming article on Myths of Aging.
We would like to be a household word among seniors, as we probe more and more of the concerns that impact all of us. Health care, Social Security, Medicare, senior concerns, senior travel are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to those matters that give pause to Seniors, already there or approaching.
During the upcoming year, we will likely be as surprised
If you have noticed you aren’t laughing as much anymore, what are some things you can do to reinstate a sense of humor? How can you generate occasions when you burst out laughing, sometimes prompted by totally nonsensical stimulations, but laughing nonetheless. The late Norman Cousins taught us all that laughter is a positive curative. We need to rely on our ability to find humor in more of life’s experiences, in more than our funny bone, in more than promptings from external sources, but energized by our own spirits.
Laugh more is a worthwhile urging that we need to take up every morning upon our arising. Laughing more is a behavior we need to nudge, particularly when we allow other things and other persons to pull us down. Laugh more so that whatever might have been creasing your brow with worry and distress
Today is my dear spouse’s birthday. Reaching for the words to say something special, not said before, sincere, reaching deep into the soul and heart is something of a romantic challenge. It is so, not because it has been done so many times before, but because, as in searching out a gift, you want it to be one of a kind, totally unique, lacking in redundancy. Anniversaries are even more challenging. The need to be creatively original runs strong. You want the communication to say what you want it to say in words not frequently heard or read. You want to plumb the absolute depth of romantic emotion. You want the love message to whisper and then scream just how much and in what ways you count her as special, beyond comparison, no words can say it.
She and I have shared a lot of years, numerous occasions, even have grown too routine in our special occasions. But somehow, beyond the indifference that
