This is Featherbrooke Hills

This is a photo anthology of our home Village FEATHERBROOKE HILLS RETIREMENT VILLAGE

These photos were all taken during the past week.  We had a stunning garden show and the garden photos were all taken of some of the gardens on display..The view on the upcoming sun was taken from the authors veranda early morning.  The birds are a well know feature in the village lately . It is the Sacred Ibis which fly overhead early mornings and early afternoons in their hundreds.... Enjoy ! 

Beyond aging

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As we grow older (and wiser) some new challenges comes our way.  I am going to use two quotes and in the process I am going to challenge you 60's plus today to read this article and to make some new choices  for yourself. 

Here is the first one : There was an old advertisement about Mainstain with an iconic jingle : 

" You can stay as you are for the rest of your life or you can change to Mainstay" 

The second one is 

"If you do not change course you will end up where you are headed" 

Here is my challenge : Ask yourself,   If I were faced with these choices today what am I going to do? .......How happy am I in my comfort zone?   Am I merely living out my life in my little corner of my comfort zone  with a  "please do not challenge me" attitude ?

Where are you headed and where are you going to end up ?   Is Frail care your ultimate destination?

We( Me and my good wife) are are not in a comfort zone and we know that if we do not change direction we will end up in a ditch from which we might never recover. 

So......we are faced with a new challenge. 

During our innings with the Tuck shop in the Featherbrooke Hills retirement village which we took over some 2 years ago we have identified certain needs and wants of our fellow passengers in our journey of the rest of our lives and there are some things that came out as clear as filtered water:   

1. Older people need companionship and they need friends. (Not a young cashier behind a till or an uninterested supplier of physical things)

2. Most older people are not rich or even living comfortably.

3. All of us have special needs : We need  our daily bread, figuratively speaking and we need one toilet roll about every second day. I do not care who you are,  you have to eat and you have to go to the loo..........In between those two there are a thousand other things you physically, spiritually and  mentally need.

During our two odd years running the shop we created a little chit chat cafe which is growing into a real Meeting place and is evolving and growing into something great. We initiated a solution to loneliness which needs to be cultivated further.

We are now challenged : We can stay as we are for the rest of our lives or we can change............to something better.

We are going to work on this challenge for the next 3 months and hopefully we are going to "wow" everyone with the eventual answer. We are not going to end in the ditch but on the peak......

Watch this space.....................................

Rockin' Purple for Lupus Flash Mob line Dancing Videos & Photos

On Saturday 6 May 2017 the Rainbow Line Dance Studios had a special promotion at the Rosebank Mall where approximately 50 line Dancers from the studio participated in a "Flash Mob" Line Dance presentation which wowed the crowds at the Mall.  Ten ladies of the Featherbrooke Hills Retirement village had the honour to participate in this 2 hour long event and every one had a ball !    Here are some photos and videos that were taken at the event.
We wish to thank the organisers and especially Leon - the instructor - for their efforts to bring the problem of the illness of Lupus to the attention of the public in this manner !

Leon with Irene, Hester. Cheryl, Krishni, Gale and  Val.   Marina, Pauline and Marian was somewhere else at the time 

Most of the participating Dancers of the Morning 

5 Myths about hearing loss

(with recognition to AARP)

5 Myths About Hearing Loss

One of the country's leading audiologists sounds off about a condition that will eventually affect almost all of us

by By Craig Newman, Ph.D., June/July 2015

For a long time, hearing loss carried a huge stigma. People didn't want to be seen as old — and hearing aids were a visible sign that they didn't have all their original faculties intact. These days, with the likes of Rob Lowe, Halle Berry, Jodie Foster and Bill Clinton not just wearing hearing aids but talking about them, that stigma has all but disappeared. Everyone is walking around with something in their ears anyway — headphones, ear buds, a Bluetooth device. Folks may as well use technology that helps them hear.

As section head of audiology at the Cleveland Clinic, I see a lot of patients with misconceptions about hearing loss. Here are a few of the most common.

Myth: Hearing loss happens only to old people.

Truth: In fact, 40 percent of the 48 million Americans with hearing loss are younger than 60. Hearing loss does accelerate with age: Almost 30 percent of those between ages 50 and 59 suffer from some degree of impaired hearing in one or both ears; 45 percent of people between 60 and 69 have impaired hearing; and three-quarters of those older than 70 do.

Myth: Your hearing loss was caused by all those rock concerts years ago.

Truth: They certainly didn't help, but there are many other contributors, including the normal aging process, genetics, medications, smoking, a poor diet and diabetes. All of these destroy the hair cells in the inner ear — and it's the hair cells that send auditory signals to your brain. Once hair cells are damaged, they're damaged. There's no approved drug that will regrow them in humans, though researchers have been able to regenerate the cells in birds and mice.

Myth: If other people would just talk louder, you would hear just fine.

Truth: Hearing is like the body's biological microphone. If you've ever heard anyone speak into a microphone that's damaged, it might be plenty loud, but there's a level of distortion that makes it hard to understand. The goal of today's hearing aid technology is both to make sounds louder and to reduce background noise and extract the more important features of sound to clarify speech. Other technology can turn your hearing aid into a Bluetooth device; some options let you stream directly from your cellphone to your hearing aid, not just for calls but for music apps such as Pandora.

Myth: As long as you can hear some sound, it's OK to wait to get hearing aids.

Truth: The longer you wait, the harder your hearing loss will be to treat. That's because the auditory system in your brain isn't stimulated, and so the brain stops recognizing sound. That's why people with hearing loss who wait to get hearing aids sometimes find that they don't help as much. Fortunately, our brains can "relearn" to hear, thanks to neuroplasticity — the fairly recent finding that the brain can reprogram itself into very old age with the proper stimulation. Practically speaking, that means you have to teach your brain to hear again, by wearing the hearing aids regularly.

Myth: Hearing loss is annoying, but it doesn't really affect your health.

New research from Johns Hopkins University shows that hearing loss may increase your risk of developing dementia. The upside is that research also shows you can improve memory and mood by correcting the hearing loss. And a study that just came out in the journal Laryngoscope found that hearing aids can improve balance. Falling is such a big problem for older adults — and some scientists are now suggesting that hearing aids could be used to treat problems with balance. — As told to Gabrielle de Groot Redford

Growing old gracefully - a must read article

Exercise the years away — how older athletes are winding back the clock

BY GRETCHEN REYNOLDS, JULY 16 2015, 05:43

OLDER athletes can be much younger, physically, than their age suggests, according to a new study of participants in the Senior Olympics. It found that the athletes’ fitness age is typically 20 years or more younger than their chronological age.

Fitness age is a concept developed by researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who took note of epidemiological data showing people with above-average cardiovascular fitness generally had longer life spans than people with lower aerobic fitness. At any age, fit people were relatively younger than were people who were out of shape.

But since the researchers decided their insight was not useful unless people could easily determine their fitness age, they used a mobile exercise laboratory to test the fitness and health of more than 5,000 Norwegian adults.

They used this data to create a sophisticated algorithm that could rapidly calculate someone’s aerobic capacity and relative fitness age based on sex, resting heart rate, waist size and exercise routine.

They then set up an online calculator at worldfitnesslevel.org that people could use to determine their fitness age.

Pamela Peeke, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland and board member of the foundation that runs the National Senior Games — the Senior Olympics — and a competitive triathlete, took note of the Norwegian study.

Biologically, it seems, she is a spring chicken. When she plugged her personal data into the online fitness calculator, it told her that her fitness age is 36. Chronologically, she is 61.

She wondered whether other older athletes would be similarly youthful, and had a plan to find out.

Contacting the scientist behind the fitness age calculator, Ulrik Wisloff, she suggested that together they study a particular group of older people — the participants in this year’s Senior Olympics.

The Senior Olympics are a biennial competition for athletes older than 50, and consist of track and field, swimming and pickleball, among other sports. To compete, athletes must qualify regionally.

Nearly 10,000 men and women aged from 50 to 100 qualified for this year’s Games, which began last week in and around Minneapolis-St Paul.

Senior Olympians are not professional athletes but most train frequently, Peeke knew. They tend to be more physically active than other people of the same chronological age.

To see just how their lifestyle affects their biological age, she and Wisloff asked all the qualifiers to complete the online calculator. They set up a site so their data could be isolated.

Many of the participants complied, producing more than 4,200 responses.

The results were impressive. While the athletes’ average chronological age was 68, their average fitness age was 43, a remarkable 25 years less.

"I had expected a big difference, since these people have trained for years (but) I was surprised that it was this big," Wisloff says.

The effect was similar for male and female athletes, he points out. Virtually every athlete had a lower fitness age than their chronological age. Peeke and Wisloff have not yet determined whether certain Senior Olympians, particularly those in endurance events such as distance running and swimming, have a younger fitness age in general than those in less vigorous sports. But they plan to parse the data extensively to answer that question and to look for other patterns among the Senior Olympians. They expect to publish their findings soon.

The takeaway message of the data should be inspiring, says Peeke, who was to compete in the triathlon at the Senior Olympics.

"A majority of the athletes at the Senior Games didn’t begin serious training until quite late in life, including me," she says. "We may have been athletes in high school or college. But then, for most of us, jobs and families and other commitments got in the way, at least for a while."

Few Senior Olympians returned to or began exercising and training regularly until middle age or older, she says."So you can start anytime. It’s never too late."

A new beginning : Growing old gracefully

We are now fast nearing the end of the year and have just past the 2 year mark of the first people moving into Featherbrooke Hills retirement village.  It was a new beginning for all of us and as life goes on the new year will again bring new beginnings to some of us and closure to others.

This medium is just my contribution to those of you that wander in the electronic age.  We have just seen the first of a printed news letter for the Village "The Village Herald" It is a commercially funded effort and does not cost any of the residents or the village any money.

This Electronic newsletter is also totally free and not funded in anyway by any commercial venture
It will become a mouthpiece for any resident wishing to enlighten us with their version of growing old gracefully.   Feel free to comment, write us interesting stories, share with us any valuable information regarding life in general and retirement village living in particular.

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