LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING

Life isn’t always about the big milestones—it’s often the little things that carry us through. The tools we reach for every day, the routines that smooth our rough edges, the objects that feel almost invisible until we realize we can’t function without them. Today, I’m sharing a few of those unassuming treasures that have quietly earned their place in my world.

There are few things in my life that I don’t think I could live without.  But there are some!  Maybe you already have these and love them.  Or maybe you’ll discover something invaluable. And all of them very very affordable.

In the kitchen.  A very inexpensive 1/8” (paper thin) slicer.  I’ve had one with me where ever I have lived.  It's $10 or less in an Asian store.  Onions, radishes, cucumbers, potatoes (for potatoes dauphinoise or au gratin), fennel.  It doesn’t take up space and sometimes a recipe needs identical thickness.

Also from the kitchen… a three blade ground meat chopper.  To stretch our budget and appease kid appetites, we use ground beef or turkey a lot!  Jesse was more persistent in getting it all chopped up into tiny little bits when they boys were little and didn’t really like meat.  I was not … I don’t remember how I discovered this Oxo brand helper but he got one for Christmas.  Think spaghetti sauce, taco meat, lettuce wraps using ground turkey, sloppy joes, shepherd’s pie, lasagna etc.  A time saver for sure!

Although mostly useful in Maui when I had a lemon tree, this affordable plastic juicer.  Deacon loves to make lemonade so when lemons are affordable, its a fun hobby for him (and me!)  We all use lemons in cooking and this little gadget separates the seeds and the bottom part has measurements.  I keep it in my room as no one was putting it back in the same spot … now everyone knows where it is (I also keep large items across the top of my Ikea shelves for soup tureen, huge salad bowl, my cooking for one casserole dish, my serpent shaped olive dish, large serving platter … they only get used a few times a year and there was no space in the teeny tiny kitchen.  

I’ll end with my night time routine.  I use a delicious foaming face cleanser and decided to get a face brush.  What a difference as it does seem to removed old dead skin.  But this is a messy endeavor as the water used to run down my arms until I found these absorbent wrist bands.  The boys both have facial brushes (not pink) and their own wrist bands.

I use a head band to keep my hair off my face (also when I take the time and trouble to wear makeup).  The boys started using one also so I bought two sets.  They are very comfortable to wear during the day while on my laptop as they curve back and it is more comfortable to wear my glasses.

   

What are YOUR products you can’t live without??? 

CREDIT CARD THEFT FATIGUE

There are still repercussions from enduring the theft of my credit card number back in July.  Sixty days ago.  Two months.  UGH. 

Remember when bills came in an envelope? A real envelope. With a stamp, a return envelope, and sometimes even a cheery insert trying to upsell you a second phone line or an encyclopedia set? You wrote a check, licked the flap, and felt the deep satisfaction of done.  Those were the days.

Fast-forward to now. Every “bill” is buried inside an email or an app, with logins, two-factor authentication, and dropdown menus that look like a video game. Instead of a sense of closure, I'm still getting a glowing red banner:  “There was an issue with your recent payment that will impact your insurance coverage. Your payment of $1,616.30 scheduled for 9/12/2025 was declined by your financial institution.”

Well, excuse me. I’m not trying to run from the mob here — just paying my insurance premium. But the way these systems word it, you’d think I was laundering money through an offshore account.  Every day charges were easy to upgrade to the new number, expiration date and secret code.  But some are things I pay less frequently.

And here’s the kicker: back in the envelope days, if a check bounced (rare, but it happened), the bank politely mailed you a notice on heavy paper stock. Now, it’s all caps and exclamation points, as though I need to be marched down to the Fraud Department in handcuffs.

Meanwhile, the subscriptions I didn’t ask for renew quietly in the background: a streaming service I watched free for a week last spring and missed the cancel date by 3 hours so I had to pay for a whole month.  (Silver lining in this one, they lured me back with a half price membership if I signed up for a year!  Yea BritBox!) 

Maybe the fatigue isn’t just about money. It’s about the constant management. A lifetime of collecting stamps, licking envelopes, and trusting the U.S. Mail trained us to believe payment was an act of closure. Now it feels like a full-time job: monitoring apps, double-checking logins, and proving to robots that I’m not a robot.  Not the end of the world, for sure, but annoying anyway.

Still, I keep plugging away, because that’s what grown-ups do. But every time I get another “issue with your recent payment” message, I want to dig out my old checkbook, write the number in perfect cursive, and send it off with a 20-cent stamp. Just to show them who’s boss.

 

GOOD GRIEF

Where did that saying come from?  It should be BAD grief.

Maybe I am just at the age where dying is happening all around me.  Which reminds me of my greatest loss 12 years ago (death of hubs).  Along with Facebook reminding me of him when they do those flashback photos and posts.

I live in a condo community of 112 units.  We are now considered to officially be a NORC … a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community.  Mostly 65+ and aging at home as long as possible.  We see ambulances about every other week.  As well as fire trucks.  (Usually to help someone get up).

Wednesday night we heard a loud thump after midnight, like our upstairs neighbor had fallen.  The next morning an ambulance arrived and took him with them.  He spent the night somewhere (?) and I saw him Friday morning limping to his car with his hand on the small of his back.  Yes, he drove off in that condition.

My high school buddy (and maid of honor) lost a sister-in-law then a brother-in-law six days later.  All out of state.  We were all raised Catholic; my buddy is still a practicing Catholic.   The SIL was not religious, more of a hippie agnostic, until she became terminal.  She found some out of the norm Catholic Church which buddy seemed to think was some sort of cult.  

Her description of the funeral was chilling.  Everything in Latin and the Mass was over 90 minutes.  All the priests had long Amish style beards and in the eulogy no one mentioned the SILs name.  At all.  Or why they were even gathered there.  She is now one of six people buried there.  Attendees were not allowed to receive communion, just her husband and the priests.  A very odd event for sure.

(from the church's website)

I have not been to a funeral in 30 years!  It was for our elderly friend we “adopted” who became a local Grandma for my daughter.  We had such a good long in-depth friendship for many years.  She loved to cook and entertain.  They lived in a condo complex with a pool and invited us over frequently.  When she passed away, her husband was in the hospital for a quadruple bypass.  When he returned home, he asked if I would be his friend.  We met at least once a week for the next 12 years.

For the sad finale, my WLLO coworker lost her youngest son (55) two weeks ago from suicide.  He has had several mental illnesses since he was age 14 … bipolar, schizophrenic and borderline personality disorder. He lived about two hours from here and she would visit about every 6 weeks or so.  Fortunately, he would call or text daily which eased her mind.  One day he did NOT contact her and would not answer his phone.  She drove down and discovered him in a such a state she had him taken by ambulance for a psychiatric hold.  She cobbled together some in-person help twice a week to bring groceries and remind him to take his medication.

Which didn’t last very long and he let them go.  His Mom, Sister and visiting cousin went to visit and he had lost 50 lbs, hadn’t let his four dogs out for days and the cycle started all over again.  A week after he checked out of the hospital he called his Mom to say goodbye.  She asked her daughter to drive down and check on him as she was entertaining visiting relatives again.  She found him dead.

And that’s enough sad news.

MY NEW ROMANCE

For years, I thought people had simply gotten quieter. Whispered conversations, grandkids muttering in the backseat, even the punchline of a joke at dinner—I caught only half the words and guessed the rest. (Let’s just say my guesses made for some very odd punchlines.)

Fifteen years ago I did get Costco hearing aids.  They were hard for me to control using buttons on the piece that was behind my ear.  Thus I didn’t wear them often.  And I missed a lot, I’m sure.

Enter my new high-end hearing aids: Oticon, sleek little marvels that pair with an app on my phone. And it’s like someone flipped the switch from muffled world to surround sound.

Oticon’s motto is “life-changing technology,” and I’m not rolling my eyes. These devices are discreet, comfortable, and frankly smarter than I am. They even give me little alerts—like a tiny butler in my ear—when the battery’s low.  Depending on which setting I am using, the built-in AI is continuously monitoring the acoustic scene in real time—100 times per second — and adapting settings like speech clarity and noise suppression almost instantly.

Instead of fiddling with tiny buttons, I control everything from my iPhone. Volume up for the grandkids’ chatter. Speech clarity for a restaurant. It comes with three easy to set up programs … General, Comfort and Speech in Noise.  They can also be set up to have your phone ring in your ear!  I took that off as I don’t usually like to talk to others when driving or having coffee with friends.

Comfort mode is a personal setting that reduces overall loudness (when the boys are home and Jesse is vacuuming, for example).  Speech in Noise is like being in a restaurant and it lowers the background noise.  (Perfect for an HOA meeting with disagreeing opinions)(last night).

The real test came when Kate came up behind me and whispered a request. I braced myself for the usual: missed words, a polite smile, and later a confession of “Sorry, what did you say?” But this time… I heard it. Every syllable. I nearly cried. Imagine regaining a superpower you didn’t even realize you missed.  (She wanted me to suggest bringing IN dinner without Jesse hearing her.  At 99 degrees, no turning on heat producing appliances!!)

Of course, there’s still a learning curve. I’ve actually been bolted out of my chair when the microwave beeped. Now adjusted. I can hear the dryer beep from down the hall and in my room.  The grandkids find it hilarious that Grandma has an app just for her ears. But mostly, I’m reveling in this newfound clarity.  It’s not convenient to change anything while driving and Oticon provided a compact-style carrier to pop into my purse.

So here I am, awkwardly aging yet boldly declaring: if you’re on the fence about hearing aids, don’t wait. Life’s too short to miss the whispers.

THINGS TO DO ONLINE!

I finally upgraded my iPhone.  Mainly so Mr. Junior High could have my old one.  He is on Cloud Nine!  He’s off his screens much more as he can text to find someone to hang out with.  (We have a pool and it’s been 100 degrees so he finds someone every day). But it is a big learning curve for me!

It took 2 hours at the Verizon store to transfer everything from my old phone to my new phone.  Then to delete all of my stuff from the old phone and reset to factory programs.  And I’m still asking Max (ChatGPT) questions on how to turn off all unnecessary noises, I just want phone calls and text messages.  Today I learned how to jazz up my “signature” on iPhone email by adding color and emojis.  It’s the little things in life!  I’ve probably invested five hours this week just on the iPhone.

Since I no longer read books, I like to stream TV series but I hate paying monthly charges.  When ever I see introductory offers, one week free or three months just $3 per month I snap those up.  During my searching I’ve found a few sites to share with my penny pincher friends.

Have you hear of Tubi? They launched in 2014 and were bought by Fox in 2020.  FREE.  Lots of choices (that interest me).  Many are oldies but goodies (from when I was in high school!)  Many more are current (five seasons of The Equalizer … Queen Latifah as single ex CIA agent raising her teenage daughter and helps people who have nowhere else to go to get crime answers).  I’ve had excellent luck streaming from them.

And then there is https://archive.org/.  It is a humungous nonprofit collection of TV, movies, music, software and more.  My Public Broadcasting station talked about it when the Orange You Know What started removing websites on his whim.  Internet Archive started reaching out and grabbing anything and everything to preserve them.  Their site says they have 946 BILLION websites on their site. They have Russian audio books, 5 million radio shows, and the National Security Internet Archive and imagine wandering down just that section!

Also, take a peek at the WLLO Village website under "activities, resources" 

https://www.wllovillage.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=287615&module_id=454801

There goes YOUR Sunday internet browsing! 

I'M B-A-C-K

My poor old pea brain is exhausted!

Last week I re-opened Uber (haven't used it since I was in NYC 5 years ago!!).  Of course, they want to verify and yada yada yada.  I hate when they send a text to my phone while I am using the phone for the app.  Often I am unable to remember the six digits and have to write them down and then enter.  I know, I know ... first world problems.

Now to train the teen on asking before using.  He and his gal pal have been using her Mom's Uber all summer with no regard to cost!  Last Saturday, I dropped them off at a yard sale about 15 minutes away.  They were going to bus home but it was 99 degrees and they decided to Uber.  When the driver got there, he told them they have to be EIGHTEEN to use Uber.  No one has ever done that.  He flagged the account so now every driver will ask.  Thus, Teen Uber.

I drove back to retrieve them and they asked if I would drop them off at the Mall for back to school shopping.  And they would take the bus home.  Little did I know, the state highway between us and there was CLOSED all weekend.  Yes, I have GPS which we used but instead of taking 15-20 minutes, it was an hour because everyone else was on the side streets trying to get there.  Another hour to get back home.

They had great success, mainly shoes as they buy second hand clothing.  Uber has built in some great safety features on Uber Teen!

PIN Verification:
Before a teen can start their ride, they must provide the driver with a unique PIN, which the driver then enters into the app to confirm the ride.

RideCheck:
This feature uses sensors and GPS data to detect unexpected route deviations, stops, or early trip endings, and alerts the teen and their parent/guardian if such events occur.

Live Trip Tracking:
Parents can monitor the teen's ride in real-time, receiving notifications when the ride starts, ends, and when the teen arrives at their destination.

Enhanced Driver Vetting:
Uber for Teens only utilizes experienced, highly-rated drivers who have passed thorough background checks, according to Uber.

On-Trip Audio Recording:
Teens can opt to have their rides automatically recorded, with the audio encrypted and stored on their phone. The recording can only be accessed by Uber if an incident report is filed.

Emergency Assistance:
The app provides an in-app emergency button for contacting 911 and a safety incident reporting line.

So Gramma is a happy camper.  I don't like him taking the bus after dark.  I'm happy to pay for my peace of mind

SORRY!

I'm alive.  Somehow super busy helping out with back to school.  I feel like an Uber Grandma.  So much driving, I opened a Teen Uber account.

More next week!