Growing Older

While there are Negative Nancy’s everywhere, on so many levels I thought 2020 was one of the best years of my life

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While there are Negative Nancy’s everywhere, on so many levels I thought 2020 was one of the best years of my life. 😀

While COVID closed some doors, it opened many others – remote work was a lot of fun especially in the summer months. While interest rates have been in the shitter, the markets were outstanding at least on paper. My work while busy throughout the year, also was varied and quite interesting. I learned a lot of new skills, especially at using Microsoft Excel and Census Bureau stasticals data and did some quality work. And while I messed up some things, I also learned how to be better and more effective leader, and more thoughtful to boot. I taught myself new mapping and data management skills, and are so fascinated by what I discovered with 3D Mapping and georeferencing data..

I didn’t really have a choice to live through or not when it came to 2020. Kind of like that congested area, you have to get through it to get out to countryside. But I think I am heck of a lot better off and my future much brighter thanks to the many changes and lessons learned during the year that came and went much too quickly. I look forward to all the adventures that are coming in the second year of decade, both good and bad.

Twenty years ago, I got my Eagle Scout

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Twenty years ago, I got my Eagle Scout 🦅

It’s hard to imagine that it was 20 years ago this autumn that I finished up my Eagle Project and all the required merit badges. Time sure goes by quickly.

I was involved with scouts from the era of Cub Scouts through Boy Scouts, I got my Arrow of Light badge as a Cub Scout, Eagle Scout badge and even did the ordeal to get my Order of the Arrow. I served as Assistant Scoutmaster for a while and a Merit Badge counselor for five different merit badges.

So I had quite a bit of experience with Boy Scouts.

I often think of Boy Scouts of teaching me more what not to do in the woods then what to do. There was many weekends days of hauling heavy aluminum pots in the woods and boiling pasta over smokey fires we dug out of the snow bank. Those constantly finckey propane lanterns and stoves, the charred bread and cakes we made in the reflector ovens.

When I started camping on my own, I went with all liquid fuel stoves, electric lights from the inverter on my truck rather than use a camp lantern. I camped under a truck cap, it was years before I bought a tent. Bungee cords rather than tyranny of tying ropes. Even the meals were different than camping in Scouts – much more fresh foods from the cooler. I never stayed in state campgrounds. Maybe it was my rebellious twenties more than anything else.

I probably can’t think of the skills and values that I learned in scouts but there was many, and when my rebellious twenties faded into my 30s, I started to tie more taught line hitches and ultimately bought more propane applications and started cooking more in the camp oven, which is a variation on the reflector oven. I even tent camped from time to time.

Scouts taught me to value the woods, to pick a good campsite, pack appropriately and lightly when backpacking and day hiking. To find firewood and build a fire in the most adverse conditions. To not fear the wilderness but be prepared for adverse conditions. To navigate the woods and not become more than temporarily disoriented. To respect but enjoy the wilderness.

6 Ways to Build a Roth Retirement Nest Egg

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6 Ways to Build a Roth Retirement Nest Egg

uilding up a Roth nest egg can pay off in spades for retirees. Money in a Roth IRA grows tax-free, and the account doesn’t have required minimum distributions—so you withdraw the money only when you need it. Withdrawals are also tax-free, so they don’t trigger other consequences. Roth withdrawals don’t count in the calculations for taxing Social Security benefits or determining Medicare premium surcharges, for instance. Roths “give retirees a lot of flexibility,” says Gil Charney, director of the Tax Institute at H&R Block, “and some control over their tax liability.”

But there isn’t just one route to getting money into a Roth. You can take a variety of paths to reach tax-free nirvana—some more well-known than others. We’ll provide you the map, so you can choose which routes might best serve your situation.

Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors?

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Do We Really Live Longer Than Our Ancestors?

This is a really good article about statistics.
 
People are living longer now on average -- not because medicine is doing all that much to prolong people at advanced age -- but because so many fewer children die from preventable diseases. If you die at age 5, you have a zero percent chance of making it to age 50.
 
And always, remember if you have made it 35 years old, you are much more likely to live to 50 years old, then if you currently are 18 years old. Time is a self-reinforcing, trends in motion tend to remain the same. Math and statistics is weird like that.

Playing with hair styles

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One of the great things about the Coronavirus PAUSE is it gives us all a chance to play with our hair styles without awkward changes being that apparent outside of zoom. I’m impressed how much side burns have grown in!

2020… The year of the geriatrics!

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2020… The year of the geriatrics!👴 👵

I don’t want to hate on old people too much but it’s telling when both of the major candidates for president are well in their 70s and the Coronavirus disease that has ground the economy and our lives to a halt primarily attacks the elderly. As cold as it might seem, the virus might be nature’s way of taking out the trash, even if it’s a rather indiscriminate on who gets culled.

American society has gotten long in the tooth, we need more young people with fresh new ideas, and for elderly to move out of center stage. It’s absurd that the next leader of the free world is likely to have grown up in the 1950s and 1960s. Old people should retire and enjoy their final years, and let young people have a chance at building a good life and realize that maybe their time has come to move on.

For too long human lifespans have been increasing to arguably excessive numbers of years, going forward we should settle on better quality but shorter lives with fewer work years and earlier retirements and more dynamicism in our country and our economy. If people could be content with fewer but better years than we all could be a lot more happy.