Tag Blogs

Golden Oldies

Michael 17 Comments

I have an anniversary coming up. A silver anniversary. Rosemary and I will be together for 25 years this spring. I don’t bring her up too often in this blog, but you might remember me speaking of Rosemary on a couple occasions. She is my little red roadster, and is the longest adult relationship I’ve had.

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Have you been with any one, or any thing, for any appreciable length of time. We did an Uplift post at ROAMcare on long-lasting love. I was inspired to write it when I read an article in the local paper about how scientists have “figured out” what makes some relationships last. Actually the article had little to do with the headline. It was really a discussion about some scientific studies that are tracking the neural responses in long term relationship couples, but its bend, as is with much of what will pop up in the news in February, is toward romantic love, passion, and sexual attraction.

Considering we hadn’t read anything in mainstream media about the other 6 kinds of love, we thought we needed to point out that there are other long term relationships out there. Some even invovling people, like normal, regular, everyday people!

If you’d like to see what we had to say, pop on over and give But do you love me a quick read. While you’re there, consider joining the ROAMcare community and subscribe to have Uplift delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website. In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly our Monday Moment of Motivation and the email exclusive Flashback Friday repost of one of our most loved publications every Friday. All free and available now at ROAMcare.org.

Uplift 2024-14

What day is it?

Michael 7 Comments

Do you know what day it is? It’s “Pay a Compliment Day,” and may I say you are all looking lovely today! I’ve talked about holidays and special days in this space before. It is easy enough to do. There are so many of them! The National Day Calendar lists over 1500 holidays and days of special remembrance or honor in the annual online calendar. With almost 3 times the number of observances as there are days in the year, not only is some day some thing, most days are many things!

Naturally we couldn’t let that go, so over at ROAMcare, Diem and I proclaimed today to be “I Am Special Day.” If you read that on the Uplift blog yesterday, you can still celebrate it today. That’s because today is “I Am Special Day” too. So will be tomorrow. And the day after that, and after that, and after that. Every day is “I Am Special Day” because we believe no day is just an everyday day.

We even introduced some traditions to get the ball rolling. One of them is to smile at other people and make them feel like they too are special on “I Am Special Day.” You could say we’re encouraging people to Make America Kind Again. (I just thought of that! Today is going to be special.)  Check out Celebrate You for all the details.

While you’re there, consider joining the ROAMcare community and subscribe to have Uplift delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website. In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly our Monday Moment of Motivation and the email exclusive Flashback Friday repost of one of our most loved publications every Friday. All free and available now at ROAMcare.org.

 

Uplift 2024-13

Dreamscape

Michael 8 Comments

If you read enough blogs over enough time, you will read at least one dream story from every blogger. Except me. I don’t recall once over the past 14 years and who knows how many posts, that I’ve ever written about my dreams. Or so it seems. Until now.

I’m not one to have recurring dreams. At least not that I know based on the ones I remember. I do have recurring dream themes and they seem to play out like a serial drama, or perhaps like a soap opera. Never really ending but different stories lines coming and going. But the same movie, night after night? Nope. No encore presentations.

But now, for the last few weeks – no, for the last few months, I seem to have hit upon a recurring dream, or else I am experiencing a dream-like occurrence. Every night, at nearly always at 3:15 in the morning, I wake up, check the time, and go back to sleep. There doesn’t seem to be an outside stimulus causing this. No odd noises from outside. Nothing consistent inside like the furnace kicking on at the same time every day. (Who designed furnaces, by the way? Did they specify manufacturers find the loudest switches known to man to activate their heating cycles?)

I thought this over and came up with this assumption. I typically am asleep by 11 and awake by 7, so 3am is my personal “middle of the night.” I may must have developed some cyclic response to my circadian rhythm whereby I wake myself once during the middle of the night to reset whatever needs reset in the sleeping body. It sounded good to me, and I continued along with my jaunty ‘4 hour sleep, short break, 4 hour sleep’ nightly pattern.

Then one day I happened to check the sleep chart on my phone. Although I had a few brief waking moments that I didn’t remember having, the three o’clock hour came and went with me never leaving a sleep state, when I did remember waking up. Did I dream that I was awake checking the clock, then rolling over and resuming my snooze. I checked other days, and found a disbursing pattern of sleep during the very time I knew I was awake? Or was that during the very time I was dreaming that I was awake?

Spooky. Weird. Michael-like. Whatever you call it, I guess I now have a dream story to put out there. If only I knew what it meant.

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Speaking of dreams, did you ever dream about how you connect with others? (Yes, I know that is stretching the bounds of segue-ism. Bear with me.) (Please.) We dream of a world where we all treat each other like members of the same club, players on the same team, kids from the same family. (I told you it was a stretch.) What kind of club would the Human Club look like. We talk about that and what the dues to belong might cost in this week’s Uplift! Check it out. While you’re there, consider joining the ROAMcare community and subscribe to have Uplift delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website. In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly our Monday Moment of Motivation and the email exclusive Flashback Friday repost of one of our most loved publications every Friday. All free and available now at ROAMcare.org.

Not just the words

Michael 6 Comments

A show of hands please. How many have ever utter the words, “Yes dear.” Now an honest answer here. who envisioned a snarky retort when thinking of the last time you uttered that phrase. And yes, I am making an assumption that every one of us has been on the giving end of those words, and the receiving end too. 

But again, being honest about it, who hasn’t also said those words endearingly. You may have to think about when a little longer, but we’ve also all most probably given and received such a sentiment.

Words themselves mean little. They should mean little and rarely taken at face value. They are only there to convey feelings anyway. Sometimes, the feelings are strengthened by images. Sometimes, the images far exceed the feelings behind the word.

I discovered something like that a couple weeks ago. As I was preparing the New Year’s Day ROAMcare post when we associated 1960s ballads with daily resolution prompts to this year’s message, Live, Love, Share, I took a side trip to YouTube to refresh my memory of some of the music and lyrics. I ran across this version of “God Only Knows” put together by BBC Music from October of 2014. Although the song is a good one and the lyrics catchy, (and really do make a good daily living prompt because we really do know that God only knows what we’d do without each other, it’s the image of 32 artists and groups mingling their distinctive styles into a single beautiful performance that keeps playing over in my head.

I suppose I found a daily prompt for probably the rest of the year to encourage me to be a part of life and share my love. If the magic of the music doesn’t last, yesterday we suggested perhaps checking the obituaries for inspiration. Do whatever it takes to make it a year of love. God only knows what we’d do without it.

Isn’t it time to consider joining the ROAMcare community and subscribe to have Uplift delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website? In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly our Monday Moment of Motivation and the email exclusive Flashback Friday repost of one of our most loved publications every Friday. All free and available now at ROAMcare.org.

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On Average

Michael 3 Comments

Not everyone can be exceptional but everyone can take pride in the exceptional qualities they possess. Even the most average of people have the most remarkable moments.

Being “average” is misunderstood, helped along by social media where curated perfection is prevalent. Embracing average allows us to recognize our strengths and weaknesses, celebrate our achievements, and find contentment in our everyday lives.

We took an above average swipe at those who feel being average is no better than having failed in the latest Uplift, Life on the Curve. You can read it on average in about 3 minutes.

After you finish that, consider joining the ROAMcare community and have Uplift delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website. In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly our Monday Moment of Motivation and the email exclusive Flashback Friday repost of one of our most loved publications every Friday. All free and available now at ROAMcare.org.

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Shhh…a real sneak peek

Michael 3 Comments

Here’s a treat for those who just can’t wait, like the people who open presents on Christmas Eve. Every Friday on the ROAMcare site we email a reintroduction to a previously published Uplift blog post or Moment of Motivation to our subscribers. I’m going to share with you today what we are re-releasing tomorrow.  Shhh. Okay, here it is: 

Tomorrow is December 7, a date most Americans associate with Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, and America’s entry into World War II. We noted last year in this blog that December 7 is also National Letter Writing Day, an event in the United States that dates to an earlier war, the American Civil War. Letter Writing Day is an unusual fun holiday in that it isn’t sponsored by a commercial interest …

Want to know what havens next? Okay, I’ll out a link in for you just this once. But don’t risk missing out in the future. consider joining the ROAMcare community and have Uplift delivered to your email as soon as it hits the website. In addition to an Uplift release every Wednesday, you will also receive weekly our Monday Moment of Motivation and the email exclusive Flashback Friday repost of one of our most loved publications every Friday. All free and available now at ROAMcare.org.

Now here’s the link to this week’s. I should make you wait a day but I’m just too nice for that. Click to read the rest of Every Letter is a Love Letter.

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The long and the short of it

Michael 12 Comments

I have noticed that my most recent posts are getting shorter.

And that’s all I have for today. Thank you for reading!

Seriously, these posts have been getting shorter. And believe it or not, that’s by design. Since November 2011 I have published 1,050-some of these and some of them were real monsters, one over 1800 words. The last several posts have seen more modest 400 to 500 word counts.

Why the big change? I don’t know. Maybe I realized I don’t have that much to say, and I don’t need 1,000 words to say not much. Or maybe I realized people don’t have time to devote untold minutes to reading my blog posts. Let’s face it, I am not dispensing indispensable information. Maybe a little smile-inducing, head-scratching, or even thought-provoking. Indispensable, imperative, can’t do without? Nah.

If you make the trip to the Uplift! blog at the ROAMcare site, you might have realized those posts with few exceptions fall in the 500-700 word range. By design. The goal is to produce a piece that can be read in two to three minutes. You might also have noticed they tend to ask more questions than they answer. Again, design. We want you to be able to read them in two or three minutes, but we’d like you to think about them for days on end. And hopefully, in a more thought provoking than head scratching way. You decide what is important for you. Taking the most recent post as an example, you probably didn’t find freshly laid goose eggs in your back yard, but it could get you thinking about what wonders you have recently experienced. (Yes, you have. Take a minute and think about it)

Another reason why I’ve taken pains to keep things brief (and yes, they are pains because I can talk and talk and talk and talk for hours and hours on end and beyond), is advice I once saw from one of the master story tellers of our time, Charles Osgood, and finally decided to give it a whirl. (Young people, you have a computer, look him up.) For forty-six years he presented “The Osgood Files” (“Reports and reflections on humankind”). He described his own style as “Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs,” and went on to say, “There’s nothing that can’t be improved by making it shorter.”

Oh boy, was he right! At least as far as my writing goes. Sometimes I think back when I was teaching and to fil the standard college hour (40-45 minutes). I routinely covered so much that my printed notes would fill pages in a notebook. Today, a 30 minute presentation reduced to writing might fill two printed pages. And be more informative. Not to mention more fun!

Sometimes I think as I write fewer words, I find more things to say. But then I read more of other people’s words, and I find I’m saying just enough. I hope you agree and are happy enough with the words I choose.

Are you still wondering about those goose eggs I mentioned? They really are a wonder. You can read about them at The Egg Hunt. What wonderful things might you find in your world?

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As I Like It

Michael 11 Comments

Guess what? Today is not the day we’ve all been waiting for. Maybe next week.

Lately I’ve had a lot of random old posts garnering new “likes” which is nice that people find something in an older blog post that still generates a smile today, but is also a little disconcerting because I don’t think there are real people behind all of those thumbs ups. Why would I question their validity or even reality you reasonably inquire? Well…

I seem to get these random “likes” in waves. Someone (or perhaps “someone”) will like a post from 2017 and within a week, 20 other people (or maybe “people”) have liked the same post. It is possible the “someone” made mention of that post in his/her/their/its/one’s blog and all the “people” who follow him/her/them/it/one all rushed over, read it, and liked it just as well and wanted to make their (whew!) own acknowledgment of likedness. (No, that’s not a typo.) Then the following week, a post from 2020 suddenly captures the attention of a dozen random readers (or “readers”).

No sooner do the “likes” start popping up that new “followers” hop on board the RRSB bandwagon. Of course they could be real people. If they are, they really should reconsider their blog name. Perhaps they are just trolling for followers of their own and forgive me questioning the sincerity of Icangetyoudiscounttraveldealsdotcom, but really, he/she/they/it/one can do better than that!

Please know that I have nothing against people liking my posts. “People” liking them is another thing. I’d rather have 2 people like a post than 22 “people” liking it. Nor do I scoff at followers. I can use all the followers I can get. Tracking followers isn’t as easy as one might think. According to WordPress, my blog has 938 followers but my average visitor rate is 121 views. My blog posts are distributed in their entirety in the email blasts that accompany the online publication, so an email recipient can read the entire post and never enter the blog site, thus not be counted among the readers. I doubt that means 817 people are reading this particular blog in their emails every week. In fact, I know it doesn’t. The follower count never goes down. People unsubscribe, leave the platform, mark the emails as ‘junk,’ or otherwise give up on reading blogs – in general or mine specifically [sniff]. When that happens, it happens, but it isn’t reflected in your followers. This blog has been running for 7&½ years. Over that time, subscribers have given up on it but who knows who or how many.

If tracking followers is difficult, tracking “likes” should not be. People read a post, their like it, the click on “like.” Occasionally they click on “comment” and, umm, comment on it. I can pretty much be sure those are real people. Advancements in AI notwithstanding. And typically within a week, everybody who is going to read a post and either “like” or “comment” on it, or not, will have done so. But then every now and then, something strange happens in the world where posts never go to die. Are there really random people who genuinely liked “Remotely Technological” from August 2018?Perhaps, but 27 random people?

Sounds more like “people” to me.

Although our days are finite, they offer us infinite opportunities. Even when you feel there aren’t enough hours in the day, there is always enough time for what’s important. Ask any turtle. Better still, read about it in the latest Uplift!

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That’s a wrap!

Michael 2 Comments

It’s been ages since I published a post in Thursday. I routinely did twice a week posts until I realized I just didn’t have that much to say – even to myself! So I dropped back to just Monday. Here that is. Many of you  know I also write a second blog in a second site ROAMcare.org. I was sitting here today working in new ideas for that one for next year when I thought to myself, between these two, I really did write some good stuff to wrap up the year. (If I say so myself) So, I invite you to wrap up your year with some of my favorite thoughts, from here and there.

Nov 9, ROAMcare

Today is only a day away

What do you do with a day that’s cloudy and gray? Don’t wait for tomorrow. Start a new day today! The sun that will come out tomorrow is already up there. Let the light in!

https://www.roamcare.org/post/today-is-only-a-day-away

Nov 16, ROAMcare

For the people who love us into being

From our earliest day there people molded us into the who we are now. They have been those who loved us into being. Thank the people who make us the who that we are.

https://www.roamcare.org/post/for-the-people-who-love-us-into-being

Nov 21, The Real Reality Show Blog

On being loved into being

Gratitude is not an exercise in saying thanks for what we have, for in truth we will not always have. We should be expressing thanks because we are, because even when we do not have, we always will be. Be grateful you have people who have loved you into being. Say thank you to them, because without them, you are not the who you are.

https://therealrealityshowblog.wordpress.com/2022/11/21/on-being-loved-into-being/

Dec 14, ROAMcare

If you could do it again…

If you could do it all over again, would you? Could you? You shouldn’t even have to ask if you take time now to review where you are in life and get ready to reset for the new year.

https://www.roamcare.org/post/if-you-could-do-it-again

Dec 21, ROAMcare

A Winter Carol

Christmas is just ahead and winter holds many holidays. It is when we remember something special shared with special people at a special time.

https://www.roamcare.org/post/a-winter-carol

Dec 26, The Real Reality Show Blog

Finding joy

We are responsible for our own happiness for if we rely solely on someone else to bring us joy, we always be living by their definition of happiness. It isn’t that the world gives us sorry. It’s that it isn’t the world’s job to make us happy. Happiness is out there. We take what the world gives us and make it something joyful.

https://therealrealityshowblog.wordpress.com/2022/12/26/finding-joy/

Dec 28, ROAMcare

The gift of gratitude

Didn’t get everything on your wish list? Fill that wish with something else. Gift yourself the gift of gratitude.

https://www.roamcare.org/post/the-gift-of-gratitude

Oh there were others, maybe more profound even, but these were my favorites from Thanksgiving on. Words that warmed me in some of the coldest days I’ve seen, and boy have I seen a lot of days!!

Happy New Year everybody. I’ll see you again in 2023.

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I Participated

Michael Leave a comment

I was working on a blog post for the foundation when a thought occurred to me. Let me give you some background. That post is about the carrots and the sticks we use on ourselves. It began with a package sent to a friend. When I asked a few days later what she thought of it she said that she hadn’t opening it but was saving it as a reward for herself when she completed a project she was working on. And there that post begins down the trail of why we incentivize our happiness with promises of work completed rather than the other way around. If you want to see how that ends, it will hit the ROAMcare website in a couple weeks. Until then, let me tell you some of the things I thought that I didn’t write.

You see, days went by, a week went by, then a week and some days went by and then project was not much nearer completion than before the first days that had gone by. The project ran into snags. Other work encroached. Another job came up. The package remained unopened.

Perhaps this is something we’ve learned along the way to becoming mature adults. As children we were likely subject to bargains such as “If you get ready for bed I’ll come in and read you a story,” or “You can have dessert when you eat all your vegetables.” As we got older, we may have heard, “You can get a driver’s license when you get better grades,” or “You can go to the dance when you can buy your own dress/suit/dancing shoes.” Even as adults we tell ourselves things like “I’ll take a break when I finish this order.” We’ve grown up with the enticement of a reward for completing a task.

The all wise and famous “They” say a mark of maturity is to be able to defer gratification. Another sign of maturity is unconditional respect for others. “They” don’t say what to do when the objectives conflict. If you decide you that you won’t make your favorite dessert until you complete a project and if the project completion Is delayed, only your joy is interrupted.  When another enters the equation is it fair to defer their gratification also, to take away their joy when they cannot assist on the side of the equation to improve the situation. Or is that when respect trumps deference.

The point of the blog that someday will appear on the ROAMcare site is that decision should never have to be made. We should not go through life bargaining with ourselves to be able to enjoy life.

image0There are still those who feel participation awards for children eliminates their sense of accomplishment when there are no winners or losers. The argument may be valid on a baseball diamond or tennis court, but not in life. In life, living is the reward. There is no part of life that is a reward for doing something. The reward is being able to do something because you have mastered how to enjoy life. When my life is over and I look back at what I have done, I will feel much better being able to say I participated and not worry so much much if I won.

If you haven’t had a chance to visit ROAMcare yet, stop by, refresh your enthusiasm and read our blogs or check out the Moments of Motivation archives. Everybody is always welcome,