Retirement Isn’t All Fun And Games
Posted: June 2, 2012 at 10:19 am
(credit: Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
BOSTON (CBS) The reality is you need to plan for the soft side of retirement as well as the financial side. I have heard from many listeners who have flunked retirement.
Retirement Isnt All Fun And Games
Many people fantasize about leaving their jobs and having the good life, a better life in retirement than what they have now! This is the biggest myth of all.
Like so many of our other fantasies we want this time in our life to be perfect. We will have retirement 24/7. That is like living a month of Saturdays. So what are you going to do with all of your Saturdays?
What about your spouse? If youre heading into the sunset coupled, what does your spouse want to do in retirement? According to Sara Yogen, author of For Better or For Worse but Not for Lunch, retirement 24/7 with your spouse may actually be a marriage wrecker.
Long before retiring, 5 to 10 years out, start talking about what you really would like to do. Its a process and should be fluid and you should be flexible as well. Communication is key to surviving retirement with a spouse.
How do you want to spend your time and where do you want to spend your time? Get a calendar and fill in the days with what you want to do. Playing golf three times a week may not be financially possible. Babysitting the grandkids is not what you signed up to do either.
Build a social network outside of work. Find a new reason to get up every morning. When you worked you had a reason to get up. Now what do you want to do with the rest of your life? Volunteer? School? Travel? Play? Garden?
If you are coupled, look to do things independent of each other, pursue different interests. Dinner conversations will be oh so much better. I know at times its hard if you have just one car. But set up a schedule and be sure you honor each others need of independence and the car keys.
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Retirement Isn’t All Fun And Games
Consumer spending edges up in April; personal income growth slows
Posted: at 10:19 am
Originally published June 1, 2012 at 5:36 AM | Page modified June 1, 2012 at 6:32 AM
Consumer spending edged up modestly in April but personal income growth was the slowest in five months, raising concerns about the ability of Americans to keep spending in the future.
Consumer spending increased 0.3 percent in April following a revised 0.2 percent gain in March, the Commerce Department said Friday.
Americans' income grew 0.2 percent in April, the poorest showing since incomes fell 0.1 percent in November. The April gain was just half the 0.4 percent March rise.
Consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of economic activity. Economists hope consumers will keep spending to support further economic growth. But the concern is that incomes have been lagging in this sub-par recovery, meaning households have less to spend. The small April income gain will add to those worries.
Worries about income growth will likely increase in light of a separate report Friday showing that the nation created just 69,000 jobs in May, the fewest in a year. The unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 percent in April, the first increase in 11 months. Weak job growth translates into weak income growth.
For April, after-tax income adjusted for inflation rose 0.2 percent, extending a string of weak increases of 0.2 percent or less that stretch back more than a year.
With consumers spending more in April at the same time their earnings growth slowed, they financed the difference by tapping savings. The savings rate as a percent of after-tax incomes dipped to 3.4 percent, matching a low hit in February. The 3.4 percent rate was the lowest since the savings rate stood at 2.6 percent in December 2007, just as the recession was beginning. The deep downturn and high unemployment prompted Americans to save more. The annual savings rate climbed to 5.4 percent in 2008 after dipping to a low of 1.5 percent in 2005, a year when soaring home prices made Americans feel less of a need to save.
For the January-March quarter, consumer spending rose at an annual rate of 2.7 percent, the strongest performance since the last quarter of 2010. But there was concern because Americans are receiving little or no pay raises. After-tax income adjusted for inflation rose at an annual rate of just 0.4 percent in the first three months of this year and that followed an even smaller 0.2 percent increase in the final three months of 2011.
The overall economy expanded at an annual rate of 1.9 percent in the January-March quarter, helped considerably by the solid gain in consumer spending.
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Consumer spending edges up in April; personal income growth slows
Scary Lasers
Posted: at 10:17 am
June 1, 2012: Editor Note: The U.S. military is backing off from efforts to deploy combat lasers because none of the development efforts has produced a practical weapon. The following is a personal account of how the search for a combat laser began half a century ago because of an unexpected early success, followed by bizarre complications.
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This is how the U.S. Army developed the first combat laser in the 1960s and 70s, but refused to deploy it because it was considered too cruel. It all started with the Advanced Propulsion Technology Branch of the Propulsion Directorate in the Army Missile Command at Redstone Arsenal in the 1960's. Their mission was the development of advanced propulsion concepts such as liquid monopropellants, bipropellants, hybrids, air breathing, etc. for application to Army missiles.
One morning, after a staff meeting with the army generals Dr. Walter Wharton, our supervisor, announced, "Men I've got a new and unusual project for you. It's not propulsion but needs all the technology and skills of propulsion. Here's the pitch: Over the past two years one of our army contractors has failed to demonstrate chemical lasing in a hardware device. The general asked us to take over the effort. And, if we achieved a satisfactory demonstration of the chemical laser, we would be the nucleus of a new laboratory and weapons effort. I told the general the problem was a natural fit to our skills. With the chemists, physicists, engineers, and technicians on our staff and our background in hardware development and testing we could do the job expeditiously."
The basic problem with using a laser as a weapon is power. A laser is focused light energy, being sent from the laser to the target in a short burst. Using batteries or generators and capacitors are too heavy for this to be practical. But the right combination of chemicals can provide the needed energy, at least in theory. The solution is a bit more complex.
Dr. Wharton led us in the analysis and evaluation of the contractor's effort and data. Their device used gaseous hydrogen and gaseous fluorine. The attempt at lasing was through the kinetic reaction states in the laser cavity to form the end product HF. Dr. Wharton, a skilled chemist, immediately determined the critical issue. To allow the intermediate activated molecules the time and space to lase to ground states in the laser cavity, would require supersonic injection by the mixing nozzles and very low cavity pressure. That environment would slow down the kinetics and stretch out the reaction zone allowing the species to lase.
Wharton designated me (Joe Connaughton, a chemical engineer) as team leader for chemist Tony Duncan, laser device operator, physicist Bill Friday, cavity optics and power, and mechanical engineer, Ben Wilson, facility design and development. We had top priority in obtaining hardware, shop, and other support services. In a matter of weeks we had the device set up and ready for operation. The big day came when we were ready to test. Dr. Wharton said, "Get that machine cranked up and don't stop till you get it to lasing. I'll be in the office, so call me if you have any problems or when it starts lasing."
We spent most of the day adjusting the flow of the gases and setting our liquid nitrogen trap and pumping speed. But near the end of the day, Bill Friday held a piece of strip recorder paper three feet from the cavity optics and yelled, "Hey! Look guys at me burn holes in this paper by that invisible laser beam!" We probably didn't project more than a hundred watts of power but it worked. We had an operating HF chemical laser, and we were in business. The next day was show time, which included all day demonstrations to various levels of management including the Commanding General.
We were off and running to build a ten kilowatt HF laser that would define the operating parameters for scale up to weapon grade hardware. It was a large modular boilerplate device designed for research studies. Calorimetric cavity mirrors for precise power measurements and ports for optical flow field visualization were included. The modular design allowed the evaluation and development of laser components to advance the technology of high-energy lasers.
The group quickly expanded to include PhD level scientists, who began to study all aspects of the chemical laser and extrapolate data to weapon system needs. Dr. Barry Allen, with contractor support, researched solid sources for the reactants. He found hydrides and fluorides that had reactant densities greater than the cryogenics were appropriate. He also worked on the successful development of chemical pumps that would replace the huge vacuum blow down system required to pump the boilerplate laser.
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Scary Lasers
2012 LEC Connects Presentation – Teaching Dance Online? – Video
Posted: at 10:17 am
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Posted: at 5:12 am
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Pure Yoga “escorts out” popular instructor Marco Rojas
Posted: at 5:11 am
Uptowns upscale yoga bunnies are buzzing after a hot instructor at luxe Pure Yoga was ordered by the studio to roll up his mat and leave through the back door this week.
Marco Rojas was treated by his clients as kind of a deity, according to a source. But he wound up in an un-Zen-like clash with the studio that blew up this week.
Sources say Rojas was bringing in up to 500 students weekly at Pures West 77th and East 86th Street locations, but he irked the studio by becoming a bit too big for his yoga pants.
He thought he wasnt expendable, and they thought he wasnt worth it anymore, said one Upper West Side novelist and yoga mom. They started to marginalize him and push him out. Sources said Rojas further antagonized Pure because he was also teaching at rival Ishta Yoga.
Liz Sullivan
Marco Rojas
A source close to Pure said the split with Rojas was mutual. But when we contacted Rojas, the downward-dog doyen told us, Yoga is about the truth. It was not a mutual decision.
He said the clash came when Pure owners werent receptive to his ideas for workshops and retreats. Management thought I was difficult because I was trying to teach them how to do things in a yogic way, he said. Managers are not yoga practitioners. I came to them with projects, and some of the managers didnt want to do it. They dont understand what it is to do a yoga retreat.
A rep for Pure said she couldnt comment, but a source said Rojas was not kicked out. Rojas countered: They [gave me] just 45 minutes before [a] class, [and] fired me without having consideration . . . It was disrespectful. They escorted me . . . to clear out my stuff, and took me out of the back door. It might be the protocol, but this is yoga. They are supposedly running a company called Pure Yoga, but this is impure yoga. However, [Im] not interested in starting a war, but an evolution, he said.
One devotee lamented the development via Facebook: Marco, I am devastated . . . You have made such a difference in my life. Namaste.
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Pure Yoga “escorts out” popular instructor Marco Rojas
Yoga for those who like it hot in Mendham
Posted: at 5:11 am
MENDHAM - The temperature is ramped up to 98 degrees while a group of men and women sweat out their toxins while concentrating on their breathing.
It is called hot yoga and it is the newest twist on a timeless practice.
The latest hot yoga facility is the Inferno Hot Yoga Studio in the Mendham Village Shopping Center on Route 24. Livingston resident Dorothy Dootsie Risch, 41, opened the studio on April 14 after giving up a job as a medical assistant.
Before 2011, Risch had never practiced yoga but her arrival to the field has come at a blistering pace.
Married with five sons, Risch said that prior to opening the studio, she worked for seven years for a Roseland pediatrician. A recreational runner, she began to suffer chronic headaches and a painful, bulging disc. She was using headache medication and had an epidural shot to help reduce the pain. None of it worked very well.
Hot Yoga
About two years ago, she stopped in to a newly opened hot yoga studio in Livingston and within two weeks, she was hooked.
The next thing I was off headache medication and there were no more neck problems, she said.
Risch was so impressed that she enrolled in the Samadhi Sun Yoga Academy in Stirling. She completed a 200-hour program and was certified as an instructor with the National Yoga Alliance. Risch also gained certification in the healing art of Reiki.
She spoke with her husband, Ronald, a retired Livingston police officer, and by last fall, she decided she would open her own hot yoga studio. Risch checked the Internet and spoke with a friend from Brookside before deciding on the storefront formerly occupied by a Verizon store.
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Yoga for those who like it hot in Mendham
Yoga Benefits Translate From the Mat to the Community
Posted: at 5:11 am
Abby Wills practically has me at hello. Its a no-brainer. She is about mindfulness and yoga and how it can help our youth. But as we talk in a recent phone interview, I feel myself sitting up straighter and listening more intently when the stories start coming.
She tells me of the 9-year-old whose mother was prone to yelling. The child would yell back and the situation would quickly escalate. Then one day the child came to yoga with another parent in her community. Now, a few years into it, she goes into the bathroom and does some yoga poses when her mother starts yelling. Then, when feeling calm, she opens the door and talks to her mother.
Or theres the bi-racial young woman who was being targeted by Latino and African-American gangs in her Los Angeles neighborhood because she is both. She rarely went outside over fear of being hassled and harassed. Enter yoga and a whole lot of mountain pose; learning how to be in the world with upright, confident energy to the point where it feels like protection. Now she walks her neighborhood like she belongs there and is not as frequently targeted.
Beautiful testimony.
Yoga has that effect, Wills tells me. We utilize the whole being mind, body, spirit and that translates from the mat to the community.
So many of us know this because we practice yoga and reap its benefits. But for Wills its different, deeper.
Co-founder and program director of Shanti Generation, which produces educational media experiences that bring ancient and modern practices to youth in relevant, innovative formats, Wills has gone from feeling misplaced as a youth and being bullied and pointedly telling herself at age 12 that life is not about what everybody thinks of you to having a sense of mission in adulthood. With some heavy things going on around her in childhood, she realizes in retrospect it would have been tremendously helpful to have the coping skills that yoga fosters.
Imagine something like that being available to me at every moment, she says. And free.
It was in college that she found herself drawn to philosophy and Eastern thought and it was on a return trip from an ashram in India in her early 20s when it hit her that this was her purpose. Now, at 37, living in California, Wills is steeped in experience, passion and knowledge on the topic of yoga for young people (with a focus on ages 7-16). Using her social justice and developmental education at Pacific Oaks College (Pasadena, Calif.) and more than 10 years of teaching, she has helped create a program on DVD that makes it easy for non-yoga people to use it in the classroom.
Mindful that instances of bullying are up and that these days teachers are often paying for resources from their own pockets, Shanti Generation has set up a buy one, give one program to get yoga to as many children as possible. And where Wills and Shanti Generation leave off, Leah Kalish and Move With Me Action Adventures come in with a focus on yoga for children ages 3-7 (and their own buy one, give one opportunity).
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Yoga Benefits Translate From the Mat to the Community
Yoga may benefit stroke recovery patients
Posted: at 5:11 am
Some 600 breast cancer survivors and their families go through yoga exercises on the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum in downtown Philadelphia May 20 2007. They participate in the the mass yoga class annually to raise funds and awareness of breast cancer issues. (UPI Photo/John Anderson)
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SAN FRANCISCO, June 1 (UPI) -- An eight-week yoga program for recovering stroke patients improved balance and flexibility and provided other benefits, U.S. researchers said.
Arlene Schmid, rehabilitation research scientist at the Richard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center in Indianapolis, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and IU Bloomington, said the men and women had completed their post-stroke occupational and physical therapy before the yoga study but continued to experience impairments.
Schmid said loss of functional strength, flexibility and endurance is common after a stroke, but it can lead to long-term disability.
The researchers said as a result of the yoga there were significant improvements in functional strength, flexibility and endurance.
The yoga activities, Schmid said, might have "improved neuromuscular control, likely allowing for strength improvements in affected limbs, sides or areas of disuse."
Schmid concluded it might be appropriate to include yoga in the in-patient or out-patient rehabilitation people receive after a stroke.
The study was presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine in San Francisco.
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Yoga may benefit stroke recovery patients