Midlife Wisdom For Men Issue #058, May 15, 2006

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· A Bit Of Health Advice

· A Handy Tool For Making Decisions

· No Nursing Home for Me

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Written by Noel McNaughton Midlife-Men.com (c) copyright 2006 midlife-men.com

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If you like this e-zine, please do a friend and me a big favour and forward it to him. If a friend DID forward this to you and if you like what you read, please subscribe by visiting Midlife Wisdom for Men.

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Welcome to this issue of Midlife Wisdom for Men.

This is a fairly short newsletter, but I hope interesting to you. I have drawn the content from a few different sources. Things are getting busy in my life now that spring is here. The good weather means the grass will be growing, and that means the cattle will be coming to our farm at the end of the month to graze for the summer, and that means there is fence to fix and water lines to repair. It's nice being on the land at this time of year, but I find as I age I am a little less interested in grunt work than I used to be, which is why the little saplings that are growing up in my fence lines haven't been cut yet, and they get a little bigger every year! I guess this the year they get trimmed.

There are about 1000 words in the articles in this newsletter, which should take you about four minutes to read.

All the best,

Noel

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A Bit Of Health Advice

Here are a couple of health tips from the latest AARP magazine (which if you are over 50, I recommend subscribing to, even if you don't live in the USA).

Toasty Toes

Keeping warm does prevent colds, after all. People who put their feet in icy water for 20 minutes caught colds 14 percent of the time in a study at Cardiff University in Wales. Only 5 percent of a control group got sick.

Blood vessels in the nose constrict when feet get cold, says study author Ron Eccles, Ph.D.Sc. This may give infections a chance to take hold.

Ticker Alert

Men: When you ask your doctor about se^x issues, ask about your heart, too. In a recent study of 9,500 men, those who reported se^x difficulties were 25 percent more likely to suffer a heart attack within five years.

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Paul Hamm, Gymnast: "I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father."

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A Handy Tool For Making Decisions

As you know, I absolutely love the web package I use for midlife-men.com. And now they have added a useful little tool for making decisions. It is called 'Choose It'

People have used Choose It! to..

o decide upon important strategic business directions

o select career paths for their adult children

o decide upon vacation destinations, and even to...

o make the monumental decision about what to have for lunch (bacon sandwich or cheese sandwich or bacon AND cheese!).

Choose It! is, quite simply, very USEFUL decision making software.

If you have two or more options to choose from, you just enter the criteria you are using to make your decision, enter a weighting factor for each criterion (how important is each criterion in your decision-making), click the submit button, and it shows you with a bar chart, which is the best decision according to what you said was important. Pretty slick!

It is free to use, and when you go to the site, there is an example to show you how to use it. Of course the example used compares various web hosting packages, and the one I use comes out on top... which is not an exaggeration.

Anyway... got a decision to make? Try Choose It

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ANDY ROONEY'S WISH FOR LIFE The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death. What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out because you're too young, you get a gold watch and you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities. You become a little baby, you go back into the womb, Spend your last nine months floating and you finish off as an orgasm.

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No Nursing Home for Me

This is a submission from the forums at Site Build It!, which is my webhost. Had never thought of this before (and I sure don't know how it fits in a web-building forum, but it is a pretty eclectic bunch...):

About 2 years ago my wife and I were on a cruise through the western Mediterranean aboard a Princess liner. At dinner we noticed an elderly lady sitting alone along the rail of the grand stairway in the main dining room. I also noticed that all the staff, ships officers, waiters, busboys, etc., all seemed very familiar with this lady. I asked our waiter who the lady was, expecting to be told that she owned the line, but he said he only knew that she had been on board for the last four cruises, back-to-back.

As we left the dining room one evening I caught her eye and stopped to say hello. We chatted and I said, "I understand you've been on this ship for the last four cruises". She replied, "Yes, that's true." I stated, "I don't understand" and she replied, without a pause, "It's cheaper than a nursing home".

So, there will be no nursing home in my future. When I get old and feeble, I am going to get on a Princess Cruise Ship. The average cost for a nursing home is $200 per day. I have checked on reservations on a Princess and I can get a long term discount and senior discount price of $135 per day. That leaves $65 a day for:

1. Gratuities which will only be $10 per day.

2. I will have as many as 10 meals a day if I can waddle to the restaurant, or I can have room service (which means I can have breakfast-in-bed every day of the week).

3. Princess has as many as three swimming pools, a workout room, free washers and dryers, and shows every night.

4. They have free toothpaste and razors, and free soap and shampoo.

5. They will even treat you like a customer, not a patient. An extra $5 worth of tips will have the entire staff scrambling to help you.

6. I will get to meet new people every 7 or 14 days.

7. T.V. broken? Light bulb need changing? Need to have the mattress replaced? No Problem! They will fix everything and apologize for your inconvenience.

8. Clean sheets and towels every day, and you don't even have to ask for them.

9. If you fall in the nursing home and break a hip you are on Medicare; if you fall and break a hip on the Princess ship they will upgrade you to a suite for the rest of your life.

Now hold on for the best! Do you want to see South America, the Panama Canal, Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, or name where you want to go?

Princess will have a ship ready to go. So don't look for me in a nursing home, just call shore to ship.

ps: And don't forget, when you die, they just dump you over the side -- at no charge.

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Dressage commentator: "This is really a lovely horse and I speak from personal experience since I once mounted her mother."

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I do this newsletter and host the www.midlife-men.com website as a service to other men, and am happy to do so. Just the same, it costs some money, and if you would like to make a small contribution to help with those costs, I would really appreciate it. If you would like, you can make a donation at: http://www.midlife-men.com/donation.html

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The Mankind Project

The ManKind Project® offers trainings which support men in developing lives of integrity, accountability, and connection to feeling. Our trainings challenge men to develop their abilities as leaders, fathers, and elders as ways of offering their deepest gifts in service to the world.

The ManKind Project's New Warrior Training Adventure® is an intense, transformative men's initiation which invites men to forge a deep conscious connection between head and heart. The NWTA offers men a powerful, challenging opportunity to look at all aspects of their lives in a richly supportive environment.

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Got your copy of Picking Up The Burning Feather yet? It will help you on your spiritual journey.

Just go to Picking Up The Burning Feather: A Spiritual Guide For Midlife Men.

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Just For You: A Free Do-It-Yourself Retirement Planning Report

If you are a new subscriber to this newsletter, you will recall I promised you a link to a secret page on the Midlife Men's site where you can download a free 27-page report on 'DIY Retirement planning' by George Slater.

Welcome to the newsletter, and for your free report, go to: DIY Retirement E-Report , and follow the instructions.

Enjoy!

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Learn to be a Teleclass Facilitator

If you are a facilitator/speaker/professional who gives lectures or workshops, you can do it from home and make money. Teleclasses (also known as teleseminars) using telephone bridge lines, are becoming increasingly popular, and and a very inexpensive way to deliver high-quality training. I took training in teleclass leadership from Teleclass International which I highly recommend.

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Classifieds

A Destroyer of Compasses by Wade Bell, published by Guernica Editions, (Toronto, Buffalo and Lancaster UK) $15.00 Cdn

One Man's Mid-Life Crisis Led to Spain. Planning to spend six weeks, he stayed five years.

A book of stories the Toronto Globe & Mail called "an assured and sensual portrait of a culture" with "precise and ironic examples of human idiosyncracy." The review went on to call stories "gems."

Available from Amazon, E-Bay and local bookstores.
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I Need Your Questions and Feedback!

Got comments? Questions? I'd love to hear from you.

Just email your suggestions and/or questions to noel@midlife-men.com . I look forward to hearing from you. And thanks.

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Well friend, that's it for now. Again, if you enjoyed this and/or found it useful, and know of anyone else who might like it, please pass it forward. And if you have questions or recommendations, I would love to hear from you.