Ecumen's Leadership-Mentoring Program Featured in Twin Cities Business Magazine
Ecumen's "Velocity" leadership development program brings established and emerging leaders together, promoting professional growth and collaboration across organizational boundaries. The connections built between Ecumen leaders and employees in the senior housing field are a priceless side effect of the Velocity program. Read "Learning to Get Things Done" in the May issue of Twin Cities Business magazine.
Ecumen Seasons at Apple Valley concludes second Academy for Lifelong Learning series, accepting reservations for summer series
Ecumen Seasons at Apple Valley offered two six-week Academy for Lifelong Learning courses on site through Inver Hills Community College in fall 2011 and spring 2012. Pictured above are the graduates of "US History: WWII through Vietnam". David Riggs, from the History department, covered the political, social, economic, and military history of war in American history, 1940-1980.
Celia Swanson, from the English department, led students through a creative writing course.
Dozens of adults have completed Ecumen’s Academy for Lifelong Learning courses, which are free and open to the community as well as to residents of Ecumen Seasons at Apple Valley. Classes are geared for people who just enjoy learning, no degrees are required.
Reservations are now being taken for the Summer Series, which will include another history class and a second subject to be determined (soon). For information or to make a reservation, phone or email Julie Walton, housing manager, at 952-698-5300 or juliewalton@ecumen.org.
Pictured: Instructor David Riggs, U.S. History, WWII to Vietnam, and his class.
Kudos to Ecumen Pathstone administrator Jennifer Pfeffer, YWCA's 2012 Women of Distinction honoree
The Mankato YWCA "Women of Distinction" award acknowledges women who embody the YWCA mission of eliminating racism and empowering women through volunteerism and their careers. Ecumen Pathstone administrator Jennifer Pfeffer was among three honored with the award this year. Read the article Mankato Magazine.
Baby Boom to Aging Boom: MinnPost 4-Part Series
MinnPost kicked off the week with a 4-part series entitled "Baby Boom to Aging Boom." You can access the series written by Kay Harvey here. What an opportunity for innovation in Minnesota and beyond.
Welcoming the Newest Member of Ecumen's Changing Aging Centenarian Club From Detroit Lakes
Congratulations to Oma Grove, above, who lives at Ecumen Emmanuel Community in Detroit Lakes, Minn! She became the newest member of Ecumen's Changing Aging Centenarian Club. Oma celebrated her 100th birthday last week.
Oma grew up in a farming family, which farmed near Osakis, Minn., and later in Jackson County. She went to high school in Jackson and did her teacher's training there and then taught country school for two years before getting married. She told the Detroit Lakes Tribune in an interview that her teaching career lasted two years, because "continuing to teach after marriage was simply not done in those days."
Oma and her husband Donald lived in Adrian, Minn., where her husband operated a farm implement shop with his father and brother. Oma kept books for a couple of years, but then was busy raising three daughters. She and Donald lived in Adrian for 60 years before relocating to Detroit Lakes. They were married for 67 years before he died in 2002.
Oma's family now includes 14 grandchildren, 30 great grandchildren and “about a dozen great greats, along with a lot of step-greats and step-great-greats,” Oma said in her Detroit Lakes Tribune interview.
86-year-old German Gymnast Johanna Quaas Outpaces Much of the World
This is pretty incredible. Check out the floor routine Johanna Quass, 86, peformed at the recent Cottbus World Cup in Germany:
A Tax Increase to Pay for Senior Services in Minnesota?
Read today's Changing Aging Post at the Minneapolis Star Tribune on paying for the future of senior services in Minnesota. You can see new poll results from The Long-Term Care Imperative - a partnership of Aging Services of Minnesota and Care Providers of Minnesota
Picture Your Future Self at University of Saint Andrews Website
Would you save more if you knew what you would look like when you're older? Try the "Face of the Future" web site from the University of Saint Andrews in the U.K. (you can also make a picture of yourself younger at the site)
Robert Powell at Marketwatch.com had an interesting post the other day entitled Six Tricks to Spend Less, Save More for Retirement. According to the column, recent research shows people will save more if you show them a photograph of their future selves.
“The problem between now and later is the question of how much do we care about our future selves,” said Dan Ariely, the author of several books including “The Upside of Irrationality,” and a behavior economics professor at Duke University. “If you care a lot you might save more, if you care only a little, you would save not so much. But if you saw an image of yourself at age 70 you might care more about your future self. And the results show that people have a higher tendency of doing so.”
So his advice to those saving for retirement is this: Take a picture of yourself, age it, and consider making it your screen saver on your computer or hanging the picture somewhere in your home or office to “to remind you of your future self.”
Jim Klobuchar - Adrift in the Facebook Follies
On my doorstep the other day, on the front page of my favorite Minneapolis daily newspaper, was a story about a spreading high tech menace called “sleep texting.”
It told of thousands of people, mostly young folks of high school and college age, unwittingly expanding their adventures in the miracles of hand held devices by subconsciously writing text messages while they’re still half asleep.
It pictured scenes in untold numbers bedrooms and dormitories where the open cell phone lies on a bed table within easy reach as a wake-up alarm. Something from the cell—maybe a sound or some flickering light-- stirs the sleeper. Like Pavlov’s trained dog responding to a familiar stimulus, the slumberer reaches for the cell phone and starts texting. Texting what?
It doesn’t have to be coherent texting, with things like, you know, subjects and predicates. Roused from sleep the texter starts typing in a fog. Anything that comes to mind. How would I know? I can’t text on my cell phone when fully awake.
As a man who labored for this newspaper, the Star Tribune, for nearly 40 years, I have no reason to doubt this story. The explanation is that chronic use of the mobile phone, in all of its derivatives—the high tech pads and pods of the world—have now become so glued into our lives that we are beginning to respond to their summons by instinct. It doesn’t matter what our state of mind is when the bell rings. It’s OUR ring. Time to act. The sound doesn’t matter. It could by the first thee bars of Mozart’s clarinet concerto or a squealing pig. It’s ours. So act! Are we driving a car? All of the sensible traffic control experts on the continent tell us DON’T use the cell while driving.
You wouldn’t want to bet your dwindling bank account on how well that advice is doing. So OK, the experts are probably right and have all the documentation on the hazards when we act like robots. And the latest breakthrough in high tech communication is writing text messages in your sleep. The only response I have there is how on earth can you find the backspace key in the dark when the keyboard is two inches wide, you can’t see it, you’re fighting cobwebs and you really don’t know who sent the message.
I’m told these things are slam-dunks for the young people of today. This may be right and I’m the first to admit not being enthralled by the miracles of Facebook and Twitter. I also admit having been dragged screaming into it. I’ve been persuaded that it’s not a generational roadblock; that millions of retirees are having a ball on Facebook, people eligible for Social Security, AARP and 10 per cent off on Viagra at some outlets. That if you want to start a revolution, Facebook is the place to recruit foot soldiers. All of this may be true. I admit having tried to launch myself into Facebook. I lost track of my password and petitioned for a new one. I began getting a scrambled alphabet and being asked to identify the numbers sent in the test. Most of the numbers looked upside down. One of them came with what looked like the face of a gorilla and turned out to be the figure 9 that had experienced a first life in a pretzel factory. Somebody said I needed a photo. I couldn’t figure out how to install it. But one of the friends stepped in to provide a photo taken years before on a bike ride, showing one of the old timers and me wearing helmets that basically obscured our faces and could have been used initially in an underground coal mine. I finally registered because I was starting to get notes from people totally unknown to me, living in such far afield cities as Manila and the Kyber Pass. But as far as I know we never crossed paths so I really don’t know what to do or say when I’m asked to go to the wall.
There was one promising exchange a year ago when I got a message on Facebook from Ljubljana in the little Balkan country of Slovenia, from where my grandparents emigrated to northern Minnesota in the late 1880s. The message came on Facebook from a young man named Blaz, his first name, and with the same surname as mine.
Blaz is fan of American pro football. He’d been surfing the internet for material on the Minnesota Vikings, whose games he was somehow able to watch on television in Ljubljana beneath the southern Alps, not far from Switzerland and Austria. Nothing is beyond the restless reach of the National Football League. Through search engines geared to information on the Vikings he found my name as the author of several books on pro football.
Correspondence followed immediately. Blaz Klobuchar turned out to be a forestry student studying at the university in Ljubljana. Through Facebook he made contact. This was sometime in 2010. The Vikings were losing routinely.
“Why don’t the Vikings move out of the 3-4 defense into something that gives them a better balance against either the run or pass?” was Blaz’ first question.
This from a forestry student in Slovenia!
“Where,” I asked, on the Facebook Wall, “are you getting all of this?”
Blaz turned out to be the only living expert on pro football in the entirety of Europe, including a small pocket of NFL fans in Trondheim, Norway, who for years having been trying to entice the Vikings to play an NFL game somewhere near the Holmenkollen ski slide outside of Oslo. When you come to think of it, that scheme could have some merit and sooner or later might get some serious attention from the Vikings. They’ve tried everything else.
The moral in this is that once the internet arrived-- followed by cell phones, I Pods, electronic tablets, Facebook, Twitter and texting while you’re sleepwalking-- the line between reality on hand and the need for daily therapeutic counseling has disappeared. I’m going to ask Blaz in Slovenia if the Vikings need another quarterback.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Meet Ecumen Customers Bud & Mae from Ecumen Oaks & Pines in Hutchinson
Neither Bud nor Mae ever seem to stop smiling.
It is a blustery February afternoon in Hutchinson and I am enjoying the couple’s company in their cozy apartment at Ecumen Oaks & Pines. They settled in here just over a year ago, in December 2010.
“The kids brought us here to show us the place and before we could say ‘Yea or Nay’ we were moved in,” says Bud. “Of course that’s not true,” Mae counters. And a conversation ensues about the process that led them to their current home, punctuated by clarifications: “But isn’t that about how it went?” queries Bud; “No dear, we took our time finding a good place,” Mae returns.
Bud and Mae are from the rural Stewart area of Minnesota, in McLeod County, current population 533, about 10 miles south of Hutchinson. They have known each other most of their lives. The two lean in toward one another as they recount story after story, pausing to question or correct the details of each other’s recollections.
Though they seem for all the world to have been happily married forever, they are not, in fact, married. They have been together since 1991, after both of their spouses passed away. “She won’t give up the farm,” jokes Bud. Mae chortles and lets the comment pass, though she doesn’t disagree.
Their lives are long intertwined and iconic of their milieu. For more than 40 years, Bud ran the family grocery store, “Ahler’s IGA,” that his grandfather bought in 1902. He and his wife, Ruth, met while Bud was in the Army. He brought her home to Minnesota from New Jersey after serving 43-and-a-half months in WWII, during which time he played the baritone in his Army post band in between stretches as a bomb disposal specialist in the Philippines and Japan. Bud and Ruth raised a daughter and three sons in Stewart, one of whom died in a car accident 10 years before Ruth’s own death, also in a car accident.
“Sure, there’s a lot of tragedy,” reflects Bud, “but isn’t that the way it is? I’ve had a pretty good life.” Holding Mae’s hand he adds, “It’s still good, right Mae?”
Mae and Howard raised a son and three daughters on 240 acres of fine farmland just north of Stewart. Her son and grandson now live in the farmhouse. Mae and Ruth were friends. “I was nearly in the car with Ruth the day she was killed,” remembers Mae. “I wasn’t able to join her because something else came up,” we all pause for a few moments, then Bud, moving on, offers, “Our kids would go out to Mae and Howard’s to be with the horses and had such a great time causing a ruckus. Howard was such a good sport he’d let them do just about whatever they wanted!”
The story of their own “courtship” unfolds with laughter in a non-linear fashion, the two finishing each other’s sentences and backfilling bits along the way. “She came by the store in her new van that fall day and told me to get in for a ride,” recalls Bud. “And he asked me, ‘Why’d you go and get yourself a new van?’” laughs Mae, adding, “We drove to Glencoe and had some pecan pie.”
Both agree that their new home is a good place. “Bud’s got diabetes, and they take such good care to check him out and manage his medications,” notes Mae, who still drives on outings, often to doctor appointments. “I’ve made a lot of nice friends here, and am learning new things,” she adds. Asked what he likes most about his new home, Bud laughs, “That’s easy. No shoveling, no mowing the lawn!”