I’ve fallen onto the couch, and I now can’t get up
- col-teri-stein
- February 8, 2024
- 1018
It’s February, so I almost have my 12-month planner put together for the year. I still need to pencil in some of the festivals and events I want to attend. It’s good to plan ahead.
I love putting together a new calendar book, as I like to call them, every year. I mark all the important dates to remember. But now I wonder if I could have gotten a planner that better fit my life.
Lately, planners have included a couple sheets of stickers to help you organize, and the book I purchased this year does not have senior citizens in mind. I’m going through the stickers in the back, and there’s a lot of them I’m never going to use, like the ones that read first day of school, last day of school, school pictures, no school, class party, half day, field trip, practice and school event.
I’m really going to use the ones that read don’t forget. There is only one row of them. Teacher conferences, forget about them.
I’m going to run out of doctor stickers in a matter of months. They should have included a few more rows of them and maybe some surgery stickers because everything from hangnail removal on up is considered that.
What other stickers would be good for a senior calendar? Definitely walking, bicycle riding, yoga and fitness class stickers. Shouldn’t there be a pickleball sticker? I haven’t tried the game yet but probably will at some point due to its popularity. After covering a meeting, I drive by a popular pickleball court twice a month around 9 p.m., and each time when the weather cooperates, there are people out there playing pickleball.
Maybe other stickers could be Parcheesi, bingo, an invasive test sticker with a frowning emoji and the ever-helpful refill meds sticker.
After a while all these notes pile up in my planner and it becomes like a diary. Stickers to keep track of what happened during the day would be helpful, like a mowed sticker. The older you get, the longer yard work takes. You can’t push yourself or mow when it’s too hot. Just like the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” everything needs to be just right. Yes, the grass is long, but when did we mow last? We have no idea.
Some good stickers might be star-shaped congratulatory stickers for eating lunch, took all my meds and remembered to ask for my senior discount. Others might be those that remind you of things that are certain to cause you pain the next day but you won’t remember, like stepped in a hole, caught my hip on the corner of the kitchen counter and lifted a box. Of course, this might not help because sometimes you just sleep wrong and wake up walking with a limp. It’s happened.
There would certainly be a need for the ever-popular “I’ve fallen (onto the couch) and I can’t get up” stickers with a weary face emoji. Could have used a couple last week.
My current planner includes 39 vacation stickers. That is a good amount, but for seniors we need one for every day. Will I use the one that says party? A good senior party starts and ends so you can home in time to watch your evening television shows.
I know I’m going to use the ones that say lunch date. My high school class, who are all old enough to have retired at least once if not twice, started a fun new activity. A classmate was in town from her home in Florida, so our class president called a last-minute lunch so we could get together. About 25% of the class showed up.
We ate, chatted, gave advice from personal experiences that were not all good, hugged and vowed to have more impromptu lunches.
It’s getting harder to get everyone together for an organized reunion. Those reunions were the best though. We regularly closed down restaurants at 2 a.m. even when we were getting older because we are such a fun and close-knit group.
But now that we are able to meet earlier, we are closing down lunch restaurants at 2 p.m. It’s a big difference from the younger us, but (lunch date sticker) we still know how to have fun.