Social media. Because your life isn’t complete unless you are up to date on what your neighbor is cooking for dinner, what that person you haven’t seen in 30 years is doing for vacation, and what some distant relative’s political views are.

My introduction to social media happened one day when my husband Ernie asked me how my one brother was doing after his surgery. I looked at Ernie quizzically.

“What surgery,” I asked?

“I don’t know,” he answered, “but he posted something about it on Facebook.”

Seriously—we’ll look at each of these individually, starting with smart phones this week, but all three can be categorized as time sucking vehicles.

As you get out of bed in the morning, you think, oh I’ll just glance at the headlines on my news feed, 30 seconds tops. Next thing you know, you’re late for work. But let’s explore, shall we?

Smart phones. These things have become like an appendage to our bodies. We all know the outright panic that occurs when you accidentally misplace your phone or can’t remember where you left it.

And God forbid you leave the house without it. You absolutely must turn around and go back to get it, no matter that you are thirty minutes in to your 60 minute work commute (pre-Covid of course).

And then there’s the charging anxiety. Constantly checking your battery life. 100% = yay! 75%= oh, ok, that’s still good, nothing to be alarmed about, 50%=hmm, getting low, half life here, 25%= oh shit, where’s my charger? Gotta get it charged. It’s gonna run out. When you hit 20% and you get that message that it’s going on low power mode to conserve battery, your anxiety is at a 10/10.

You madly text the person you are texting that your battery is low and you might lose them. You scrounge your purse for your battery charger to plug in, or you’re smart enough to have an external charger and you hope you were smart enough to make sure that was fully charged.

Ah, the indignities of aging keep-a-coming. Despite your best efforts to tone, tighten, and strengthen your aging body, one must recognize that there are things outside of one’s control. No matter how healthily you eat, how much exercise you do, when it comes to the aging body, well, it’s gonna do what aging bodies do at some point.

There I was the other night, cozily ensconced beneath my blanket, sitting on my sofa, waiting for the Chiefs-Dolphins football playoff came to come on.

Ernie walked in and asked, “Did the game start yet?”

I looked up to answer him and I saw fireworks. Now, to be fair, what married woman doesn’t see fireworks when she sees her beloved husband? Am I right ladies? But no. These weren’t the figurative kind. They were the literal.

“That is asinine.”

So texted my dear friend Christine to me when I told her I was participating in Dry January.

She followed up with, “All things in moderation” and “January has to be the worst month anyway for something like that when it’s cold, dark, and not much to look forward to. June would be a much better month.”

I followed up with, dang, she’s right and went ahead and poured myself a glass of wine, thereby removing myself from the Dry January experiment into the Damp January one.

Oh, it’s a slippery slope when you find yourself on Mount Aging. And you will, one day, find yourself on that slope, if you aren’t there already. It’s a fact of life. Like death and taxes. It comes for us all.

But don’t dismay. All is not gloom and doom. The key is to be aware and have the knowledge to navigate that slope. And most importantly, acceptance. Once you accept the situation, adaptation, the key to Darwin’s theory of evolution mind you (smart man), life will be easier.

Ernie, who retired a year ahead of me, took up kayaking. His sister introduced him to it, and he and she and sometimes a couple of her friends would go kayaking on the various lakes and creeks in the area.

Ernie encouraged me to try it. I thought it sounded like fun. Why not give it a try? I’m an outdoorsy person, right? At this point, thoughts of our ill-fated ski trip (see previous blog post) should have come to mind and raised some red flags.

Like the Robot in Lost in Space who would warn Will Robinson about impending danger, my internal warning system should have kicked in with a “Danger, Mary Lunghi, Danger”.

But I blithely gave him the go ahead to purchase two kayaks. He was clearly into it, I thought I would enjoy it as well, and it would be a fun, outdoorsy activity for us to do together in retirement.

The year was 1988 or thereabouts. I was working at an agency in downtown Boston. In a tall, skyscraper type building located at 101 Arch Street to be exact.

One day, the windows were being washed. By a very hot guy. Needless to say that all of the young women in the office, about 5 or 6 of us, had congregated in the hallway outside of the office of the windows he was cleaning.

We thought he would not be able to see us if we stood in the hallway (we didn’t want him to think us rude or make him feel uncomfortable), though we could see him clearly. Very clearly. Did I mention he was hot?

As he completed that office’s windows, he slid himself over to the next office’s windows. We shuffled ourselves like we were a single entity down the hallway to the next office where we continued our gazing.

Used to be, that if asked about the categorization of clothes, I’d have responded as follows: athleisure (which in the old days we just called sweats), casual, work casual, professional, dressy, and formal.

However, post-Covid and post-Retirement, there is another, far more important categorization that trumps all the others, IMHO. And that is, soft clothes and hard clothes. Really, all clothing can be boiled down to those two descriptors.

That’s what it has come down to for me. And guess where I fall? If you thought soft clothes, you thought right.

There are two kinds of people. Those who buy real Christmas trees and those who buy fake ones. I suppose you could say that there is a third kind, those who don’t buy any Christmas trees at all. But for the purposes of this story, we will not include them.

So, real vs fake Christmas trees. There is no middle ground here. Talk about your divisive issues. Maybe not to the level of gun control, abortion, or same-sex marriage. But close.

I’ve crossed the line. I am officially old. I now wear my reading glasses on a chain around my neck. Nothing says old like wearing your readers around your neck.

One could say nothing says old like needing reading glasses, but since that starts around age 40, and 40 is the new 30, that is hardly old.

When my eye doctor first told me I needed reading glasses, he suggested I go to the dollar store and buy a bunch and leave a pair in every room of the house. Good advice. That’s exactly what I did.

At work however, I only had one pair. I don’t think the company would have appreciated my randomly leaving reading glasses around the office.

Somewhere along the way, weather became WEATHER and became a national past time, akin to a major sporting event. We’ve got all kinds of ways to keep track of weather now. There’s the old school way, your local evening news. Well, truly the old school way would be opening the door and sticking your head out to see what the weather is like and figure out what to wear for the day.

But now, you’ve got an app on your phone, you’ve got weather alerts on your weather app on your phone, you’ve got the weather channel on tv, you’ve got an assortment of AI support in the form of Siri, Alexa or Cortana. So truly, knowing the current and future weather by the minute is now at your finger tips.

Used to be that the protocol for tipping was very clear. First of all, tipping was mainly for when you dined in a restaurant.

You would dine in at a restaurant where a waiter or waitress, waited on you. They reviewed the menu with you, answering any questions you might have, they described the specials. Then, they took your order and gave it to the chefs in the kitchen who prepared your food. The waitstaff carried your order out, sometimes requiring great feats of balance, and placed it on the table before you. They periodically checked in with you to see if everything was ok, refilled a drink, and repeated the process should you desire dessert.

For all that effort and attentiveness, we tip them. We also tip them because generally they are not paid well by the restaurant and so they rely on the tips to earn an income.

The good Lord gave us all talents of one kind or another. And while we very much appreciate the talents we do have, it’s the ones that we haven’t been given that really can rankle us.

For example, I love music. I love listening to music, dancing to music, and singing to music. Of those three things, I can listen very well. I can dance better than Elaine Benes. But I can’t sing.

I was not aware that I lacked that talent for a fairly long time. I would sing my heart out when at home listening to all kinds of music-I was especially fond of musicals and would sing along to all the albums we had: Sound of Music, The King and I, Oliver, Mary Poppins, South Pacific, Oklahoma!. I would sing at church on Sundays. I would sing in the car listening to the radio.

Covid wrought more than a few changes and adaptations to our daily lives a few years ago. Not the least of which was the inability to get to a barber or hair salon for the three or so months we were all in quarantine.

For me, this meant taking the plunge with going silver (note that I said silver, not gray, as silver sounds so much more sophisticated). I had been contemplating it for a time anyway and between lockdown and my colorist Karen moving to FL (I miss you!), it seemed like as good a time as any to take the silver plunge.

For Ernie, this meant that his hair grew. Pre-Covid, Ernie always wore his hair pretty darn short. A very close cut. In barber parlance, I think it would be like a 1 or a 2. For those of you unfamiliar with barber parlance, think Kevin Costner in The Body Guard. Not quite military buzz cut, but super close.

Let’s talk meatballs. Being Italian-American, I know a thing or two about them. Amongst my peeps, It’s its own food group, along with pasta (aka macaroni for us old schoolers). Not sure there is a better food pairing than macaroni and meatballs.

Growing up it was dinner twice a week: Sunday and Wednesday. You made enough every Sunday to have it again on Wednesday.

When I went to work for IKEA, I discovered this thing called a Swedish meatball. Everyone raves about IKEA’s meatballs. Say to anyone that you work there and they will ask you about their meatballs. Do you get a discount on the meatballs? Do you eat the meatballs every day? How great are those meatballs?

Ummm. Yes, I get a discount on the meatballs. No, I don’t eat them every day. And I wouldn’t know, since I never had one.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed how much it costs to buy a pizza these days? I mean, I know we’ve had some inflation and whatnot, but I would love to see the data on the overall rate of inflation vs pizza inflation. I would say pizza inflation beats overall inflation by a mile.

It used to be an economical take-out dinner option. In fact, pretty much my entire life from the time I can remember has been a pepperoni pizza on Friday night. We were a family of 7 back when I was a kid and two pizzas fed us all pretty cheaply. I continued this tradition with my own nuclear unit family. And it’s one that continues into Empty Nesterhood.

Let’s talk about the C word. No, not that C word. The other one. Also goes by The Vid and Rona. Yeah. That C word. Covid.

Ernie and I managed to avoid its clutches for the first two years. Quarantining initially like everyone, wearing masks, getting vaccinated.

It wasn’t until March/April of last year, when we went to our first public event, an NCAA March Madness playoff game at the Wells Fargo Center, when Ernie caught the bug. And then he kindly gave it to me three days later. We’re all about sharing in this family.

Ernie fared ok. Me? Not so much. 3 days into it and I developed bronchial spasms such that the doctor prescribed Paxlovid and a nebulizer inhaler. Paxlovid did the trick and eventually we both were all better.

For those of you who know me, it comes as no surprise that Ernie and I are avid Philly sports fans. Phillies, Eagles, Sixers. Flyers too, but not as much. I find watching hockey on tv hard to do…where is that puck? I know I am not alone in that, because for a time they tried to use a graphic that highlighted where the puck was, but that was just distracting and didn’t really work out well.

The other day a quote from our second President, the irascible John Adams, came across my fb feed (ever the history nerd, one of the sites I follow is Plodding Through the Presidents). The quote was “Thanks be to God, that He gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”

I immediately shared this with my siblings, laughing as I texted, who does this remind you of? Only our entire family. Grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins. The whole shebang. This is a trait that is so dominant in that side of our family, that an uncle who married into the family used to say, “You can tell a Morroney, but you can’t tell them much.” (Morroney being my maiden name).

Go Go, Slow Go, No Go. Have you heard of this expression? It refers to your retirement years. Theoretically, the first third of your retirement years, your ‘young’ years are the Go Go period. This is when you have the most vitality, energy, all your joints are in good working condition, and your overall health is good.