20160204 – Thursday – Coffee with Rhonda Saxon

I was sitting in Rosie’s cafe this morning, looking out over the playing fields of Henley High School and working away on my iPad, when I received a phone call from my friend Rhonda Saxon.

Rhonda asked if I would like to meet her at Southgate Plaza for coffee because she was having her car serviced and thought it was an opportunity for a chat.

This was an invitation I was happy to accept and soon was on my way up the southern beaches toward Southgate Plaza.

I hadn’t seen Rhonda for ages because she has been in Cambodia on mission work.  We ended up having lunch together which for me was tuna and salad on a spud topped with sour cream. Yum!

I received a message from Colleen Roberts about arrangements for transport when they next have to fly interstate. Colleen makes me laugh, because whenever she has something she would like me to do for her she addresses her SMS to me as FGM, or “Fairy God Mother,” and has done this for many years now.

I was thinking last night about Memory, and how Memory is so important to us as human beings. Without memory we are nothing, just a shell as people with Alzheimer’s become.

I thought I would write about what I do to minimize memory loss as I get older.

I started to have short-term memory loss absolutely years ago.

I remember the day I completely lost my car at Glenelg. From memory (joke) it would have been around 1991 when I had an office at Glenelg in Mosely Square (where the Hogs Breath Cafe is now located).

I used to park my car in all sorts of different spots and then walk to my office and this particular day  I had forgotten where I had parked it. I had forgotten where I had parked my car on other occasions, most people do, but this time I REALLY had forgotten where I had parked it.

I ended up walking up and down each street in Glenelg and must have walked for miles. Eventually I found it, but by that time I was simply exhausted.

This really worried me and it was then that I decided I would have to DO something about it.

From then on, every time I parked my car I would take really good note of where I had parked it, mentally attaching my parking spot to two or three external points to help me remember.

That was the beginning, then I began to lose words, names, or completely lose my train of thought if interrupted while I was speaking to someone.

It was somewhere around this time that I discovered the computer program “The Brain,” which over time has become my “Digital Memory.”

Once I got the hang of using this program, it has “lived with me” ever since. I can not do without it. Every time I do anything, every time I need to remember anything, big or small, it goes straight into “Fay’s Brain.”

When I first started to use the program everything was free. I could attach files, pictures and internet URLs. Then the program became better and it began to cost. It is free to download but doesn’t have any of the “bells and whistles.” To buy the “bells and whistles it now costs $229 or to renew after having purchased it now costs me $159 a year.

My license ran out this year on 14th of January 2016 and I decided I would not renew and struggled on trying to use it without “the bells and whistles.” Well that lasted a week. Then in despair, I finally renewed and my savings went down by $159, which peeved me no end, but I knew it had to be done.

With my “Fay’s Brain” now back in full functioning order I leaped into fully using it again. When I need some information all I have to do is type in one word and there I am right at the piece of information I was trying to retrieve.

Here is an example. To set up my web-site I had to purchase a domain name. I purchased one, paid for it and then forgot all about it. Stan Isbell from Canada had seen my website and commented that he had spent hours and hours setting up a website himself at one time, but then had forgotten to renew his domain name a year later and so he lost his domain name and all his data!

I was horrified!  I had understood that the purchase I had made of a domain name was a one-off purchase and not considered that I would need to renew if yearly. I couldn’t even remember what company I had purchased from. I had no idea!

I went to ‘Fay’s brain,” typed in “domain,” and there is was, all the information I needed to know, and I soon found that when I purchased my domain name I had set up for “automatic renewal,” but had no memory of having done so.  Without Stan’s warning and being able to look it up in “Fay’s Brain” I would have done nothing and possibly lost my domain name AND all my data!!

When you initially lay down a memory, it is often not a very deep memory – not deeply laid.

When your are my age (76) and when the time taken to transfer a memory from short-term to long-term is much shorter now than it used to be, I often find I cannot recall the memory I am looking for.

Sometimes if I wait a while the memory will just “emerge,” but what I soon noticed was that sometimes that memory just did not emerge at all.

This is the beginning of Alzheimers.

That is where “Fay’s Brain” comes in for me.

If I have entered that piece of information in my digital brain, then it is there permanently and one word, or related word will generally locate that piece of “lost” data. What happens then, is I read the data I had lost, and it becomes a new memory. The more I refer to it, the more the memory is deepened in my long-term memory.

I began (years ago) to lose names of people, so I did two things. One, I took a great deal of notice of people’s names, more than I ever used to do, and also entered them into “Fay’s Brain.” I also added memory joggers about the name.

Now my memory for names is excellent, much better than it used to be when I was young. Every important book that I read I try to summarize so that I can recall and revise what I have read.

Everything I do goes into “Fay’s Brain,” all of my genealogies are in “Fay’s brain,” thousands of names. For example, Patrick Dangerfield is a “rellie” of mine (my grandmother was Alice Maude Dangerfield) and so I have Patrick’s genealogy in “Fay’s brain” right back to his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, William Dangerfield (1746-1820). How have I done this? Well I have typed it all in from printed genealogies. This of course is “over the top” for most people, but it is just one of my particular interests and so I took the time to do it  – and of course, I am a fast typist.

So I guess what I am saying, is that if you don’t want Alzheimer’s, then sooner or later (sooner I hope) you need to start writing down what you need to remember, otherwise, there is nothing more certain than that you will “lose it.” if you don’t.

I am convinced that the reason the onset of Alzheimer’s is often so rapid is because once we start to lose a memory here and there it becomes easy to just let more and more “slide away.”

My legs don’t work too well, and I KNOW that I should exercise more, but exercise is not “pleasant” for me because it hurts. I should exercise more, but I would rather spend time reading or at my computer, and so I let my exercise “slide” and so have to put up with the consequences.

But, I don’t let my memory slide. I work on that every day, because I love doing it, and also I don’t want to get Alzheimer’s.

So that is what I thought about for some of today.

Oh, and I do my Bible studies the same way, it all ends up in “Fay’s Brain,” and so I am condemned to have to pay $159 + every year to have the privilege of keeping all of my data up “in the cloud.” The day I stop paying, I lose all the “bells and whistles” I can’t do without.

Of course, if I get Alzheimers then I won’t even know I have a “Fay’s Brain,” in the cloud, or that I ever had any “bells and whistles.”