Year 2006 in review (#301, Topic D)

Happy New Year. As usual, I got up at 6:30, and was ready to take my morning walk. But, it was raining. On rainy days, I spend my time by walking backward at the lower-level indoor garage. According to our late Tai Chi teacher, Master Tang, walking backward, which one seldom does, is very helpful to one's lower-back pain -- even better than Tai Chi, which has a short sequence featuring walking bakward. Due to car accidents, I had lower-back pain. Through Tai Chi, in time, the pain became unnoticeable, except when I had to stand still for 15 minutes or longer (as when washing dishes). Thus, this morning, I again walked backward. This being the New Year's Day, this backward walking also gave me a chance to review the year 2006. During the entire year, I was never sick -- nor was my wife. I attributed this to our having a regular routine (up at 6:30 am, nap in the early afternoon, and to bed at 11 pm), modest exercise (for me, daily walk and weekly Tai Chi; for my wife, daily swimming and weekly Tai Chi), good diet (oatmeal and flexseed in the morning; salad and turkey burger, sometime with soup, for lunch; simple Chinese dinner; a glass of soy milk at 9:30 pm), regular physician and dental appointments, flu shots, no cigarettes nor hard liquor. I keep myself mentally alert by reading 3 or 4 dailies (in print: Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Investor Business Daily; on-line, New York Times), several news weeklies (Economist, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report), and several specialized journals. Still, I cannot help feeling that I am not too far away from being inflicted with first-stage dementia. On the last point, I mentioned it to a retired physician, who was sitting next to me at luncheon yesterday (#296); she pooh-poohed the idea, saying that a person who deals with figures all one's time cannot be so inflicted. But I beg to differ. One of my acquaintances, a brother of my college classmates, was a Certified Public Accountant and, when I first met him in Beijing, was the resident representative in China for a Big Five CPA firm. But he later contracted dementia, so much so that he was unable to do his own income tax. I am not far away from that. Recently, I have paid special attention to brain and brain cancer, as several of my friends died with this disease. The current issue of Economist (12/23/06, a holiday double issue) has a special report on brain; I only glanced at it, and need to read it more carefully. In any case, I hope this no-illness streak continues throughout this year.
PS - To the end of 2006, I have blogged for slightly over a year (I began in late December 2005), with 295+ entries, but not quite 300. I have decided to use the last few numbers before 300 for a comprehensive index covering these entries, and begin 2007 with #301.