Stay Cool and Ride Easy

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay. Hey, how's it going, man? It's good to see you. [00:00:02] Speaker B: It's good to see you, too. It's hot. It's really hot. [00:00:06] Speaker A: Gosh, it's hot. It is hot. I think that today where we're living, I think around noon, the heat index was around 96. It's probably way higher than that now. [00:00:16] Speaker B: I think the rest of the week we're going to get into triple digits, too. They're Talking about like 40 million people affected that way in the nation. It's going to be really, really bad. So got some neat things to talk about it and things we need to prepare ourselves for. [00:00:40] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Wow. You know, it's something that everybody needs to think about, and I'm sure there are a lot of senior specific sort of things that we need to think about. So what you got on that? [00:00:52] Speaker B: Well, so we have this heat dome that seems to be our annual friend that shows up every once so often, particularly where we're living. We seem to be included in that heat dome. It seems to include us. But, you know, there's a lot of things you got to take in mind. You're already looking at a lot of things. You know, we talked about UTIs and, and some capacity issues for loved ones. But. But heat stroke can also cause some of those features, too. You need to be really careful about them. So there's some signs for heat stroke that you know, just want to be mindful that you know about. Like there's several symptoms like high temperature and hot skin and whether or not your altered mental state is altered. Rapid eye, heartbeat and rapid breathing can be a problem. So if you're noticing that if they're having any kind of nausea and vomiting for unexplained reasons, you might want to ask about that. And, you know, and then you can get the normal things like headaches and dizzying and fainting that really apply. And then even flush skin, you can have an appearance of your skin going flush. What happens if you do that? You call 911 immediately. You get them in contact with somebody. You move them to a cooler place, maybe to a place like a fan or something. Like you remove clothing that you can to give them the ability to get cooler faster. One of the things I noticed on this tip list that I would have thought to do was you don't give them fluids when they're experiencing a heat stroke. You need to make sure that they get past the heat stroke first. So it's not about fluids. So I didn't know that. So that's something to keep in mind and we'll, we'll drop this in the show notes and kind of remind people about it. You know, the other thing, Barry, is you don't want to get the heat stroke, so you need to do. So a couple other things. Like, you know that inspection on your air conditioning that needs to happen? [00:02:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Making sure that it works. [00:02:31] Speaker B: To make sure it works. And you should do that at least twice a year when the season changes. It's usually a good time to do that when springs. We're about to. In the time period recording this spring has ended. So it's usually something you want to do before spring ends, but do other. Some other things too, like check your filters and, and, and make sure you're drinking water before you have this so that you can keep hydrated and then, you know, be aware of the signs. So yeah, it's something to look out for. [00:02:59] Speaker A: Speaking of signs, there's one other one there that, that hit me a couple of years back. I was doing a. It was an athletic event thing. I was doing a long bike ride up in the mountains and it turned out to be a lot hotter that day than I thought it was going to be. And my, my, my personal go to symptom for you've had too much is that everything sort of goes white like you're. When I'm. Oh yeah, everything around the edges start turning white. And that's usually my signal to no, you need to sit down, you need to pour some water over your head, you need to cool off because things are about to get bad. So yeah, that's another one to add to the list. And you're right about making sure that your cooling systems in your house are taken care of. A matter of fact, I spoke with my aunt just a little while ago. She was getting that arranged for the house that she doesn't live in anymore, actually, just to make sure that it's still running properly and doesn't cause a problem. And of course sure that the, the people at assisted living facilities, the people who run the places are on. Are hyperv. Vigilant about this sort of stuff and are on alert about making sure that all of that stays cool. [00:04:06] Speaker B: I heard something on the news too that I used to do when we were a kid. Stay out of the hottest times of the day from 10am Till about 3pm if you don't have to do activities during that time, don't. Because that's honestly do it in the morning when you can or do it in the evening where it's cooler. You know, things like that we have to pay attention to. And sometimes you have to remind your loved ones about that too. You know, there's no reason to go get the mail at noon. [00:04:35] Speaker A: Yep. [00:04:36] Speaker B: Wait a while. [00:04:37] Speaker A: For sure. [00:04:37] Speaker B: And so I don't have those kind of issues. [00:04:40] Speaker A: Go back to the old concept of a siesta, you know, where you do morning things, then you take a nap or it'd be cool. [00:04:46] Speaker B: I used to do that all the time. Didn't you used to do that? You know, when you were little school, you'd have a nap time time. They wouldn't let you out of research at noon. It would be too hot. So yeah. [00:04:54] Speaker A: And luckily I'm in that retired period where I can have a nap anytime I want to and I do on a regular basis. [00:05:01] Speaker B: For folks who listening, he rubs that in every once in a while for me because I'm still working. But yeah, the nap is also something that we need to deal with. [00:05:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Come on over to the dark side. We have cookies. [00:05:13] Speaker B: Come on over. [00:05:14] Speaker A: So yeah, I think that's all good stuff to, to pay attention to this time of the, this time of the year or really anytime. Honestly, I. I think it's a good idea to cooling and heating systems checked on on a regular basis. [00:05:25] Speaker B: I do. [00:05:26] Speaker A: It's. Most places that do that kind of work would rather schedule it with you on a yearly basis than to do it on the fly. That way you know that when it's, when it's time for, for changes like that that you're, you're kind of at the top of the list. So it's a good thing to, to talk to them about that ahead of time, honestly. So I got a different topic. A while back we, we talked about ride sharing services and how that literally somebody needs to come up with a senior focused ride sharing service. Turns out they have. So Uber and Lyft, they're household names, right? You know that. Sure. At least for us anyway. But what changed with these guys lately is how easy they've made it for seniors to use their services without a smartphone. So Uber now lets caregivers book rides, handle payments, even schedule medication deliveries through something called Uber Caregiver. And apparently that rolled out last summer, the summer of 2024. And Uber Health is already being used by clinics and insurance plans to offer rides to and from medical appointments. So you don't even need the app anymore. You can go to goo uber.com rider call to ride. And we're going to put some links in the show notes about this, I'll have a nice table comparing some of these things, but apparently also not just an Uber thing. So Lyft has some similar features. You can set up a family account and they've got a healthcare program too. But there's something kind of clever too called Lyft plus Lively, which connects to, you know those jitterbug phones that you see advertised all the time. [00:07:00] Speaker B: So that's kind of cool. [00:07:01] Speaker A: Yeah. With this thing like you can press 0, you talk to a, to a real person and they'll get a ride sent out to you just done. So they're kind of a go between, between the, the senior and some of the, some of the ride sharing services. So, you know, if tech's not your loved one's thing at all, there's a, there's a wonderful site called Go Go Garrett Go Parent and there's another one called Arrive and they're very similar services. You just call a number, a human books a ride for you. Uber, Lyft, groceries, meds, you name it. And it's a, it's a subscription thing so it's around 10 bucks a month plus the fair. But it kind of gets you, gets you in the door. They go ahead and set your accounts up so that you'll get charged properly and you can just give them a call and they'll, they'll take care of these things for you and we'll pass. [00:07:49] Speaker B: I think that's actually really interesting. Yeah. [00:07:51] Speaker A: Yeah. For even more hands on help, there's even another one called Silver Ride. Apparently these are trained drivers who will walk you to the car, they'll help you with walkers, you know, the works. So that's silverride.com and finally there's the new one called Liftsilver that just launched nationwide. It's a different app, but it's got bigger fonts, it's got simplified screens, easier to board vehicles, US based phone support and caregiver trip sharing. And you can find [email protected] Ryder Silver but the gist really is there's no one size fits all here. But these tools can make up a huge difference in helping somebody you care about stay independent and mobile. So it's something that worth looking into to take advantage of. And the reason I bring these up is like, you know, we have often talked about comfort keepers as a great example for helping folks out with things around the house or taking them to appointments or rides and things like that. The thing with comfort campers is though is they have a minimum hourly commitment. So if you give them a call, you want to have them come out and do something. There's a four hour minimum and there's an hourly charge. So that can add up if you just need to go, you know, to a doctor's appointment or you need to go shopping or some things like that. So this might be a good alternative to spending a four hour ticket on something that needs to get done fairly quickly. And it's all good and it's vetted, it's, it's for seniors and I think it could help out a lot. [00:09:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And so I also think that that standard is fairly normal. Meaning that I've heard that four hour minimum from other places that are doing services like comfort keepers, so maybe not be. It may be sort of a general rule that you may run into. So, yeah, I think it's a really good idea to consider some of these other services. It's really good information. [00:09:43] Speaker A: Awesome. Good things to think about. Let's see here. One other thing. While I was talking with my aunt, this little thing came up that I thought it'd be worth talking to everybody about. Here is sometimes it's hard from a caregiver standpoint or even a technical caregiver standpoint to, I think it's called the curse of knowledge. You know, you don't, you don't know what you don't know. And the things you do know seem easy once you've, once you've learned them and seen them. So my aunt was talking to me today and getting ready to, we were getting ready to get off the phone and she said, oh yeah, I got one other thing I need to ask you about. Says, how do I set the clock on my phone? I said, okay, tell me more about what you're looking for. Because really the clock should be set automatically on your phone. [00:10:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:33] Speaker A: Oh. She said, oh, no, I don't, I don't mean my setting the clock, I mean setting the alarm. I said, huh, okay. You know, and those are things you and I just assume we know how to do. It's, you know, we go to the clock app, we do our thing, we set an alarm and it happens. We were able to turn it off and all that, but I never thought that she didn't know how to do that on her phone. So she had, what she'd been doing is apparently for dinner every evening, they go to their, their dining room and they hang out with the people that usually have dinner with and there's a, there's a fellow that it's near at her table or near her table, who she asked to sit to help her out and set her, set her alarm for 6:30 the next morning. And he does that every evening. He just sets the alarm for her. And she said, you know, I'd kind of like to know how to do that myself sometime or to set a different alarm. So I, I tried to walk her through it and I ended up having trouble kitten to, to attaching to her phone where I could share her, share screen, show her how to do it. So I ended up making her a small video for it to show her all the steps and how to find the clock and all that kind of stuff. So, so hopefully that's going to take care of it. But you know, she said, well if, if that doesn't do it, the next time you're here you could show me how. I said okay, I'll do that, not a problem. But it just reminded me that there are so many things that we take for granted as being quote unquote, simple things on these tech devices that not everybody realize, not, not everybody thinks of them as simple. [00:11:58] Speaker B: What I thought you were going to tell me was that she had her time zone wrong and that because I've had that problem happen to me. What do you mean your clock's not right? And there's even a side issue with that. Especially if you're on an iPhone, there are clocks you can be set, you can set to say tell me the time in you know, Atlanta or California. And they don't always make it obvious that that clock is set for California time. So yeah, if you're having problems like that, check that and make sure that, that, that's not an issue. [00:12:26] Speaker A: And here's another obscure one, very similar to that is that a few years back my mother in law called and said something that's odd with my phone, the time is off on it and it was an hour off. And I thought it was a time zone problem too. But we looked at it, it wasn't a time zone problem. Everything, everything looked fine and it was getting its time from the network. Turned out there was a bug in the cell tower near her house, that the time zone was wrong on the equipment in the cell tower. And the cell tower usually just sends all that out to the other phones and say this is what time it is. [00:12:56] Speaker B: How does she resolve it? You just called the company or something? [00:12:58] Speaker A: We called the company and told, told her what, told them what was going on because I did a little troubleshooting and I was able to turn off the cell signal and just Connect it to WI fi and WI fi set the time properly. But when you'd go back to the cell signal, it would, it would, it would put it back, set the time wrong. So yeah, they rebooted, rebooted the tower and took care of it. So that was very obscure one for sure. For sure. [00:13:22] Speaker B: Yeah. You have to be careful those kind of things. You're right about the knowledge. Sometimes you just don't know. So that's why we're trying to make sure we do what we provide them a list of answers and I bet our show notes is pretty thorough. Now we're coming up on a year having done this. I bet our show notes are probably packed full of things. Yeah. So, you know, again, if you like this kind of show and you want us to continue, you need to like us and go ahead, subscribe to us too so that we can keep doing it. [00:13:47] Speaker A: Yeah, we really appreciate that sort of thing. And in any kind of reviews that you can do and whatever your podcast platform is, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any of the other ones, just, you know, if there's a review mechanism, we really appreciate that, that helps us a lot and lets know everybody's out there listening. And oh, that reminds me, listeners, we've gotten some new folks lately from New Orleans. We have a new couple of listeners from the New Orleans and Slidell, Louisiana areas. So that, that's pretty cool to see on our, our analytics. So shout out to NOLA and parts around there and we appreciate having you on the, having our, having you on the listener list. So it's all good. Well, I think that's a, that's a, that's a quick shout out for everybody today. And like Bobby said, please dislike and subs subscribe and give us any kind of reviews you could and we really appreciate you being here and we will see you next time for care, tech and tips. [00:14:41] Speaker B: See you all later. Stay cool. [00:14:43] Speaker A: Stay cool.