Seasonal Allergies are Back

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Remember when it was impossible to misplace the TV remote? Because you were the TV remote? Remember when music sounded like this?
Remember when social media was truly social?

**Doug Pike** (0:17)
Hey John, how's it going today?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:20)
Well, this show is all about you. This is 50 Plus with Doug Pike. Helpful information on your finances, good health, and what to do for fun.
50 Plus brought to you by the UT Health Houston Institute on Aging. Informed decisions for a healthier, happier life. And now, Fifty Plus with Doug Pike.

**Doug Pike** (0:45)
All right, here we go. Welcome aboard on Friday. Holy cow, for, I guess, which for those of you who still work is half done at this point. You're on your lunch break, hopefully, or maybe buttoning up and sneaking out a little early. Just puts you all the closer to starting your weekend, and more power to you. And for the retirees in this audience, I presume it's just, I don't know, another day on which you can go do whatever you want to do. An interesting conversation recently with a friend, high school friend of mine who's been quite successful in his career. And he's still working a little bit more than he should probably. Or certainly more than he has to. He doesn't have to work another day in his life. Not another minute. He's doing very well, and I'm very happy for him. But he said he's doing it, and a lot of people our age do, just to keep his mind sharp. Way more important to keep that mind sharp than to start piling up money, which he doesn't need to do. And he feels like at least staying connected with the working world at least a little bit is good. And I would agree with that. From what I can gather after talking to a lot of friends who fully retired, there comes a time early in that stage where a lot of them, they tell me, got so bored and felt so not useless, really. Maybe just not, they weren't having to set goals for themselves. There was nothing that motivated them, really. And working in the garden doesn't work. How many rounds of golf can you play? How many times can you go fish? Well, golf and fishing can occupy a lot of my time right now. But here's why. It's so important to realize that those things, the golf, the fishing, the gardening, the bowling, the going to ballgames, whatever it is, we look forward to those things when they're not everyday things that we can do. When there comes the time that you can just do whatever you want. And immediately you go to all those things that you treasured so much when you were working full time. Oh man, I've got a three day weekend. I'm going to run down to the coast and do some fishing for three days. I'm going to the big ballgame next week. Whatever it was, you went because it was kind of a treat, if you will. And now it's not a treat anymore. It's just whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it. And I would imagine, and I'm kind of scared of this really, it would become very boring very quickly.
Very boring. I'm fortunate that I have a job I truly enjoy, one that enables me to have great conversations with really smart people, lets me learn something brand new almost every single day. I like the challenge of generating this show content. I like trying to find things that I hope you find interesting. And I like to throw in some curve balls on occasion, at least, just to make you really think about something. The more we use these brains of ours, the longer they'll work for us, so long as we do the two things almost every doctor I've interviewed since we started here 10 or 11 years ago. They all say to do this, no matter what condition we're talking about, it might be hangnails. Oh well, eat healthy food and exercise at least four or five days a week. If you do that, if I do that, we can keep doing this for a very long time to come. So anyway, another Chamber of Commerce Day in Houston and throughout the region, actually, we've got this giant wad of high pressure just pushing down on us. It doesn't keep the humidity from the Gulf of Mexico from sneaking in, but at least it does give us pretty sunrises and sunsets. Although when I was trying to leave the neighborhood this morning, my street faces east-west. And as I come down the street going east, there in the little hole in the trees and everything else is between me and the other side of the main street of the neighborhood. There's this big bright orange ball, and it is penetrating the windshield, which is covered with dew, covered with precipitation, well, not precip, but with moisture. And it just magnified. It was almost like somebody had a spotlight in my face. I couldn't see, I hit my wipers and got most of that stuff off the windshield, but it came right back, because it was, it wasn't fog, but it was just the heaviest air you can get without it being fog. And every time the wipers went across, I could almost see for about a half a second, and then it was right back to that piercing burning glare. And I literally had to pull over on the side of the street and get everything cleaned off before I could go out and actually get into traffic. I was a little bit scared about that. I really was, holy cow. So anyway, great day to go watch the Texas Children's Houston Open over at Memorial Park, where there were actually a lot of birdies on the board through the morning rounds. The guys who got out early, I think, are going to have a decent advantage over the guys who go out later as well. As hard and fast as these greens already are, and will become even more so as we get into the weekend, the morning tee times are going to have a slight advantage, especially today when it's still, the entire field is out there trying to make the cut and maybe get a paycheck this week. There was water dripping off my roof line late into the morning. That same moisture over at Memorial Park softens the greens just a little bit, just enough to help these players and give them the opportunity to aim to really tight pins that aren't going to be nearly so easy to find later in the day when everything dries out again. I'm kind of curious to see what they do with these greens going through the weekend, because clearly there's no rain expected. And unless they water them, they're liable to get really, really crispy and hard. And that would be tough. We've also got game two of the Astros, the 0-1 Astros after disappointing yesterday.