Monthly Archives: January 2019

Senior living … with the emphasis on living!

It’s a concern I often hear.

Life in a senior living community means giving up your independence. Or it means you no longer own your own home. Or it means we’ll be isolated from our friends and family. And on and on.

But nothing could be further from the truth!

And so many people who come to live in a Diakon Senior Living Community later say they held back from making a decision and were suddenly forced to consider the move. They frequently add that they wish they had made the decision long ago, had they known the positive impact our lifestyle can have.

We at Diakon Senior Living Services are happy to debunk such commonly held myths. In fact, many of our residents say that community life opens up new opportunities for better health and wellness, quality of life and a sense of fulfillment they could never experience living on their own!

From greater independence to security for the future, the benefits can be life-changing:

Click here to read more!

A “dino”-mite marketing campaign

While I hate clichés, sometimes thinking “outside the box” can be a great idea, even if occasionally a daunting task.

A few years back, we were tasked with developing a direct mail marketing-focused post card for one of our senior living communities. But think about your mail for a moment and recall how many such cards you receive weekly.

So the goal for any such card is to get picked up and at least looked at.

For some reason—perhaps that book by Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History I read at night as a child, the blanket pulled over my head to avoid parental discovery, a flashlight held by my teeth—I thought: dinosaurs.

Decreased sense of smell could be linked to cognitive illnesses

Hmmm …

Not smelling as well? (And we don’t mean personal hygiene!)

According to Harvard Health, recent studies show that an inadequate sniffer could be a red flag when it comes to determining one’s risk for developing cognitive impairments (what the medical field calls dementia).

While much more research needs to be done before smell becomes a reliable diagnostic test for memory loss, a study published last year in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society claims that scientists might have picked up the scent on a new correlation.

Last September, the journal published a study conducted by otolaryngologist Jayant M. Pinto in which nearly 3,000 adults ages 57 to 85 were asked to smell and identify five odors.

Click here to read more about the results from this study…

A shared respect for the past

As Diakon’s unofficial historian for both the Tressler Lutheran Home for Children and the Topton Orphans Home, I am concerned about the ultimate preservation of the artifacts that remain from these orphanages, particularly when you consider one is now 150 years old.

For example, our “history closet” contains the painted portraits of Col. John Tressler and his son, Capt. David Loy Tressler—the founders of the classical academy and then soldiers’ orphans home purchased in 1868 by the Lutheran church, creating the Tressler Orphans Home. I assume the paintings date to the late 1800s.

When I brought out the portraits last year to photograph for our anniversary video, I found some of their paint was flecking, the image of Capt. David with a slight tear in it.

To my amazement, I found a nationally recognized art conservationist in nearby Carlisle, Pennsylvania, so one day soon, I will be loading the two large portraits into my vehicle and transporting them for repair.