by Paul Young on Friday, August 27, 2010, * Grape Seed Extract
This fact sheet provides basic information about grape seed extract—uses, potential side effects, and resources for more information. The grape seeds used to produce grape seed extract are generally obtained from wine manufacturers. The leaves and fruit of the grape have been used medicinally since ancient Greece.
What Grape Seed Extract Is Used For
* Grape seed extract is used for conditions related to the heart and blood vessels, such as atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and poor circulation.
* Other reasons for the use of grape seed extract include complications related to diabetes, such as nerve and eye damage; vision problems, such as macular degeneration (which can cause blindness); and swelling after an injury or surgery.
* Grape seed extract is also used for cancer prevention and wound healing.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Myrtle Geist, who celebrated her 103rd birthday Monday, has the uncanny ability to bounce back from illness.
By LORI VAN INGEN,
Myrtle Geist, who celebrated her 103rd birthday Monday, has the uncanny ability to bounce back from illness.
Geist twice had pneumonia that landed her in the hospital, and she had to have a pacemaker installed at age 93. She also has macular degeneration.
"Every day is a gift," her daughter, Phyllis Strittmatter, said.
Born Aug. 9, 1907, in Millersville, Geist was the first of two children of Charles Eagle and Mary Kauffman Siegler. Her younger brother is the late Harold C. Siegler.
Geist attended a one-room school in Millersville through grade eight.
She graduated in 1925 from Penn Manor High School. In her senior year, she was a member of the championship girls basketball team.
After graduation, she worked as a secretary for the Robert B. Myers insurance agency in Lancaster.
In 1948, Geist became deputy recorder of deeds in Lancaster, a position she held until she retired in 1973.
Coming from a musical family, Geist began taking piano and organ lessons as a young girl with the late Frank McConnell. She put those lessons to work during high school when she became the organist at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Millersville.
She later was the organist at St. Matthew's and Faith Reformed and substituted at Emmanuel Lutheran.
She met her husband, Allen H. Geist, through a mutual friend who knew of their shared musical interest. Geist had a group, Al Geist and the Dixieland Band, that played on WGAL.
The Geists married on June 25, 1938. They had two children, Strittmatter, and a son, Andrew L., both of Lancaster. They had no grandchildren. Her husband died in 1977.
After retirement, Geist attended the Happy Hours senior citizen group in Lancaster and joined the Melodious, a group that entertained at nursing homes. She also played the organ for the Quack Quacks.
She had to give up playing the organ just six months ago, when arthritis began affecting one of her fingers.
With AARP, Geist had the opportunity to travel to Hawaii.
The Homestead Village resident now enjoys playing bingo, with some help because of her macular degeneration.
Myrtle Geist, who celebrated her 103rd birthday Monday, has the uncanny ability to bounce back from illness.
Geist twice had pneumonia that landed her in the hospital, and she had to have a pacemaker installed at age 93. She also has macular degeneration.
"Every day is a gift," her daughter, Phyllis Strittmatter, said.
Born Aug. 9, 1907, in Millersville, Geist was the first of two children of Charles Eagle and Mary Kauffman Siegler. Her younger brother is the late Harold C. Siegler.
Geist attended a one-room school in Millersville through grade eight.
She graduated in 1925 from Penn Manor High School. In her senior year, she was a member of the championship girls basketball team.
After graduation, she worked as a secretary for the Robert B. Myers insurance agency in Lancaster.
In 1948, Geist became deputy recorder of deeds in Lancaster, a position she held until she retired in 1973.
Coming from a musical family, Geist began taking piano and organ lessons as a young girl with the late Frank McConnell. She put those lessons to work during high school when she became the organist at St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Millersville.
She later was the organist at St. Matthew's and Faith Reformed and substituted at Emmanuel Lutheran.
She met her husband, Allen H. Geist, through a mutual friend who knew of their shared musical interest. Geist had a group, Al Geist and the Dixieland Band, that played on WGAL.
The Geists married on June 25, 1938. They had two children, Strittmatter, and a son, Andrew L., both of Lancaster. They had no grandchildren. Her husband died in 1977.
After retirement, Geist attended the Happy Hours senior citizen group in Lancaster and joined the Melodious, a group that entertained at nursing homes. She also played the organ for the Quack Quacks.
She had to give up playing the organ just six months ago, when arthritis began affecting one of her fingers.
With AARP, Geist had the opportunity to travel to Hawaii.
The Homestead Village resident now enjoys playing bingo, with some help because of her macular degeneration.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Prep Track and Field Ageless wonder
At 83, Batavia volunteer Harold Anderson continues to have no trouble connecting with young athletes
Comments
The sun has climbed above the horizon this June morning, but it's full impact won't be felt for a couple hours.
That's good news for the six teenage girls who begin arriving, just like clockwork, at the Batavia High School track. Some drive themselves. Some are dropped off by parents. Another comes by bike.
One by one, they start to stretch.
Soon, it will be 7 a.m.
An elderly gentleman in khaki pants and golf polo, snow white hair showing from underneath his red baseball cap, joins them. There's good-natured banter before he goes to work, lining up five pairs of hurdles, side by side on two of the running lanes.
Class is in session for 83-year-old Harold Anderson who suffers from macular degeneration. It starts with the one-step drill.
This is a rite of summer for the assistant coach who works each spring with hurdlers and pole vaulters for the girls and boys track teams of coaches Chad Hillman and Dennis Piron.
Anderson, who retired from teaching at Kaneland in 1987 and quit coaching there in 1991, gives the term "veteran" new meaning. Prompted by former Batavia coach Mike DiDomenico, who still assists Piron, Anderson has volunteered here since 1991.
It's no coincidence that both programs have developed into consistent challengers for conference titles.
The magic is hard work
Three times a week, bright and early, Anderson puts his hurdlers through specialized drills at voluntary workouts that last an hour or so and run through July. You snooze, you lose.
"This is the best hurdle drill in America," Anderson says as he watches each girl line up for a turn, doing what is close to a walk-through over the five, tightly-placed hurdles.
They don't run all out. This is about feel. Emphasis is on form, balance and economy of motion with just one step between each obstacle before going over the next one, always with the same lead leg.
"When that trail leg comes down, they're jumping (over the next hurdle)," said Anderson. "That's why I call it the one-step drill.
"It looks easy but it's not," he continues as one of the upperclassmen navigates it smoothly.
Moments later, a younger girl loses her balance and has to stop before wiping out on the third hurdle.
"It's hard," Anderson says gently, knowing it's easy to get discouraged.
Several attempts later, the same girls gets through it, a tad shaky but with no bobbles.
"If you lose a little momentum, by the time you get to that fourth or fifth hurdle, you can't do it," he says. "That trail leg has got to come through and reach out because you don't get another step. ... instead of jumping the hurdle, you run the hurdle."
In an aside to an observer, he notes, "I have had kids do 10 (hurdles) in a row. It's a fantastic drill. You can take a sprinter and teach 'em how to hurdle."
Other drills emphasize starts, curves and stride.
His No. 1 sermon, though, stresses the importance of clearing each hurdle with the same lead leg, no matter if it's the 100-meter or 300-meter race.
Don't their steps get choppy and cost them time, trying to maintain that same lead leg?
"Not if your stride is right," said Anderson. "If you hit it right on the button, you'll be alright."
Then, he repeats an oft-used phrase with a chuckle.
"I tell them, 'You can cuss, but you can't say alternate,'" he says.
Connecting with kids
Natalie Tarter remembers meeting Anderson for the first time at one of these sessions before she started high school.
Tarter played soccer and basketball and from junior high, knew she was a pretty good sprinter. Her older brother would challenge boys to race her when they were killing time while having to attend their younger brother's little league games and she always won.
"(Anderson) said, 'We're gonna have you hurdle,'" Tarter remembers. "And the first time I tried it, I fell down and fell down hard. I mean, I was all scraped up on my leg and hip, a bunch of strawberries. It looked pretty bad.
"I said, 'I'm never hurdling again.' But he was the sweetest man. He said, 'You can take the next day off and regroup. It happens to everyone.'"
It does. And Anderson, it may seem, has seen it all.
He has macular degeneration, which impacts the center of a person's field of vision. He still saw the potential in Tarter. It was realized her junior year when she won the state title in the 300 hurdles and repeated as runnerup in the 100 hurdles. Injury kept her from trying for a double as a senior but she's now a sophomore on a track scholarship at the University of Wisconsin.
Brittney Bernardoni, another of Anderson's charges, will join Tarter at Wisconsin this fall but she won't be a member of the track team.
Bernardoni, who had an injury-plagued career at Miami of Ohio after winning the state pole vault title in high school, will go to Wisconsin's medical school. It's one of eight she could have attended, Anderson says with pride. She also ran hurdles remembers her first meeting with Anderson.
"He was older than I expected," she said. "But he's very kind-hearted, very supportive and he knows a ton. He's very self-effacing ... has accomplished so much but he's never one to toot his own horn."
Both standouts grew to enjoy the summer workouts.
"They were tough in the beginning, and no teenager likes to get up at 6," Tarter said. "But (eventually) I couldn't get enough of it. It was such a challenge to learn it. You felt like you were learning something new every day. Plus, then you had the rest of the day."
Little wonder, both, like many who have trained under Anderson, stay in touch after graduation.
His most recent state champ (300 hurdles), Kathryn Warner, will, too.
She will attend East Carolina University this fall on a track scholarship.
Call him visionary
"I didn't start hurdles until my sophomore year," said Warner, also an excellent vaulter. "(Anderson) kept telling me the hurdles would help me in the pole vault. He kept telling me how good I could be in the hurdles so I stuck it out.
"He's a legend. He can barely see, but he can see how many steps you're taking between hurdles."
And he sees more than his athletes might think.
As Warner's father, Guy, notes: "Even though he claims he can't see, from 100 yards, he can spot a trail leg that is a couple inches low."
Anderson prides himself on teaching technique.
"The hurdles and the pole vault are the two easiest events to get points in because three-quarters of the schools don't have pole vault coaches and only 20 percent have anybody that really know the hurdles," said Anderson, who began coaching and teaching in Catlin after graduating from Illinois Wesleyan in 1950. He also led the track program at Mooseheart early in his career.
In his day, the vaulter's poles were made of bamboo.
"I like technique," he said. "I even like coaching discus next to pole vault and hurdles.
"I'm not a yeller. But in 60 years, you ought to learn something."
He has, and often achieves his yearly goal.
"I like to get two athletes in the finals of the conference in each event," he said. "I think we've had about 90 percent success here. Then, you know you're doing something right."
That's a given.
"Perhaps what makes coach so special is the respect and admiration he gets from the athletes ... which is equalled by the respect and admiration he has for them," said Guy Warner.
"When you see athletes finish a race then come talk to him with a big smile on their face looking for approval, you know something special is going on ... everything is a learning experience."
And could be termed the never-ending story.
"This is therapy to me," said Anderson.
Therapy that works both ways.
Comments
The sun has climbed above the horizon this June morning, but it's full impact won't be felt for a couple hours.
That's good news for the six teenage girls who begin arriving, just like clockwork, at the Batavia High School track. Some drive themselves. Some are dropped off by parents. Another comes by bike.
One by one, they start to stretch.
Soon, it will be 7 a.m.
An elderly gentleman in khaki pants and golf polo, snow white hair showing from underneath his red baseball cap, joins them. There's good-natured banter before he goes to work, lining up five pairs of hurdles, side by side on two of the running lanes.
Class is in session for 83-year-old Harold Anderson who suffers from macular degeneration. It starts with the one-step drill.
This is a rite of summer for the assistant coach who works each spring with hurdlers and pole vaulters for the girls and boys track teams of coaches Chad Hillman and Dennis Piron.
Anderson, who retired from teaching at Kaneland in 1987 and quit coaching there in 1991, gives the term "veteran" new meaning. Prompted by former Batavia coach Mike DiDomenico, who still assists Piron, Anderson has volunteered here since 1991.
It's no coincidence that both programs have developed into consistent challengers for conference titles.
The magic is hard work
Three times a week, bright and early, Anderson puts his hurdlers through specialized drills at voluntary workouts that last an hour or so and run through July. You snooze, you lose.
"This is the best hurdle drill in America," Anderson says as he watches each girl line up for a turn, doing what is close to a walk-through over the five, tightly-placed hurdles.
They don't run all out. This is about feel. Emphasis is on form, balance and economy of motion with just one step between each obstacle before going over the next one, always with the same lead leg.
"When that trail leg comes down, they're jumping (over the next hurdle)," said Anderson. "That's why I call it the one-step drill.
"It looks easy but it's not," he continues as one of the upperclassmen navigates it smoothly.
Moments later, a younger girl loses her balance and has to stop before wiping out on the third hurdle.
"It's hard," Anderson says gently, knowing it's easy to get discouraged.
Several attempts later, the same girls gets through it, a tad shaky but with no bobbles.
"If you lose a little momentum, by the time you get to that fourth or fifth hurdle, you can't do it," he says. "That trail leg has got to come through and reach out because you don't get another step. ... instead of jumping the hurdle, you run the hurdle."
In an aside to an observer, he notes, "I have had kids do 10 (hurdles) in a row. It's a fantastic drill. You can take a sprinter and teach 'em how to hurdle."
Other drills emphasize starts, curves and stride.
His No. 1 sermon, though, stresses the importance of clearing each hurdle with the same lead leg, no matter if it's the 100-meter or 300-meter race.
Don't their steps get choppy and cost them time, trying to maintain that same lead leg?
"Not if your stride is right," said Anderson. "If you hit it right on the button, you'll be alright."
Then, he repeats an oft-used phrase with a chuckle.
"I tell them, 'You can cuss, but you can't say alternate,'" he says.
Connecting with kids
Natalie Tarter remembers meeting Anderson for the first time at one of these sessions before she started high school.
Tarter played soccer and basketball and from junior high, knew she was a pretty good sprinter. Her older brother would challenge boys to race her when they were killing time while having to attend their younger brother's little league games and she always won.
"(Anderson) said, 'We're gonna have you hurdle,'" Tarter remembers. "And the first time I tried it, I fell down and fell down hard. I mean, I was all scraped up on my leg and hip, a bunch of strawberries. It looked pretty bad.
"I said, 'I'm never hurdling again.' But he was the sweetest man. He said, 'You can take the next day off and regroup. It happens to everyone.'"
It does. And Anderson, it may seem, has seen it all.
He has macular degeneration, which impacts the center of a person's field of vision. He still saw the potential in Tarter. It was realized her junior year when she won the state title in the 300 hurdles and repeated as runnerup in the 100 hurdles. Injury kept her from trying for a double as a senior but she's now a sophomore on a track scholarship at the University of Wisconsin.
Brittney Bernardoni, another of Anderson's charges, will join Tarter at Wisconsin this fall but she won't be a member of the track team.
Bernardoni, who had an injury-plagued career at Miami of Ohio after winning the state pole vault title in high school, will go to Wisconsin's medical school. It's one of eight she could have attended, Anderson says with pride. She also ran hurdles remembers her first meeting with Anderson.
"He was older than I expected," she said. "But he's very kind-hearted, very supportive and he knows a ton. He's very self-effacing ... has accomplished so much but he's never one to toot his own horn."
Both standouts grew to enjoy the summer workouts.
"They were tough in the beginning, and no teenager likes to get up at 6," Tarter said. "But (eventually) I couldn't get enough of it. It was such a challenge to learn it. You felt like you were learning something new every day. Plus, then you had the rest of the day."
Little wonder, both, like many who have trained under Anderson, stay in touch after graduation.
His most recent state champ (300 hurdles), Kathryn Warner, will, too.
She will attend East Carolina University this fall on a track scholarship.
Call him visionary
"I didn't start hurdles until my sophomore year," said Warner, also an excellent vaulter. "(Anderson) kept telling me the hurdles would help me in the pole vault. He kept telling me how good I could be in the hurdles so I stuck it out.
"He's a legend. He can barely see, but he can see how many steps you're taking between hurdles."
And he sees more than his athletes might think.
As Warner's father, Guy, notes: "Even though he claims he can't see, from 100 yards, he can spot a trail leg that is a couple inches low."
Anderson prides himself on teaching technique.
"The hurdles and the pole vault are the two easiest events to get points in because three-quarters of the schools don't have pole vault coaches and only 20 percent have anybody that really know the hurdles," said Anderson, who began coaching and teaching in Catlin after graduating from Illinois Wesleyan in 1950. He also led the track program at Mooseheart early in his career.
In his day, the vaulter's poles were made of bamboo.
"I like technique," he said. "I even like coaching discus next to pole vault and hurdles.
"I'm not a yeller. But in 60 years, you ought to learn something."
He has, and often achieves his yearly goal.
"I like to get two athletes in the finals of the conference in each event," he said. "I think we've had about 90 percent success here. Then, you know you're doing something right."
That's a given.
"Perhaps what makes coach so special is the respect and admiration he gets from the athletes ... which is equalled by the respect and admiration he has for them," said Guy Warner.
"When you see athletes finish a race then come talk to him with a big smile on their face looking for approval, you know something special is going on ... everything is a learning experience."
And could be termed the never-ending story.
"This is therapy to me," said Anderson.
Therapy that works both ways.
Monday, August 2, 2010
Meeting Challenges: Ruth's Story
For years, Ruth MacCalman sewed them all and decorated her works with intricate embroidery.
About six years ago, she had to stop.
Glaucoma and macular degeneration were eroding her vision.
The pressure of fluids building in the front of the eye from glaucoma blurs vision, narrows the field of sight and can cause total blindness. Macular degeneration affects blood vessels in the macula, part of the retina, and often is associated with aging.
“People will put their arms around me, and I can’t see their faces at all,” MacCalman, 89, said.
A former accountant at the state prison in Deer Lodge, she quit working several decades ago after suffering a severe back injury in icy conditions.
As her eyes weakened, she gave up favorite activities such as golf and square dancing. No longer able to read, she has a woman come to her home each week to help with the mail and has marked the stove and microwave so that she can use the controls.
MacCalman stopped driving because glaucoma turned the white line down the road into a series of roiling waves.
She misses driving and is saddened at the prospect of giving up playing bridge with friends.
“I have to say, ‘Is that a diamond or a heart?’ ” she said.
She still has some of her sight, although her 98-year-old sister is fully blind.
MacCalman uses a short white cane because her legs go out and her hip can pop out of socket.
At the Montana Association for the Blind’s Summer Orientation Program, her orientation and mobility instructor, Tracey Orcutt, of Butte, adapted lessons in getting around to MacCalman’s physical needs.
In Aids to Daily Living classes, she learned different ways to tackle grooming, housekeeping and other everyday chores complicated by her vision loss.
A longtime baker, who also loved other types of cooking, MacCalman took both cooking and sewing lessons during the SOP.
Instructor Cherrie Albrecht, of Helena, showed MacCalman and other students how to use special self-threading needles for hand and machine sewing and to create special guides to move material in a straight line through the presser foot when sewing seams by machine.
“We just made so many things,” MacCalman said, ticking off sewing projects that included five pillows, six pot holders and a bag for carrying groceries.
She has two sons, a daughter, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. And her sewing projects will become gifts for family and friends.
At the SOP, she said, “The people have been just wonderful. It has been kind of like home.
“They don’t look at you as if you can’t do this, you can’t do that.”
For MacCalman, the adaptive skills learned are a key part in her goal to remain in the Deer Lodge home that the first of her two late husbands built in the 1940s.
“My main desire is I don’t have to leave it,” she said.
About six years ago, she had to stop.
Glaucoma and macular degeneration were eroding her vision.
The pressure of fluids building in the front of the eye from glaucoma blurs vision, narrows the field of sight and can cause total blindness. Macular degeneration affects blood vessels in the macula, part of the retina, and often is associated with aging.
“People will put their arms around me, and I can’t see their faces at all,” MacCalman, 89, said.
A former accountant at the state prison in Deer Lodge, she quit working several decades ago after suffering a severe back injury in icy conditions.
As her eyes weakened, she gave up favorite activities such as golf and square dancing. No longer able to read, she has a woman come to her home each week to help with the mail and has marked the stove and microwave so that she can use the controls.
MacCalman stopped driving because glaucoma turned the white line down the road into a series of roiling waves.
She misses driving and is saddened at the prospect of giving up playing bridge with friends.
“I have to say, ‘Is that a diamond or a heart?’ ” she said.
She still has some of her sight, although her 98-year-old sister is fully blind.
MacCalman uses a short white cane because her legs go out and her hip can pop out of socket.
At the Montana Association for the Blind’s Summer Orientation Program, her orientation and mobility instructor, Tracey Orcutt, of Butte, adapted lessons in getting around to MacCalman’s physical needs.
In Aids to Daily Living classes, she learned different ways to tackle grooming, housekeeping and other everyday chores complicated by her vision loss.
A longtime baker, who also loved other types of cooking, MacCalman took both cooking and sewing lessons during the SOP.
Instructor Cherrie Albrecht, of Helena, showed MacCalman and other students how to use special self-threading needles for hand and machine sewing and to create special guides to move material in a straight line through the presser foot when sewing seams by machine.
“We just made so many things,” MacCalman said, ticking off sewing projects that included five pillows, six pot holders and a bag for carrying groceries.
She has two sons, a daughter, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. And her sewing projects will become gifts for family and friends.
At the SOP, she said, “The people have been just wonderful. It has been kind of like home.
“They don’t look at you as if you can’t do this, you can’t do that.”
For MacCalman, the adaptive skills learned are a key part in her goal to remain in the Deer Lodge home that the first of her two late husbands built in the 1940s.
“My main desire is I don’t have to leave it,” she said.
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