Donegal separated couple share €500k Lotto win with different tickets
In Letterkenny the 500,00 jackpot was won with two tickets which were bought within a few hundred metres of each other in two different shops — Mac’s Mace on High Rd in Letterkenny and The Paper Post on the town’s Main St.
They may have been unlucky in love but an estranged couple hit the Lotto jackpot when they scooped €500,000 with two separate tickets with the same numbers.
Pat O’Hagan from Letterkenny, Co Donegal, collected his €250,000 cheque at Lotto headquarters in Dublin after his numbers came up on Saturday in the Lotto Plus 2 draw.
But, amazingly, his was just one of two tickets which scooped the prize, as another ticket in the town had exactly the same numbers.
The second winner refused to reveal their identity, preferring to remain anonymous. However, sources have revealed that the second winner was Pat’s estranged wife, Margaret.
Amazingly, both did the Lotto numbers separately last Saturday.
Margaret, a former hospital worker at Letterkenny General Hospital, did a €12 Lotto ticket at The Paper Post on Letterkenny’s Main St last Saturday. Pat did his €4 ticket at Mac’s Mace on the town’s High Road.
The pair went to Dublin by Bus Éireann coach to collect their winnings yesterday and were due to return to Letterkenny last night.
They have a grown-up family.
Pat celebrated his win by sipping champagne at The Voodoo Lounge in Letterkenny on Monday before travelling to Dublin.
He said he was looking forward to spending some of his winnings on a trip to Florence in Italy, as he has a love of architecture.
He revealed he used the same numbers he has been using since 1988 to scoop the windfall.
Pat revealed “I won over €1,000 in the mid-’80s but haven’t won anything since.
“I’m really looking forward to taking a holiday in Florence in Italy soon, to see the Statue of David because I’m interested in art and sculpture.
“I’m also going to visit my older brother in New Mexico later on.”
Big summer storm bringing high winds and heavy rain is expected to sweep across Ireland today.
Met Éireann said a combination of gale-force winds, heavy rainfall, and abnormally low pressure will make for dangerous conditions in south Munster and east Leinster.
The Coast Guard has strongly advised the public to stay away from exposed coastal areas, particularly cliffs, piers and harbour walls during the inclement weather, warning that high waves will make these places “extremely hazardous”.
Met Éireann said there would be strong gale-force winds of up to 110km/h in many parts as a deep depression swept in across the country from the mid-Atlantic.
Up to 50mm of rain is expected to fall in some parts, with higher totals possible in mountainous areas, bringing a high risk of coastal and river flooding.
The worst-affected areas are expected to be the southern counties of Cork, Waterford and Kerry.
Meteorologist Vincent O’Shea said most of the country would experience “very inclement weather” today.
However, he said the stormy conditions would not be comparable to Hurricane Charley, which hit parts of the country in 1986, bringing record-breaking winds and rainfalls.
Nevertheless, he said conditions would be treacherous in many parts, with south Munster experiencing the heaviest rainfall and strongest winds.
He said the weather represented a dramatic change from the mild and sunny conditions experienced earlier in the week.
The Coast Guard has advised the public not to go out on exposed coasts, cliffs and piers with high winds and low pressure expected to generate seven-metre swells in several coastal areas.
Irish Coast Guard manager Declan Geoghegan said: “Do not attempt to cross at fast-running river or flood water fords as they may be stronger and deeper than you think.
“Flooded urban areas may contain many hazards, not least of which include submerged open manholes and downed power lines.
“The combination of tides, forecasted gale warnings for the next day or so, high sea conditions and swollen rivers may result in very dangerous conditions,” he added.
The Road Safety Authority also warned motorists of hazardous driving conditions.
RSA chief executive Noel Brett advised that a build-up of oil on the roads following the recent dry spell combined with rain could cause skidding.
“Our advice is to slow down and keep a safe distance [at least four seconds] behind the vehicle in front of you to allow for poor surface conditions,” he said.
How To Make Love Last
Marriage help: Lessons from Hope Springs ‘Eternal’
First, the bad news: Tons of Americans are unhappy with their love lives. Now, for the good news: It’s very often fixable.
The aptly-titled movie, Hope Springs, exemplifies that trajectory through the hard-won reconnection of Kay (Meryl Streep) and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones)(pictured above left). Thirty-one years of marriage have left the couple bereft of any connection and mired in excruciating monotony: Each morning Kay fries one egg and a strip of bacon for Arnold, who hardly notices her, and the days end with their retreat to separate bedrooms. They haven’t had sex in nearly five years.
Desperate for physical and emotional intimacy, Streep’s character, though timid and traditional, plunks her savings into a weeklong retreat to rescue their marriage, despite her husband’s disgust at the notion. What happens next are the heart-wrenching heroics of a couple working to find each other again after years of hurt, anger, and, ultimately, withdrawal.
Although this plot line often escapes the happily-ever-after mantra of so many Hollywood rom-coms, the story will likely resonate with the many longtime couples who have wrestled to reclaim lost love. And for those who hope to attain lasting, loving partnerships. The screenplay actually developed from the writer’s own soul-searching after a series of ill-fated relationships. The resulting film reconceptualizes romantic partnership as less fairy tale and more deliberate, in which we “choose our partner every day,” Vanessa Taylor tells U.S. News. And she projected those values onto a more seasoned couple, for whom the effort would be tougher but the reward, perhaps, sweeter.
Indeed, sustaining a long-term relationship takes effort. “You start to gain such familiarity that you don’t put the effort into paying attention to each other,” says Sheryl Kingsberg, clinical psychologist and professor in the department of reproductive biology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “The long-term couple that’s the most successful is the couple that has figured out you really have to work at maintaining a relationship and maintaining romance.”
Sex plays a huge role in that effort. “You need that sense of intimacy that separates this relationship from all others,” says Pepper Schwartz, a relationship columnist for AARP’s magazine and website, and professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We’re talking about far more than a set of sensations here,” she says, explaining that sex creates comfort, closeness, and connection—literally, through the release of bonding hormones.
A lack of sex is particularly damaging, experts say. “Bad sex or no sex does way more to subvert an otherwise really good relationship than good sex does to promote an average one,” Kingsberg says, citing statistics by American University psychology professor Barry McCarthy, who claims that a healthy sexual relationship boosts marital satisfaction by 15 to 20 percent, while a “dysfunctional, problematic, or non-existent” sex life saps a relationship by 50 to 70 percent. The latter category describes the sex life of at least one in five couples, Kingsberg says.
Among those who seek Schwartz’s advice, sexless unions are a frequent source of dismay. “It’s not like this need goes away. It’s very common, and people are hugely upset about it,” she says. Worse, the situation carries a sense of shame, which leads to silence on the subject. “There is a taboo about talking about it, because it’s seen as not just a relationship failure, but a personal failure…the longer there’s no sex there, the longer the couple themselves can’t talk about it.” A lack of both sex and communication reinforce each other, wounding the partnership repeatedly. “You get a sense of rejection, you feel hurt, you feel the person doesn’t see who you are…you start to withdraw,” and all of that pain damages your sex life, further unraveling your relationship, Schwartz explains.
Conversely, an emotional connection can create the physical one. That sensibility inspired Meryl Streep’s performance, says the film’s director David Frankel, who also directed The Devil Wears Prada. “Meryl was at pains to make clear in her performance (that) physical intimacy wasn’t the ultimate goal,” Frankel says. “Satisfying physical intimacy only came because there was genuine emotional intimacy.”
Is laziness a medical condition?
Lack of exercise should be treated as a medical condition by doctors, according to one physiologist from the US.
A sedentary lifestyle is a common cause of obesity. Excessive body weight and fat lead to diabetes, high blood pressure, joint damage and other serious health problems.
“I would argue that physical inactivity is the root cause of many of the common problems that we have,” said Dr Michael Joyner, from the Mayo Clinic research centre in Minnesota.
“If we were to medicalise it, we could then develop a way, just like we’ve done for addiction, cigarettes and other things, to give people treatments, and lifelong treatments, that focus on behavioural modifications and physical activity. And then we can take public health measures, like we did for smoking, drunken driving and other things, to limit physical inactivity and promote physical activity.”
Physical inactivity affects the health not only of many obese patients, but also people of normal weight, such as workers with desk jobs, patients immobilised for long periods after injuries or surgery, and women on extended bed rest during pregnancies, among others.
According to Dr Joyner, prolonged lack of exercise can cause the body to become deconditioned, with wide-ranging structural and metabolic changes: the heart rate may rise excessively during physical activity, bones and muscles atrophy, physical endurance wane, and blood volume decline.
When deconditioned people try to exercise, they may tire quickly and experience dizziness or other discomfort, then give up trying to exercise and find the problem gets worse rather than better.
Several chronic medical conditions are associated with poor capacity to exercise, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, better known as POTS, a syndrome involving an excessive heart rate and flu-like symptoms when standing or a given level of exercise.
Too often, medication rather than progressive exercise is prescribed, argues Dr Joyner.
Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center researchers found that three months of exercise training can reverse or improve many POTS symptoms. That study offers hope for such patients and shows that doctors should consider prescribing carefully monitored exercise before medication.
If physical inactivity were treated as a medical condition itself rather than simply a cause or byproduct of other medical conditions, health professionals may become more aware of the value of prescribing supported exercise, and more formal rehabilitation programs that include cognitive and behavioral therapy would develop, Dr. Joyner says.
For those who have been sedentary and are trying to get into exercise, the physiologist advises doing it slowly and progressively.
“You just don’t jump right back into it and try to train for a marathon,” he said. “Start off with achievable goals and do it in small bites.”
There’s no need to join a gym or get a personal trainer: build as much activity as possible into daily life. Even walking just 10 minutes three times a day can go a long way toward working up to the 150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity the typical adult needs, advised Dr Joyner.
Drinking cocoa May Sharpen an Aging Brain
Cocoa-Rich Drink May Help Brain Health in Older People
Drinking a cup of cocoa beverage every day may help the brain’s health in older adults, a new study shows.
The study, published in Hypertension, included 90 elderly people who already had mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which can include difficulty with memory, language, thinking, or judgment.
For eight weeks, they drank a cocoa drink that had high, medium, or low amounts of antioxidants called flavanols. Those who got high and medium levels of flavanols in their drink did better on tests of attention and other mental skills, compared to people who got low amounts of flavanols.
Flavanols “could be one element of a dietary approach to the maintaining and improving not only of cardiovascular health, but also specifically brain health,” write the researchers, including Giovambattista Desideri, MD, of Italy’s University of L’Aquila.
He cautions that the results may not apply to everyone with MCI.
“We can’t say, ‘Eat chocolate every day,’” says neurologist and Alzheimer’sdisease researcher Marc L. Gordon, MD, of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, N.Y. “People need to be very careful about making broad-based dietary changes based on one study.”
Mars, Inc., maker of the cocoa powder, funded the study.
MIXED VIEWS
Chocolate can be high in fat and calories, and more research is needed to see how much help it is, or isn’t, to the aging brain.
Importantly, this study does not say that eating cocoa daily can help prevent MCI or Alzheimer’s. “It suggests that it may have a modest effect on some aspects of cognition among people with MCI,” Gordon says. “We need to look at this for longer periods of time and in people with Alzheimer’s as well as those with no signs of cognitive impairment.”
Sam Gandy, MD, PhD, agrees. He recommends exercise – 30 minutes of it, at least three times a week — over flavanols.
“Flavonoids are the subject of much interest and speculation, but the evidence for flavonoids pales in comparison to that for physical exercise,” Gandy says in an email. He is the Mount Sinai chair in Alzheimer’s disease research at New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
When it comes to cocoa, “moderation is key,” says Richard S. Isaacson, MD, of the University of Miami School of Medicine. “This is a great study. You are what you eat and you can change what you eat.”
To get more cocoa in your diet, Connie Diekman, RD, suggests the following:
- Make brownies from scratch with cocoa and oil instead of butter.
- Add cocoa powder to a banana-and-peanut-butter yogurt smoothie.
- Use cocoa powder and sweetener for chocolate milk.
Diekman is the director of university nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis.
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