You sound like a serious person. Come on in; the waters fine; glad to have you, but fair warning; Alzheimers sneeks up when you least suspect it!
Been away from Chess for awhile.
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Especially at my age..... 
I try and stay mentally active. I am still a working musician, part time, and also work in the electronics field part time, so that keeps my mental activity going. I think Chess is a bigger challenge, sort of like mental aerobics...
So we have 3 things in common; your dog avatar; I love dogs. Our love of chess, and I've been trying to be a jazz drummer.
I've been away from Chess for about 3 years, and started thinking about it the other day. My old PC had been replaced last year, but I still had Shredder 12, that I had transferred to my new one when I set it up. First thing I did this week was upgrade Shredder to Deep Shredder 12 since I now have a Quad core I5 and figured it would run better. Then I noticed that my Chessimo which was the windows program and I used alot previously , didn't seem to want to run on my new PC. I counted on Chessimo to help dust out some of the cobwebs in my Chess thinking. I looked on the Chessimo site and saw that they now have an online version for about $20, so I got that. I really like the Online version , and have done about 700 exercises already.
I played one game so far with the new Deep Shredder, and suprisingly I got a rating of 1540 on my first evaluation game, which surprised the heck out of me. I guess the Alzheimers hasn't kicked in yet. Anyway, going to spend a couple of months trying to get my playing up to speed, and looking forward to playing some live games eventually.