Narration provided by Wondervox.

By Mark McNease

Gardening is good for the soul as well as the soil. There’s something about planting and watching your vegetables or flowers grow that gives you a feeling of accomplishment.

I’m in the process of renovating our vegetable garden. We have a large back lawn, and when we first moved here permanently from New York City, I wanted to create a real vegetable garden, not the sad attempts we’d made when we were only here on weekends. I ordered three wooden raised bed kits, comprised of six 4×4 rectangles. I then immediately made the mistake of putting two of these adjacent to each other, as 8×4 beds, forming one large 8×8 box. That would be all right, if you never needed to weed or prune or in any other way work within the growing area. I had the sense to put the third long box several feet away, so you could walk between them.

Three years passed. The wood rotted. The soil wasn’t producing very well. And this year I decided to redo the whole thing. The rotted wood has all been pulled out, but the mounds of dirt remain. I’m 65, I don’t shovel snow in the winter, having read stories every year about people my age suffering heart attacks while they shovel their walkways. I’m not interested in dying in my garden, like Vito Corleone in The Godfather. If the dirt had to be moved, it would be by someone else.

Reprinted with permission from Mark S. King’s My Fabulous Disease

The Emotional Triumph of Playwrights Living with HIV

You should know the end of the story first, because the ending demands to be heard. It took place last month in the largest event space at The LGBT Center in New York City, where hundreds of people were excitedly greeting each other, grazing at the food table or sitting in rapturous anticipation for a unique evening of theater.

Over the course of the next two hours, seven pairs of actors would take turns on stage, presenting individual scenes filled with insight, humor, and moments of joyful, sometimes painful truth.

The night was a triumph. There was laughter, emotional silences, nods of recognition and roars of approval. Those roars were only multiplied when, after the final scene, the playwrights who wrote the seven scenes were invited to the stage.

The playwrights were new to this. Some had never before written a theatrical scene. Some had traveled across the country to be there. And each and every one of them was living with HIV. They stood together, holding hands, while the packed audience cheered thunderously. It is a sound that would ring in the grinning playwrights’ ears for days to come.

Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose with a look back at an incredible year – the good, the bad and the meh.

Enjoy The Twist on Libsyn, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, and TheTwistPodcast.com.

Copyright 2023 MadeMark Publishing

Narration provided by Wondervox.

By Jim Miller

Dear Savvy Senior,

Where can I turn to for caregiving help? I help take care of my 80-year-old father and work too, and it’s wearing me out.

Worn Out Wendy

Dear Wendy,

Taking care of an aging parent over a period of time – especially when juggling work and other family obligations – can be exhausting. But help and resources are available. Here’s what you should know.

Identify Your Needs

To help you determine and prioritize the kinds of help you need, a good first step is to make a detailed list of everything you do as your dad’s caregiver and the amount of time each task takes. Identify the times when you need help the most and which tasks others might be able to do for you.

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So many cat owners put up with behavior problems that could have been prevented with the right knowledge and early intervention. It takes a lot longer to break a bad habit than it does to form one. And once a behavior happens for a prolonged period of time, the habit is activated in memory and considered automatic – neural circuits perform the habit without conscious thought. In other words, your cat may not be choosing to avoid the litter box any more – eliminating outside the box is an automatic action.

About Cat Talk Radio

Cat Talk Radio is all about cats, what makes them do what they do, why they occasionally misbehave and what cat guardians can do to fix it. We educate you on how to modify unwanted cat behavior by providing the proper environment and stimulation, enabling cats to express their natural behaviors in ways that are preferable for both the humans and cats. You will learn how to have fun with your cat, fascinating cat facts and be inspired to try new things, which will lead to a happier relationship and closer bond with your cat. We’ll also call attention to the plight of cats in our country, feel compassion for their challenges and share the message.

Narration provided by Wondervox.

We adopted two older cats several years ago when we lost our others (we’ve had a number of cats, and I had quite a few on my own over the years). Wilma was 3 at the time we got her, and she came from a ‘hoarder home.’ We had no idea what that meant, except that she had trust issues and had spent the first three years of her life uncertain and anxious. Our girl Peanut came from a pet store, via a local animal rescue organization. She was 5, and gorgeous. I saw her in the store window for three months, and I was baffled why someone hadn’t taken her home already. But she was older, and she wasn’t the type of cat to play with everyone who came up to the carrier. We got lucky, and she came home with us.

They’re now approximately 8 and 10+. Peanut has lost weight, and she recently started defecating outside the litter box. I was mystified, and stressed about her health. Then I realized she was constipated, and that constipation is a leading cause of cats doing this. I thought back over the previous week, and realized I had changed her diet to a senior wet food that was very different in its ingredients from the Fancy Feast she’d been eating for years (I give them almost exclusively wet food, except when we go away; then I have a cat person who comes twice a day to feed and care, and we leave dry food down). I got her to a (new) vet and was reassured after a thorough exam that she’s healthy and, once she got past the constipation, happy. All is well again. They make our house a home.