-
Savvy Senior: Keeping Older Drivers Safe on the Road
Narration provided by Wondervox.
By Jim Miller
Dear Savvy Senior,
What safety tips can you recommend for older drivers? My 86-year-old mother, who still drives herself, had a fender bender last month and I worry about her safety.
Back Seat Daughter
Dear Back Seat,
With more and more older Americans driving well into their 70s, 80s and beyond, there are a variety of things your mom can do to help maintain and even improve her driving skills. Here are some recommendations by driving rehabilitation specialists that work with older drivers.
Get an eye exam: Because about 90 percent of the information necessary to drive is received through our eyes, this is a good first step in ensuring your mom’s driving safety. So, get your mom’s eyes checked every year to be sure her vision and eyewear is up to par.
-
The Twist Podcast #253: Skittish SCOTUS, Biden’s Brain Debacle, and Horrible Valentine’s Gifts for that Special Someone
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose as we consider SCOTUS’s sudden humility in the face of promised MAGA mayhem, Biden’s big bad brain day, and America’s favorite manufactured holiday. Be our Valentine!
-
Adventures in Gardening: The Pleasures of Raised Bed Gardening
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.
-
The Weekly Readlines February 8
BIG CUP: THE WEEK’S TOP STORIES
The House and Senate GOP took their marching orders from Trump and killed the border bill, to everyone’s shock and no one’s surprise. The border crisis is now theirs.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas lived to be impeached another day.
Taylor Swift set a new record with four Album of the Year Wins. And Tracy Chapman showed the world what serenity looks like, sharing a stage with a deeply respectful Luke Combs to sing her iconic song, Fast Car.
LGBTQ NEWS
FBI: Schools Are The Third Most Popular Location For Hate Crimes
Los Angeles BladeUtah’s First LGBTQ Community Health Center Celebrates Grand Opening
KSL TVUniversity of North Florida Students Protest Closing Of LGBT Center
GO Magazine -
One Thing or Another: Perchance to Sleep
Narration provided by Wondervox.
By Mark McNease
A lighthearted look at life, aging, and the absurdities of it all.
I’m an early riser anyway. I’m at my most alert and creative in the mornings, and if I manage to sleep until 5:00 a.m., I consider it a good night’s rest and I’m ready to go.
Do we sleep less because we’re older, or are we older because we sleep less? It’s a mystery for the ages, pondered at 3:00 a.m. when we’re in bed staring at the ceiling or the wall, wondering if we will go back to sleep. It’s a toss-up: sometimes we do, and many times we don’t. Something trivial or significant catches our mind like a shimmering fishhook snapped up by a grouper, and soon we know we might as well get out of bed.
-
Savvy Senior: Does Medicare Cover Weight-Loss Treatments?
Narration provided by Wondervox.
By Jim Miller
Dear Savvy Senior,
Does Medicare cover any weight-loss treatments for overweight retirees? I just turned 65 and need to lose about 100 pounds and would like to know if Medicare can help.
Overweight Owen
Dear Owen,
Yes, traditional Medicare does indeed cover some weight-loss treatments like counseling and certain types of surgery for overweight beneficiaries, but unfortunately it doesn’t cover weight-loss programs or medications. Here’s what you should know.
Who’s Eligible
For beneficiaries to receive available Medicare-covered weight-loss treatments your body mass index (BMI), which is an estimate of your body fat based on your height and weight, must be 30 or higher.
A BMI of 30 or above is considered obese and increases your risk for many health conditions, such as some cancers, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke and sleep apnea. To find out your BMI, the National Institutes of Health has a free calculator that you can access online at nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmicalc.htm.
-
Cathy’s Wealth of Health: Healthy Digestion In Times of Stress
Narration provided by Wondervox.
By Cathy McNease, Dipl CH, RH
It is a familiar problem: stressful events occur and our digestion goes to hell. For some it means loss of appetite, others will resort to binges on comfort foods. Diarrhea, constipation, bloating and indigestion are other common reactions to stress. I fall prey to all of these as well, and over the decades have figured a few things out to help. First, minimize stress as much as you can. Second, don’t allow the stress to send you off the rails in your food choices.
If we can minimize the increase in stress hormones being produced, that is a step in the right direction.
Maintaining an anti-inflammatory diet, as much as possible, is a good start. The following tips will reduce cortisol and adrenaline, which increase with stress. Limit as much as you can these foods: added sugars, processed foods, dairy products, gluten, too much meat, and refined oils. Rely more on non-starchy vegetables. Also watch your intake of coffee and alcohol.
If GERD (gastro-esophogeal reflux disorder), heartburn, or indigestion are the issue, here are a few suggestions. Foods that increase stomach acid problems include very spicy foods, deep fried foods, tomatoes, onions, chocolate, citrus, carbonated drinks, cocktails, caffeine, and mints, especially peppermint, which relaxes the valve between the stomach and esophagus, allowing acid to come up to the throat. Also, limit canned and vitamin C enriched foods.
-
The Twist Podcast #252: Taylor Triumphant, Joltin’ Jodie Foster, and Some Twist Podcast Predictions for 2024
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose we we toast Taylor Swift’s conquest of the world, give mad props to Jodie Foster, and makes some fun Twist Podcast predictions for the coming year.
-
Health Beat: The Importance of Stretching for Older Adults (Includes Video)
Health Beat is a feature at LGBTSr promoting health and well-being.
By Mark McNease
I’ll confess – I’m not good at taking my own advice when it comes to stretching, but the older I get, the more obvious the need for it becomes. I can feel my muscles, especially in my legs, contracting and in need of get a good stretch. Maybe knowing there’s a problem is the first step in addressing it! This year my objectives including losing 50 pounds, and listening to my body when it speaks to me, which is daily.
Stretching is a simple and effective way to improve our health and well-being, especially for older adults. As we age, we tend to lose flexibility, range of motion, and balance, which can lead to various problems such as pain, stiffness, injury, and reduced mobility. In my case, I was diagnosed with Restless Leg Syndrome. I’m convinced that stretching would be a better remedy than medication, but for now I’ll do both.
-
On the Map: Cruising the Caribbean on the Anthem of the Seas (Includes Slideshow and Video)
Narration provided by Wondervox.
By Mark McNease
On the Map is a feature at LGBTSr offering travel reviews and experiences.
If you know us, you know we love to cruise, and we’ve been doing it for the 17 years we’ve been together. Now that we’re both retired from the 9-5 world (I prefer the word emancipated), we’re cruising even more. We went to Canada last October, with stops in Boston, Portland, Bar Harbor, Halifax and St. John. We’re heading on another cruise in May, but in the meantime … we just did an 11-nighter to the Caribbean, on Royal Caribbean’s Anthem of the Seas.
Cruising is one of the most popular ways to travel and relax at the same time. Cruises offer a variety of benefits that make them appealing to people who like just chilling out at sea, and people who love visiting ports and taking excursions. You can get it all on a cruise, and it’s one of the most affordable getaways available. If you didn’t want to spend any extra money for food, you wouldn’t have to. It’s included! We like going to some of the specialty restaurants, and I enjoy eating locally for lunch, but there’s food available on the ship 24/7.
Five ports in five days!
I love sea days, when we have the entire day and night just to relax, do activities on the ship, encounter people we’ve made friends with on the cruise, and … nap! I’m a big napper. If I can’t get an hour’s sleep in the cabin, I’m happy to recline in a chaise on deck or by the pool, and settle in for a good read and a snooze.
-
Mark S. King Among Playwrights Featured with National Queer Theater’s ‘Write It Out’ at New York’s LGBT Center
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.
-
The Twist Podcast #251: Rick’s Big Birthday, Caribbean Cruise Memories, and an Interview with Hollywood Hustle Author Jon Lindstrom
Join co-hosts Mark McNease and Rick Rose for a recap of Mark’s Caribbean cruise, party hat hurrahs for Rick’s big birthday, and Rick’s interview with Hollywood Hustle author Jon Lindstrom.
Winston Greene, a has-been film star, wakes one morning to find his six-year-old granddaughter at his bedside—traumatized, unattended, and gripping onto a thumb drive. She comes bearing video proof that her mother, Win’s troubled adult daughter, has been kidnapped by a murderous gang demanding all his “movie money” for her safe return. But what they don’t know is…his movie money is long gone.