Posted in Humor

Living with Crohn’s Disease

Image by Canva

I have always had a nervous stomach. At least that’s what everyone called the constant vomiting and diarrhea I suffered from when I was growing up. My brother nicknamed me “Vomit Lips”. Any stress at all would cause me to lose my appetite or get violently ill when I ate. 

I quickly developed a tough exterior after being called skinny everyday. I got used to being told I needed to eat a cheeseburger on a constant basis. I was told if I turned sideways and stuck out my tongue, I would look just like a zipper. I learned the rules for picking on people’s weight only applied to the fluffy not the underweight. One of a million of nonsensical rules formulated by God knows who. 

I frequented several doctors throughout my adolescence and at one point got force fed Jell-O because my best friend told the principal of my middle school that I was anorexic. I was actually confused at the time if I was anorexic or not. I wanted to eat, but I just could not get past the nausea. It made me literally sick. 

I was twenty two years old when I experienced, what I termed, an episode, but it didn’t go away within a few hours like it normally did. I was on my hands and knees in pain because I couldn’t stand up straight, I was alone, and I had a small child to take care of. Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and go to the emergency room.

Upon arriving at the hospital, they took my weight,which was 87 pounds, and all the other entry vitals. They did some blood work, determined that my inflammation rate was very high and that I needed to get a colonoscopy and an endoscopy immediately. Which, I might add, is not the most pleasant experience in the world, but extremely necessary and something I continue to get done every five years. I do remember pleading with them, jokingly, to do my throat first.

The surgeon and doctor determined that I had Crohn’s disease in my large intestine during these procedures and removed several polyps and had them sent off for a biopsy. I ended up being in the hospital for ten days. It was like a huge weight had been lifted off of me. I wasn’t weird or attention seeking. I was actually sick, but with something that could be treated and managed.

I spent the next couple of months trying out new medications and responding the best to the steroids which made me feel horrible in a thousand different other ways. As I got older, I realized I could control it with diet and probably could help control it with my stress level but that wasn’t going to happen with four kids. So I just focused on the diet.

I kept a notebook of what I ate and how it made me feel. I quickly learned all fried foods made me feel the worst with dairy foods coming in a close second. I would not recommend living in the south with that kind of diet. There are a lot of really informative books out there on gut health and eating an anti-inflammatory diet. For me, it has been all about trial and error, but I never stop trying to learn. My triggers seem to change and grow as I age. 

Overall, I have learned to manage my health and I look and feel healthy more often than not. Since my diagnosis, my sister has been diagnosed with Diverticulitis, my mother has also been diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and my brother has gotten Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I’m not a doctor, but there seems to be a genetic link here.

Posted in Humor

Tips for Repairing Credit

I spend most of my work week either selling homes, listing homes or helping people repair their credit in order get them into a position to buy a house. I also do financial consulting on the side. So if you follow me on Medium, you will notice I am usually joking around and writing humorous articles. But this time I thought I would actually lay out some helpful advice.

I learned about credit the hard way as many of us did that came from my generation. In school, they taught us how to make a good apple turnover, but not how to balance a checkbook. I turned eighteen, ran up a bunch of credit, and didn’t pay it off. What was the worst that could happen? Throw in a couple of bad marriages and I was prime bad credit candidate number one.

Luckily for me, and my children, I got my act together and figured out some tricks to make repairing credit easier than we think it is. Like anything else, there is a method to it. It is still a lot easier to ruin credit than it is to fix it, though.

Seven Years

There is a rumor that all debt falls off your credit after seven years and while some debts do fall off (and some don’t), one debt in particular never goes away. So please make sure your children know this before they get way more student loans than they need. Student loans do not ever fall off of your credit. It is extremely rare to have them forgiven. They are a government backed loan and as we all know the government is going to get theirs. Nonpayment of student loans will keep you from buying a house, even if your student loan is 35 years old. So first and foremost, pay your taxes and your student loans.

Credit cards

Reduce your debt to income ratio by only having one or two credit cards. Make the minimum monthly payment on all of these credit cards except for the one you owe the least amount of money on. Pay as much as you can on that one alone, the minimum only on all of the others, until it is paid off and then do the same for the next smallest one. This is called the snowball method.

You can pay them off according to the smallest amount or the highest interest rate. The highest interest-rate would be preferable, but if you don’t have access to that information or don’t want to spend the time to find it then just pay off the smallest amount first.

Secured credit

If you don’t have any open credit cards and still have a bad or low credit score, take $300 and go open a secured credit card with your bank. Do not open a secured credit card with a lender that is offering you a 47% interest rate!

Once you have opened your secured credit card, go make a purchase of $100 or so and then wait for the bill to come in. Once the bill comes in pay above what is due but do not pay it off. You want to make at least three monthly payments so it can reflect well on your credit score. You want to pay above the minimum payment to knock off some of the interest.

Do this every month until it is paid off. Please be aware that at the beginning, right after opening this new account, your credit score may dip before rising. This is normal. After that, you will see a steady rise as long as you make your payments on time.

Time

Think of the due date as the date you will lose points on your credit rating. Make sure that your payment gets there way before then. Allow for the mailman to be late or the post to get stuck in a pile on someone’s desk. In a perfect world, you would pay the bill online immediately upon receipt, but we all know that just is not feasible with debts and children and other bills. So just make sure you pay it before the due date.

Collections

I could write ten more articles on how to pay off collections, how to dispute collections, etc. I will keep this brief and just say use the snowball method mentioned above and pay off the most recent debt first and then refine that group to pay off the smallest balance.

Paying off old debt is not fun, but seeing that credit score rise is. And in today’s world, good credit will get you a lot further than just a nicer pair of shoes. Be diligent and you will reap the rewards sooner than you think.

This article is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered Financial or Legal Advice. Not all information will be accurate. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decision

Posted in Humor

Lookout Buzzfeed – I’m Taking Over

Photo Made By Kylie Craft

If I Was Quiz Developer At BuzzFeed

We have all done those quizzes on buzzfeed. Don’t even lie about it. The ones where you take a three or four question quiz to find out what kind of color you are or what number you are or who you are in animal form. For those of you that are closet quiz takers, I am not here to out you or embarrass you. This is way more common than you think it is. I am here because I deserve to be in charge of those quizzes. I have a brain full of untapped quiz material that will actually bring meaning to your life.

The last BuzzFeed quiz I took told me that I was a jaguar on the outside and a fluffy little kitten sitting in a cup on the inside. While this may be extremely accurate, that was not the information I was looking to find out. But I did still update my resume to include that fact along with the results showing that I am the color red, a pineapple pizza and was Al Capone in a former life. There is absolutely no way that BuzzFeed could say no to my proposition to run their whole business but primarily the quiz department after seeing these items.

Last week, I submitted my seriously impressive resume with some sample quizzes to BuzzFeed and it’s only a matter of time before I am famous and extremely, extremely rich. I picked a few to share with you out of the 700 that I sent.

  1. Take this quiz to find out if you are as dumb as your parents say you are!
  2. Take this quiz to find out why your husband hates you!
  3. What STD are you? The answer is always Herpes.
  4. Are You Gold digger or Just a hoe?
  5. Which Jonas brother do you smell like?
  6. Take this quiz to find out if you like carrots.
  7. Find if your personality is more suited for dragon fighting or yoga championships!
  8. Find out which reptile your ex is.
  9. Answer only three questions to find out the rest of your entire life in essay format.

I’m the brains of the operation so obviously the prolific ideas are my strong point. I will rely on BuzzFeed to provide the super complicated algorithms to get the correct answers to generate.

I hope you all look out for me because soon I’m going to be famous. And not just because I’m going to rule Buzzfeed. But also because I took a quiz that said I was going to be famous and married to Will Ferrell within five years. I have not told my husband yet.

Posted in Humor

The Day My Last F&$k Flew Away

We have all seen them before. People that just don’t care what other people think and don’t care what other people do. We will make fun of them but deep down be jealous of the dangerous and free way they live their lives. They sure do look happy though, we would think to ourselves. They better enjoy it now because they’ll be burning in hell soon for having all that fun. What a ridiculous notion!

I know we are a product of our environment but how can people really believe some of the things they believe. So you’re telling me that you really believe that your kind and loving God is going to send a baby straight to hell because they were not baptized? Or someone else straight to hell for loving the same sex or somebody other than their spouse? But yet you want to shout, “We are all sinners!” at every breath. The hypocrisy is too much for me sometimes. If people. would just sit down and think about things logically instead of blindly following what they’re told to believe in, the world would be a totally different place. And no, I don’t like granola and I’m not a hippie but I love the people that are and I love everyone else too because if you do what you want to do and you’re truly happy with it , then do it . But I have a hard time believing that a lot of people I know are really happy deep down. They squish their instinct or natural behaviors down to follow societies norms. I will lose friends over this post. I don’t care.

I used to be a lot different than I am now but now I am very close to being one of those IDGAF people. As of now, the only things I really care about anymore are my family, children and animals. The opinions of strangers are not on the list anymore.

It is hard to worry about impressing people after you experience a traumatic death. You realize suddenly how short life is. Do you want to spend it meeting societies expectations? Or living by a code that some guy wrote 1200 years ago? Or do you want to follow your natural instinct and do what you want to do as long as you are hurting no one else? That is where I am at now in my life. Going forward, I will be living my life according to how I see fit. My husband and I are on the same page so that won’t be a problem. As for the rest of the people who worry about what kind of purse they have instead of what kind of person they are, it is time to let them go.

I don’t have the time in my life left to waste on non-precious people and non-precious moments.

I didn’t literally see my last f$&k fly away but I felt it.