FYI

FYI, if you hit a rough spot an have to default on a loan, unsecured such as credit card, and you live in a state that does not allow garnishment of wages, don't even bother paying it off.  I did.  I also notified the credit reporting agencies and found out that it doesn't matter.  It is still on your credit report for 10 years.  The deck is stacked against the working class.  Always has been and always will be.  The banking industry crashed our world economy and nothing, nothing happened to any of them.  Wells Fargo just got caught setting up bogus accounts for their clients and collecting money on those accounts.  Screwed their depositors.  And guess what happened to the powers that be in that bank.  Nothing.  Nothing. Nothing.  The bank was forced to pay a fine.  No one went to jail for embezzlement, which was what it was.  No one went to jail for identity theft.  No.One.Went. To. Jail.  Had that been and average working person, they would already be behind bars for years.  So, best to just not use credit cards, save for what you need.  Try to have no debt at all.  That is my goal and I am getting very close to doing that.  And, by the way, your government is working for those same businesses that screw you.

Update on health issues

I'm not moving as fast as I want on regaining my health.  I have developed spike in heartbeat.  It has reached to 126 at one time.  I am on a beta blocker now for it.  Well, this week, I have spent three days stacking boxes and it was quite a workout.  Yesterday, I had a real problem with my heart skipping.  So today I am calling my doctor and asking for a referal to a cardiologist.  I want an opinion from a cardiologist.  Since heart trouble runs in the family, time to get proactive.  And I am back to walking 4 miles a day.

Black and Decker

Ok, I said I would never buy Black and Decker again, but I did pick up a B&D GH3000 weed eater.  It is rated really good.  We'll see,  I do hope it is as good as it is touted to be.

I'm making a little progress

I am making a little progress with my health routine.  I spent 3 hours doing yard work today.  I have kinda gotten my diet under control.  I am eating nothing with preservaties.  And I need to confess here.  I am not eating any processed foods because the preservaties make me so ill.  I can eat something like lunch meat and for hours I feel like barfing.  No  sodas but that was easy because I don't like them.  Carbs are my downfall, but I am working on that.  I really have to speed this up and get in shape and lose the weight.  I have popped a skin condition with the beta blocker.  For the first time in around 2 years, my hands are swollen, broken open and bleeding.  So I gotta get serious about this diet and exercise.  I am walking again. 4 miles a day.  So wish me luck.

Credit bureaus

Don't ever trust that little 3 number score you are shown when you pay those credit agencies that collect and sell your entire life.  Those three little scores they show you are not the real deal and if you are trying to make a mortgage or buy a vehicle, those lenders see a totally different score, usually many points lower than what you have been shown.  Your life is controlled by business and they will sell all your data at the drop of a hat and usually drop the hat themselves.  And banks and credit unions, when you inquire about making a loan whether you have any intention of doing so or not, will sell the information you give them to Every. Damn. Fly. By. Nite. Lending company.  Every one of them.  You have no privacy any more.  And do not ever think that you as a customer matter to any business or bank.  You do not.  You are just someone to be taken advantage of.  Best scenario, go cash only.  No credit cards, no checks.  It is not as difficult as you think.  However, you will have no credit then because every thing hinges on the number of credit cards you have.  Have too high a balance, negative. Pay it off every month. Another negative.  Use occasionally.  Another negative.  I really think that those doing those scores just toss a coin and see what comes up.  There is no rhyme or reason to these three little numbers.  Good luck.

I have had some healt problems

I have had some health problems, so the weight loss was on the back burner.  My bad.  I have had a sinus infection rocking along and making me miserable.  I  just thought it was my chronic sinusitis.  Well, it was, but it turned into a raging sinus infection complete with dizziness, nausea, chills and general misery.  I am now into a week of antibiotics.  I hate taking antibiotics, but if I had not stopped taking the Allegra D, I would maybe not be in the mess I am in now.  And I also have the beginnings of a kidney infection.  Not bad yet.  So, time to listen to my body, get it back into tiptop shape and get away from the chemicals. 

I buy organic food.  In fact I am heading down to the farmer's market this morning to get yard eggs and maybe some veggies if there are any available.  We are in between the end of the summer veggies and the fall veggies, so I may not be able to get any veggies for a few weeks.  My freezer is full of okra and squash and I have planted green beans, Trail of Tears beans, mustard greens, kale, turnip greens and beets.  We'll see if I get anything from them.  And I planted sweet potatoes.  I need those in making food for my furry friends.  I make the food for the dogs.  I do not try to make the food for the cats.  You can do a lot of damage because cats have such specific requirements. 

I am today making a lot of dishes and freezing them in serving size containers.  Actually what I do is freeze them in muffin tins, pop them out, and store in freezer bags.  And do not discard those freezer bags.  Wash and reuse them.  More later.

Backslide

Was really getting into this health thing, then a relative took off to Louisiana for two weeks.  She left her little dog for me to take care of.  She envisioned the little dog staying at my house.  Yeah.  Well that did not happen. The little do, a chihuahua mix, very hyper, and does not play well with other dogs.  She immediately attacked my Jock.  She immediately went back to her house.  She stayed there for two weeks with me running between my house, job and her house.  By the time this relative got back, I was exhausted.  No more leaving the dog for me to care for.  She will board the dog next time. 
Anyway, I let the doc put me on Beta blockers because I was having frequent bouts of tachycardia.  My heart rate was spiking to 127.  It only last a few minutes, but it is scary when it does happen.  Also, this week when I went in, he discovered what I have been trying to tell the docs for years.  I sometimes have skipped heart beats.  I called it stuttering.  He seems to think it is ok, so I will only minimally worry about it.  So, I am now back on my plan. 

New Necessary Goal

I had not been posting on this blog because, well, I had nothing to pose.  However, I am now dedicating this blog to my new, necessary goal.  I am 66 years old, kinda out of shape and way overweight.  I am at least 80 pounds overweight.  Add to that I have high blood pressure.  And none of the meds work on my blood pressure.  The only thing they do is make me sick, cause me to have skin problems, and outright allergies to them to the point of causing severe breathing problems.  Oh, and none of them have ever lowered my blood pressure.  In fact, they make it worse.  So my only options is to get in shape and lose the weight.  My goal is to take it all off by the end of the year.  I am working on menus.  I have started walking on the treadmill.  I can do 60 minutes at a relatively slow pace and that is what I am going to start off with.  I can climb 5 flights of stairs and do twice a day at work.  We are on the fifth floor and I take the stairs.  So that is something.  I am not completely out of shape.  I will post a picture soon and you can see how, for want of a better word, disgusting I look.  And I am going to post pictures as I progress.  I have my goal.  I have a size 5 dress hanging in my closet and I am going to get into that.  I either do this or I die. And since I am not ready to cash in my chips, I'm gonna do it.  My blood pressure routinely runs 158-165/75.  So you can see how necessary this is.  And I am going to use this blog to keep my focus.  Wish me luck.

Update

I got sick and was not on the treadmill for two weeks.  Before I even recovered from my illness, my children's relative with MS took a fall and broke two ribs so guess who had to take off work and take her to the ER?  And guess who had to go over there every day to make sure that she was eating, to check on her in general.  I did this for a week until her follow up.  Then I told her she was on her own.  She tried to tell me how much it hurt.  I had been in a similar situation when I had a 5 month old, a 17 month old and a 5 year old and I had a car wreck and broke three ribs, got a concussion and banged up both my knees.  So I already knew how this shook out.  So I laid it out for her.  Get up and walk or those ribs will not heal.  You have to keep your circulatory system moving if you want to heal.  And I told her it was up to her.  Well, I go over ever other day and take out her trash.  She seems to be doing better on her feet.  I haven't asked if she is walking or not.  I am done playing caretaker for people who refuse to help themselves.  Life is too short for self pity and if someone wants to sit and feel sorry for themselves, they will do it without me.  We'll see if she does what she needs to do.  She has never done it before. 
Now I am trying to get back to where I was.  I am still climbing 5 flights of stairs twice a day.  Haven't gotten back to my hour per day on the treadmill, but I have been spending a lot of time on yard work and will be working on my fence this weekend.  So I hope that counts for something. 

Continuing

So now the doctor wants to try a beta blocker.  That was what the first one was.  So I started doing my own research.  I found that these meds can cause diabetes and diabetes can cause high blood pressure. And that the damage done by these meds is not completely reversable. 

So 20 years on, I am in much worse shape than when I started this medicine.  I don't know if I will ever get back close to where I was.  And the really scary part is that they would have just left me on this crap and it would have killed me.  And they would have just never admitted that they had killed me with these meds.  I will not ever trust a doctor again.  I will question everything.  And the only meds I will take is an antibiotic when I absolutely need it.  Only when my body cannot fend off the illness.  Just think of the people that this medicine has already killed. 

I have joined the American Diabetes Associantion.  I have begun a rigorous exercise program.  I am in the process of working out a diet of mostly vegetables and fruits.  We will see how it all shakes out.  But I will do it without any so-called meds. 

And the dermatologist who cost me my job, he isn't a dermatologist.  Scott and White needed a dermatologist and didn't have one so they put a GP in that position.  They also put a newly graduated foreigner in as an MS specialist and she knows nothing about the disease. 

I spent an hour on the treadmill this morning.  I will walk 2 miles in the morning and 2 miles tomorrow afternoon.  I am planning on walking 30 miles a week.  And add exercises to that. 

Continuing

The only thing different was that this one was not a beta blocker and it still contained hyrochlorothiazide.  I started it in December 2013.  By January 2014, my arms had broken out in a god-awful mess.  They were oozing blood and pus.  I did not know what was happening.  I called the doctor.  He called in a prescription for steroid cream and said that it was caused by the cold weather.  In Apri, I could stand it no more.  I made and appointment and went in.  The first sentence out of his mouth was, "Oh you really can't take these meds."  He knew that the first time around was caused by these meds and he put me on them again.  Well, I stopped taking them.  He told me to use an anti-itch cream like benadryl.  Wrong again.  It exacerbated the problem.  My arms now looked like raw hamburger.  I went back. Now I needed a dermatologist.  Since I was no longer with Scott and White, I saw a different dermatologist.  He prescribed a spray steroid.  I used the sample on Monday when I saw this dermatologist.  It burned like hell.  I started having trouble breathing almost immediately.  It got worse Monday night.  I used the spray again Tuesday morning.  Then I picked up the prescription.  I read the literature.  It was not supposed to be used on open wounds and my arms were nothing but open wounds.  By Tuesday afternoon, my breathing was much worse and I called the nurse at the dermatologist's office.  She called me back and told me that the doc said to double the dose.  No, this is causing me to have asthma like symptoms.  Well that is what he said and she hung up.  I had not used this steroid since Tuesday morning.  By Wednesday, I was much worse.  I called again.  No return call.  Wednesday night was bad.  Thursday morning was worse.  I called again.  No return call.  By Thursday night, I was in real trouble.  I was in a full on asthma attack and I don't even have asthma.  I was so bloated.  I sat straight up in a chair all night because I was afraid to go to sleep.  At 8am Friday morning, I called my doctor's office.  I got and appointment for 1:30 that afternoon.  At 1pm, the nurse called and told me that the doctor said that I didn't need to come in because he couldn't do anything more for me.

Ok, so I muddled through the attack.  I wrapped my arms in gauze and went to work on Monday morning.  A friend who drives for UPS pushed for me to see his dermatologist.  I balked at first, but then I made and appointment for Thursday.  When I saw him, he told me I had chemical burns on my arms and he was going to treat me as a burn victim.  I spent an entire week in my house out of the sun.  I wrapped my arms twice a day in gauze soaked in a solution, then applied steroid cream.  Even after my arms cleared up, I would still break out in huge hives.  I controlled this with Allegra.  It took me over a year to get over this second assult to my system.  And now I had high blood pressure.  Those meds had given me high blood pressure.  And an extra 15 pounds.  So from April 2014 until March of this year no meds.  I went to a new doctor in February 2015. He did a complete work up.  He used a lab that was under investigation for paying kickbacks to doctors for referrals of people with diabetes and it was also receiving kickbacks from the drug companies for pushing their diabetic treatments.  It showed my cholestrol of 171 and I was now diabetic.  I blew it off after what I had found out about the lab.  Never in any of my physicals had any indication of diabetes surfaced even when I had had the lab work done after drinking a soda.  Now I was staying away from doctors.  But the beginning of this year, I went to see the remaining old school doctor.  He did a physical.  He didn't like my blood pressure and talked me into taking lisinopril.  Erratic blood pressure and racing heart beat, dizziness, feeling of general misery.  So we quite that one.  It did nothing to control the blood pressure.

Our very dangerous medical profession

Back in 1997, after my husband passed away from a long illness, my doctor, within a week of his passing, put me on blood pressure meds.  This med was called Ziac and the chemical component was bisoprolol fulmarate and hydrochlorothiazide.  This is a beta blocker and a diuretic.  I was kept on this for 11 years in spite of the fact that it did nothing to control my blood pressure.  When I was first put on it, my pressure was 144/80.  Now keep in mind I had been taking care of my husband for 10 years with a terminal illness.  Ten years of stress and it was only 144/80.  Anyway, after 6 years, I developed really dry, swollen hands.  They would itch like crazy, then swell and feel like I had millions of needles under the skin trying to break through.  Then they would split open and hurt like, well there is no words to really describe the pain.  So the post office, where I worked, sent me to a dermatologist.  His answer was steroid creams.  Shortly after I started having problems with my hands, I developed a severe kidney infection.  So now I am dealing with bloody hands and a kidney infection.  I started wearing cotton gloves to soak up the blood and surgical gloves over them to contain the blood.  After several visits to the so-called dermatologist, he decided I must be allergic to some of the industrial chemicals that I was being exposed to in my job.  And I was trading off antibiotics with the kidney infection.  I would finish one and within a week go to another.  In this mess we did allergy testing  with the chemicals that I would supposedly come in contact with through handling the mail.  I was told I had an allergy to paraphenelinediamine.  It is used in ink.  Well, not really.  Most inks are now soy based.  But the so-called dermatologist had decided that that was what was causing my problems and I had to leave my job.  Well, I was not about to leave my job when I only had about 15 years to retirement.  So I suffered.  The post office furnished me with the gloves I needed and was understanding when my hands swelled so much I couldn't work.  And it took a year to finally clear up the kidney infection.

So I delt with the hands until 2007.  I took an early retirement and gave up around 2000 per month in my retirement.  All this time my blood pressure is running around 155/55.  I kept calling attention to this and none of the doctors listened.  Oh it is low dose; it won't hurt you.  My hands did not clear up after I left the job.  And I was getting sicker and sicker.  Then in 2009, I made a trip to Denver to house sit for my son.  I was so short of breath I could not walk across the room and my feet and legs were so swollen.  I said nothing to my son.  When I got home, I called the doctor and told the nurse I thought I was going into congestive heart failure and I needed a timeline so I could put my affairs in order.  She told me it was the blood pressure meds and to come in and they would confirm it.  Needless to say I was very, very angry.  Think Mt St Helens when it exploded.  When I got there, I told the doc that I wanted to get off the meds.  His answer was, " Well we have to get you on something else." Nope.  I am quitting alltogether.  How do I do it?  Oh it is low dose.  You can just stop.  That in spite of the literature telling me otherwise.  So I called the pharmacist and she told me how to step down off it.  Within 2 months my cholesterol was down from 230 to 130. My tryglycerides were from 250 to under 100. I felt fantastic.  Fast forward to October of 2014.  I had a physical.  Everything checked out.  But my blood pressure was 125/70.  He pushed for more blood pressure meds.  I said no.  There was no indication of any pre-diabetes.  November I let him talk me into another bp med.  This time it was triamterene/hydrachloeothiazide.  And he assured me that it was totally different from the first me. 

Selling of America

Chevorlet is already making their pick up trucks in Mexico.  Ford is now moving operations to Mexico.  My dodge is no longer made in the US.  Now if you want a vehicle made in the US, you have to buy a foreign car such as Toyota, Honda and Mercades.  They may send the profits overseas, but they pay Americans to build the cars.  The only thing the big three do is send the profits back to the states.  That does not benefit anyone except the big shots in the company and the shareholders.  And they expect us to buy them.  Not me.  I will drive a Toyota or Honda before I will buy one from the so called big three.  They can kiss my grits.  I buy everything I can made in the USA.  If it is made here, I will buy it.  I don't care if it is higher priced.  I will buy it.  Because it gives jobs to citizens.  And we need those jobs.

Clark shoes

I just bought a pair of Clark Bendables.  They are beautiful shoes.  I bought my size, 7.5M, and they are a full size too small.  They are made in China, cost close to $100, and they are trash.  Moving the manufacturing base overseas has done nothing for quality nor has it done anything for the economy.  All the cheap crap, and I mean cheap only in the materials and finished product, is shipped over here and dumped on the American people and we like the fools we are, just suck it up.  I am buying American made and I don't care if those shoes cost me $200 or more.  I will pay it.
There a whole slew of shoe and boot makers in the US.  Just google American Made Shoes.  And I will buy from them.  Will it be cost effective?  No.  Will my feet thank me.  Hell yes!  Will it be worth it?  If I can help create a good job for only l citizen, then yes.

Savannah, Georgia

I went to Savannah, Georgia in the week between Christmas and New Years.  I loved it.  The historical district is absolutely beautiful.  The Savannah river flows right through town and I saw the most beautiful sailboat tied up there.  It had to be close to 100 feet long with sails of at least 80 feet.  it was drop dead gorgeous.  We went to a restaurant there and had fried oysters, gator bites and grilled shrimp with hush puppies.

We walked all over the historical district.  I saw the homes used in the movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.  It is positively the most beautiful city I have ever seen.  Even better than New Orleans.  I am definitely going back several times.  Can't wait till summer.  Two weeks at least.