Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Spring means mortgages – new and renewals!

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I was just thinking that it was about this time of year six years ago when Chris and I started hunting for, this, our very first home. I did most of the house hunting with our real estate agent as Chris worked really long hours on the other side of town back then and he couldn’t get home in time to go out with us. If we’d always scheduled viewings that included him we either would have seen far fewer houses or our hunt would have taken a lot longer. As it was, I went armed with a borrowed digital camera so I could show pictures to Chris of the houses that I saw, and it still took about two months to find this nice solid house.

Having said that, and knowing that many other people are out there house hunting right now since it’s Spring … the best time to buy and sell a house, I’d also imagine that for many home owners it’s also time to think about your Mortgage, and perhaps begin to hunt for companies that specialize in Remortgages. I don’t envy any of you!

I can remember what it felt like when we applied for our first mortgage. You have to do that first when you start house hunting so that you know what kind of price range you can look for in a home. It was at that time that I discovered I still had a few listings in my credit report, that if I hadn’t managed to clear up in time, would have caused us a lot of trouble in securing a mortgage. We might have had to hunt for one of those bad credit mortgages as a result.

Luckily it was stuff that I’d payed off in the past, but hadn’t been removed from my credit report. I got the report cleared and we got an estimate of what kind of mortgage range we could afford and we were off to house hunt, or rather as I explained above I was off house hunting.

Still the whole experience was nerve wracking. I don’t like borrowing money from people or banks, and I don’t like owing money either. Of course when it comes to something like a mortgage, unless you won the lottery chances are you are going to owe a lending institution some money if you want to get a house.

We really lucked out with our first mortgage. Interest rates were at an all time low and we decided to take a variable interest mortgage. You know how good our mortgage was? We paid zero interest the first 6 months and then half a percent below prime which at first was as low as only 2% interest each month. We saved a lot of money on interest in our first five years of owning the house!

Last year we had to remortgage the home since our five year mortgage contract was ending. I hummed and hawed about it for at least a month before I started to seriously look for institutions with good mortgage rates. Once I had some figures I called up our current mortgage broker and discussed renewing our mortgage and when I told our agent that I’d found lower prices with another company I ended up lowering our mortgage rate by a whole percentage.

I discovered that I was a better negotiator than I’d thought I was! Still … the nerves, the stress!

My advice to anyone that’s seeking a new mortgage or is about to remortgage their home is to do some research like I did, and also make sure that your credit report is clean too. As my husband would say – Knowledge is power. Use it well.





A visit to the pain doctor

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This past Monday I had yet another appointment with my Pain doctor. She’s really a family practice doctor who happens to specialize in pain. She treats a number of people, even so rather well known people – so she’s gained a good reputation as a pain specialist.

She’s disappointed that the many pain meds that she’s put me on haven’t been helping all that much.

We aren’t going to try the synthetic marijuana again. When I told her that I was out of it for a few days after trying my first one, and that the same thing happened when I tried it again she thought the side effects were too much. It’s surprising though, considering that I’m on some very heavy pain medication you’d think the nabilone wouldn’t have hit me so hard. Oh well.

She also talked about weaning me off some of the pain meds that I’m currently on – again, since they haven’t had spectacular results. When she said she might take me off some of my meds I was terrified. They have helped me. Much more than she realizes.

I’ve been in pain on and off since 1992. I never had any pain medication at all. So that means I had no form of relief until I met this pain doctor in January 2006. With this latest Crohn’s flare that’s being going on since the fall of 2004 I was in terrible terrible pain. It was just getting worse and worse. Before being started on some pain meds in January of 2006 I could barely function. I was just lying on the couch all day. Not being the tiniest bit productive.

When I started taking the pain medication I got up off the couch. I started this blog and within a few months several others. I found a way to make money from home. Now, while I’m still not all that physically active, at least I can tolerate sitting up and moving around my own home. I can think more clearly too. When the pain wasn’t being controlled everything was just a fog and my concentration levels were very low.

So the pain meds didn’t help me get back to work. Unfortunately not. However, they did help me get a bit of my life back, not as much as I hoped, but through my work on the computer and the earnings I’m bringing in I feel like a contributing member of this household again.

I don’t think she’d ever completely take me off my medications. Well, if I really started to improve and get better certainly I wouldn’t need them anymore, but while I’m still sick I’d better stay on some. I can’t imagine going back to being unproductive and in constant severe pain 24/7 again. I’d lose my ability to make some income too.

Yes I still have some days when I’m in severe pain, and most days there’s at least moderate pain. The pain meds have cut my pain levels by at least 50% when they are working. Unfortunately, Crohn’s is a disorder that affects your digestive system and I know for a fact that my body doesn’t always absorb the pain medications that I take. How … well lets just keep it simple and say pain meds float. Ok? So, on the days that the pain meds move too quickly through my system it’s literally like I haven’t taken any pain meds at all.

I think after explaining the “digestive problem” to her, and that the pain meds have helped to some degree she understands. She did take me off the nabilone that I only tried twice. As I said the side effects were really bad and literally put me back on the couch with a spinning head and blurred vision, and she took me off another medication called Tramacet which is a mild morphine derivitate – similar to tylenol with codeine (I’m allergic to codeine so I couldn’t take tylenol #3, and this med was like tyl #3).

Well see how I do without the tramacet. It definitely didn’t do as much as the other and much stronger pain meds that I’m on.

Maybe I should put a disclaimer at the end of my posts? “This post has been brought to you by the benifits of strong pain meds.” It might help explain some of my stranger posts. LOL

Glyconutrients – Sugars that heal

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I’ve always tried to eat healthy by making sure that most of the food that I eat is home made and made with fresh ingredients. As some of you know I garden and grow some of the vegetables and fruit that we eat too. I just feel that many of the processed foods available in grocery stores and fast food restaurants contain too many chemicals, preservatives and unwanted fats.

I want to stay as healthy as possible, and considering that I already have an illness that affects my immune system it’s very important that I watch what I eat and try to maintain my health.

I carry those beliefs into any supplements that I choose to take. If I chose to take any supplements I try to pick ones that have natural ingredients in them.

I was asked to write about a new product called GlycoPlex glyconutrient complex. I chose to tell you about this product today because it fits with my beliefs regarding natural products. It’s made with all natural ingredients, and it’s designed provide essential monosaccharides that work with your body to help make all of the various systems within our body work more efficiently. It’s true isn’t it that when your body is healthy you are able to fight and virus’ and potential bacterial infections better isn’t it?

You know what I like best about this product? It doesn’t claim that glyconutrients will cure this disease or that disease like so many other supplement products out there. No, it only claims that by taking this supplement you will be giving your body more of the essential micro nutrients that it needs to help make it work more efficiently and as a result this should make you healthier and give you a much better chance at fighting off disease.

Essentially, glyconutrients are sugars that heal. That sounds like a contradiction doesn’t it? We’ve been taught that sugars are bad for us haven’t we? There are actually 8 different sugars, but there are two that keep popping up in our diets regularly, too often in fact. Without a proper balance of all eight sugars our health could decline. There is a far better write up about sugars and how they work than anything I could put in this post – please see the last link to learn more about sugars that heal.

GlycoPlex contains the eight essential sugars that our bodies need – Glucose, Mannose, Galactose, Fucose, N-AcetylGalactosamine, N-AcetylGlucosamine, N-AcetylNeuraminic Acid, and Xylose. Other ingredients in GlycoPlex are shark cartillage, Shitake Mushrooms, Psyllium Seed Husk, Fenugreek seed, Lecithin, Nutritional Yeast, Whey Protein Isolate and Kelp. All of these ingredients will work together to improve your health and build your immune system.

Please visit glycoinformation.com for more information about GlycoPlex and glyconutrients. The site has quite a bit of information and I came away feeling that I learn quite a bit about essential sugars and how they work in our bodies.

Once a blogger always a blogger?

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They say that when people first start blogging they sometimes hit a wall. Often new bloggers blog about blogging. If that wall stays up too long sometimes that’s all they blog about.

Well I’m certainly not a new blogger, but I am going to blog about blogging.

I’ve been thinking about how blogging has changed my life in so many ways since I started my first blog 14 months ago. I started blogging as an outlet, something to take up my time since I was starting to get bored with being stuck at home. Remember I’m only home because I have Crohn’s and haven’t improved enough yet to return to work.

Well, regular visitors to my sites know the rest of the story. One blog expanded into another, and then another and so on. At this point I probably have too many blogs! Oh well, it’s fun and it keeps me busy. It’s also turned out to be a great way to earn a living since I can’t earn a living any other way right now.

I’m not making as much each month as I did at my nursing job. Not yet anyway, but I can see it coming, probably within the next month.

I often wonder what would have happened if I’d started my first blog and then gone back to work a month or two later. Would I have kept blogging? Yes I think I would have.

Would I write seven blogs? No, probably not.

As a nurse I was working four 12 hour shifts in a row – two day shifts, one 11:30 to 11:30 and then a night shift. I’d have five days off but the first one I’d spend sleeping since I’d have just gotten off my night shift. So that left me four days to recover go from being a night owl to an early riser, get house work and other things done, maintain the garden, socialize, and do all my internet work – maintaining at least two large websites, moderating a reptile related forum, and running four mailing lists.

It’s possible that the gardening and photography blogs might have been in the picture by now had I gone back to work. I mean gardening, and the photography that goes hand in hand with it, has become a big part of my life in the last 6 years. I’m sure those sites would have arrived on the scene by now. Perhaps one of the tech blogs that I write as well since I do so much tech and design work.

I’m certain that I wouldn’t have had enough time in a day to have created the other blogs that I now write.

I guess now that I think about it, once I started blogging it just became something that I do. It would have evolved to some degree even if I had gone back to work before now.

How about you? How did you start blogging? Now that you have at least one blog do you think you’d ever stop blogging? Has it changed your life in anyway?

Obviously blogging has become a major source of income for me. It saved us! If I hadn’t found a way to earn a decent income from my blogs we could have been facing losing our house by now.

Re-establish natural lactobacilli with Femanol

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MedcoSouth has produced a new herbal supplement specifically for women. The all natural product is called Femanol.

Femanol, when taken regularly is said to help lower Cholesterol levels, control diarrhea and some of the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, as well as relieve gas bloating, and flatulence. It’s main purpose however is to help cure the root cause of Bacterial Vaginosis, as the main ingredients of Femanol are said to help re-establish the natural lactobacilli, boost your immune system and fight the existing condition. Taken regularly it should help prevent a recurrence.

To learn more about Femanol, how it works and to see a list of the natural ingredients use to formulate this supplement please visit the Femanol.com website.

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