Karin's Adventures

I know we all get "old" sooner or later, that's by design. I am hoping to get really, really, old - because that's still better than dying young. What I don't like are the side effects of getting old. For me the most noticeable, and most annoying, side effects of aging were mobility restrictions: morning stiffness, aching joints, start-up pain, lower back pain, sciatic nerve problems, maybe even early stage arthritis, or osteoporosis.

Instead of simply accepting the facts, or going to a doctor to get some kind of prescription, I went on a treasure hunt in pursuit of a solution to my problem, or at least an improvement of the condition.

Now, two months into my research and experiment, I am happy to report that things are looking really good! My mobility has greatly improved. Joint pain is almost gone in most situations. In addition to my main concern being a lot less concerning, I am also finding surprising improvements in other areas. Thinning eyebrows are growing in nicely again, I now have visible lower eye-lashes, my skin isn't itchy and dry anymore, the gaps between my receding gums and upper back molars seem a lot smaller lately, my respiratory allergies cause less frequent/severe coughing during the day.

How did I do all this, you may ask. Apart from a few general recommendations for a healthy life-style (eat less animal protein, get enough sleep, exercise every day) I attribute my success to three supplements that I added to my daily regimen, listed in descending order of importance.

1. one tablespoon full of colloidal silica (Hübner Silica Gel)
2. two capsules of high dose pure serrapeptase (Arthur Andrew Serrétia)
3. two capsules of cissus quadrangularis extract (Nutrakey Cissus Quadrangularis)  

I invented the awesome ExxoPok phone pouch - and I (try to) sell it on Etsy and Ebay. Not bad, for a start. It's like having a stand at the flea-market, though. Your shop isn't really yours, and the marketplace wants to make money off of you by charging various fees. Listing fees, transaction fees, monthly fees, service fees.........

So I started looking for ways to diversify, maybe add a web-shop to my own little old home page? Or sell ExxoPoks on Facebook? There are so many different ways to do that, I started to get confused. Shopify, Volusion, BigCartel, SquareSpace, 3dCart, LemonStand, BigCommerce, AmeriCommerce......... all fine products having several flaws in common.

They all cost monthly fees (after some initial trial period), ranging anywhere from $8 to $299 a month, depending on the level of flexibility you buy. Also, once you decide what e-commerce platform to use, you are pretty much "stuck" with them. Migrating to a different platform is complicated, or next to impossible, for most of these.

After weeks of digging I finally found a little gem called "Ecwid". It took me a few hours on the weekend to get this figured out, setting up a subdomain, adding a free template to it, customizing that and integrating Ecwid's shop plugin - looks great!

ExxoPok shop powered by Ecwid

Then I realized you can simply add that plugin to a Facebook page too. For up to 10 items the whole platform is completely free to use, forever. Which means, if I make a sale through Ecwid, all I'd have to pay would be Paypal's transaction fees.

I even figured out how to embed a single product widget right here, in my old blog!

Now that two of the three phones on our family plan were out of contract, and the "early termination fee" for the third line was about as much as one month's payment for the entire plan, we gave them one last call to cancel the whole thing.

Google's Project fi helps cut our cost in half. They charge only for the data that we actually use - at $.10 per KByte. No international roaming charges either; unlimited texting worldwide, unlimited phone-calls in the US; $.01 per minute for international calls; no charges ever for incoming calls worldwide; no contract to be stuck with; one easy simple bill to check right there, on your phone.

Too bad fi didn't come earlier - ten years' worth of unused data lost to Verizon could have added up to $10,000 more in our pockets instead.

Normally I don't trust banks. I have a quite negative opinion about them. I use banks because I have to, not because I want to. Today, though, I was pleasantly surprised about how one bank did business with me.

Here's what happened:

• at 7:28 a.m. I received a text message to my cell phone, and an email, alerting me of an international transaction on one of my credit cards. The message stated the transaction amount of $0.51 and the name of a person I did not recognize.
  
  
• at 7:30 a.m. I called the number on the back of my card and talked to somebody with a heavy Indian accent. I immediately thought, this was going to go South now - my English isn't good enough for Indian call center people.
  
  
• at 7:33 a.m. the Indian call center person transferred me to the bank's US Fraud Department. There I got to talk to someone speaking perfect American. She asked me a few questions to confirm my identity. Then she explained that my card had obviously been compromised, the fraudulent transaction would be reversed, and I would be issued a new card free of charge. My new card should arrive in the mail within a week, and that I may now destroy the old card which would be invalidated effective immediately.
  
  
• at 7:41 a.m. I hung up, thinking to myself "wow! that was quick."

What do we learn from that? Not all banks are evil. If your bank or credit card company gives you the option of setting up account activity alerts, use them! If your bank doesn't offer that level of service, demand that they do!

I know my design idea for the ExxoPok is ingenious. I know the "angle of dangle" solves the main problem that people have with today's big smart-phones. I also heard "hey, you should market that!" from a few people. I was thinking about it.

Still, thinking about something is different from actually doing it.

So when I finally set up my shop on Etsy early in November, I thought nothing would come out of that, probably. There are millions of products on Etsy. Thousands of cell-phone pouches to chose from, hundreds of them looking way more "polished" than mine.

Nevertheless - today it really happened! A lady in New York City ordered a black, left-handed ExxoPok for her LG G4 phone. I was so excited, I had to make that pouch right away. It will ship tomorrow.