Hi, I'm Jerry James!

I'm really excited about the steemit community, and steem as well. I hold many interests, including professional broadcasting-which is my current profession, but also drone photography, hydroponic cannabis gardening-It's legal in Alaska!- and cryptocurrency trading.

These days, especially cryptocurrency trading.

I've held an interest in cryptocurrencies since bitcoin was around $10 a coin, and have played around with trading cryptos in the past with a fair level of success. I could kick myself over all of the bitcoin I've just spent. I bought a flat-screen smart TV, audio equipment, Christmas presents, guitars-you name it, I've pretty much bought it with bitcoin.

A few years ago, I got pretty heavy into mining and trading altcoins and had been posting about it a lot on social media. I was sold on crypto investing, and sang its praises as the best investment opportunity of my entire lifetime. Yep, I was a crypto believer, and I traded with a few hundred bucks for a month or two, and everything was fine. I was making some money and posting on social media and learning the ropes and getting really excited and yapping away about it all the time. It's a good thing someone was listening, because I obviously never heard a word I said.

Life has a way of making you forget things. Important things.

We hadn't been in Alaska long. We came up from Muscle Shoals, Alabama. We sold our home and everything we couldn't bring on the ferry or a plane. What didn't sell was abandoned. Goodbye, Alabama.

The job I have is just a constant hassle, one of my sons got married, the other one got a girlfriend. Both of them became fathers within a month or so of each other. Our lives got busy and stressful and more of our time was consumed by work and family obligations, and with not only our sons but their women and children to worry about as well, money got tight, and I did the worst thing I could possibly do.

I just quit. But sometimes, life reminds us, too.

Fast forward to last month. I'm cruising Facebook and notice a post from a fellow I had talked to about cryptos back then. I had to read it twice. The post read something like, "This month, the profits I made from my crypto investments was more than I made at my job." He went on to say that while he wasn't ready to quit yet, he did see it coming much sooner than he had anticipated before he discovered cryptos.

I had turned this guy on to cryptos! Yet here he was, making it work for him while I continued to live life-if you want to call it that, like always. Working to make ends meet from month to month with no end in sight, and quite honestly, a pretty bleak outlook for any chance of a decent retirement.

That was a month and a half ago, and I have been trading and building my crypto portfolio ever since. My cash investment is $680 and today my portfolio is worth $1368, and that's down more than $400 from its high. I'm not worried though because there isn't a single coin in my portfolio that I don't believe in. Not one. I'm very happy to have added STEEM today, and it will be a regular purchase monthly. Nothing will get in my way again.

Nothing.

Life is still hard though. My middle son and his wife took off to Alabama. My wife is having issues with a bully at work, and it has been so stressful. It continues to be stressful because it goes ignored while she is attacked, slandered, falsely accused of not doing things she has done. It's a terrible situation. Honestly, we could both end up unemployed over it.

But things can always get worse.

Yesterday my oldest son lost his partner, Kate. She collapsed shortly after getting out of bed Saturday morning. We got the phone call from him saying paramedics were there working on her and we were out the door and at his apartment within fifteen minutes. By the time we got there, she was gone. She was 26. She leaves behind a one and a half year-old daughter and my son, whose heart is broken, her family in Alabama-all of us. He's lost his best friend. although they couldn't get along half the time, and my heart hurts for him and my granddaughter. She doesn't realize what's happened, she's just a baby. They both have a long, hard road ahead of them and I worry. They've moved in with us temporarily, and we're showing them both all of the love and patience we can, and that is all we can do. It's so sad.

Life is hard, but you can't quit. And I won't. I keep thinking that maybe things would have been different if I hadn't stopped trading when I did those few years back. Having access to more funds certainly would have relieved a lot of stress when they needed money, or when we needed money because we gave ours to them. Life is full of regrets and what-if's.

But no more.

I'll never stop investing in the things that I believe in. I believe in crypto. People who see it-Well, they see it. Cryptocurrencies are, I believe, the future of money, and it is just getting started. It isn't a get-rich quick thing or a fad. It isn't easy, and it is risky, but I still believe that investing in cryptocurrencies is the best investment opportunity of my lifetime. I might be stupid, but I never make the same mistake twice.

Good luck everybody. Never quit.