Early Retirement Extreme Forums

A few years ago I've listened to an episode of the BBCs "The infinite monkey cage", which stuck in my brain ever since. It's called "The teenage brain" and the researcher states that we should parent the other way round as society does now - lots more freedom when the kids are sm...

High IQ is heritable, and runs in families like mine (my 4th sister is also very high IQ, my 3rd sister is above average IQ, very socially popular jock type, or as she has expressed it with great good humor "In any normal family, I would be the smart one." ) Haha, I can relate to that! Wh...

Today I had listeners as I practiced my tin whistle, by our creek. Two field hares were sitting next to me and listened briefly. I spend a lot of time at his creek and have watched many birds, but hares have never come this close before. One hare was really sitting just under 3 meters next to me. I ...

Yes, I can attest to the wonders of hyaluronic acid. I recently purchased a face cream (a relatively inexpensive organic store brand of a German drugstore chain) with hyaluronic acid and I was amazed how my (as of yet very light) wrinkles simply vanished after first use. I did not know that there ar...

@axelHeyst and @jacob have already very eloquently stated many of my feelings regarding MBTI. My brain runs mostly on pattern recognition, so naturally MBTI is highly appealing to me. Is it really “dehumanizing” to sort people into 16 different categories? 16 is a lot of variation, IMO. I would also...

Another voice for normalising going NC. I haven't seen or spoken to my mother in 4,5 years. Luckily (no irony, I really mean that) my parents are divorced and I've still got my dad, brother and stepmom. I can relate to feeling defective or broken, but in the end I've told myself firmly that I am abl...

Consider joining a classic rock band, as a member or a Roadie, if you are not musical. Lugging flight cases and amps around is a great workout, not to mention energetic performances. That's obviously a little facetious, but not entirely. My hobbies keep me strong (said rock band and horseback riding...

I finally managed to read through your journal - another horsewoman, how neat! Your plan of permanently travelling with the horses sounds to equal parts wonderful and terrifying :) Here in Germany this would not be feasible I guess, because everything is pretty densely populated. 25 years ago people...

Is it maybe an effect of successful marketing and advertisement that only a new or newish car is viewed as "safe"? Or is it the fact that cars in the us are so unnecessary huge that driving a smaller car feels unsafe (because those ubiquitous trucks will flatten you in an accident?). Our s...

@henry, that's a very transactional way of looking at it. Step parents and step children often deal with jealously issues, because families get re-arranged, people get "replaced" - at least it often feels that way. Calling someone a "bonus mum" or a "bonus sister" makes...

@chenda - exactly. I don't like "step mom" because there's some negative connotations, and she's so much more to me. Total sweetheart, I love her to bits.
But it's very obvious she's not my bio mum, so I adopted that term. It's pretty common in Germany for patchwork families.

My bonus mom is from the Philippines. The last time she needed some official documents in Manila she and my dad had to stand in line for hours at the government agency and pay bribes to officialls to get the documents. Also, she's been back only 3 times in 30 years (money for travelling was never a ...

Bedsheets are amongst a selected few things I don't mend (zippers on coats come to mind as well). It's not because of the optics - those could be easily improved by choosing a similar coloured patch, an old soft T-shirt perhaps. The duvet covers it anyways, so it's not really important. But I couldn...

I'm a lifelong coaster (nearly 43, around 8 years of FT work, the rest PT or "Work-from-home-Mom"). My impression is that it comes down to personality. Coasting comes naturally to people who are predominantly generalists, as compared to specialists. Those two mindsets will make very differ...

Frohe Weihnachten, liebes Forum

Thank you @shaz and @moretrees for your kind words. In the end it was equal parts grief and relief - he's been obviously very unhappy with his blindness for years, and constantly terrified, but he was relatively healthy otherwise. We often debated if it was cruel to keep him alive when he suffered s...

The situation with your friends took me a few years back, when we had a similar thing on our farm. There is a small flat above our garages and one of the horse owners asked if she could move in there in exchange for helping in the stables. Initially we were very happy but the situation turned compli...

2022 has been a not so great year. A few things that happened, in no particular order. The most intense event was the death of my old horse in August. The end of an era. I’ve met my husband through this horse, and he's been with us for a very long time. His death kicked off a lot of reflection regar...

The bricks of our house are from around 1790, it was torn down and re-build with those bricks sometime in the last century. I almost daily use a fork my grandma owned and used (she was born 1919). Also, a frying pan that I was not new when I was a kid, so it's at least 45 years old. Lots of my kitch...

I often joke that we would have got divorced a long time ago if not for our 8 acres of land and the ridiculously large house. The main disadvantage I see with living in separate places is cost/redundancy. Keeping up two residences and equipping them with stuff and appliances seems needlessly complic...