Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Huh, I was not aware how many Germans are on the forum!

Since I'm a pretty busy musician most weekends in summer time are already blocked, but if it's not too far off, I'd be interested.

I'm situated about an hour or less away by car from Landshut, Munich or Passau.

As we have established, our family structures are pretty similar, so it's not surprising that I too have a ADHD husband, MIL and kid :) my daughter's type is ADD, so luckily for me - no sports! One thing that's so important to me (I've learned about this at "how to ADHD" first) is to be hyper aware ...

Welcome to the dark side, we have cookies :) Since I've travelled this road before I've got plenty of thoughts, but not much time today to write them down. A few quick comments: - self diagnosis: selfDX is valid and often the the first step to an official diagnosis. Don't let anyone tell you ...

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 small and firm support ...

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! Whenever ...

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 ...

@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 ...

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 small and ...

@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 clear that they are added to ...

@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 different kinds ...

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 ...

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 ...