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Continue reading →: Confessions of a FI Gambler Part 1 : $1,600 on BlackI’ve admitted to a gambling issue that keeps me away from any casino (Never Tell Me the Odds: The Dark Side of the Stress Vacuum). I have admitted to picking individual stocks (The Price of (Toilet) Paper Wealth). Both non FIRE like bad habits. I’ve spent years engineering my way toward the…
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Continue reading →: It’s Official — I Have Crossed the Line to the Dark Side of FIREI have hinted at it in previous posts, but today I am making it official. This was supposed to be the week I stepped away, threw off the bowlines, and retired. But… One More Year. The Dark Side that the FIRE community fights every day. A relentless condition, and somewhere…
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Continue reading →: Never Tell Me the Odds: Am I Risking My Good YearsI am causing my own stress. Every single day, and I mean every single day, I keep thinking about my number. When will we get there? How much are we saving this month? What does it mean when we get there? It’s this last one that has me completely wrapped…
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Continue reading →: Vacation Musings: Lessons on Relaxing in RetirementI got to thinking recently about vacations—their actual purpose, and what they will look like once retirement finally arrives. Back in the fall, I took a 10-day adventure of fun and frivolity to the tropical Caribbean island of Grenada. It was meant to be 10 days of just sitting back…
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Continue reading →: T-1: Mid-Course CorrectionsI have decided to keep the countdown clock as is. I am not leaving or retiring in a month as discussed in T-2. The countdown simply marks a passage of time for me, and when it hits zero, it will still feel like a big day. It might not be…
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Continue reading →: Random musings: Return of the Stormtroopers, The Empress, and the Hunt for JoyThe Return of the Stormtroopers With more and more Stormtroopers being mandated back to the Death Star office, I am enjoying work less. It has taken me years to get comfortable working by myself. Deep down, I truly expected that having more people around would mean more fun. More engagement.…
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Continue reading →: The Good Side: Why Work Isn’t All BadIf I look back at my previous posts, it probably sounds like my current job is slightly better than contracting the plague. Those are the bad days. But as I often say, we humans are wired to obsess over the negative, letting the positive moments drift by without giving them…
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Continue reading →: Hero vs. Villain: Words Matter, Part 2Good vs. Bad. Which one are we? We look at the jobs or relationships we left behind and subconsciously decide if we were the Hero or the Villain of the story. Typically, there is no in-between. We are one or the other. How we label our past dictates our inner…
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Continue reading →: The Husband Shield and Other Short-Term Memory GlitchesIn my 50s, my brain still likes to think it’s in its 20s. But let’s face it, there’s some mileage on the chassis now, and the body rears its head every so often to remind me. Take my knee, for example. It greets me with a dull ache after too…
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Continue reading →: Work things I won’t miss: Looking behind the Curtain of the Senior Management ClubAll of the Death Star Senior Managers are off-site for two days at a yearly strategic planning meeting. I am not there. My first instinctual feeling was, what the $%^%#? I imagine the Senior Management Club as a smoke-filled room of mastermind strategists plotting the future of the galaxy with…
Welcome to my corner of the Empire. Here you find my struggle to give up the Dark Side and finally Retire from force choking coworkers. Got to say I will miss that some day
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