ER Foibles and Aha! moments?

[ESRBob]

It's true confessions time... anyone got any weird or funny things you can tell us about doing as you adjusted to ER during those first years? Mine is that whenever the markets would go down a big chunk back in 2001-3 I would go around the house scouring up all the loose change and rolling it into rolls to take to the bank. I don't know why that seemed to work for me -- it was literally 'loose change' compared to the big bucks I was losing int he market, but that was what I did.

Or how about any Aha! moments when you realize your life has changed for the better? Like when I was cruising along a local overpass over the highway at 6pm one recent Friday and looked out into the traffic jam realizing, "oh yeah, all those people have been at work all week, and I used to be one of them...!"

[wabmester]

I spent my first year of ER thinking it was a sabatical. I was evaluating businesses to buy, looked at a couple of executive gigs, thought about writing a book.

After one particularly intense negotiation during a potential business purchase, I felt stress hormones being pumped into my bloodstream for the first time in months. That's when I said screw the sabatical, I'm retired. And I went outside to play.

[free4now]

In my first few months of ER I was definitely overly focussed on trying to pinch pennies. I spent a lot of time trying cheaper products, shopping at the Indian grocery store and realizing their produce is crappy, shopping at the discount grocery store that caters to Mexicans and realizing their stuff smells weird to me.

I finally settled on Trader Joes as my main grocery store.