A Short Visit to the E.R. on Christmas Eve

I woke up a little after midnight with a pretty intense pain on the right side of my stomach. I'd felt something earlier in the evening but thought it was maybe just gas.

I snuck out of the bedroom Mrs. Done by Forty, Baby AF, and our dog, Cayenne were all sleeping in while visiting my in-laws, and crept into the bathroom to, um, validate whether or not it was just gas. It was not.

I managed to ignore the throbbing and get back to sleep, but then the pain woke me up again around two in the morning. I started googling and it seemed like I might have appendicitis.

Daycare or Not Daycare

The other day, a good friend of ours asked if we knew a specific date we'd be hitting financial independence. Unfortunately, I told her I didn't think we could give an answer. At least in our case, I'm not sure we'll really be able to do a lot of forecasting.

Financial independence, ironically, becomes less in our control as we get closer to it. More and more is in the hands of the market, while our contributions make up a smaller and smaller portion of the overall portfolio. If the market goes up the next year or so we'll likely hit financial independence in my fortieth year without much problem.

If the stock market dips hard, then there's literally nothing we can do to make up for it. Those are the breaks.

Does FIRE Make for Healthy Comparisons?

My good friends recommended a great podcast recently, Dr. Laurie Santos' The Happiness Lab. The show is based on Santos' immensely popular class on positive psychology at Yale, "The Science of Well-Being", which at one point had over a quarter of the students at Yale enrolled, with hundreds of thousands more enrolled online for free through Coursera.

The podcast tackles the myths of what we think will make us happy (but doesn't), while also outlining the science of what actually makes us happy (even though it's not often what we think).