Andy

Ich komme aus Deutschland und wohne in der Nähe von Braunschweig

Not if you desinfect the needle you are using to drain and neither if you can take a little pain and rub the dead skin from the drained blister with some high volume alcohol. Cover it with a plaster and it is done for a few days. Alternatively you can use pieces of cloth soaked with camomile tea over the drained blister or honey , if you have time that is.

I once had a small thing that kept all my toes away from each other since I have hammer toes that sort of lean on the next toe. It was made from a hard but rather flexible foam to keep distance between the toes

Make sure that your feet are not able to move in the shoes. If nothing works use extra thick socks. And keep your feet dry even if it requires changing socks once or twice during the day. If your feet are sweating strong you could use babypowder in the socks. I must admit that I never had really problems with blisters on my feet. Not even during the basic training when I served but a lot of what I mention above helped guys who had the same prob back then.

If you take into account that the "cloth like feel" is nothing more than plastic backed with fibres glued or pressed to the frontside the "cheaper" plastic might just be the same foil that is used to be backed up with the cloth like fibres layer

Yes, I do.

Funny that you mention this. When I returned to school (technician college) I learnt that a lot of the grammar and spelling rules in my native language have been given up because pupils failed the PISA test twice in the language. So clever politicians decided to give up on these rules because pupils failed to learn them. I felt, and still feel, that the true problem was adressed the wrong way in order to make the statistic way nicer. It almost feels like a miracle now, how I was able to learn my native language without all these simplifications. For what it is worth, I still use the grammar and spelling rules I used to learn as a school boy. This most often earns respect but in one or two occasions made me not getting a job because the decider on the other side of the desk was already committing to the "new" grammar and spelling.

North American / Canada only as far as I understand. This sucks big time

A crossword withouth words crossing 3=e ; 4=a ; 1=i ; 7=t ; 5=s

It is a nappy .... n-a-p-p-y tsk tsk Seriously though, English is not my first language. I learnt bits in school, forgot the most of it in about 8 years after I left school and then started to learn it again on my own. I am still learning, in fact, I doubt I can say that I will have finished learning one day in the future just because it is all too different. I have talked to US Americans, English people and Aussies and although all speak the same language all three are pretty much different in parts. Also I enjoy to listen to Radio Ulster and Radio Scotland because both carry a different charme in language compared to the main (clean English) BBC program from England. Another difference can be seen in books of different times. At the moment I am reading "Lady Chatterley`s Lover" by D.H. Lawrence, for example, and it is entirely different to what I can read in more recent book releases. The next book on my list will be "Flatlands" by Edgar Abott and as it was written in the late 1800s, I am already excited about what I will be in for. By the way, I do not use spellcheckers. This doesn`t mean that I do not spellcheck though. If I find an obvious mistake after I posted a post I`ll edit the post instantly. If I do not see a mistake but there is one, it makes it more human. I handle translation machines like babelfish or google translation similar too. They are good if I miss a word but for a whole text I prefer translating myself, if I have to translate at all. I hope above makes sense and doesn`t carry too many mistakes, both grammar and spell.

Try to find your personal method against stress. Mine is going for a run between 30 and 60 mins every 2nd day, for the long breath so to say. Sometimes for the short moment a punching ball or sand sack works miracles as well if it is dead negative stress

I`d be interested in who did these studies and who paid to do these studies

Please note that the next few lines are from personal experience . They are definately not the "be it, end all" but give maybe a hint or two. Almost 5 years ago (in May) I quit smoking cold turkey from almost 50 cggies a day. Most important thing is to find a or the trigger. In my case it was a bad hangover that lasted for almost 2 days. My bud and I partied all night with lots of beer, vodka and jim beam-coke. After waking up I didn`t feel any need for cigarette, in fact I felt very ill with my bad hangover haha. It helped pretty much to get the need for nicotine down. Sometime during the second day I saw the remaining cigarette pack laying around and almost pulled out another cigarette. But then I put it all back and threw it to the bin. During the first few weeks this lead to funny occasions. For example, one bud offered me a ciggy and I took and hold it till I realized that I didn`t want it at all. Eventually I put it back and earned some laughter but it was worth the effort because I haven`t touched a cigarette since. In fact, I sit there sometimes and laugh out loud on myself because it is just too funny for me when I think about how dumb I was to even start smoking. Only important thing is to be 100% convinced and having found the personal trigger. I often hear people saying that they were 100% convinced but didn`t make it. Well, in my opinion they missed the last little bit even if it was about 0.0001% only. One really nice thing that comes back after you have quit is taste. You can definately taste better and so , in my case, the more I regained taste the less I had fast food from McD or BK. I also put on about 25 kg (~50 lbs) but I have got down a huge chunk in the past year again. If I get down 5 to 8 kg more (~ 10 to 16 lbs) I am near ideal weight again (not the bmi bulls). A Chili is not just the either hot spiced or lush meal anymore. A chili does definately have more flavours than just hot pepper. If you don`t want to put on weight after quitting you have to force yourself to do sports lots and giving sweets a miss more often. Favouring a salad over too much too fat food will help there too. Good luck with quitting Sarah, it is worth the effort

congrats !