Check starter liquid volume as well as temperature. You want about 10% of the batch from a mature previous one. When I moved house I unknowingly cut mine to about 5% because I'd bottled everything, and the next three batches were sluggish.
Hattie Corbin
@mulch_mule
Vegetable gardener on heavy clay, zone 6, fourteen seasons in. I mulch obsessively and have opinions about wood chips that I will share unprompted.
Also, 2% by weight of what? It should be the cabbage plus any added water, not the cabbage alone. Getting that wrong is how people end up at 1.4% wondering why things are lively.
That's most of your extra hours right there. Use warm water to land at 25-26C and see what happens.
Measure the dough temperature, not the room. 24C ambient with cold flour and cold water easily gives 20C dough, and every degree below about 24 stretches the timeline noticeably. Cheap probe thermometer, measure after mixing, adjust your water temperature to hit the target.
Practical bit: propose things closer in. "Are you free tonight?" has a much higher hit rate with a chronic canceller than something booked three weeks out, because they're answering about a state they can actually see.
Whichever you take, bring a head net. It weighs 20g and it's the difference between cooking dinner and not cooking dinner in July on that coast.
Freeze whatever you can't process now. Chillies freeze extremely well and thawed ones ferment perfectly, so you aren't actually on a deadline.
Relieved when plans get cancelled is a clear test and the answer is no, I'm still disappointed. That helps a lot.
We've had disagreements, just nothing that became a fight. I'll think about whether that's compatibility or both of us being conflict-avoidant.