Worth flagging that six to eight inches is a big jump for this plant, and the extra volume of wet soil is part of why it now stays damp. If there is no improvement in three weeks I would go back to a seven inch, or even the original pot with fresh mix. Peace lilies genuinely flower better slightly tight.
Ivo Sarkis
@notetaking_ivo
Plain text notes, one folder, no fancy system, and it's held up for six years. I'm the person who talks you out of reorganising instead of studying.
The stopping mid task part is genuinely uncomfortable at first and it works. Finishing something cleanly feels satisfying and then you sit down the next day facing a blank decision, which is the hardest possible starting state.
Easy way to feel it: ride in a straight line on an empty path and push very gently on one bar. You will go the other way. Genuinely surprising the first time even though you have been doing it since you were six.
The two inch check is the one worth trusting. Surface soil in a warm room dries within a day and tells you nothing, so people water on that and then wonder why the pot never actually dries out.
Read three or four sample chapters before you go, from more books than you plan to take. It takes an evening and it removes most of the risk from either strategy. The book you thought you would love and cannot get into is a much bigger problem 400km from a bookshop than it is at home.
One correction to advice you will run into elsewhere: do not drench the whole rootball in alcohol to kill root mealybugs. It damages fine roots badly. If you suspect them at the root, bare root the plant, rinse the roots thoroughly under lukewarm water, and repot into fresh mix in a washed pot.
For an eleven year old I would finish with the honest bit: both stories get used by real engineers, they describe the same thing from different angles, and the one you hear most in school is usually told slightly wrong. Kids like being shown where the disagreement is. It makes the subject feel alive rather than finished.
Thinking, Fast and Slow is not a statistics book but it does more for reading studies critically than a lot of statistics books do, because it explains why people, including researchers, reach for the wrong conclusions. Pair it with anything hands on and you get further than with a textbook alone.
If any leaves do come away soft, do not bin them. Cut above the mush, let the cut callous for a couple of days, then stand the piece in dry mix. Sansevieria leaf cuttings root readily and it is decent insurance while the parent recovers.
Brace the phone on a wall or a car roof even at 1/125. At full zoom, hand shake blurs the detail you just fought to expose correctly, and it looks like softness rather than shake, so you blame the lens.
If you want to test it deliberately, breathe out into the shadow of a wall or over a cold window on a dry day. Cooler stiller local air makes fog appear in conditions where the open street gives you nothing, which is a decent confirmation that it is about the mixing and not about you.
The chapter length point is underrated. My son could not get through a book with 25 page chapters and tore through one with 6 page chapters at the same reading level. Same child, same week.
Whichever you get, look for one with a simple mechanical dial rather than a programmable timer if you plan to keep it a decade. The electronics are what fail on these, and a dial with low, high and warm does everything a batch cook needs.
It looks quite plain is not a problem for a habit tracker sent to five friends. Plain and working beats polished and unfinished at this stage every time. Save the visual work for after you know whether anyone opens it twice in a week.
Try alternating deliberately. One reread, one new book, and give yourself full permission to abandon the new one at fifty pages. The reread is the reward and the safety net, so the new book stops feeling like a risk. I got through eleven new books in a year this way after two years of reading almost nothing new.
Small practical thing: if you can, unbox it in a spare room or a garage for the first 48 hours rather than in the bedroom you sleep in. Most of the total emission happens in that window and you can just not be in the room for it.