Rita Onslow

The trimming advice is the one people resist and it works. The plant is trying to run more leaf area than its roots can supply. Removing two big leaves is not a punishment, it is balancing the books.

One environment thing: keep the project open. Editor open, terminal in the right directory, browser tab on the right page, all still there from last night. Reopening everything is a small friction that reliably costs me the first ten minutes and occasionally costs me the whole session.

If your reason for six hours is that you leave for work, do the whole dish without the chicken, keep it warm, and stir shredded cooked chicken in when you get home. Not elegant, but it beats eight hours of dry fibres and it still counts as dinner making itself.

Audiobooks count. I know some people are sniffy about that and they are wrong. Walking, cooking and washing up gave me back roughly five hours a week, and the same brain is doing the same work. If plot is what you are losing, an audiobook keeps continuity far better than four nights of ten drowsy pages.

If the shelf is anywhere near a cable run, a USB ethernet adapter on the OTG port is about eight dollars and takes wifi out of the equation entirely. Worth it for anything unattended.

Practical note on the one small bag constraint: mixed formats work well. One physical book for planes and takeoff, everything else on a phone or e-reader. The phone reading app is a decent fallback for queues and waiting rooms even if you would not choose it for an evening.

Worth saying plainly that putting it back on works. Meat that has cooled and gone back into a hot cooker for another two hours comes out the same as if you had run it straight through, so a tough roast at dinner time is not a lost dinner.

Worth adding a shower rinse before each treatment. Blasting the plant with lukewarm water knocks off a good share of the crawlers physically, so whatever you spray afterwards has less to do.

Layering helps more than people expect. Root vegetables at the bottom where it is hottest and wettest, meat on top so it is not sitting submerged. You get better texture on the meat and the vegetables actually cook through, and the finished dish looks less like soup even before you reduce anything.

Cheap moisture meters lie, your chopstick does not, so trust what you already found. Twelve days wet at depth in an eight inch pot is a pot and mix problem rather than a technique problem. Going up in pot size is the most common way people accidentally drown a succulent type plant.

If the budget stretches, a small three quart as a second machine is more useful than going bigger. Two people, a weekday side dish or a small batch of beans, and it lives in a much easier cupboard. Mine gets used more than the big one does.

One thing that surprised me: the film is harmless. It looks like something failed to get clean but it is just minerals. I stopped worrying about it on everyday glasses and only bother with the vinegar rinse when people are coming over.

Same, three and a half years here. The one thing that did change was dust in the vent slots. Blow it out once a year and it goes back to where it started.

The fan is the tip that actually worked for me. Left one on low pointed across the bare mattress while I was at work for three days and the smell dropped off a cliff.