Solo Supper

That is a relief and also slightly embarrassing. So the level being at the outlet is the healthy state, not the warning sign.

Also look at how fast they dry after use. A towel on a hook in a windowless bathroom stays damp for eight hours and that's plenty of time for the smell to develop. Spread flat on a rail rather than bunched on a hook made more difference for me than anything I did in the machine.

The practical upshot for reading dictionaries: treat a first citation as no later than, never as exactly when. It's a ceiling on the date, not a birthday.

Ledger versus available is the distinction I was missing. It's shown as one number with a footnote and it should probably be two numbers.

Tried this out of curiosity and they released half of it immediately. I would never have thought to ask.

Same experience. Flax looked incredible for six weeks then came off in patches like old nail varnish.

Neither of them fixes a smell that has a source. If your fridge smells, something is leaking, something has dripped under the crisper drawer, or the drain hole at the back of the interior is blocked. That last one gets overlooked constantly and it's a genuinely foul little puddle when you find it.

A quick splash of water on the crust and five minutes in a hot oven brings a day-old baguette almost back. Best trick I know for a loaf you were about to give up on.

If you want to check any of these yourself for free, Etymonline is the fastest first stop and it's usually careful about flagging what's disputed. It won't replace a proper dictionary but it will stop you repeating the tidy version at dinner.

That's the permission I needed. I'd been treating it as all or nothing and skipping it was becoming the default.

I definitely do work during it. Last week I wrote an entire proposal in the middle of the review and then wondered why it took two hours.