Sonia

Normal, usually two to three weeks. But stop watering it because it wilted.

A peace lily that flops with damp soil is not thirsty, it has fewer working roots than leaves right now because fine roots tore during the repot. Watering into that raises the rot risk and does not fix the flop. Water on the soil's schedule, not the leaf's.

Things that shorten the sulk:

• keep it out of direct sun for a couple of weeks, bright shade only
• remove one or two of the largest older leaves so there is less to support
• no fertiliser for at least six weeks, the roots cannot use it
• a clear bag propped loosely over the top for five days raises humidity and cuts the afternoon collapse noticeably

If it is still flopping daily at four weeks, tip it out and look at the roots.

Practical footnote for teaching: this is exactly why balance bikes work better than stabilisers. Stabilisers stop the bike leaning, so the child never learns the steer into the lean reflex and has to start over later. Take the pedals off a small bike and let her scoot for a week.

Newer machines especially. Mine reaches a proper simmer on low within two hours, which is nothing like the older one it replaced, and every recipe I had learned suddenly overcooked.

Do not fertilise a plant that is dropping leaves. It is not hungry, it is broke. Feeding a stressed fig mostly gives you salt build up in the pot and a plant that still has no light.

Also, some of those four bookmarked books are probably boring and you are being too loyal. Give a book fifty pages. If you are not gripped, abandon it without guilt. Nothing kills a reading habit faster than an obligation to finish something you are not enjoying, because the whole activity starts to feel like homework.

I keep a shelf of books I stopped. It is not a shelf of failures, it is a shelf of things that were not for me at that time.

Counterpoint for the series, since nobody has made it. Three or four hours a day for three weeks is a lot of reading, and there is a specific pleasure in living inside one world for a whole trip that five separate books do not give you. If you already know you like the author, the series is the better experience. The rule I use is: only commit to a long series if you have read and enjoyed something else by the same writer.

Cut it in half next time. Two one kilo pieces get to temperature far more evenly than one two kilo lump, and it also gives you more surface for the sauce. It is the easiest change on this list and it costs nothing.

And check anything that shared a saucer or a windowsill drip tray. Mealybugs are slow but they are not immobile, and a shared tray is a highway.

Run f3probe or h2testw on any new card before you trust it with anything. Takes an hour and catches the fakes that report 32GB and actually hold 8.

Also check there is actually a hole. I have lost count of how often this exact problem turns out to be a nursery pot sitting inside a decorative cover pot with an inch of water in the bottom that never gets tipped out.

Practical timing note: shoot a couple of days either side of full rather than at full. At full moon the sun is behind you and the surface has almost no shadows, so even a correct exposure looks flat. A day or two off gives you a shadow line along the terminator and the craters actually look three dimensional.

You can also stop the disk sleeping so it stops spinning up over and over. Try hdparm -B 254 -S 0 on the device and see whether the warnings stop. It burns a couple of watts continuously, but constant spin up cycles are hard on both the drive and your power budget.

Add the RAM and USB controller pads too if the kit came with them. Not because those chips need it, but because they help move heat into the shell from more places.

Practically, the reliable sequence I use for any bean and tomato dish: soaked beans plus water plus aromatics on high for two hours, check, then low until a bean squashes easily between two fingers, then add tomato and seasoning for a final hour. Total time varies between five and eight hours depending on the bean and the machine, and checking beats trusting the clock.

Bridging works. I went from rereading the same three crime novels to reading new ones by finding writers people specifically compared to my favourite, rather than picking from a general best of list.