Ned

Politely disagreeing with the usual advice to learn on free curbside mowers. You learn faster on your own machines because you actually care whether they work afterwards, and because you already know their history. Practice machines teach you to take things apart, your own machines teach you to put them back together properly.

Same, and putting it first thing matters. Anything I schedule for the afternoon gets eaten roughly four days out of five.

Dull and boring is what mine are, and they arrive like clockwork on my days off. Starting the three week version this weekend.

She does gasp occasionally and I have absolutely been treating it as a noise problem to engineer around. That's a conversation for this week rather than a duvet purchase.

Ordering one tonight. I hadn't separated the movement from the draught in my head at all and now that you say it, it's the cold that wakes me.

For the heap, chop and mix. For the bin, let it sit in a tub for a week or two first and give the bin small amounts of the softened stuff.

The bigger worry is the hour of running dry. A submersible is cooled by the water flowing past it, so dry running cooks the motor. It survived this time. Fit a low water cutoff or a pump protection device, they're about the price of a nice dinner and they shut the pump off before it eats itself.

Three things eat it. Storage, because customers drop off in April and collect in July and your garage becomes a car park. Parts waiting, because a machine sitting half apart for nine days is floor space you cannot bill for. And seasonality, since a huge share of the year's work lands in a few spring weeks and you will turn away work in May and sit idle in November. Flat rate your common jobs so a tune up is one price on a board, and only go hourly on the weird stuff.

Three years of receipts, and what I would undo. Total spend was more than I want to admit. The things that earned their money: the interface, the dynamic mic, the stand, one set of panels, and a subscription to a sample library I actually use. The things that did not: a second condenser I have used twice, a MIDI keyboard that has been a monitor stand for two years, and about six plugin sales I bought because it was Black Friday. Roughly a third of my spend did nothing for the records.

Eight habits at once in a beautifully constructed dashboard, with rollups and streak counters and a weekly automation. Kept it for six weeks. Zero of the eight habits survived, and I could tell you precisely how many I had failed. The system was the hobby.

Whichever you buy, leave yourself a drain and a plumbed bypass now, plus enough pipe length for the second unit. Retrofitting that in a tight pump room next year costs more in plumber time than the parts do.

The printer you use twice a year is worth unplugging, not really for the standby draw but because some of them wake up and run a maintenance cycle on a timer. That's ink and power for a document nobody asked for.

Half a suggestion: is going part time at the salaried role on the table? Four days for 80% keeps the insurance in a lot of setups and buys you a whole day for the contract. Worth asking before you frame it as a binary.

Same split here. The Friday half is mechanical enough to do when tired, which is the whole point, and the planning half gets a fresh brain.