Pat

I have owned three of these across about seven years and I regret two of them. The two I regret were both the rake-through-a-flat-tray design, anything softer than a perfect clump smears, and then you are cleaning a machine instead of a box. The globe-style one has been fine for two years with the one caveat that my larger cat needed a month of the lid staying open before he would use it. If you buy one, buy the design where waste falls into a lined drawer, not the kind that drags a comb across the litter bed.

Also lower the bar for what counts as a win. 'Understood 60% and got fed' is a success. I spent a year treating anything short of fluent as failure and nearly quit over a conversation about bread.

How do I test it, export a page and try to search it in a PDF reader?

Food, unglamorously. I stopped eating properly at about month two and then spent three months wondering why I had no energy. That is not a supplement problem. Three actual meals was the entire intervention.

Whatever you decide, don't decide it in week one of the leave. I made a dramatic decision on day four of mine and un-made it on day twenty. For the first ten days you are not the person who should be choosing anything permanent.

That is the version most people quietly end up at after a year of doing it properly.

You have found the actual insight without noticing it: the timer is good at starting and bad at stopping. So use it only for starting. Set it for whatever length makes beginning feel trivial, ten minutes is fine, and when it goes off you are allowed to stop but you are not required to, and if the work is flowing you simply carry on until it is not. That kills both of your problems at once, because the start is cheap and the stop is determined by the work rather than the clock. The Pomodoro rule about honouring the break exists to build a habit for people who never stop, which is not your problem.

Start reading earlier than feels reasonable, even badly. Graded readers exist at your 400 words and they're short. Twenty minutes of reading beats twenty minutes of flashcards the moment you can technically read anything at all, because you meet the same kanji in context repeatedly and for free.

Practical: turn off stroke order quizzes and handwriting drills if you don't plan to write by hand. I spent months on handwriting I have used exactly zero times since, and it felt productive the whole way.

The reverse engineering point is the one I was missing. The story explains the weirdness because someone built it to explain the weirdness.

Going to disagree with the pure leak-hunting advice, or at least add to it. At 400 rps on 2 vCPU with Postgres behind it, you are almost certainly not CPU bound, so the rewrite will not buy you throughput. But the memory profile of a Go service genuinely is different in kind, not just degree, and if your constraint is a small box then that difference has real operational value. I would still find the leak first, because you cannot make an honest comparison against a broken baseline, and I would then evaluate Go on operational grounds like a single static binary and a much smaller image rather than on rps.

Nine extra pages plus a filterable listing plus an integration is not creep, that's a different project. I'd price the remainder as a new engagement rather than trying to salvage the original quote, because a revised fixed price on a project that's already tripled tends to get revised again.

Then year two will look much better and you should still budget an annual amount for the next backlog. There's always one.

Check the annual and irregular stuff specifically. In your last working year a lot of people quietly defer things: dentist, car service, replacing the washing machine, the trip to see family. Year one off is when all of that lands at once, and it looks like general inflation across categories because you're paying for a backlog rather than a new habit.

Your partner noticing is worth taking seriously. The people around you can see the shape of this from outside, and burnout in particular wrecks your ability to assess yourself. Mine told me for four months before I actually heard it, and I'd been arguing with her the whole time using evidence I was in no state to evaluate.

I bought it, used it four times, and went back to a 20L, because it turned out my actual trips are 'laptop and one shirt'. Buy for the trip you take, not the trip you picture yourself taking.

The composition matters more than the word tofu. These are made from soy, pea and corn starch in varying ratios, and the pea-fibre-heavy ones break down faster in water while still clumping: which is what you want if you flush, and what you do not want if your box gets splashed. Two brands both labelled tofu litter behaved completely differently for me for exactly this reason.

Mine are disc caps from a chemist multipack, so that tracks. Ordering flip caps with gaskets.

On the abbreviation, the split is real but it is convention rather than etymology and it varies by jurisdiction. In US legal citation the standard style is v. with a full stop in case names. In English practice you will see it written v with no stop, and read aloud it is not usually said as versus at all: in criminal matters people say the Crown against so and so, and in civil matters plenty of practitioners say and. So the same two letters get spoken three different ways depending on the room you are standing in. Sports and marketing copy inherited vs. from general prose, where the longer abbreviation reads more naturally to a non lawyer.

I tracked mine properly for a year with a timer I had to start and stop by hand, which is annoying enough that you do not cheat. Yearly average came out just under three hours a day of genuinely focused work on working days, with a best week at about four and a half and a worst week near one. The pattern that mattered was not daily heroics, it was that the bad weeks were nearly always weeks with a context switch, meaning a new client or a big meeting mid week. Removing one context switch bought me more focused hours than any technique I tried.

Bleeding hydraulic brakes belongs at home and people are far too scared of it. The kit for your brand is not expensive, the process is genuinely about twenty minutes per brake once you have done one, and the alternative is booking the bike in every time a lever gets spongy. Do it over a tray, wear gloves, keep the fluid away from the pads and rotor, and buy new pads before you start in case you contaminate the old ones.

I did four months of this while travelling and the thing that broke me was not the editor, it was everything around the editor. Two windows plus a terminal plus documentation on a tablet means constant swapping, and the keyboard case has no escape key row you can hit reliably in the dark. I still learned plenty, but I was maybe two thirds as productive per hour compared to a cheap secondhand laptop I later bought for about the price of three months of that VPS.

Not a timeline answer but relevant: the occupational health referral was the single most useful thing I did and I nearly skipped it, because I assumed it was HR wearing a lab coat. Whether that exists depends entirely on where you work - but if it does, use it, and get whatever is agreed in writing before you plan any kind of return.

Same, and I'd add a trigger for the other direction. Mine says what we allow ourselves to spend extra on after two good years, otherwise you just ratchet down forever and never enjoy any of it.

45 days isn't unusual for a company of any size, so I'd keep the temperature low for now. What I would do immediately is stop any work in progress for them, not as a threat, just as a policy. It's easier to hold that line before you've delivered the next thing.