Stu

I will disagree with the whole cents-per-point framing. It only means anything if you would genuinely have paid the cash price. If 1150 is more than you would ever spend on that flight, then measuring your redemption against it is flattering yourself, and the honest comparison is against the cheapest ticket you would actually have bought. Ask what you would have done if the points did not exist, and price against that.

Divide the cash price by the points and you get about 1.28 cents per point, which is a fine but not exciting portal redemption. The real comparison is not against a chart, it is against your alternatives: what would the same points get if transferred to a partner for the same route, and what is your guaranteed cash-out rate if you gave up and took a statement credit. If the transfer option is not obviously better and you actually want this flight, 1.28 is a perfectly respectable use of points you would otherwise sit on.

The thing that broke this cycle for me was getting out of bed rather than lying there. Twenty minutes awake and I get up, go to another room, sit under a dim lamp and read something boring on paper until I feel genuinely sleepy, then go back. Usually 25-40 minutes.

It feels counterproductive and it is miserable for the first week. But lying awake in bed for ninety minutes a night teaches your brain that bed is a place where you are awake and thinking about work. Breaking that association was the whole fix for me, about three weeks before the waking got shorter, a couple of months before it mostly stopped.

Worth saying: if you snore, wake up gasping, or feel unrefreshed no matter how long you are down, that is worth raising with a doctor rather than treating as a habits problem.

Pen and paper specifically. The moment it becomes a phone note you have a bright screen and an inbox in your hand.

I paid a similar amount for a Japan itinerary and the specific thing that made it worth it was the rail maths. Whether a rail pass beats individual tickets depends entirely on your route and it changed enough in recent years that half the blog posts you will find are simply wrong. The planner ran our actual route both ways and the answer was the opposite of what I had assumed, which covered the fee on its own. Everything else in the document I could have found myself.

I have been eating at breaks only, so maybe three times a day. That is probably a big part of it.

The single most missed detail in modular threads. "It flips up" and "it is certified flipped up" are two entirely different claims.

Day one has been my longest day both times, because it looked easy on the map from a chair.

Everyone says get three quotes. In my county there were two drillers, one of them was booked eleven months out and the other one set the price. The real cost of that job was time, not money. If you are building, ask both when they can actually be on site, because a house framed with no water in it is its own expense.

Being honest, I would feel guilty. Is that just something people do?

Also check whether there is a phone booking fee and whether it gets waived when the seat is not bookable online. In my experience programmes will waive it if you politely point out their site could not display the flight, but you have to ask before they issue the ticket rather than after. It is worth confirming the total including taxes and surcharges on the same call, because those vary enormously between programmes on the exact same partner flight.

I would be careful with the marry the house, date the rate slogan that always comes up here. Refinancing later is a possibility, not a plan, and it depends on rates, on your income at the time and on the property still valuing. Buy something you can afford at the rate you are actually offered, and treat any future refinance as a bonus.

Tape peeling usually means moisture, not bad tape. Apply to genuinely dry skin in the morning, with a thin layer of tincture of benzoin underneath if you can get hold of it: it makes tape stick through a full wet day. Kinesiology tape holds far better than fabric plasters for this.

Push back on the insurance, correct the tax form, accept the PO and the terms, answer the questionnaire once and save it. Below about 1k a year, offer card only and mean it.

For me it took closer to six weeks before bedtime drifted earlier on its own, and it only happened after I stopped napping on the sofa at 7pm. Small evening naps are invisible and they eat your sleep pressure.

Mesh versus Bluetooth changes nothing about your problem. People conflate the intercom protocol with audio quality and they're entirely separate things.

Light discipline on the way home is the other half. Wear proper dark sunglasses walking or driving home after a night shift even if it feels ridiculous, and do not stop at the shops in daylight. Morning light after a night shift is a direct instruction to your body to wake up, and it undoes the sleep you are about to attempt.

Half measure that helped me: sacrifice the second day only. Keep the first one normal for family, then shift hard.

The certification point is separate: strictly, a helmet with anything attached is no longer in the configuration it was approved in. How much anyone cares about that varies wildly by country.

Before writing it off, do a proper deep clean rather than a field backflush. Fill the syringe with clean water, backflush hard ten to fifteen times, then leave the filter fully submerged in clean water for an hour and backflush again. Cartridges that seem dead often come substantially back after a soak, because the fines lift off rather than being blasted off.

If that does not help, the two likely causes are silt that has bonded in, or a freeze cycle you did not notice. Freezing kills them silently and permanently, no visible damage, and worse, it can fail open. A filter that froze and looks fine is a safety issue rather than a flow annoyance.

With a five day trip in two weeks I would clean it, test it, and buy a spare cartridge regardless. They are cheap relative to the trip.

Or shift the itinerary by half a day rather than moving the boxes. Usually easier.

Small logistics point that saves money: pack the boxes but have someone at home post them on a schedule rather than sending them all before you leave. You can call and adjust contents or cancel one if your pace changes, and you are not paying to store food in a post office for a month.

One more consideration: if you ever want to wake naturally with light in summer, total blackout removes that option and you will need an alarm year round. Not a reason to skip it with a streetlight that close, just something people are surprised by in June.