Bo Ferris

Two pairs a year at 35 km a week means you're replacing roughly every 900 km, which is on the long side already. If you can stretch to three pairs in rotation, each one lasts longer in calendar terms and you get more sale windows to buy into.

Honest note: some things need three passes months apart and there is no technique that collapses that. I have understood the same concept four times, each time slightly more deeply, and only on the fourth could I have taught it. That is not failure, it is what learning a hard thing looks like from the inside.

I failed a serious for stalling on a hill start and rolling back into the space behind me, which was entirely avoidable and happened because I had practised hill starts on one hill for a month. What it cost me was the fee and a seven week wait for the next slot, which in your position is the actual risk. Practise the awkward stuff in different places, not the same place repeatedly.

Also check the boring stuff. Fourteen months of bad chairs, restaurant food, broken sleep and no consistent exercise will produce exactly this flatness in someone with nothing else wrong. It is worth ruling out before you conclude anything about the lifestyle.

A local cobbler can also re-glue a lifting toe for a couple of hundred rupees and buy you another season. Worth trying before you write a pair off entirely.

Herbs need light hours, not a bay of glass. A shelf and a grow light gets you winter parsley for the price of a takeaway. Spend the window money on the window if you want the window.

Rain is a separate purchase. Almost nothing in that bracket is genuinely waterproof whatever the fabric page claims, because the water gets in at the seams and the zip, not through the material. Buy whatever bag you like plus a cheap pack cover, or put the laptop inside a dry bag inside the backpack. Six years of commuting like that and I have never lost a machine.

Buying the materials myself had not occurred to me. Presumably I need to check with him what exactly to get so I do not buy the wrong shelf brackets.

Also ask specifically about a reback rather than a full rebind. If the sewing is sound and only the spine has failed, a competent reback keeps the original boards and costs a good deal less, because the pulling and resewing - the expensive part: never happens.

Middle path that worked for me: take the shifts for three months to get money flowing, and use that stability to build the freelance thing slowly with one client. Then drop shifts as the freelance hours fill. You never have a month at zero and you never have to accept a bad client because rent is due.

Disagreeing gently with the strict rules. The line is not really the job type, it is whether you can undo it. Painting badly is a Saturday to fix. Cutting a pipe in the wrong place is not. So before starting anything ask what the recovery looks like if I get this half done and stop, and if the answer is 'no water until Monday', pay someone. That framing let me do far more myself than a category-based rule ever did.

Count it honestly, only sets taken near failure. Most people running a barbell only programme find they are at four or five per muscle and are surprised.

Seconding. I bought my way out of cold nights twice with bags before somebody pointed at my mat. Fixed it for less than either bag cost me.

Same applies to cat food and I learned it the same way, with a fussy animal and a bin I had not washed in a year.

Downtown garage parking also means the car starts warm, which flatters all-weathers further. The one place I have regretted mine was an unheated overnight stop north of the city at minus twenty five, where the first two kilometres felt like driving on wood.

I have been going at random times to whichever slot was quiet, which in retrospect guarantees I never see the same person twice.

Get a plug in meter and a look at your smart meter data by half hour and you will stop arguing with strangers about this within a week. Mine showed a dehumidifier and an old chest freezer accounting for a surprising share of the base load, and neither was on anyone's list of tips. The general point is that your house has one or two specific offenders, and generic advice is aimed at an average house that does not exist.

Change the activity if you can. Standing face to face with a drink is the hardest possible mode. Walking somewhere, playing something, cooking something, all of it removes the requirement for continuous speech and the conversation gets better as a side effect.

Also worth knowing that a lot of library apps will let you borrow both formats of the same title and keep the place in sync, which removes the cost objection entirely.

Rows for anything you harvest all at once, mixed for anything you pick a handful at a time. Most people need both and get religious about one.

Spent our first year money on: gutters, a chimney check, loft insulation topped up, and having the electrics inspected so we knew what we had. Nothing to show visitors and no regrets at all.

We waited a year on everything and the only thing I regret waiting on was insulation, purely because we spent a winter heating the loft.

Weekly, and the reasoning has nothing to do with board games versus hills.

Friendship comes out of repeated unplanned exposure to the same faces. Once a month means you meet people twelve times a year and you spend the first hour of each one re establishing who you are. Once a week means that by March you have seen the same six people twenty times and somebody suggests food afterwards, and that is the moment it becomes a friendship rather than an activity.

Rule of thumb I have found reliable: it takes roughly six to eight encounters with the same person before either of you will suggest doing something separately. Pick whichever thing gets you to eight fastest.

So the fridge was actively the worst option rather than a neutral one. Freezing sliced from now on.

Six months is fine. The first thousand is the slowest thousand you will ever save because nothing is compounding and nothing feels different yet.