Tess

I found out about the brittleness the expensive way. Deglazed a very hot skillet with cold tap water, heard a crack like a dropped plate, and there was a hairline running from the cooking surface to the rim. It still technically worked and it wept oil onto the hob every time. Warm water, always.

Practise the exit once in daylight. Knowing you can be moving in under a minute with the bed still made is worth a lot of sleep.

My contribution is the mistake: I bought a 12 inch cast iron for a flat like yours because everyone online loves them. I could not lift it one-handed to tip an omelette out, it didn't fit the drawer, and it lived on the hob as decoration until I gave it away. Whatever you choose, buy it in 24 to 26 cm and pick it up in the shop with one hand first.

For your specific worry about the belt: find out whether that engine has a belt or a chain before you shortlist anything, because it changes the sums entirely. If it is a belt, the only thing that counts is a dated invoice from a garage with the mileage on it. A seller saying it was done is not evidence, and a stamp in a book without a receipt is barely better. On a six thousand pound car, an unproven belt is a bill you should assume you are paying, so knock it off what you offer or walk away.

Two clocks run at different speeds and people conflate them. The safety clock barely moves once it is properly acidic, cold and submerged, because the acidity that made it kimchi is the same thing keeping other organisms out. The quality clock moves fast: crunch is mostly gone by month three in my fridge, the paste separates, and the flavour goes from bright to flatly sour by around month six. So is it still good and is it still safe have different answers, and the one you are actually asking is about quality.

Slight counterpoint since everyone's saying slow down: if this is a one-off and you know you want to see specific things in four specific places, see them. Being tired in a place you wanted to see beats being well rested and wondering. Just don't do it because a map looks efficient.

Check your pressures cold, first thing, before you drive anywhere. The rule of thumb my shop uses is roughly one psi lost for every ten degrees fahrenheit the temperature drops, and between a mild autumn fitting and a January morning that adds up to a meaningfully soft tyre. Underinflated tyres flex and squirm and can absolutely produce a speed dependent shimmy that improves as they warm and the pressure comes back up. It costs nothing to rule out and half the winter vibration questions I have seen turned out to be this.

Wiping isn't the problem, lube choice is. Salt water is being flung into the chain constantly and a dry or ceramic wax lube has nothing to keep it out. In salt you want a proper wet lube - thick, oily, attracts grit, looks filthy, keeps water off the metal. Yes it collects black gunge. That's the trade.

Routine that works for me from December to March, 20km a day on salted roads:

• rinse the drivetrain with plain water when I get in, no soap, no pressure washer
• wipe, then a drop of wet lube per roller
• wipe again in the morning before riding so the outside is dry and only the inside is oiled

Surface rust on the plates is cosmetic and doesn't matter much. Rust in the rollers and pins is what actually kills a chain, and that's what the wet lube prevents.

Until the fix sticks, tape before the hike, not after the hot spot. Leukotape on clean dry skin stays on for three days including showers, where the little blister plasters roll up within an hour. It's a preventive, not a treatment.

I would gently push back on everyone who is about to tell you to add intervals. I did that. I turned a pleasant twenty two minute ride into a training session, started arriving sweaty and irritable, needed a change of clothes at work, and within two months I was driving on the days I could not face it. The commute stopped being transport and became an obligation, and then it stopped entirely. It took me a year to start riding again and I now deliberately keep it easy. Protect the habit before you optimise it.

Before any of this, spend an hour on actual numbers for your role, your city and your years of experience. The reason people fold on this question is that they don't have a number they believe in, so any pushback moves them. Walk in knowing what you're worth and the conversation gets easy.

Worth knowing that "steel" covers three different tools that people talk about as if they were one. A grooved or ribbed steel realigns and mildly abrades. A smooth polished steel realigns and does effectively no cutting, which is what most butchers actually use and use often. A ceramic rod does remove metal, slowly, and will genuinely refresh a slightly tired edge, which is probably what you actually want between stone sessions. A diamond rod is a sharpening tool wearing a rod costume, it removes metal fast and will reprofile your edge if you use it casually. For softer Western knives like Victorinox, a smooth or ceramic rod plus a stone every month or two is the whole programme.

Held pressure fine overnight with the pump off, so it's the check valve. Ordering a rebuild kit rather than a new pump.

Had them check while the cassette was off. Slightly out, straightened, shifting is genuinely better than it's been in a year.

Gauge dropped straight in at 0.75 and nearly at 1.0. New chain and cassette, skipping gone completely. I'd convinced myself it had to be cable stretch.

Politely against the buy-the-card consensus. RAM is so cheap relative to a 24GB card that I would buy it anyway, because it also buys you longer contexts, bigger batch jobs, and the ability to run something overnight without babysitting it. It is not either-or on any sane budget, it is RAM now and the card when you can. I ran a 70b overnight on mostly system memory to produce a dataset and I did not care that it took nine hours, because I was asleep.

I ignored a chain for two winters because it was still shifting. When it finally started skipping under load I had worn the cassette and the middle chainring, and the bill for chain, cassette and ring together with labour was several times what three chains would have cost me. The mechanic showed me the teeth and they were visibly hooked. Buy the gauge. It is the cheapest tool in cycling and the only one that regularly saves you money.

Took a counteroffer in 2019, stayed four more years, got promoted twice. It is not automatically a trap. What made it work was that my complaint was concrete and fixable and they fixed the concrete thing, not just the number.

One more thought since it's easy to miss in the excitement: compare total comp, not base. If the outside offer had a bonus structure, better pension matching, or four extra days of leave, 108 versus 96 might not be the gap it looks like.

The stopping point is the one I keep hearing and keep underrating.

Skip the nonstick griddle plates entirely, which is what I bought first. Smashburger temperature is well past what those coatings are meant to see, and mine started shedding within about two months. Cheap lesson but a lesson.

Audit your t.Parallel() calls in that package. A shared fixture built in TestMain, or a package-level testCache that two parallel subtests both write to, produces exactly this flakiness pattern. It fails more in CI because CI runs the whole suite and yours probably runs one package.

Treatments and sugar are pocket money. Glass and dead colonies are the budget. Plan for one loss every few winters and it stops being a shock.

Cheap interim measures that help a lot while you plan the proper fix:

• crack the roof vent 2cm all night, every night, even when it's freezing. You lose a bit of heat and gain a dry van
• run the fan on its lowest setting on extract
• don't cook or boil water without the vent fully open, since a single pasta dinner puts out more moisture than a night of breathing
• wipe the ribs in the morning for now. Not a fix, but standing water on a ledge is what turns condensation into rust

Ran a light rear drive coupe through four winters. On proper winters it is genuinely fine on any road that has been plowed, and the low weight and honest steering make it easier to catch than something tall and numb. What ends the fun is depth, not grip. The moment the snow is deeper than your ground clearance you are a plow, and a plow with no weight over the drive wheels goes nowhere.