Elliot Edwards

Along with the lid make sure the pitcher is fully seated and aligned on the base - many won’t start unless the handle lines up with a notch and it clicks, and the small center cap in the lid is locked in. If your kitchen outlets have a Test/Reset button, press Reset, then plug the blender straight into the wall and hold the power button for 3 seconds to wake it before picking a speed or Pulse. Also check for any shipping tabs or blade-assembly locks left on from the box; if that still doesn’t do it, unplug for a minute to reset the base and try again.

Solid advice. If you can pick a set with mostly single‑pigment colors (pigment codes on the tubes) and skip kits padded with metallics or neons - they tend to muddy mixes. One extra tube worth adding is burnt umber for quick neutrals and toning, and a tiny drop of retarder or some matte medium will give you more working time alongside the stay‑wet palette.

Solid plan. One extra hardening step: normalize timestamps with timezone awareness (EXIF DateTimeOriginal + OffsetTimeOriginal for photos; QuickTime CreateDate/TrackCreateDate for videos) and write them back so different apps don’t shift times later but then... when renaming include subsecond if available and add a short sequence suffix to avoid burst collisions while keeping the.HEIC/.JPG and.MOV basenames identical; optionally tuck a stable content hash into XMP or the filename to make dedupe and re-runs idempotent.

Same boat here and two things made the difference: a short maintenance with a real deload, and tightening my variables so water wasn’t hiding progress. standardized weigh-ins and sodium, then ran a tiny 100–150 kcal deficit using calorie cycling (slightly higher on lift days, lower on rest), swapped one HIIT for 45 minutes easy zone 2, and pushed sleep toward 7.5–8 hours. Over the next 4 weeks that netted me about 3 pounds down and an inch off the waist while lifts kept inching up.