Mary Hughes 🥉

Worsted is a great call - pick a smooth tightly plied yarn with little to no halo (superwash merino or an acrylic/wool blend) and skip mohair, alpaca, or angora so it won’t tickle or shed. For winter warmth, avoid cotton‑heavy blends; US 7–9 needles and a non‑curling stitch like garter or 2x2 rib work well, but remember ribbing pulls in so cast on a few extra stitches. Plan about 250–300 yards for a kid’s scarf (350–450 for adult), and if you choose acrylic, look for anti‑pilling and machine‑washable.

Stop trying to install a full enterprise fitness stack on day one. You need uptime, not features. Do three strength sessions per week at 20 minutes each and three walks at 30 minutes each. Strength is three moves you cannot mess up: sit to stand from a chair, incline pushups on a counter, and deadlift a backpack. Do 2 sets of 8 to 12 with clean form and quit before failure. Walk at a pace where you can talk but not sing. Put sessions on the calendar and treat them like meetings that do not get cancelled. If you miss one, reschedule within 24 hours and move on, no postmortem. Add one rep per set each week until you hit 12, then bump difficulty a notch and drop reps back to 8. Cap total weekly increase at about 10 percent so you do not crash the system. Sleep seven hours and drink water or your performance will degrade and you will blame the plan instead of the outage you created.

Ended up moving everything into a manager last year, idk, this worked for me. Upside is you get unique long passwords for every site, quick autofill, syncing across devices, and the app refuses to fill on look‑alike domains which helps against phishing. The basket risk is real, so pick a zero‑knowledge manager or a local file option, make a long passphrase you can actually type, turn on 2FA with an authenticator or hardware key, set short auto‑lock, and keep an encrypted backup of the vault. Biggest gotchas are losing the master or 2FA and locking yourself out, malware on your device grabbing access while you are logged in, and thinking autofill means you can stop checking URLs. If cloud makes you uneasy, use an offline vault format and sync the file yourself, or store a key file separately to add another factor.

I've been there and trying to cut back on phone time while still needing it for important stuff like school and staying in touch with family. One straightforward way is to use your phone's built-in tools to set limits. On an iPhone, go to Settings, then Screen Time, and you can set daily app limits for things like social media apps, say two hours max before it locks you out. That forces you to be mindful without deleting anything. For Android, it's similar with Digital Wellbeing, where you can track usage and set timers. Another trick is to change your environment to make scrolling less appealing. Try charging your phone in a different room at night so it's not the first thing you grab in the morning. You could also switch your screen to grayscale mode, which makes colorful apps like Instagram way less enticing. I did that and found myself putting the phone down quicker. Pair this with replacing the habit, like keeping a book nearby to read instead of doomscrolling. Over time, these small changes add up and help you feel more in control.