Hello good and clever people of Tildes, I need some advice.

With electricity the price it is, and my wife having a sizable workshop in the garden, I'm looking for ways to bring down the heating cost.

Her workshop is 5m x 4m x 2.2m, and the wood is 44cm thick. It's a chunky beast. She makes gifts and personalised items, so when she has the heatpresses and mug/tumbler press on the go, it gets toasty. If the sun comes out, also toasty. However, over night, it gets super chilled, almost to whatever temp is outside. To combat this I decided to use a Govee Electric Space Heater, 1500W with Thermostat, WiFi & Bluetooth. However, this barely does anything and the electric usage flies up.

What are good options here? The office is about 10 metres from my house. It's too far to extend the home central heating via plumbing, plus too much lagging. I don't want to spend a fortune, so any sensible options I'm willing to entertain. If we're talking a couple of thousand, it's off the menu.

Thanks for any help.

Dropping an edit with a link to the actual cabin: https://www.tigersheds.com/product/the-gamma-44mm-log-cabin/

It's not like a USA style log cabin, that's for sure!

Edit 2: Okay - wall insulation looks like the next thing to tackle before even thinking about heating it. Thanks folks.

Hey friends,

I struggled hard to find a simple to-do list that would work the way I needed it to. Even the paid options weren't quite helpful for me. Eventually I just gave up and made my own.

I use it at work and at home every single day. I also made a backup copy to handle an individual project I'm working on.

Anyway, it's free. I just wanted to share it with you guys.

Small side notes

• To start using this, just copy it. It'll open in a read-only mode but you can quite easily pull it over to your own Google Drive.

• I threw in a donation link on the Sheet. Delete it or ignore it. It's 100% optional and I figured I'd put it there in case this ended up becoming someone's daily driver and they want to say thanks.

• You can somewhat easily make this sheet work with Google appsheet to use it on mobile as an app. That's what I do for mine so that I can use it on my phone and on desktop throughout the day. Just open appsheet from this sheet and start customizing your app. As long as you're using it for just yourself, you don't have to deploy it or anything. You just download the appsheet app on mobile and access it that way. You can even name it and choose a custom icon. The one caveat is that you'll have to create a time trigger in scripts to make it auto sort. If anyone is dying to do this, I'll post more specific details to help you through it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sIp4uPq3xwgudNA9tIOGmNXzETtyG421WbmvJPWgbsI/edit?usp=drivesdk

I have a slightly unusual last name, leading to people assuming they know how to spell it better than I do. I have already fixed my registered name once this year and I just received a new voter registration card...and it had the old spelling. I checked my registration online and the spelling has reverted in the state database too. Whose fault is this and WHY THE HELL DO PEOPLE MANUALLY ENTER/EDIT NAMES THAT USERS ENTER INTO COMPUTER SYSTEMS? WHY IS THIS A THING?? WHY DO I GET SO MUCH MAIL WITH MY NAME MISSPELLED??? JUST SPELL IT THE WAY I ENTERED IT INTO YOUR SYSTEM, YOU JACKASSES.

I own a small apartment house in Asheville. It doesn't make much money, I mainly do it to maintain my connection to the community and have a place to stay, all the rents are below market and I have a diverse group of folks there. I'm proud I'm able to participate in this way.

Lots of trees came down in the yard, thousands of dollars in damages, from Helene. I called FEMA. Their response was it's not your primary residence, no love. What about the other tenants? Common areas are not 'primary residences.' So I expressed some frustration, and the FEMA person really sucked at their response.

They said it was totally fair that I should be responsible, out of pocket for trees. I asked why that was? Their reponse was "this conversation is over," and they hung up. The answer from a decent person would be, I understand your frustration, but FEMA isn't set up to handle this circumstance. Please reach out to SBA.

Here's why this sucks. If I were a recent transplant to Asheville with my multimillion dollar single family residence right next door to my apartment house, thousands of dollars would flow to you from FEMA for your tree damage. I, and my low income tenants, get squat. That is a shameful misallocation of resources.

I've looked, and there is apparantly no assistance to folks in my situation (and nothing available to my tenants). Had the consequences been worse, I would be forced to sell my property, and five decent, hardworking folks would now be forced to find substandard housing. What a world we live in.

So, got a new job. That's great. Pay bump, more / new responsibilities and all that jazz. It took until my first day on the job for it to like, REALLY sink in that it's my first job managing people. I want to be good at this, or at the very least, competent. I'm responsible for my team and I don't want to let them down. I'm already looking things up online, talking to my parents, friends in similar positions for more information, and figured it would be good to ask around on here.

I guess the other half of this is that I've gone from looking at code in the IDE to now being more responsible for higher level architectural decisions. Possibly company steering decisions. Not used to that yet either, or at least the feeling. I feel under-prepared, and am possibly verging on overwhelmed. Lots of new things happening at once here, also writing this to unpack it as I type it out.

What advice do you have for me? Anything that you've learned while in a managerial role that you haven't gotten to share? Tips and Tricks? Prayers? 🤣

This is such a vague thing to post, but in the past few years I've been wrestling with my increasing introversion. I'm always tired. I was talking about my feelings towards friendships to a friend (without an intent to say anything negative) and found myself surprised at how little I mentioned any benefits from companionships. What weighed on me was the time spent, the work spent, the money spent on trying to "keep people happy." (I have a few other closer friends, so it's not the way I feel about everyone). It's a weird position to be in as someone who had once tried hard to make new friends. I find myself struggling with the guilt for how I feel and the desire to just recess, to focus on myself, and to attend to my desire for stability (especially financial stability-- I feel like things have gotten more expensive). I have deeper and more commitments than I used to, which should make me feel so fortunate. However, as a result, they are also in competition for my time / energy.

I've been feeling really weighted down by this lately, so I'm curious to hear from people who may have gone through something similar. A part of me feels that perhaps if I made my life more stable (a cheaper mortgage instead of renting in a major / global city, a higher paying job, lower-key friendships etc.) then I would feel happier on a day-to-day level.

edit: clarified some things

Assume cleaning is done on a regular basis. My apartment has a subtle "scent" from, what I assume to be, the vinyl flooring wax. I'd like that to not be the smell visitors first experience.

I'm considering an air purifier/diffuser, but don't know if they're effective.

Given the current cosmic circumstances – hurricanes, extreme weather, end of the year festivities, moon 2: intergalactic boogaloo, and the never-ending struggle against the forces of evil – it seems like a good time to delve into each others personal realms just a a bit, or perhaps too much.

So... How's it going? How's life? Working on anything? How's the family? How's your friends and loved ones? Any worries? Any triumphs, failures, or any other radical (or not so radical) sensical nonsense? Writing or constructing your magnum opus? or are you just feeling like a massive dope, or even The Massive Dopeness?

Rant, don't rant, just a check-in, choose-your-own-adventure, go to page 85, or go to page 20, your choice.

We already have several recurring threads that scratch the surface of our present experiences, focusing primarily on tech and games and the like². But, hows your individual journey going?¹

Despite everyone else in the family being right handed, my son is a leftie! Very excited for this development, but as we're nearing school age at 5, I'm wondering about the things he uses daily.

Seeing him cutting with right handed scissors, I'm getting him some left handed ones. What are other common items I may not be considering that are just so much easier to use the left handed version of?

I’m looking for some new king size sheets, and likely a new duvet cover as one of the ties inside is ripped. My wife is intrigued by Brooklinen and other brands marketed on social media, but I’ve read that those are terrible. Do any of you have brand recommendations that aren’t thousands of dollars?

Inspired by this post and many thoughts I had about the topic previously.

For some reason, a lot of people treat friendships and romantic relationships as two entirely separate things. People say stuff like "I could never date a friend" or "I want to date them but they just want to be friends". The top comment by @BeanBurrito on the post I linked mentions how men want to become friends with women simply because they have too little confidence to just ask them out.

I've never understood this. To me, being a friend and dating are just two points on the same closeness spectrum. You go from acquaintances to friends, then best friends, then partners. You can obviously skip some of those steps sometimes, but those are still the same thing - being in a romantic relationship is the same as being very close friends, it's just an even closer form of it. Yes, there's usually an extra factor of exclusivity in a relationship - but they can be non exclusive, so it's not a defining trait.

Asking someone out shortly after meeting them is such a wild concept to me. You probably wouldn't meet someone and immediately just go "hey, let's be best friends", so why would you ask them if they would be even more?

I also don't really get why people care about being "friendzoned", for the same reason. Like ok, you won't be the "bestest closest friends" with someone, but you can still be good friends? If they agree, you can still have personal conversations, or cuddle, or do whatever else that you can do in a relationship. I get why people can be upset if a person they like shows absolutely no attention towards them, but why would you be upset at them just wanting to be friends?

It it literally just about sex and physical attraction? But then also, things like "friends with benefits" exist. So clearly, you don't have to be in a relationship in order to do that. And if that's the only thing you actually need, why would you ask someone "let's date" instead of just directly saying what you want?

I don't get it.

I read through hundreds of comments on reddit (I know, Ive digressed) on the question 'What would women dislike most if they became men?' The one that hit me square in the face were the thousands of men who agreed that they hadn't been complimented for anything in years.

One commenter said the last time he was complimented was ten years ago and he can still remember the time and the place because it was so unusual. One gut punch even said, "Many men are laying in their casket before many good things are ever said about them" and at first I thought, well that's gotta be hyperbole. But then I thought more about it and realized that while I have had a couple of compliments from my wife over the last year, I dont recall a single other person saying anything complimentary in probably over a year... And I never really thought about it, but its just not something we expect to hear.

It's not like I was waiting for compliments, but I think the statement true - men just rarely get compliments. And I'm not sure why.

I definitely don't compliment my friends very often. Occasionally do compliment my adult son but I'm sure, like most guys, that's pretty infrequent coming from any other male in his life.

It's just a bit odd when I think about how often my wife gets compliments. Or my daughters. Not sure why we men get so little affirmation that way. It really struck me as odd.