u/xIvyPop

It took us embarrassingly longer than it should have to notice this. We had no consistency across searches. Every one started completely fresh, no documentation of what the bar actually looked like, no notes from previous debrief rounds, no signal we could carry forward. So every search took just as long as the last one, and our eng managers were spending time screening people who should have been filtered way earlier.

A few things changed that. We started writing down what specifically made the person we hired the right call after every placement, not a generic job description but what actually held up in the evaluation. We kept debrief notes and actually referred back to them. And for the searches where we needed to outsource recruiters who understood specialized technical roles, we started working with people through paraform because they'd usually placed similar roles before, so we weren't re-explaining the same technical context from scratch every time.

The process still isn't perfect but the time to fill has come down and eng manager time per search is meaningfully lower. If you're still treating each hire like a completely fresh problem it's worth asking whether you're paying a bigger price for that than you think. We for sure were.

My post comply with the rules

The reality of aging in place without nearby family is that the safety net is thinner than most people think about consciously until something happens and they realize how long it would have taken for anyone to notice. Neighbors are not a plan. Scheduled calls are not a plan. An actual plan has a response pathway that doesn't depend on luck or timing. For seniors in this situation or families thinking through this, what does a real emergency response setup actually look like and what's the minimum viable safety layer that makes independent living actually viable rather than just hoped for?

Three trips before this one I checked a bag. Not because I needed to, because I couldn't figure out how to make my toiletry situation work in a carry on for anything longer than a week. Liquids were the problem every time. Decanting into travel bottles, hitting the 100ml limit, running out mid trip and spending an hour in a Vietnamese pharmacy trying to identify shampoo by process of elimination.

The trip before Southeast Asia I switched to solid hair care and didn't check a bag for the first time in years.

Six weeks across four countries, carry on only, and my entire hair situation fit in a small mesh pouch. One shampoo bar, one conditioner bar, nothing to decant, nothing to leak, nothing to weigh me down at check in. I used the kitsch rice water shampoo bar for the whole trip, washing every other day, and it lasted the full six weeks with about a third of the bar still left when I got home. Different water conditions in every country and my hair behaved more consistently than it ever did with liquid shampoo, which I didn't expect.

The thing that surprised me most was not thinking about hair once the whole trip. Previous trips I'd spend mental energy managing the liquid situation, buying local products that didn't work for my hair, adjusting to different formulas every few weeks. This time none of that happened. One bar, same result everywhere, done.

There are other solid options worth knowing about too, ethique and hibar both travel well and have been around longer if you want more community feedback on specific formulas before committing. But for a first solid travel shampoo the accessibility of finding kitsch at target before a trip rather than ordering online the week before is genuinely useful.

Trying to sort out power for a longer route I've been planning, no hookups for the whole stretch. Was running a jackery on a four-day trip and it was dead by day three, had enough sun on day two to get partial recharge but not enough to make up what the fridge and lights were pulling overnight. Not looking for what a YouTube channel got paid to recommend, genuinely curious what the overlanding community is using right now that holds up across multiple days of actual off-grid use.

Im recently diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and my therapist mentioned that an emotional support animal could be genuinely helpful for my situation. The problem is she doesn't do ESA letters as part of her practice which apparently is pretty common among private practice therapists.

So Im trying to understand how to get an esa letter when you're early in your mental health journey, don't have a long term provider history and your current therapist specifically doesn't handle documentation. Do you need months of treatment records first or is a thorough evaluation from a different provider sufficient? Would going through a separate provider just for documentation affect anything with my ongoing care?

I keep getting recommendations at one extreme or the other. Either someone says just grab whatever from amazon or they tell me to get Sigvaris medical compression which is $50+ a pair. I have to imagine there's a middle ground that actually works for a normal person with t2 and some mild circulation issues. Does it exist?