That gap between 11,200 and 12,400 is scary. I read somewhere that paperwork weight is often just an estimate, so hitting the scale yourself on anything heavy seems like the safe move.

That "finger tight" part hits home. I found a back pad on my mill that I could turn by hand and it had probably been like that since we moved it in. Cheap fix, tight check. Takes two minutes with a wrench and saves a spindle quote.

The part about "you don't mess with it" is the real gold here, because most of us keep stirring and messing and adding stuff just so we feel like we're doing something. There's a whole thing in cooking where the more you mess with a pot the more you cool it down and break it up, so the sauce never really settles into one flavor. Standing there doing nothing for 3 hours is way harder than dumping in 9 ingredients, honestly.