Oh man, that friend sounds like she has her stuff together. I once had a dry spell that lasted almost four months and I was convinced the market was just dead. Turns out I had ghosted basically everyone after a bad project and nobody knew I was still freelancing. I even changed my LinkedIn photo to a blurry one from 2017 and forgot about it.

My buddy with 45k followers took that $500 steady gig and @lisas78 and he's booked solid for months.

Little correction though - $500 for 60 hours works out to about $8.33 an hour, not a $500 loss. Your real loss was the opportunity cost of not taking other work during those hours. Either way, you learned a cheap lesson compared to some folks who keep making this mistake for years.

Hold up, tomato skins? That's actually a thing people worry about with these things? I always just assumed a blender motor was a blender motor, you know, plug it in and it goes. Guess I never really thought about how much torque it actually takes to break down something like a nut or a potato skin. Learning something new every day from this thread, that's for sure. So basically you're saying the cheap ones are just glorified whisks for hot soup, basically useless for actual cooking. What a rip off if you buy the wrong one without knowing this.

@the_betty always gotta read the fine print, learned that one the hard way too.