Glue has its place if the book isn't going to get rough treatment. But for anything you actually use, stitching wins every time, no contest.

Man @ivanb41 is spot on, I've seen the same thing in electronics that should have lasted years but crapped out in months. What worked for me was just adding a simple burn-in step where we run stuff for 48 hours straight before it ever touches a customer's car, caught so many bad solder joints that way. It's not fancy or fast but it saved us from having to explain why something died on the highway.

Wait, are you saying a birth mom milestone feeling heavy is a surprise? I mean no disrespect but 8 years is a long time to carry that weight, isn't it?

Man, just reading that made my back ache in sympathy. Thousand square yards in Phoenix July? That's not just working hard, that's borderline superhuman if you ask me. I've helped buddy on a few small carpet jobs and even doing a single room in that kind of heat had me ready to call it quits by noon. You must have been drinking your body weight in water every single day just to keep from passing out. Honestly, I'm more impressed by the fact you even bothered to add up the numbers at the end of it all, because after days like that I'd just want to collapse and never think about work again. Mad respect for that kind of grind, seriously.

Print statements are basic debugging, not some secret hack.