Oh actually I have to gently push back on one thing here, and I mean this in the nicest way possible. You said the prompt came from a "random stranger" but if she pointed at your notebook and gave you a specific line, that's not quite random in my book. A random stranger would be someone who just happens to be standing near you, not someone who actually reads over your shoulder or sees what you're writing. In my experience, that person was already curious about you or your work before she said anything. I had a similar thing happen at a park once where this older guy saw me doodling and said "draw the bird that keeps stealing bread from the pigeons" and I ended up sketching something I actually hung on my wall. That wasn't random either, he saw what I was doing and decided to engage. So I'd call that more of a deliberate stranger interaction, not a totally random one. Your mileage may vary of course.

Had a buddy who got stuck on a job like this once, said he just started counting how many twigs he picked up to keep his mind off the hours slipping away. How long did that one end up taking you?

Picked up a basic Jennings scale years ago for around thirty dollars and it's still going strong. Does grams to the tenth and that's all I need for my morning pour over. Faithc17, if you're still looking for something simple, that's the route I'd go - nothing fancy, just reliable and easy to read.

Oh, I hear you on that worry. But honestly, @the_oscar has a good point about using them as a starting point. In my own book club, we tried a similar set of conversation starters when things got a bit heated one month, and it actually helped. We each picked one card that spoke to us before the meeting, then talked about why we chose it. It gave us a shared focus without feeling like we were reading from a teleprompter.

Check your local labor laws, heat regulations might cover your rights there.