Those veneers are tricky, man. Over sanding is the easiest mistake to make. What worked for me after doing the exact same thing was to stop sanding by hand that day and just let it sit. Came back the next day and used a card scraper instead of the orbital on the curved spots. Also started keeping my stain cans in a plastic tray with a lip around it after I tipped one over. Took me a whole day to clean up that mess from the garage floor. Sticky concrete is no joke.

Buddy of mine had his Crain crack near the foot end same way.

Oh man, that is the most accurate thing I've read all day. My niece did the exact same thing with Splendor - completely ignored the whole 'collect gems and buy cards to get prestige points' thing and just started hoarding all the red chips because 'they look like strawberries.' She spent the whole game making me 'buy' her imaginary strawberry lemonade with them. Kids have this amazing ability to look at any set of rules and go 'nah, here's what we're ACTUALLY doing now.' I think they can smell when a game is trying to teach them something and they'd rather just have fun on their own terms. Your nephew turning grapes into imaginary snacks sounds way more engaging than actual Viticulture anyway, honestly.

Wow, four years for an 8 foot ramp. Did you ever figure out if it was one specific person dropping the ball or the whole office just passing it around? I had a similar thing with a fence permit once and it turned out one clerk was literally throwing my paperwork in a drawer every time it came across her desk.

Wait, that's actually a game changer for me though. I always thought the microwave trick would just make things worse so I'd just sit there staring at my broken frosting feeling defeated lol. Now I'm wondering if my old method of adding room temp butter piece by piece was actually making the problem drag out longer than it needed to. Definitely trying that drizzle trick next time my butter decides to rebel on me.