How to keep your shafts steady while threading

I have a counterbalance floor loom. It's my pride and joy. (Counterbalance looms are like hen's teeth in Australia.) I've finished one project on it and am well under way warping the next, so I'm still in the honeymoon phase. However, this honeymoon hasn't been without its issues.

The Problem

Like a lot of pulley-based looms, mine has wooden shafts top and bottom that float freely in the castle - no sides or guide rails. This can make it difficult to thread the heddles. They wave around and bump into each other, and before you know it you've threaded shaft three with shaft four's intended thread, or worse - threaded *both* together.

Habitica and Plans for 2023

After a ~5 year break, I’m back to using Habitica for day-to-day task management. While the vast majority of my project/task management happens in Obsidian (love that app), I found I needed some distance between “everything that I ever need to do, whether today or five years from now” and “stuff I need to get done within the next week or so".

Both my needs and attitude towards task management have changed a lot over the last few years, so I was hesitant to go back to it, but for right now it meets 95% of my needs. It helps that the elder child is old enough to start learning to manage their own stuff, instead of me. The gamification (especially the pets) is catnip to them. Our little two-person party is doing pretty well for a perpetually-stressed adult with too many responsibilities, and an ADHD homeschooled tween with no sense of time.