In addition to already excellent suggestions I’d throw in Ficus benjamina as well. Not the variegated type, the regular one because the variegated one needs tad more light. Once it gets growing it’s fairly tough and forgiving. Easy to propagate from branches too.

Yup, been there, done that. They thrive on neglect. Better not show them you love them, they’ll throw a hissy fit.

After having tests work on my computer but mysteriously fail on test server I discovered that test server was set to UTC and tests that depended on having test data return the same time/date failed. Since it was not critical to test those edge cases we just offset times in test cases so that they didn’t overflow into next day in our test server. It never gets boring when working with time and date.