Austin humidity probably did half that work for you, since wet air keeps hair from drying out the way it does back home. Three weeks is just long enough to grow out the damaged tips too, so a trim when you got back might be doing more than the serum ever did.

Wet dog smell in a basement could just be a musty old rug or a dead mouse somewhere though. I looked at a place last year that smelled like that and the inspection came back totally clean. Cracks in old homes are pretty normal too, my parents' house has had one since the 90s and it's never leaked.

Man, the part nobody talks about is the resume robots. When you send 150 apps, most of them get filtered out by software before a human ever sees them, so you're basically throwing paper into a black hole. With only 2 a week you can actually look up who the hiring manager is and find a way around the filter, which is probably why your hit rate jumped. The 90 minutes per app stings but you're getting paid for that time eventually, unlike the spray and pray method.