@Alan ₿ running my own node made relying on someone else's feel strange in hindsight

I knew I followed you already because we had this conversation before lol

Another 30 days and my node should be fully synced and ready to transact!

No reason it should take that long. You may need more powerful hardware

Node software still needs to be made more user friendly in my opinion

And even then, we put our trust in the hardware we buy and trust the node software (and verify the hash maybe) we run on it. We increase the chance of having great privacy transacting by running our own node(s), but never trust blindly. If you can't figure out how to hide node activity from your ISP (who scans&logs&sells your data) with the use of a vpn or tor, I'd also suggest to those people to not disclose to the world (continuously syncing the blockchain) that they're into bitcoin and attaching your real IP doing so. Because that would decrease their safety, whilst just wanting to increase privacy... I might also be overly cautious, but that is because I don't trust easily.

Yea I think I’m limited by using an older spindle harddrive.

I think the only way to hide your node activity is to install a VPN directly on your router. Even then I’m pretty sure it’s visible that you’re utilizing specific ports used for Bitcoin. How do you have yours set up?