This is more a Vermont story.

As someone who was born and raised in Vermont, IMO hippies want a sense of community without the commercialization. That means small towns bordering bigger towns. And there are no bigger towns north of Concord that aren't complete yuppy enclaves.

I only have a 1600 sq-ft house and it has decent insulation.

I cut/buck/split/stack wood off my own property. Went through about 3.5 cord so far this year. Doing your own firewood is definitely not free though, it takes gas and a TON of time/effort. I'd wager if I did a cost analysis it's actually more expensive for me to do it than to buy it given my occupation, but it's satisfying, a good workout and really helps clear out the massive amount of old growth behind the house.

As for oil, paid maybe ~$1600 over the last year. Only turned oil heat on once during the deep freeze we had, otherwise it's exclusively hot water.

Pretty sure that's a Ski-Doo. I had a Freeride 137, that 800 was a phenomenal motor.

As a side note, it's pretty interesting how they implement reverse. They literally stop the engine, then restart it and run it backwards. The marvel of a 2-stroke.

Just up the road in Dublin, we lost power at 5 but it's back on now. 12 inches here already. This shit is insanely heavy, though. Heavier than the last few dumps, which were also heavy wet snow. I've already had to cut one tree down.

Gonna be a fun cleanup tomorrow.

Edit Lost power again at 8:30AM, on the gen again. Snow looks to be around 16" as of 9AM.

We've gotten 12+ inches of wet heavy snow a few times already. In Dublin I got 14 inches of cement on January 22.

Like I said, we've gotten enough heavy wet stuff and high winds in the past few months that I doubt there will be significant power issues. My generator is ready in case I'm wrong, though.

Living in the Monadnock region myself, I'd be surprised if there were significant power outages. We've already had more power outages this winter than we've had the past 4 years combined. My assumption is most of the dead and loose tree limbs have already come down with the previous few storms we've gotten, and there will only be sporadic outages here and there.

Supposedly rodents don't like Rockwool.

Troy and Rindge are far worse than Winchester. The Chief of Police of Troy attended Jan 6.

From what I know their policy is to do it and ask for forgiveness later. My mother in law lives in Rumney and had a bunch of trees on her property abutting the road cut down without her input.

I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, but at some point we have to ask ourselves what trade-offs we need to make to keep our power infrastructure more reliable, especially with the push towards everything being electric. Underground service would be great, but it's not feasible in most of the state, and I'd assume prohibitively expensive.

We at least partially have the deregulated environment to thank for that. Eversource invests the absolute minimum required to keep their equipment operational. If you look at the other utilities in this state, like NH Power Co-op, they literally cut trees down within 10ft of the lines down to the ground, while Eversource only trims branches 6ft around the lines themselves.

The worst is stopping in the middle of an active lane of traffic to let someone in/out. I can't count the amount of times I've seen that.

This may be an extremely stupid question, but have you verified that your well pump breaker is on?