Good map, but even this method can be deceptive and hide the peak volume centers. E.g. the city of Boston is basically a dot on this map, but has a population basically equivalent to all of Vermont’s!

This is the correct answer.

So... now I'm curious.

• Why was your bf's car there?
• Did you expect the plow to come by to sand?
• Where was your bf's car parked (was it easy enough for the plow to avoid it)?
• Did the car actually get damaged, or was it at risk of getting damaged? This is the part I'm curious about- either there was an actual risk here, or your bf is being picky for no good reason.

I don't have enough info to judge, but from the very limited evidence offered, I'm tending toward the "Keep the plow guy. Drop the boyfriend" point of view!

Same here. The only roads I won’t take the Odyssey on around here (Shoreham) in the spring are the ones that are closed for the winter. I will take my RAV on those.

I'm cheating, I still have the oil-fired furnace as backup. I do need to work with the installer to tune the heat pump settings; I'd like it to go lower than it currently does because I have a lot of excess solar generation credits I want to use up.

Please then do a blind taste test with VT, NY, and Canadian syrup, and report back!

Are you looking for a fight?

I am married to a Canadian (Acadian New Brunswick) and have had lots of Canadian syrup in my day, and now get my VT syrup from Trade Winds Farm (among other sources), so I'm sort of a neutral.

Answer: I have yet to taste "bad" maple syrup. Darker is better (the old Grade B, now Grade A: Dark Color & Robust Flavor or something?), regardless of the source.

>Listen, if people want to kill themselves, as tragic as it is, theyre going to do it. Id rather a clean bullet to the head, than forcing some poor volunteer to carry my body out of the quechee gorge...

This is not a true statement. Some suicide is pre-meditated, but *a lot* is not- look at people who attempted suicide once and then did not repeat. It is generally not a methodical and rationale act.

And your second sentence contradicts your first; you basically admit that guns lower the threshold and make it easier to commit suicide.

If you plot the lot size (x axis) vs assessed value (y-axis), and fit a line to the (noisy) data, the y-intercept will tell you the implicit value of having a buildable lot of any size.

The pattern you see is totally typically. The marginal value of one additional sq ft is generally less than the average.

Example: let’s say you had 0.25 acres and your neighbor had 1 acre, and you were allowed to bargain for land on the border. Ignoring ability to pay, you’d probably value each marginal square foot more than your neighbor- they already have the space they need for a patio, swingset, chicken coop, yard.

I run a long extension cord.

Very good advice. My only comment is that we have lost a bird or two with people outside- I walked to the far side of the house for a couple mins and a coyote got one. And we also had a hawk attack under similar circumstances, but that bird survived (long story)!

I feel like this should be on a 2CV, a Subaru, or a monster truck.

Interesting re: Plug Power; I live a couple miles from their electrolyzer facility in MA. And my company has looked at their stuff for forklifts; that's a pretty good use case for them.

I typically see a range of 3-5x more for buried vs overhead, but these numbers are in the right ballpark (btw $100/ft works out to $528k per mile). In my town in MA, we used to be able to install underground for $1-2M per mile (mid 2010's), but it's probably crept up since then.

And because Vermont is rural, infrastructure that is network-based is expensive per capita (many miles to cover, not so many people). My neighbor in VT 2 doors down got a quote for running electrical service (which currently stops at the house in between ours); it was something like $100k. So, he decided to go off the grid: solar, small wind turbine, batteries. It was cheaper.

>https://www.bluettipower.com/

Me 3. StarLink is magic for us. Doesn't change my opinion of Elon much, though.

>nothing is cheap

I know there are real cost of living issues in VT, but as a Masshole who buys goods and services in both VT and metro Boston... I see VT as a low-price paradise in comparison.

For the record the "friendly" dog assaults are not limited to VT (reporting from suburban MA). I once had a woman call my children "assholes" after her dog knocked one kid over (resulting in a laceration due to getting a stick in the face upon landing). Plus, many, many other slightly less insane encounters in the woods!

They don't have calendars, but they sure know something about the length of the day! Like temperature, it's pretty relevant to their basic operations

Damned if you do, damned if you don't... Your estimate of 4 weekends a year is... low, by a large margin.

Given that we are there frequently and erratically, this is not feasible at this time.

I'm one of those Massholes with a second home in VT. I don't AirBnB it, and plan to move to VT full time in 2026, so back off.

For reasons I won’t bore y’all with, I ended up with snow tires on one of our cars for all of 2022. I wouldn’t recommend doing so, but they actually worked pretty well, even in the summer.

Who is your electric utility? 49c per kWh is very expensive, even for MA.

Also, how big is your house? Have you invested in airsealing, insulation, etc.? Basic insulation can have an incredibly good ROI.

Look at both the supply and demand side!

This is nice land, and offers swimming in an area that actually doesn't have many such options (no one's swimming in the Lemon Fair River), and serves a non-affluent community.

Failing state support, I really hope that the Boy Scouts find a mission-driven buyer to purchase the land, or that local groups will be able to cobble together funds to purchase the property. It'd be a real loss if it gets McMansioned.

Yes- I’m in the process of doing that.