My brother legit did this to repair his old farm house that he shouldn’t have bought. Tools and supplies are tax write offs, the company always operates at a loss, but he is basically a decent carpenter and worked through college and highschool summers as one.

Also don’t buy an ancient house unless you have the funds to build another house in it.

Is it a metro area with significant sprawl?

Median list price in Massachusetts is $716,000 and most houses still go from listed to pending in around 8 days.

At least in our part of the north east, they’ve gone away because there are less kids in the schools. Enrollment and birthdates are both way down in our small towns. Ann my Moms town has closed 2 of the 5 elementary schools.

Mines slightly lighter, but otherwise same.

I’d argue it’s both freedom and dependence.

If you live in a rural area it really does feel like you are trapped there without a motorized vehicle. Especially late at night or in an emergency, even an ambulance can be 20+ minutes away in many places.

You can see this with the popularity of over powered e-bikes with teens. Basically silent dirt bikes at this point. They let kids go much farther from home and reduce the speed differential on road sides.

Public transit would be nice of course, but lots of people live 20-50km from any stores, and plenty live further. And have long cold winters.

I commuted by bike and subway for 18 years in Boston, but then moved home to care for dementia parents, now my son is biking (just pedals), and we’re forced to ride on paths or one town over where they have wide sidewalks and crossings (there aren’t either in our 2 stoplight town). Btw my commute took twice as long by public transport than by bike, but that’s another issue.

Like everything else, it’s a gray area, I think the US could realistically reduce vehicle use to the 40%s, but to go much lower would require the elimination of sprawl, building denser housing and a ton more local shopping, doctors, and grocery stores. Not just more trains and buses.

/end rant, sorry it got long, nuance is tricky.

That’s what I like about Ruby ORMs. They did all the conversion for you, and you could have SQLite on your dev box, Postgres on the test server and MySQL on the annoying production host that wouldn’t run anything else.

This was 18 years ago though.

Strawberry rhubarb with mostly rhubarb. Two crusts, nine of that crumble garbage and a big lump of vanilla ice cream on top.

Our dog is kinda gray, but his hair is banded black/white/black. So it shows up on anything.

Unfortunately he sheds like 2 dogs so we’re ultimately in the same boat.

Reusable grocery bags are the most embarrassing, so I end up cleaning them every week.

Dog tax:

I’m 6’3 and tall to most people, but fit under most doors just fine.

Basement stairs can fuck right off though I’ve done that lotsa times and it managed to be a surprising painful thing every time.

Also I think I’d laugh if someone said and if the short guy things to me, I get called things like string bean and “big guy” by bros who don’t know me.

Just watched Back to the Future with my 8 year old.

He’s kinda sensitive about stressful scenes and bullies, and has had a hard time finishing some movies, but he made it through and was the most psyched I’ve seen him about a movie at the end.

We’re gonna watch 2 next Friday. He’s Pumped.