It was super cold in my area. So cold it hardly snowed though. So if you didn’t get your skiing in before January you missed out. And we’re still in a drought even though we used to live in basically a seasonal rain forest.

That’sa valid concern, we’re here for the inconsequential stuff.

Fully agree though.

That’s a really small section of Americans at this point.

Baggers are the motorcycles with loud exhaust and even louder speaker systems in the big plastic cargo bags on the back. Often ridden by insecure assholes in my experience.

Eh, underestimating new England’s 4000 footers is how most people end up dying out there. The trees are way more dense, and all the same age because of re-forestation after the 1800s. So going off trail is a terrible idea.

Also as was said before, the puny 6000ft Mount Washington wind speed is actually the highest recorded on earth (not inside a tornado anyway). But it’s just a symptom of how fast the weather changes and that is most often what kills people.

Oh yeah, and for the skiers and boarders out there, if you learned to ski in New England, you can ski anywhere. “New England Packed powder” (blue ice with occasional groomer tracks in it) separates the pros from the joeys.

If he fell asleep with his foot over the accelerator and then woke up as the car left the road, this should be expected.

My brother did the same thing while my parents were following him home and had to watch him drive up an embankment and do a half donut before he was aware enough to hit the brakes.

They thought he was having a stroke or something, but he dozed for a second and woke up to a road sign directly in front of him and thought he was hitting the brakes.

Basically my origin story, that’s why I like the song, but hate the assholes who blast it from their baggers or other dick compensators.

Probably. I stopped serious dev a decade ago now and just manage some old sites as a side gig.

I was getting apprentice credit I could have used to shorten an apprenticeship after graduation, but I dropped the box classes senior year and went to college for design instead.

I eventually ended up using a tiny bit of the knowledge for interactive museum and store front installations, but I’d have made a killing in commercial electrician work in the mean time.

It’s tiny and only goes 50mph max (maybe, and that’s pushing it). it’s more like an all terrain golf cart than even a UTV.

It’s smaller than an old OG jeep.

Somehow the builder didn’t even mention it. But there almost no way he hadn’t seen that right? I think that book came out in the late 1960s.

I’ve wanted a Steyr Puch Haflinger since I was about 5 from that book. Pretty rare in the US though.

I wish I’d stuck with the vocational classes and ignored the utter morons I was surrounded by.

I could have made a killing and been retired by now, but I thought I was too smart and went to college, got in a bunch of debt, and crushed my soul in advertising and web dev for my best years.

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.

Mines slightly lighter, but otherwise same.

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.

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: