• I would add keeping a jug of sand or cat litter along with a couple 12"+ 2x4s in the vehicle to help with getting some traction if you or someone else ends up stuck.
• i dunno about EVs but if you’ve got an ICE vehicle give it a minute or two of just idling and warming up before going anywhere
• When I start driving on snow I tap the brakes a couple times if nobody’s around just to get a feel for how good my traction is. Am I sliding a little bit? A lot? Not at all? That helps set the tone for what to expect on the roads.
• Don’t accelerate through turns if you’ve already got momentum, and if the weather’s REALLY suspect I prefer to coast on overpasses as well since those ice over first.
• Respect the possibility of black ice. If you live in a mountainous area then assume anywhere in the shade is black ice
• If the house is on a crawlspace make sure any ductwork and copper piping are properly Insulated, keep the crawlspace vents closed during the cold months.
• Use ice melt sparingly if you have to use it at all (sand is preferable) because it’s caustic to concrete.
• if you’re somewhere that gets an absolutely stupid amount of snow, follow your neighbors’ lead if you see them shoveling snow off their roofs. I saw a lot of roof collapses in a luxury mountain town where rich people’s second (third? Fourth? Ninth?) homes were left vacant during a pretty nasty snowstorm

It might be a few hundred to scope the main sewer line but you could probably find promos to lower the cost. There’s a “one stop shop” in my area that’s advertising scopes for $30, but they do plumbing, electrical, and HVAC and I haven’t heard of them doing any of those particularly well. If you find a company like that just be ready to put up with their sales pitch and then keep the video to run it by a different plumber for a dimebag or a case of beer or maybe even some real money.

Do you have many big trees on the property? That’s usually the biggest cause for backups like what you’re describing: roots sneak into the sewer line, then keep growing/expanding and catching all the toilet paper flowing by and then just turns into this big dumb obstruction that constipates the whole line

This is the best way of doing it. I’d recommend some paint thinner and paper towels to help clean up the silicon. Even people that have been doing this work for years can get enthusiastic with caulking stuff in and silicon can get messy fast. Plus make sure to give the whole space enough time to fully cure and be good to go against water exposure. I’m also surprised at the apparent lack of retention screw or something in there, pretty strange

That crack isn’t bad at all, especially if it’s following a mortar line. Are there doors/windows nearby, or is it close to a corner? Insurance will almost certainly tell you it’s nothing. My area had a quake a few years ago and I got a bigger crack (maybe 1/4") above the basement walkout door, also through the mortar like this one. If you wanna seal the crack then you’d have better luck with caulk, mortar would have a hard time taking to such a small crack; and sealing it would make the area more difficult to monitor. Just keep an eye on it over time and bone up on the water management around your house to make sure it’s all flowing away from your foundation, not loitering. I really don’t think you’ve got something to worry about right now based on what I see, and I’ve worked on or evaluated hundreds of houses. Rest easy, friend

I always left mine in neutral but when I’d take it to a shop they’d leave it in gear and I’d lurch forward like an amateur when I left. I’m not convinced there’s a difference between the two but I’m no mechanic

I installed Mint this past spring and fiddled around with it briefly every once in a while but I’m not a tech guy so there was a little bit of a learning curve on stuff like getting a second monitor to work, stuff like that. I’m sure you’ve already found out that there’s TONS of documentation and forums for questions, it’s just a matter of feeling kinda dumb for a little while as you troubleshoot. I switched over to Mint full time a few months ago and haven’t looked back. I’ve still got Win10 on an extra hard drive just in case but I think more and more of reclaiming that space for Steam now, I don’t miss Windows at all

I’m enjoying it, tried a few different rogue builds and doing a sorc right now, fireball then probably switch to lightning spear when I get the right gear. Doubt I’ll be playing this season for much longer though since it’s shorter and I don’t wanna burnout right before the expansion. Plus I’m a simp for Age of Mythology so that’s gonna be my September.

I also finally beat Lilith and all the tormented bosses, I’ve really been enjoying the changes since season 4 and the reworked uniques for this season

You aren’t the only one feeling that way, just put yourself in a position to meet others. Start going to meetups of things that interest you, or, at the very least, engage with others on things that interest them and you’ll usually find common ground eventually. It can feel difficult and awkward, but everybody struggles with that when they first start to put themselves out there. Just persevere, you’ll find people.

Same. If it were just up to the wife and I we would’ve simply gone to the courthouse and signed some stuff but we decided on a ceremony because it was “important to our families” and did things more traditionally than if it were only the two of us. We would’ve had a lot more fun with the whole thing if we could have just realized that the day was for us and about us and should’ve been done our way.

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There’s a real cognitive dissonance there. Their version of Christianity takes a back seat to politics because they’ve been told all these visions of grandeur about how “Jesus is coming back” and how they are the “sheep” and all those godless liberals are the "goats. They’ve been trained to look for reasons to feel persecuted even if they don’t come directly out and say it, even if they don’t realize it themselves. There’s a real “us vs. them” mentality in a lot of those types of churches and they’ll gladly go rub one out to stuff like where Jesus said to his disciples in one of the gospels that if people aren’t for him then they’re against him. Nevermind that one of the other gospels says the opposite. A lot of Christians I’ve come across just have this persecution fetish where any slight inconvenience or call for accountability from pretty much anyone (because their church won’t take them to task over things) turns into a ‘righteous’ cry to their lord about how the godless Philistines around them are normalizing oppression and sodomy and trans rights or whatever and these holy little Christian’s are the only beacon of hope in society even though they insist on treating anyone who isn’t like them like absolute garbage. I’m not a social scientist or anything like that, hopefully people smarter than me chime in. But conservatives treat equity in a community like a zero sum game, you know? If poor people are given a hand up by the government then it’s interpreted by these (at best) middle class Christians as an affront to their hard earned money. They worked for their income but “these filthy poors just get handouts at MY expense?” You can tell by their actions that they have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus regardless of how they try to present themselves. They’re full of crap and they deserve to be treated as such.

Source: Grew up in a very conservative farming community, did all the church stuff, then moved away and found myself.

Also, I know I abused quotation marks but my bad on any grammar or spelling errors or general incoherence. I treated myself to vodka for dinner.

Plenty of good suggestions already but I for the under cabinet kitchen lighting (16’ strip of cob LED) I installed a few years ago I just used thermostat (18/2 I think?) wire to run the gap between cabinets. Just don’t make the same mistake I did and use the cheap solder that comes with the kits, it was such a frustrating experience until I bit the bullet and bought some nicer stuff, made the process WAY easier

I’ve moved a few times around the US and, like the other commenter, have adopted kind of a mixed dialect. I grew up in the north but spent quite a while in the south, which have VAST cultural differences, and people from the south can tell I’m not one of them while people from the north think I’m from the south. For a little while after my first move from the north to the south, when I was still in my early 20s, I felt out of place but a lot of that was probably just due to being insecure and half a country away from my family. Wife and I moved to a northern state a few years back and we both feel even more out of place here because of the state religion but have accepted that we like being nomadic. We’re mapping out a plan to move to a different part of the south and try that culture, then maybe after a few years move to a different part of the north or possibly a different country because why not. I used to be scared of trying new/unknown things (perk of growing up in a small town) but now I embrace it because there’s so much to learn from different people and cultures. Plus I figure if we keep trying then my wife and I will find our tribe eventually

Sounds like it comes down to your approach on risk management. Others have pretty clearly laid out the risks and frustrations of living in a house that’s being fixed/renovated, but if the seller is as negligent as they sound then I’d expect to find even more issues. If the inspection couldn’t cover anything pertaining to electricity then that’d be a huge red flag for me, that stuff can get real expensive real fast. Follow your gut and try not to fall for the sunk cost fallacy, it can be hard when you focus on how many hundreds of dollars and hours of time you’ve spent so far but it sounds like you’re looking at at least another several thousand dollars in repairs, and that’s only for the problems you’re currently aware of. Everybody’s situation is different so maybe this whole thing is right for you, but don’t ignore the red flags just because of how much you’ve already invested

Regal and Aura both. I was a Sherwin Williams fanboy on my own projects until I started working with a guy who tries to only use Ben Moore stuff and now I’m sold. So worth the cost