Back in the day my students (criminal justice types heading for LE) would take the Academy's "100 hour" course so they could take OOB Police Dept seasonal jobs to patrol the beach for drunken Mass*** kids. And parents. And geezers. But no-one ever seemed to get very hurt.

The folks behind PTP are pro solar. I don’t think Maines Regulatory environment for solar he’s going to get harder

We have a 900 square foot STR that has a 25kBTU Fujitsu. The Fujitsu actually seems to work better when it's cooler. The remote set point has always been squirrelly, plus or minus 5F, usually minus. We tell the guests to set it to 74 to get 68F. It's a replacement remote, although it is the proper Fujitsu one. But I would never want just a heat pump in Maine with lousy CMP service and outages six to eight times a year. We put in a 10kBTU Empire propane monitor, runs without electricity, just enough to keep the chill off for when the power goes out in winter and we're not there and there's no guest, and a pellet stove for when there is a guest, no power, and we need to run a generator. Both were lightly used but secondhand and cost $500 each and then the stove pipe, etc. Pellet stoves pull only a few hundred watts, so we can still run the stove or hot tank on a 5kW genny (just not at the same time). We can turn the pilot on the propane monitor off after April and leave it off until November. We also put in a couple baseboards, which are quieter if the guest wants less fan noise. Kinda regret that once a month sometimes when the bill comes, because some guests will just run the baseboards and run up the power bill, but they never complain so that's worth something. Others would rather run the pellet stove, so we encourage that, and buy pellet for them no questions asked. It's important to know that the insurance company gave us not trouble when we said that there was both a heat pump and a monitor. That combination seemed to fit the bill. Twenty years ago they might have held out for a furnace.

This is close by: https://mrdrewandhisanimalstoo.com

She would have had to pay rent and be there for more than 28 days to be a tenant. But Maine eviction courts favor tenants even when landlords are in the right based on the law. Landlords who show up to court hoping for a clean eviction, if they lack counsel and do not have a perfect case, are essentially railroaded into arbitration before cases go to trial. Housing advocates appear in court to manage arbitration before each case is even heard. (This is based on experience in Waldo County, but it's a state law so I assume it's similar elsewhere.) So if you got rid of her, you are good and change the locks and you should probably never let her back in the house ever again, or at least not until you're sure she has a place of her own and is settled.

You need a bill of sale to pay taxes on and register the boat. The person getting the car needs one for the same purpose. You need a copy of the car's bill of sale to prove, if you ever needed to, that you sold that car on a certain date (before some dude you never met before and found on FB or CL drives it drunk into a pedestrian and drives away). He might ask for a copy of the boat's bill of sale for the same purpose. Helps to have a home printer scanner but you can just write out two copies and sign them both, or take pictures with a phone or digital camera (which is helpful because it will have date/time data to go with the picture).

I use a heat lamp and close the barn door.

It doesn't hurt, if you do your own handyman work, to pre-assemble the kit needed to defrost a well line. I keep mine handy. You need about 30 feet of the harder transparent pipe they sell by the foot in the hardware store, depending how far your well is from your basement, has about 1/4 or 3/8 inch internal diameter, as well as one of those black submersible utility pumps, hardware fittings to go from the pump to the 30-foot pipe, and a nice clean five gallon bucket. Set aside enough water to fill that bucket somewhere it doesn't freeze. If your well pipe freezes, you heat that water up super hot on your stove, fill the bucket, turn the well off, disconnect the well line close to the place it comes into the basement, and put the bucket under the end to catch the water and recycle. Pump the hot water into the well pipe, recycling as much as you can. Push the line in as you go. It will melt the ice in the pipe at a rate of a couple inches a second. As soon as it is ice-free, reconnect and turn on the well. Then run the tap furthest from the well for the rest of the hard part of winter. The same kit is good for winterizing onboard and stern drive boat engines and campers, only in that case you pump RV antifreeze instead.

Run the tap that is furthest from the well just a trickle. But remember that the cold has to penetrate the ground to freeze the pipe that comes to the house, which takes more time than this 24-36 hour cold snap. Keep plenty of heat in the house and run that tap.

I got paid two home-grown (frozen) chickens for plowing a neighbor's sister's driveway. Is that side enough?

We first took off the bottom six to eight inches of siding and sheathing. We cleared out the mouse nests and other debris from the old stud bays. We scarfed in some new wood in a few places where there was partially rotten sill. Put PT sheathing over that. Drilled a two-inch hole at the top of each floor's stud bay. Blew in cellulose until it wouldn't blow in any more. This requires a special blower, not the one they rent at Home Despot. Put two-inch foam board over the old siding, glued at the edges. Put 7/16 OSB nailer over that with long screws. Then my wife put up shingles, which she likes to do. The house was built of rough cut hemlock, fully four inches, which at R3.8/inch for cellulose is about R15 for the stud bays, and the foam board makes it R25. But it's the air sealing that does most of the work. It was still drafty until a couple years later when we put spray foam over the top several feet of cellar wall and over the joist bays. It's not hard. We did it ourselves with the canisters they sell at Home Depot. You have to suit up and wear a very good respirator. It's recommended that you use the kind with an air supply. I didn't, and survived, but I should have done. But you can get a contractor to do it for you and they have all the proper kit.

I should mention we cut some of the firewood ourselves, off our own land. But not all. About half.

Our old farmhouse isn't that large, about 2000 feet with a recent extension, but it has distant wings, so doesn't heat easily.

When we got it, it wasn't insulated. The previous occupants used 700 gallons oil and ten cords of wood a year. We didn't exactly convert the place from oil. The oil furnace is still there. What we did was make incremental improvements. First we put in a wood stove and used that instead of the oil hot air furnace for about 80% of the heat. Then in stages we air sealed and insulated: new windows and doors, R40 cellulose blown in the attic, four inches cellulose blown into the stud bays, and two inches R10 foam board over the entire outside. Spray foam on the upper four feet of the cellar walls and joist bays. Smarter thermostats for the furnace and baseboards. Every year for five or six years we did something to improve on air sealing and insulation. We did it all ourselves.

Then we built an extension that had R10 foam board and six inches cellulose in the walls and R40 in the attic. We added a heat pump in the kitchen where we can feed both wings, although not well enough to get to the far corners where we have electric heaters to top up. We added solar, 2.7kW/hour of sunshine, which cancels out some of the extra power needed for the heat pump and baseboards. Right now we use 3-4 cords firewood, less than 50 gallons oil, and our power bills go from $40 in summer to $100 in late fall and spring to $300 in January and February. Quite a bit of that is tank heaters and heat lamps for livestock and block heaters for a tractor, though. We measured their consumption with a meter and it is high, as much as $80/month. If we didn't want to keep stock then we'd have only $120 to $180 more electrical consumption/month in winter. Our power bills would top out just over $200/month. I estimate our total actual heating costs at about $1200/year. Right now we are replacing the furnace with an identical newer used model. We don't use it much -- we've gone only from from 1/3 to 1/4 of a tank so far this year. But when it's really cold we do use it to keep the house warm when we're not here. It sits in the cellar so it keeps the pipes from freezing. The old one is getting rusty because the 120-year old cellar is damp and floods occasionally. And the insurance company wants us to have one, even if we barely use it.

(Full disclosure: I was an energy academic before retirement. Now I'm just a grumpy handyman.)

I would guess because "cottage" and the Anglo-Scots root "cottar" or "commoner" refer to the old British peasantry. So it's "commoner's pie" and was originally made with leftover roast beef.

No lamb for you, then!

It might seem like a lot but it's not. Look up the amps specification for the heat pump. It might pull 10-15 amps at the peak of its duty cycle. At 220V, that's 2.2 to 3.3 kWh/hour, or 36 to 59¢ per hour of heat (10 or 15 amps times 220V for one hour = 2.2 to 3.3kWh at 18 ¢/kWh = 40 to 59¢).

If it runs half the time that's $144 to $212 a month (rounded: 30 days times 12 hours/day x 40 or 59¢ per hour). If it ran all the time that would be twice that. If an 120btu/hour (roughly 1 gallon/hour) oil furnace ran 12 hours a day at the current state average of $4.50/gallon, that would be $1600.

The only thing cheaper is firewood.

I'm a shepherd. That means I farm sheep. It's not shepherd's pie unless it uses ground lamb or mutton. It's cottage pie. Look it up, people. Be good to your local shepherd.

I tried to study and teach about climate and sustainability and resilience for thirty years at the college level. My wife (also a professor) and I started a small farm and have been running that for twenty years, trying to model on a small scale the agricultural and energy and housing systems needed to fight climate change. In my teaching, I met resistance at every turn. I was a poverty stricken grad student for twelve years just in order to get the PhD (climate policy) needed to qualify for my eventual position. I gave up a large portion of potential income, and postponed having a family. I was yelled at at public meetings and insulted by conservative students. Ultimately our brand of radical thinking was too much for our employers and we were forced out. I chose to retire in near mental exhaustion.

But I can tell myself I fought the good fight. And as for my former opponents of all stripes, fuck 'em. They can kiss my sustainable ass.

Now in retirement, getting my exercise running the farm and fixing things, having recovered mentally and physically, I have become not complacent, not fatalistic, but perhaps I am now able now to take the geologic view over the ecological one. Nothing in nature is static. The planet has been here for 4.5 billion years. Home sapiens only for around 150,000 years. Maine only for 203. If everything happens much as the majority of climate scientists expect, the place we now call Maine will have a climate more like Virginia's by 2100. The ecosystem we know in Maine will be replaced by one more like that found in VA. The sea level will rise, perhaps by a lot if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet fails, as it certainly appears to be trying to do. Our costal towns will need to move uphill and inland. It's possible, even likely, that the warming will continue after 2300, unless we find a cheap way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Immigrant pressure from the global south, where farming and urban environments will fail humanity completely, will increase tremendously, perhaps catastrophically at times. Storms will get yet worse, especially hurricanes and rainstorms. But ecosystems currently unattractive in places like Labrador and Greenland will also open up and so some of us will move north in turn, pioneering new civilizations. Even Maine life will go on. It won't necessarily be awful, just different. We'll be better off than Texas and Florida, a notion that carries some shard of natural consequence for the collective guilt of the populations of those states in regard to climate politics. The hard part will be the toxic politics and conflict that these changes will encourage globally. We will be lucky to keep our democracy and freedom. I realize that more and more with recent events and have started to realize my work isn't over, so I've begun to write about the nexus between climate change, societal resilience, democracy and freedom.

I'll let you know how this new venture turns out if I get anywhere with it.

1. Change on a decadal time scale: Read Maine's Climate Future. https://climatechange.umaine.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/439/2020/02/Maines-Climate-Future-2020-Update-3.pdf

2. Change on an annual/biannual time scale: Begin to understand El Niño/La Niña https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/elnino/what-is-el-nino

3. Change on a daily/weekly timescale: Understand and track the jet stream: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/250hPa/orthographic=-70.70,49.95,598/loc=-1.418,50.936

I have good anecdotal evidence to suggest that climate ignorance in intergenerational. I'm an old fart (61) who spent most of my adult life researching and teaching about climate change and solutions at the college level. My young students only rarely got the message. Many met my work with open disdain. It was hard, uphill-stone-rolling work. I am happy to be retired now -- to my climate-proofed sustainable homestead, of course. If you haven't encountered climate denial among the young, you must be living in a pretty good bubble. I will say one more useful thing. If I ever tried to communicate about climate using only sarcasm and disdain, I made even less headway. As my generation says, "take a Quaalude, dude."