I leave the expertise on douchery to you.

And what I see is toyless.

Get as indignant as you like, I'm glad to hear you have a clue. As for the rest of the readers downvoting me, I hope they have a clue too, because most people do not, and the majority of these birds are cared for poorly. If I opened anybody's eyes, that's fine by me.

It's a challenging time to find service providers for pretty much anything. If the guy plowing your driveway works for someone else, he may be a new hire and won't learn what not to do unless you provide some feedback.

Since the pandemic I get ghosted all the time trying to find new tradespeople, they show up for a quote then never come back, over and over.

On the bright side, maybe the driveway is one of those things you can do yourself with some modest equipment (a snow blower, or whatever). One thing is always true, nobody you pay is going to give it the same level of attention as you. Corners will be cut (literally, off your yard and plantings), messes will be made, sometimes if you want it done right you have to do it yourself.

Good luck. My driveway service had new blood this year who we really messing up. Three calls later and some additional stakes in the driveway and finally the mess has ebbed.

I don't see any toys in that cage. You have a creature with the intelligence of a small child that will live 50-80 years, please get it the stimulating toys it needs. Beware letting it play with human things, there could be all manner of toxins in human toys.

Buy or make wood and puzzle toys designed for birds. PM me if you need help, owning a grey is a HUGE, LIFETIME responsibility.

Alewife, or some outlying town on the green line would be my suggestion. However overnight parking could be a problem, particularly in the Winter where many towns have overnight parking restrictions to keep roads clear for plows.

I don't understand the periodic light. Does it have lights that blink? If it was just reflecting sunlight it seems like it would a solid line.

What TV reception? I haven't seen TV in 14 years.

However I don't miss it at all so long as the internet is fast enough for streaming content (my basic DSL is fast enough), and maybe not even then.

As others have said, main roads after clearing should be fine. It's mostly after snow or icy rain, for a day or three depending on what the weather is like, that you need to beware.

It all comes down to physics, slippery roads are going to teach you some hard lessons if you don't anticipate the physics.

Trying to pull out of a parking lot with a slushy entrance? You may push the pedal harder to try to get out before the light turns or oncoming traffic arrives, but the wheels, without proper traction, will spin and you'll go slowly, if at all. Good tires help, common sense is still important. Traction/friction is your friend.

Similarly if it's icy, you can press the brakes, but just because the tires stop rotating doesn't mean you'll slow down or stop moving forward. You have momentum proportional to the weight of your vehicle and the speed you're traveling. Give yourself a long path to slow down. (Or, as others said, best not to be out in the first place).

A heavy car with rear wheel drive on icy roads can also be a turning hazard, you can turn the wheels but the car just continues in the same direction. Not much of a problem in this day with front/awd/4 wheel drive and lighter vehicles.

Anyway, you get the idea. But avoid the icy days to drive, and if you must drive in bad conditions (only if you must), anticipate lack of traction and plan for it.

Each town sets its own rate for property taxes. When I bought my house, Brattleboro had the highest rate in Vermont. But when you're buying a house you tend to concentrate on the up-front cost, not the annual property taxes, so numbers indicating percentages as tax tend to blur in your head and not have a solid "so this is what it will cost me annually to live here" effect.

Ignoring those numbers can make for a costly choice.

I'll say only that Brattleboro has the highest property taxes in the state, or it did when I bought, and it's no joke. I regret buying in Brattleboro. Good luck in your purchase.

Electric heat will never be as efficient or cheap as oil heat for a large square footage. And as oil has been above $5 all year I think, compared to $3 or less in past years, it's gonna hurt.

I've turned my whole house, except for two small rooms, down to 50 degrees on the thermostat. On most average days this has substantially reduced the amount of time the furnace is running, but it also means I need a jacket to stay in most of the other rooms. I've also stopped some wasteful washing habits w.r.t. hot water.

In a very small room I use electric heat which works reasonably well for that small space, not least because the hot water furnace radiator is in the floor and works very inefficiently.

Anyway, electric won't be your answer to heat the whole house. Good luck.

Oil/heating is no more expensive in Vermont than any other northern state, in fact our electricity is cheaper than many states because of its source. If you want to know how much your next oil fill-up will cost, look at the price of diesel at the pump, subtract about 80 cents per gallon, and that's probably what you'll pay for home heating oil.

Los Pollos Hermanos

Unless you have no other way to get water away from your house, IMO, gutters are nothing but a pain. In any state. On any house. They clog in the winter with ice, they clog in the fall with leaves, you have to clean them every year, longer spouts at the bottom get knocked about. Eventually they start to fall apart, especially if you don't clean them and maintain the woodwork on which they're mounted.

Grade your land accordingly or install drainage around the house. Life is better without gutters.

I'm guessing you're not going to get more than a day or two out of a battery backup, but of course it depends on your battery capacity. As for recharging those batteries with solar panels, well, it could take a lot of solar panels. Still, worth figuring out if you want the green and self sufficient option.

Me, I have oil heat and a 500 gallon (underground) propane tank hooked up to my generator. It automatically switches on in less than a second most of the time, and I don't know how long I could stretch those 500 gallon of propane, but I'm thinking a couple of months.

Peace of mind, and since it only runs when the power is down, it isn't like it really uses that much propane.

People complaining about DM clear text need to re-read the reddit terms of service.

I've had Consolidated (and their predecessors) for 13 years. In the early years there were problems with reliability. But the last 10 years or so it's been pretty solid. (See caveats below).

I'm at the end of the road and wire. That means I get 8 Mbps down, and 1 Mbps up, and I have no options to improve that except to pay for a second line.

Here's the thing I've learned to watch out for. Uploads. You can bash your downloads all you want, everything works fine. But if you actually upload and peg your 1Mbps up, the connection becomes utterly unusable for any other purpose until that upload is done.

And while I upload photos regularly, I know when I'm uploading them. The big problem with the uploads-killing-internet-for-the-whole-house cames from the Apple ecosystem.

Every person who visits with their 2.5 Apple devices, ipads, watches, phones (especially phones), computers, all trying to exchange cat photos and share them to the cloud. Oy.

Someone plugs in their iphone to charge, that's when it decides to upload/sync to the cloud. House internet dies as 400MB of cat or baby videos get uploaded.

I finally solved the problem by getting a router that let's me police bandwidth. So now all those iphones and other devices can only upload at about 30% of the upload max bandwidth, leaving the network working.

Maybe that's what's getting you, maybe not, but worth keeping in mind if you have CC DSL.

You've missed the peak. Leaves are now falling from the trees. There's still color today (with rain), but it won't be worth it by the weekend. I'm in southern VT, presumably it's further past peak in points north.

Wow!