Lumber has gotten back down to a reasonable price, but everything else is more expensive. Drywall, insulation, fixtures, flooring and paint are all 25-50% more than they were in 2019. That's at the regular prices. Worst of all, Lowe's has gotten a lot stingier with their clearance prices. I remodel houses for a living, and my overall material costs have gone up by well over 50%.

I suggest we use Alaskan rules at a 4-way traffic stop. Right of way goes to whoever has the oldest truck.

Right where I live, of course. There's a bus that comes here on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month.

Yes, that really is the schedule.

Using a container for a chicken coop is a terrible idea. It's going to be roasting hot in the summer unless you cut holes for ventilation, which is going to be ten times as hard to do with a steel container as it would be with an ordinary shed. It will also be freezing cold in the winter. You want something smaller than a container so the chickens' body heat and the manure breaking down will keep the coop a few degrees warmer than the outside. Speaking of manure, you will want something with a dirt floor to let the ammonia leach out. The doors on a container aren't going to be very well suited for a chicken coop, and again they'll be much harder to modify than wooden doors would be. I'd check FB marketplace and Craigslist for a used shed or chicken coop if you're on a budget.

Put the temporary plate inside the rear window. Don’t ever scrape the dust or frost off the rear window.

While you have my sympathy, be very careful with the thermostat at 45 degrees. If there's a cold spot in your house with water pipes in it, they could freeze. This is especially true if you have any pipes running in an exterior wall. If you do set the thermostat that low, keep checking every day to make sure your water is still running everywhere. Leave your bathroom doors open when you're not in them. Leave the cabinet doors under the kitchen and bathroom sinks open. If a pipe does freeze, warm it up quickly, by turning the house thermostat back up to 65 if necessary. Be especially careful if your house has CPVC pipes, as these will completely shatter if they freeze solid. If you have to, leave a trickle of water running from the sink.

Wow. $7 a gallon? I just moved down here from Alaska, where it gets even colder than Vermont and where we also use a lot of heating oil. NOBODY there uses kerosene. Everything is either #1 or #2 heating oil, mostly #2, which is basically the same as highway diesel only without the tax. It burns just fine in a home furnace, and I certainly never had any problems with it, even at 25 below. Now that I'm here I'm going to get some oil drums to put in the back of my truck and fill with red diesel. I can drive up next to my house and siphon them into the home tank.

I would never use cocaine.

I just like the way it smells.

Don't feel bad. They don't get uniforms either.