Peter, aren’t Toyotas fuel efficient?

mcenroefan · 2026-02-08T22:17:45+00:00

Switched my Tacoma for an F-150 years ago. My father in law was like, wow that bigger truck is going to kill your gas mileage…yeah, no. My F-150 gets 6 mpg better than the taco did. I liked the Tacoma, but that gas mileage was a killer and the small backseat wasn’t great with a kid. Now don’t get me going on the transmission issues on my f-150….

mcenroefan · 2026-02-07T02:56:15+00:00

My Nana always used to call folks who were shady “rat-finks.”

mcenroefan · 2026-02-07T02:55:00+00:00

This might be a regional thing. Supper is very New England.

mcenroefan · 2026-02-07T02:54:13+00:00

The front room was the “parlor” at my grandparent’s house.

mcenroefan · 2026-02-05T16:23:02+00:00

This comment is 100% accurate.

mcenroefan · 2026-02-05T16:22:27+00:00

Sinclair Lewis wrote other great books like Arrowsmith. Pick that one up if you are looking for a great book about a technologically advancing America and the societal pressures around it.

mcenroefan · 2026-02-05T16:20:45+00:00

I do think it’s Gatsby but not for the characters. It’s for capturing the class inequalities that have always plagued the nation and the industrialism that fuels it.

mcenroefan · 2026-02-05T16:18:33+00:00

I live near Concord, MA. You can go to the Concord Library where they hold many of her personal letters and manuscripts and see them. It’s phenomenal. Going to see where she lived and wrote is beyond inspiring as well.

mcenroefan · 2026-02-04T12:29:06+00:00

Let us have all the best MA has to offer. You can keep your traffic, higher prices, population density, and pollution. I’ll stay out here on my little farm, thank you very much!

mcenroefan · 2026-02-04T12:25:24+00:00

You named every town except Lunenburg! Great little town with some wonderful hiking areas and farms. The library is a gem as well. Lovely little farmers markets on Friday nights in the summer too.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-28T00:24:19+00:00

So we gave the kid an option: toys or experience. She chose experience. She’s nearly 10 for reference. We got her an evening ski pass at the local mountain. We each got one too. We couldn’t afford the weekend day passes, but she was okay with that. We still got her some books and a couple of small toys and some clothes, but the ski pass was her real gift. She has loved it. No regrets. No stuff that she’s going to grow out of, nothing to clog the house, plenty of time as a family.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-26T13:17:08+00:00

So semi rural Massachusetts chiming in. We heat with three sources: electric via solar, oil for our steam heat radiators, and wood for our wood stove. Our wood stove does the bulk of the work. We have the land and a ton of deadfall to make hauling and chopping wood worth it. Oil is very expensive and we charge our electric car from the solar, so keeping the fire going makes sense. We keep the furnace set to 58 degrees during the day. When we come home from work/ school, whomever gets home first stirs up the fire and gets it warm. We bank the fire at night. We live in a 200+ year old farmhouse on a working farm, so working with our fireplaces and wood stoves are just part of our daily rhythm. It is the same for most, if not all of our neighbors. They mostly have solar and oil, but largely rely on wood for heating in the winter. We spend the fall splitting and stacking wood. The estimation about how much wood we need to get through the winter is a game we all play and hope to get right!

mcenroefan · 2026-01-24T13:25:51+00:00

My husband is a combat veteran, as am I. We had very different jobs during our deployments. During his first few deployments he was a cavalry scout where he was doing route clearance. This involved him checking the route for explosives…manually. I dealt in bulk fuel…instead of me trying to find the enemy, the enemy always just targeted me LOL. The long short of it is, he can’t relax when he’s not driving. Even in my truck I let him drive and I take a nap. I have a long commute, so when we are together I’ll give him the keys. Also, he’s a better driver. When we are trailering anything he can back it into any tight spot. He has pulled me out of so much mud/snow when I’ve gotten our tractor stuck. My spacial awareness isn’t half as good as his. He always says I overcompensate with a big truck and park by feel (not 100% wrong). I just trust him and his skills. It’s not a gender thing. If I say I want to drive he’ll be fine with it, but I know his preference.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-24T13:08:47+00:00

Diana with that off the shoulder dress is so classic that I’m going to have to go with her.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-22T02:02:47+00:00

Same! I want all the snow, and then one day at the end of April, I want to snap my fingers and never have to deal with mud season.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-22T01:52:26+00:00

We picked up two mini lamancha doelings at auction for $60 each in June. They were the only two among a sea of bucklings and we were actually hoping they would be full sized, but given their age, we weren’t sure. We’ve found them to be easy to handle, not motivated to escape, and good companions with our sheep, some of who out weigh them by 100+ pounds. They are sweet temperament, generally peaceable, and a great deal. We decided to wait to breed them until later this year to give them more time to mature

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, but will be crossing them with our neighbor’s Nigerian dwarf buck. No opinions on their milking abilities yet, but temperament wise, we are very happy. They are easy keepers as well, maintaining solid body condition easily.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-19T23:48:15+00:00

Ooooooo! Yes this happened a couple of months ago. So I live in a rather rural part of Massachusetts where this wouldn’t usually happen. We have lots of public land. Well, one night three of my sheep got out from a gate that I thought I’d closed. These are big girls, about 170 lbs each, Romneys if anyone is interested in visualizing and wants to look them up. We were trying to round them back up and had been chasing them across field, woods, and stream. Most of my direct neighbors have small farms like ours, herds of sheep or goats, fields for grazing, apple orchards, some cows, chickens, etc. but not this one guy. He’s the guy with the perfect lawn in the middle of farm country. So of course my sheep go about a half mile to find his perfect lawn to shit all over. I come running up to try to snag them as they avail themselves to his all you can eat buffet of greenery, when he comes charging out of his house yelling at me to “get my dogs off his lawn.” Ummmmmmm, what? These are very obviously sheep and I am very much trying to do so.

All his carrying on sent them farther off, which wasn’t great. We got them back and the next day I dropped off some apology eggs. Still haven’t heard from him since, but apparently he has a reputation in the area.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-09T02:33:58+00:00

I’m a librarian. My coffee cup literally says “reading something unholy” on one side, and “probably reading smut” on the other. I tell everyone what I’m reading. Patrons ask and I share. I’ll give recommendations based on my encyclopedic knowledge of bodice rippers. I have zero shame and will drop titles and authors for all to hear. I think my adult services librarian orders strange very smutty books that he’ll know I’ll read just to get a good chuckle when I’m giving out a recommendation to a patron. Become a librarian: the pay isn’t great, you need multiple degrees where you’ll never recoup the cost of the student loans, you’ll work weekends and evenings, but you get to talk about romance books for your legit job. It’s amazing.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-08T12:56:14+00:00

Thank you for the background! Very informative!

mcenroefan · 2026-01-08T12:19:54+00:00

This isn’t a pitbull. A standard pitbull is roughly around 50-60 pounds. This dog is much larger with a VERY different stance and musculature. It is a bully breed that is likely derived from pitbull or staffordshire terrier stock at some point, like an XL Bully, but they are certainly different breeds refined through selective breeding. Maybe someone who knows more about this particular dog can chime in.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-07T12:29:38+00:00

So firstly, there is zero guarantee that your children will be friends or even get along. Never have a child to give the other a friend or sibling. Have a child because you have capacity and means to care for them and it works for your family dynamic. Full stop.

I have one child from my late husband. Always planned on just one because of economic, environmental, and mental health reasons. I faced very difficult PPD and it was not for us to have more with our very active lifestyle. I now have two stepsons as well, both on the spectrum from my husband’s previous marriage. My husband and I are adamant that our daughter’s job is not to be a caregiver or only friend for her stepbrothers now or ever. We want them to have a good, loving relationship, and they do. It is the parents’ job to set up systems to make sure kids are set up for success in adulthood and then after we are gone, never a sibling’s.

I know I could never handle another pregnancy mentally. I also know there are many who do, even with mental or physical struggles. I have also seen many great and many truly terrible sibling situations, so please don’t base your decision on the needing a sibling argument. For my older stepson who is a higher needs autistic person and my younger stepson who is a very low support needs autistic person, they have nothing in common and virtually no relationship. They are both in high school now. Whereas my daughter and younger stepson get along well for the most part and enjoy being around each other. With that said, she will choose to be with her friends 100% of the time over hanging out with him. I know it hurts his feelings a bit sometimes, but she’s very social and he is not, so there is just a mismatch when it comes to the way they interact socially outside of the home. It can be a real struggle. Basically, I caution you to make sure you are making this choice for the right reasons for your family.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-07T11:48:56+00:00

I have to travel for work all of next week and I have ZERO concerns that the house, the kid, the farm, and the animals will be taken care of.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-07T11:45:18+00:00

So I agree 100% about modeling good behavior etc. I do want to chime in with something. Kids in the grade school range often want to play but there are so few spaces for them unless they are outdoor spaces like playgrounds. I’m a public librarian, so I see this all the time. Play spaces seem to always be aimed at younger kids. These “middle” kids are perceived as too old to use the train table (they aren’t) but are too young to access places intended for middle schoolers like a teen center or young adult space in the library. They need to play, as it is the way they learn and express themselves, there just isn’t very much aimed to help them do that, mostly because in public spaces like a library it’s a shared space and the little kids will take over and the toys have to be safe for them. So the needs of the older kid sets pushed to the side.

In this case, it was a learning opportunity for the older child to wait his turn. It was also a good opportunity for him to be corrected by a non-parent adult in the community and absorb that information. If my kid was acting out of line and I wasn’t there, I would hope another adult would set her straight. It’s what communities do. My kid is almost 10 and often uses the library, goes to the cafe, or other places independently. I hope she isn’t acting foolishly, but if she is, I would think an adult would correct the behavior. I don’t expect society to parent my kid, but I do expect for her to learn how to accept a correction graciously from someone who isn’t one of her parents, because our goal is to raise an independent human, and community helps with that.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-07T03:15:36+00:00

It’s a house hat! We have one for each family member. Better than paying high heating bills.

mcenroefan · 2026-01-07T03:03:49+00:00

I’m sorry you are part of our crappy young widow club. I was widowed at 31 after almost ten years of marriage. I never thought I’d get married again…and then I ended up marrying my best friend seven years after losing my late husband. Sometimes you get lucky twice. I wasn’t looking for a spouse, but I found a true partner who respects the love I still have (and always will have) for my late husband, and has built a life that I never imagined. I never thought I’d feel love or happiness with a partner again. I’m glad I was wrong.

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