We had to put one of our two dogs “to sleep” yesterday. What a dishonest phrase. We euthanized her, and it broke our hearts. It was unexpected, and I still don’t know whether that made it worse or saved us some pain. Without burdening anyone reading this with all the details, she got sick suddenly, we took her to the vet, and they found she had swallowed part of a cloth toy, which had never happened in her eleven years. …
Author: Joe
My friend Jeff called me soon after we finished Town Meeting on Saturday, telling me that a reporter from one of the Portland TV stations wanted to do a story about the effects of poor internet on small businesses and small communities. They wanted to interview him and a community member or two in about an hour. I agreed to do it as I’m the VP of our nonprofit broadband utility district (which has yet to get off the ground …
We had the annual Town Meeting yesterday, here in Liberty. It’s one of my favorite community gatherings. If you’ve never experienced a New England town meeting, it’s the closest thing to true democracy you’ll likely ever see. Every town resident has the opportunity to comment on absolutely anything on the agenda (and we had about 30 items, which is typical). Every line item on the town budget, the performance of local elected officials, and any number of other topics are …
The topic of snowplowing came up a few days ago in a work meeting with a client in southern California, where they were getting snow for the first time in about three or more decades. I jokingly offered to put my “snow rig” on a trailer and send it out to him. As I told that story later to some friends, they asked about my “snow rig”. Here it is. My tractor is a 40 horsepower John Deere 4044R, a …
It’s March 2, 2023 and we’re getting another round of snow. That’s a picture of the exercise “studio” I built over the summer and fall, from a shed I had built and delivered. At 10′ x 20′, it’s a bit larger than the sauna (8′ x 16′). Both of these buildings have their electricity supplied by the six solar panels on the roof of this building, which drops to zero on a day like today. But the buildings can go …
My friend and fellow sauna enthusiast Dan told me that there’s a thing called the 200-degree club. You become a member by taking a sauna with a 200 degree difference between the temperature of the sauna and the outside air temperature. I was intrigued, but sure I could pull that off, at least in this first year of real sauna (wood-fired) ownership. Well, Mother Nature decided to help out couple of weeks ago, when we had -17 F temps. I …
The roads to our house is 1.7 miles long, from pavement to our dooryard. My neighbor and I are basically the only two humans that perform any sort of maintenance on it. Another young fellow helps out with some repairs when it gets bad but his job prevents him from doing much of anything in terms of snow removal and related tasks, so that leaves it to two old geezers. We split the cost of what we thought was a …
When I built the sauna a few months ago, I decided to place it right beside the exercise studio, on the opposite side of the dooryard from the house. By the way, for those of you not from New England, a dooryard is the area in front of your house that you drive into and park. You don’t really have those areas in suburbia, where people often just drive up in front of a garage, or if it’s a fancier …
I’ve been wanting a sauna – a real, wood-fired, outdoor one, not the infrared type that we had before – for the past year or two. There’s nothing quite like a sauna to take the cold out of your bones, and after experiencing them when I was younger, and then again a few years ago in Europe, the desire was stuck in the back of my mind. My friend Dan seemed to get a great deal of enjoyment out of …
I founded and still lead a company called “Think Patients”. You’d think a person with that background would have a pretty good handle on their healthcare. But it’s been about 6 years since I had a primary care physician despite having no obstacles to that other than an inability to find a decent one, in a practice I liked, and in which I could get an actual appointment for care without having to wait for weeks on end. This says a …