I purged my library of 2,000 books a few years ago and switched to eBooks. My Kindle has ~ 200 books. Over the last 3 years, I also read a lot of library eBooks. I hadn’t used a library in 40+ years. I always bought books.

I’ve tried that experiment. In conference rooms around the country in business meetings, I’m occasionally asked where I’m from. I always ask people to guess. I usually get California or Seattle. Nope. Masshole born in New Behfuh where everyone talks like Emeril LaGasse. You can tell where I’m from by the slang, not the accent. Water bubbler. Rotary. Package store. Frappe. The shellfish is pronounced SKALL-ups.

I wasn’t allowed to have the local accent growing up and was immediately corrected by my mother. I speak “newscaster”.

It’s kind of moot since it’s totally out of your price range. The Boston suburbs are socioeconomically segregated. Newton is 80% college educated adults. The school system rating will reflect that. You’re competing against dual income white collar professionals for the small amount of single family home rental stock. Newton also has good commuter rail and several Green Line routes. It’s some of the best access to the city in metro Boston.

To get a single family home rental at your price point that doesn’t have something drastically wrong with it and get a strong elementary school system, you’re going to have to be outside rational daily commuting distance from the high paying metro Boston job market.

A link that works: https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2022/12/22/missouri-to-massachusetts-gina-kaufmann

I’m mid 60s. At this stage in my life, I read to be entertained. I read fiction exclusively.

Pre-internet, I read far more nonfiction. With the web, I use search engines to find online information rather than books.

Since COVID, the bus service is abysmal. 2 commuter bus runs in the morning and one afternoon run. The commuter rail outside of the morning commute won’t be very frequent but better than the current bus schedule.

I see a 3/2 cape with a 2 car attached garage in Mattapoisett for $2,700. Excellent K-5. Town beach and nice harbor.

Edited:

Hospitals: St Luke’s in New Bedford is a Level II trauma center.

The elementary schools in Mattapoisett and Marion are better than Fairhaven, Westport, and Dartmouth.

Off hours, that house in Mattapoisett is 58 minutes to South Station according to Google Maps. At 75 mph, you could theoretically do it in 50 minutes. I did Logan Airport to Padanaram in 65 minutes on Thursday late-morning. I can reliably get to Dim Sum brunch in Chinatown on a weekend in less than an hour. For occasional off hours Boston use, it’s not a big deal. At rush hour, it’s abysmal.

I encountered the sobriety checkpoint at the southern end of 140 in New Bedford once. I recall it went like: “Have you been drinking?” “No” “Your eyes look bloodshot.” “It’s 11:00. I’m tired and going home to bed. Am I free to leave?”

That was the end of it. I don’t like the fact that roadblocks exist but the courts have ruled them legal as long as they stop everyone. It would be a good ballot initiative to amend the state constitution.

My father’s college roommate had a summer house next to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port in the 1960s. My childhood memory is of the Kennedy clan cruising the neighborhood like a pack of wild dogs. It was my first exposure to a society that has a different set of rules for the powerful.

Winchester

A few cans of foam and some weatherstripping could make a big difference

What about windows and doors? Have you found all the air leaks with an IR camera and stopped them?

I got a rate change email from Eversource last week so I went online to see what rate I had been paying. It actually went down slightly. I have been paying $1.07134 per therm. $1.049 is an improvement and way better than I was expecting. I was paying $0.83090 a year ago. It’s gone up by ~ 20% since last year.

The problem is that UMass-Dartmouth is in a suburban town with very little rental housing. The nearest inexpensive housing is an SRTA bus ride away in New Bedford or Fall River. It’s SRTA bus route 9 which is hourly service. Link to schedule: https://www.srtabus.com/wp-content/uploads/NB9_20220829.pdf

Apartments in New Bedford and Fall River are fairly expensive because of Section 8 housing assistance vouchers. It would be really challenging to pay rent, utilities, food, and transportation on $2,000/month in your own apartment near bus route 9. Kempton Street in New Bedford on that bus route is not a nice part of the city. You are probably better off working with the University to understand your housing options.

I’m not an attorney but I stayed at a Holiday Inn. This is entrapment.

That’s unfortunate. There isn’t much between 495 and Manchester.

I haven’t been there in ages but The Common Man in Windham is good.

Comcast still has 16 million video subscribers. Broadband has grown to 32 million. Video is down 10% in the last year. I only watch sports on “Classic television”. I’ve been streaming it for years. I should probably put a big mast on my chimney to get over-the-air. I can’t get anything with an indoor antenna.

Your error is assuming that people are buying those properties with W-2 money. We had a decade+ of stock market run-up and lots of people getting wealthy from corporate stock plans.

This. I used to have a large collection of hard copy books. I purged those and am now building up a large collection of eBooks. I only switched over less than 3 years ago so I don’t have 5,000 books on my eReader yet. I also have read a lot of library books that I delete when the loan expires.

With hard copy books, I discarded them because my bookcases were overflowing. I’ll never have that issue with eBooks.

Meh. Back in the day, the old Harold Robbins one orgasm per chapter books were entertaining. In that era, there was no ubiquitous internet pornography so bestsellers had sex scenes. The Godfather, for example. The Arthur Hailey books. Now, endless graphic pornography is a mouse click away so sex scenes in books is kind of pointless. I bought the Fifty Shades trilogy from Bezos and slogged my way through it to see what all the fuss was about. It was an awful set of books compared to the typical bestseller of 50 years ago.

You can drill vertical well holes for geothermal. That works fine on a small lot.

I look at the nominees. The winner isn’t necessarily the best read.

I think Pompeii is the best Robert Harris book. Fatherland is the best concept but it isn’t as good a read.

I much prefer the Sherlock Holmes smartest guy in the room character. I also vastly prefer the short stories.