No, not really. My wife doesn't like the BBQ though so maybe it's something she tastes that I don't. Middleswarth's are polarizing.

Nibble with Gibbles, Martins, Herrs, Utz. Never had Goods but now I'm on the trail.

Used to hang out in my neighborhood bar in Altoona when I was in college and the owner started carrying jalapeno chips in plain silver bags that would take out the inside of your mouth. Fantastic chips. Turns out they were Groff's from somewhere around Lancaster, apparently they've been out of business for a while.

BBQ Swarths are very good. Plain? For some reason the plain Swarths leave a greasy film in my mouth. Wife says the same thing.

Only semi-related but my daughter and I went to a lecture given by a Professor from Lycoming College on Eastern Hellbenders. Wonderful little creatures that were believed by local yokels to be responsible for eating all the fish so local yokel community leaders had an actual bounty on them back in the 1920's. Turns out they don't eat fish at all.

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*edited for too-fast fat fingers

Stand up against tyranny? That's valid??

Doesn't appear the op thinks a lot about science and fact

You're a gem, a treasure. You should be proud

> I respect their decision...

No you don't.

Holy shit. You seriously can't figure this out.

Sadly they aren't in business anymore

Lived next door to the locals bar in my old neighborhood when I was in college. The owner started selling Groff's jalapeno chips in unmarked (no shit - unmarked!) silver bags. Bastards would set your tongue on fire, leading to increased beer consumption of course. Best chips I ever had.

Voles or rabbits. Shrew maybe

Nowhere near the Grand Canyon. From Long Island likely either 80/380 or 84 to 81. Poconos, Scranton, Susquehanna County. I live in NEPA, and while it's pretty up here it's not as beautiful as most of the rest of the state.

Well not exactly happy when the power goes out. The generator is a 16,000 kwh whole-house, runs on propane. We have two 100 gallon tanks so we're good for a couple days continuous use. Longest the power's been out here has been 11 hours; of course it was before we had the generator and was in the dead of winter because that's just the natural order of things. Biggest inconvenience is the internet being down - we're very rural and the LTE is not incredibly strong out here.

Late January to mid-February. By the end of February you don't care anymore because by March it's getting warmer so the big snows are gone quickly. December though is way too early for big freezes.

We've had a couple brownouts. The power doesn't go out but dips enough to kick the generator into action for a minute or two. Too early in the winter for this horseshit weather

Northeast PA, rural, up in the hills. All seasons for us. We haven't needed winter tires or chains and we're up and down hills all the time. My daily is a Volvo AWD, wife's a RAV 4. We have a 2006 Rubicon and f350 4WD also. Driveway is about 1000', icy as hell. Honestly it's fine.

Doubling down? You some sort of masochist?

Good for both of us I suppose.

Blind loyalty to the gas companies is fine from the perspective that the drilling/extraction results in job creation but those jobs come from the exploitation of the farmers around here who don't have two nickels to rub together.

Gas companies have been offering leases since the 60's even though no work started until about 10 years ago. So some of these folks with 500 acres or so leased for 50 cents per acre. The leases are self-renewing every five years; all the company has to do is pay the landowner a nominal fee, usually $50. The leases are short but complicated and pretty much every bastard attorney around here was "urged" to get as many signatures as possible as quickly as possible. As a result negotiating for a better deal for the landowner wasn't really a high priority.

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There's three big parts of the lease, although it all runs together as one document:

How much per acre up front to sign

Royalty percentage

How will the royalties be paid

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A lot of people realized they could negotiate the first part but didn't pay enough attention to the other two. So if you got $1000/acre at 12% paid before company expenses you may have thought the deal was pretty good but you would have been taking a royal screwing. "Before expenses" means the gas workers get paid and the equipment bought, etc., out of your royalty cut. It makes a huge difference. As an example, we make our $5000/month off ten acres (we don't make that every month - sometimes it's more sometimes less, but that's an estimated average over the past 7 or 8 years). The lady across the way has 54 acres - she never has gotten more than $500 in a month. I'm not lamenting for myself obviously. What they've paid us paid for our land and our house and they'll be financing our daughter's education and ultimately supplementing our retirement and providing our daughter with a nice monthly income for likely her lifetime. But not everyone got the same deal. Those people who didn't went in all wide-eyed thinking this was the break that would pull them out of the rural poverty cycle and instead turned out to be the break that bought them a new dirt bike every couple years.

Still not reaping any rewards though are you? While you continue your activity we'll continue averaging $5000/month in royalties. And under the gas is oil, so when/if the gas is finally exhausted the wells will be drilled deeper and the oil extracted. Our daughter is 16 - she'll be receiving royalty checks for the rest of her life.

Oh it's right all right.

Royalties are the other screwing. Unless you had some idea what you were signing when you signed the lease you could wind up with almost nothing. Besides percentage there's "before expenses/after expenses" language that makes a big difference in the amount that shows up in your mailbox.

persechino218

0 points

·

28 days ago

Red wave coming. Get the tissues ready next week.

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Good call

Republican-appointed judges, Republican-controlled legislatures in WI, PA. MI, and AZ, 61 cases of election fraud presented, 61 losses.

If your point is that the entire political system is corrupt then, sure, it always has been. It is everywhere in the world at every level. So what's new? If your point is Republicans are paragons of virtue and evil Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from the Republican god trump I don't know what to tell you except you're brainwashed out of your mind. trump is as reviled internationally as is Putin and to refuse to believe the majority of your fellow citizens chose to vote for the other guy is reality denial.

I might be mistaken but I think that's the new fracking method - sand rather than the old benzene-containing liquid.

Chesapeake killed our first well with those drop-down-a-hole exploratory charges. Caused a disruption (small earthquake) that collapsed the well, next day we were pumping mud. Of course they did nothing to rectify it so $18,000 later we had a new well drilled.

Anybody who doesn't live with natural gas drilling and blindly supports it can go fuck themselves. They exploited the "uninformed" land owners who naively thought they were all getting rich - you know, like all rural Oklahomans are 🙄 - and ambushed the state before any environmental protections were in place and while the politicians were in full feeding frenzy mode. People around us signed gas leases at $5/acre, even less, and the companies rolled in with big-ass access roads to big-ass pads with big-ass towers and just obliterated the landscape. And now somewhere along the line some gas company ideas man came up with natural gas-fired generators to power the pads; these things are the size and noise equivalent of a diesel locomotive and the folks with pads on their properties have that locomotive right out back all day every day. But hey - they made a little money!

The only positive for us personally, and we're a rarity out here, is that we held out to the bitter end before signing a lease and we knew what we were doing (because we took our time and did some homework and because we learned from our neighbor's mistakes) so we got a high up-front payment for a subsurface-only lease with the best possible royalty agreement. Chesapeake has paid for our house, our land, and they're about to pay for our daughter's college education. But again, we're a rarity. Not saying we were smart, just patient.