• I would add keeping a jug of sand or cat litter along with a couple 12"+ 2x4s in the vehicle to help with getting some traction if you or someone else ends up stuck.
• i dunno about EVs but if you’ve got an ICE vehicle give it a minute or two of just idling and warming up before going anywhere
• When I start driving on snow I tap the brakes a couple times if nobody’s around just to get a feel for how good my traction is. Am I sliding a little bit? A lot? Not at all? That helps set the tone for what to expect on the roads.
• Don’t accelerate through turns if you’ve already got momentum, and if the weather’s REALLY suspect I prefer to coast on overpasses as well since those ice over first.
• Respect the possibility of black ice. If you live in a mountainous area then assume anywhere in the shade is black ice
• If the house is on a crawlspace make sure any ductwork and copper piping are properly Insulated, keep the crawlspace vents closed during the cold months.
• Use ice melt sparingly if you have to use it at all (sand is preferable) because it’s caustic to concrete.
• if you’re somewhere that gets an absolutely stupid amount of snow, follow your neighbors’ lead if you see them shoveling snow off their roofs. I saw a lot of roof collapses in a luxury mountain town where rich people’s second (third? Fourth? Ninth?) homes were left vacant during a pretty nasty snowstorm

I always left mine in neutral but when I’d take it to a shop they’d leave it in gear and I’d lurch forward like an amateur when I left. I’m not convinced there’s a difference between the two but I’m no mechanic

You aren’t the only one feeling that way, just put yourself in a position to meet others. Start going to meetups of things that interest you, or, at the very least, engage with others on things that interest them and you’ll usually find common ground eventually. It can feel difficult and awkward, but everybody struggles with that when they first start to put themselves out there. Just persevere, you’ll find people.

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There’s a real cognitive dissonance there. Their version of Christianity takes a back seat to politics because they’ve been told all these visions of grandeur about how “Jesus is coming back” and how they are the “sheep” and all those godless liberals are the "goats. They’ve been trained to look for reasons to feel persecuted even if they don’t come directly out and say it, even if they don’t realize it themselves. There’s a real “us vs. them” mentality in a lot of those types of churches and they’ll gladly go rub one out to stuff like where Jesus said to his disciples in one of the gospels that if people aren’t for him then they’re against him. Nevermind that one of the other gospels says the opposite. A lot of Christians I’ve come across just have this persecution fetish where any slight inconvenience or call for accountability from pretty much anyone (because their church won’t take them to task over things) turns into a ‘righteous’ cry to their lord about how the godless Philistines around them are normalizing oppression and sodomy and trans rights or whatever and these holy little Christian’s are the only beacon of hope in society even though they insist on treating anyone who isn’t like them like absolute garbage. I’m not a social scientist or anything like that, hopefully people smarter than me chime in. But conservatives treat equity in a community like a zero sum game, you know? If poor people are given a hand up by the government then it’s interpreted by these (at best) middle class Christians as an affront to their hard earned money. They worked for their income but “these filthy poors just get handouts at MY expense?” You can tell by their actions that they have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus regardless of how they try to present themselves. They’re full of crap and they deserve to be treated as such.

Source: Grew up in a very conservative farming community, did all the church stuff, then moved away and found myself.

Also, I know I abused quotation marks but my bad on any grammar or spelling errors or general incoherence. I treated myself to vodka for dinner.

I’ve moved a few times around the US and, like the other commenter, have adopted kind of a mixed dialect. I grew up in the north but spent quite a while in the south, which have VAST cultural differences, and people from the south can tell I’m not one of them while people from the north think I’m from the south. For a little while after my first move from the north to the south, when I was still in my early 20s, I felt out of place but a lot of that was probably just due to being insecure and half a country away from my family. Wife and I moved to a northern state a few years back and we both feel even more out of place here because of the state religion but have accepted that we like being nomadic. We’re mapping out a plan to move to a different part of the south and try that culture, then maybe after a few years move to a different part of the north or possibly a different country because why not. I used to be scared of trying new/unknown things (perk of growing up in a small town) but now I embrace it because there’s so much to learn from different people and cultures. Plus I figure if we keep trying then my wife and I will find our tribe eventually

Sounds like it comes down to your approach on risk management. Others have pretty clearly laid out the risks and frustrations of living in a house that’s being fixed/renovated, but if the seller is as negligent as they sound then I’d expect to find even more issues. If the inspection couldn’t cover anything pertaining to electricity then that’d be a huge red flag for me, that stuff can get real expensive real fast. Follow your gut and try not to fall for the sunk cost fallacy, it can be hard when you focus on how many hundreds of dollars and hours of time you’ve spent so far but it sounds like you’re looking at at least another several thousand dollars in repairs, and that’s only for the problems you’re currently aware of. Everybody’s situation is different so maybe this whole thing is right for you, but don’t ignore the red flags just because of how much you’ve already invested