Here's a satellite photo of my old house in Vermont, just off of the Peeper Highway:


                                       

See where the arrow points? That was where we lived. It was actually built along a ridge line, and it overlooked that large building to the east, with the big parking lot - that's Ben and Jerry's dairy, on Route 100.

If you're wondering why I'm showing you a picture of our home in Vermont, well, all week long, the highs have been up close to 110 F. That's a lot of Farenheits.

It's enough Farenheits that it makes a fellow wish that he had never, ever, left Vermont :)

We had an air conditioner at the house in Vermont, but I don't know if it worked - we never turned it on (we left in late May). Living in Vermont was very, very nice.

Working in Vermont wasn't so nice - the folks there who had real jobs (by that I don't mean "jobs where you really worked" - I mean "jobs where they pay you a wage comparable to the national scale") tended to be very intent on keeping those jobs, so in the IT company where I worked, things felt very competitive; it seemed to me that we were playing the game of "whoever's car is in the parking lot last, wins".

So the working life was a sort of incarnation of the worst things that I would fear about trying to work in New York or Boston, while home life was wonderfully relaxing and tonic. However, I was so worked up about things at work that I couldn't relax - I'd sit up on the deck behind that house on the ridge, looking out over the town of Waterbury, and my belly would be in knots. I'd walk down the sidewalk in the little town, and be worrying.

I decided, eventually, that Vermont would be a great place to live, provided that one had made one's money elsewhere first. I'm not talking about "retirement" because - well, Vermont is cold. The coldest I've ever been (at least, the coldest temperature that I can say for sure that I've been outside in) was in Vermont - 35 degrees below 0. And that's not Grandma's thermometer on the back porch - that was the National Weather Service published temperature.

It was so cold that night that, when I sat down in my car, the seat didn't bend. The coils were frozen; I drove home with my hair brushing the ceiling of the car's interior. That was cold.

But along with "cold winters" came two things - skiing, and NOT HOT the rest of the year. The skiing was a given; in Vermont, you didn't say "do you ski?" - you said "where do you ski?" Everybody's kid was on the ski team (when they were old enough) - if somebody didn't ski, then the onus was on them to say so; it was okay to assume that they did ski. (Sorta like being a Republican in Utah - nobody minds if you're a Democrat, but at least pay folks the courtesy of letting them know :)

I often wish that I could have stayed in Vermont. I've often thought that I might go back again, someday, to live there without the economic pressures of making a living, but I am running out of time. I don't think that I'll have enough time to make enough money to retire to Vermont and still have any time left to actually live there :)