Of Crowds and Cold
Today was the first really cold day of the season in Hanover. It's 6 degrees Farenheit outside, even at midday. I confess I carpooled with the rest of the Voxfamily for a short ride to work this morning. And the recent bout of freezing rain made the 45 minutes with the snowblower this week more challenging than usual. But I wouldn't want Hanover without the cold winters.
As much as the cold is uncomfortable, I've got a higher threshold for it than most people I've met. The cold keeps the place uncrowded. And it turns out that I've got a much lower threshold for crowds and congestion than most people I've met. So the rest of the world and I sort ourselves into communities where we each get relatively more of what we like and relatively less of what we don't like. And at important times, the fact that we were not in competition made us both better off. Consider, for example, what the prices we paid for our respective first homes might have been if we were all searching in the same market.
To tell the truth, I might even like it even ... colder.
5 comments:
But Andrew, the cold-haters have figured out a way around the weather...buy up a bunch of year-round houses, and only come up for 2 weeks in the summer!
I used to say that it would never get crowded up here (Strafford, VT) because it was too cold, but try leaving Centerra at 5:30pm...starting to remind me of Long Island.
Me too, and thus I wouldn't mind it a little bit ... colder.
But as long as the snowbirds pay their 52 weeks of property taxes for their 2 week stay, I'd say we're making out pretty well.
We've made some planning mistakes in the area, particularly in getting people from DHMC to Vermont without going through Hanover. I also thought that we endured a lot of traffic headaches on Wheelock Street and the Ledyard bridge a few years back for, essentially, no greater capacity. And that's why it's feeling like Long Island, I think.
Cold is an issue. So is snow. We bought our house in Grantham in August 2001. The woman we bought it from had put it on the market after the area was hit with a ton of snow in March '01. She'd had enough, and packed off to North Carolina.
Actually, Tim, in Vermont there is a major tax shift through the persistent rise of property values. The way we're structured, we pay an essentially flat fee per $1000 of valuation, which has doubled in 5 years. Then the state returns the "extra" (after siphoning off a bit) based on INCOME, not property value. So, I'm paying double, but my neighbor whose husband does not work, as seen about a 10% increase, for the same services. That's why we care more on this side of the river.
"the fact that we were not in competition made us both better off"
This is interesting. Reminds me of electrons in atoms. They tend to arrange themselves so they're the furthest possible from all other electrons in the same atom. I hate crowds too.
If you enjoy the cold, you may want to move up to Saskatchewan, Canada. I used to live there, around Regina. It sometimes fell to 60 Celsius below with windchill. You'd love it there...
Not too many people live there either.
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