I’ve had this kind of situation in my life, I helped out my mother around the house when I was young and home from school, and I took care of my grandmother when she needed someone in the house. I’m now a stay-at-home mom so I can say I genuinely do get the appeal.

Here are some questions you should ask yourself though, and really consider your answers.

What are your life goals? If you knew you were going to die in a month, what would be the first things that came to mind that you would be sad you didn’t accomplish? Does your current path lead to these things?

What is your plan for when your dad’s current financial situation changes? If he loses his job or business, if he retires, do you have other means of making an independent income or other people in your life you could make similar arrangements with?

Do you have any of your own income, money, or savings tucked away? If something happened between the two of you, do you have options to get out?

What sort of preparation do you have for if something suddenly happened to your dad, like in the event of an accident or heart attack? Are you in his will? On the deed/lease? Do you have a joint bank account? Are you a beneficiary of his life insurance?

Do you want a romantic relationship, partnership, or kids? If so, what steps are you taking to make that happen, and how would that fit in to your current situation?

What sort of social or support network do you have? Do you have friends who would let you stay with them if you needed it? Do you have people in your life you can connect to and who will give you outside perspectives?

Domesticity can be alluring because you’re directly improving the lives of people you love, can make your own schedule, you’re not selling your soul to a corporation etc, but it’s extremely easy for the situation to go bad. There are so many ways people have been trapped, isolated, abused, or suddenly found themselves in changing circumstances that turn a good thing into a personal hell. Just the day to day of things can make a decade go by before you realize you never took that trip or learned that skill or made that thing.

Don’t just try to make your answers fit your current situation just because change is uncomfortable. If this lifestyle appeals to you there’s nothing wrong with that, but make sure you have your own contingencies.

You’d have to, like, add a whole other layer to the inside or outside

That is, actually what they do, by my understanding. If the house isn’t brick, then when you need to replace the siding they will actually put an entirely new layer of sheathing on over the outside, something like Zip R that has poly-iso foam insulation and acts as an air barrier. They then can put siding back on that fits the original look of the house, hopefully using architectural elements and details that were saved from teardown.

Another way is to go from the inside, and rip out the walls to the studs while saving trim pieces and put in new insulation and replace the horsehair plaster with drywall. Then you’ll be dealing with special ordering non-standard modern double glazed windows in weird sizes, because if you wanted to use the standard window sizes you can’t use your beautiful old growth mahogany trim pieces lovingly carved for your whacky leaky windows.

The attic is often not that bad to insulate because there should be relatively few cut-ins and blown in cellulose can go everywhere, but then you miss out on your perfect gothic “Wednesday’s room” unless you want to spend even more money trying to figure out how to get all of those turret towers and vaulting and weird rooflines into your envelope.

So, it’s possible, just prohibitively expensive

I’ve lived in New England most of my life, and most other posters have covered the major points. One I would add is that the weather IS getting more extreme here, and we are now getting things like tornados and worse hurricanes. It’s not anything like as bad as other places in the US but climate change is definitely effecting this area too. I would watch out for where you end up being a decent elevation, and give any bodies of water a good amount of space, no houses or apartments right on the edge of a river. There was an unprecedented flood that hit Leominster and Fitchburgh MA not long ago that shocked a lot of people because the region had never experienced something like it. That will probably be happening more often in the coming years.

An antique Victorian or Queen Anne house. I love the towers, the gingerbread charm, the corbels and fascias and all the little crinkly bits. The rich old wood interiors with tin ceilings and plaster medallions, hand carved staircases and crown mouldings.

However I am never going to be able to afford the absurd cost of retrofitting one to be energy efficient, and I know the quirks of odd room sizes, antiquated floor plans and non-standard sized things like weird door heights and window widths would drive me absolutely insane. So I’ll admire them from afar

If you can spare a spa day once every couple of months, you can try sugar waxing at home. The smoothness lasts way longer than shaving and it’s more gentle on the skin (and easier to clean) than normal waxing. After a few years of that my hair stopped growing back on my calves, and I haven’t had to shave there in a long time.

Definitely recommend it, it’s a major departure from his usual hijinx. It’s a genuinely sweet and quirky movie.

You can definitely still get that thrill of highly impactful combat, just not at any of the major meta events. The world at this point is so big that if you’re anywhere that’s not on the event timer you’ll probably be roaming by yourself. If you find a small event chain and it’s just you pushing it, it can be exciting and suspenseful. Knowing that if you get downed, all of your progress will reset, it’s a great moment when someone else runs up and starts reviving you and helps you succeed.

There are also instanced scenarios like dungeons, fractals and raids where you and a team have to be strategic with your classes and builds and how they synergize, and then there’s the added dimension of much more demanding movement and maneuvering than in the first game. I loved both games, they’re different but both great in their own ways IMO. If you only ever played in some of the starting maps I highly recommend giving it another go.

My contribution would be candied hibiscus flowers in syrup. They can be used as a garnish on a dessert like a tart or a nice sorbet, but they’re perfectly fine to eat on their own. The flower has a subtle warm berry-like flavor. You don’t eat the syrup directly but you can mix it in drinks or serve it with desserts.

I don’t know how much of a chocolate lover the person in question is, but if they like it a fun thing to try is a sampler of single origin chocolates. It can be fun to taste the difference between chocolates from different regions and see how one is fruity, another is smokey, another is earthy etc.

I was an incredibly angsty teenager, mad at the world and hostile to just about everyone by default. Apathetic, grumpy, and uninterested in physical activity or the things I liked as a preteen.

After having a baby and getting very little sleep for 6 months I recognized some of my old patterns. Turns out, it wasn’t just part of being a teen, I was chronically sleep deprived. I was up at 6am most days back then, when I would sleep until 1pm on weekends. I think a lot of teens are unfairly characterized as angry and defiant when they’re operating on half or a quarter of the sleep they need.

What you say is mostly true, but we don’t all have the same circadian rhythms. There is such a thing as night owls, and while you might not sleep well in the daylight I genuinely sleep better in a sunbeam. The times in my life that I have been the most exhausted and chronically sleep deprived were when my circumstances demanded that I be up and active before 10am. I have struggled for years against the constraints of others schedules while my body screamed at me that it wanted to do everything later. The simple fact is your body will tell you what schedule works for you or not. If you are not energized or at your best at midnight, fine, but humans come in all sorts of variations and some of us evolved to guard the tribe while others slept.

As a night owl, this is some daywalker shit. Night shift means an easy commute, cooler temps, no need for sunscreen, quieter working environment, usually higher pay, fewer distractions, sleeping in, the list goes on. Night shift and second shift have their perks.