Cover the seeds with ground cayenne pepper. Squirrels and chipmunks have very sensitive noses. It should piss them off enough to not go for your seeds after a few seconds. You do have to reapply after it rains tho

If you're planting new, or doing a heavy overseed like op is looking at, late May is too late to guarantee conditions for seeding. The best conditions for cool seeding is almost always April.

And like you mentioned, clover mixes don't require hardly any maintenance lol.

Yeah any subreddit that begins "fuck" is just awful. Like I agree with the tenants of that sub but i had to unsubscribe because it's just thousands of own-fart wafting and finger wagging posts.

Most yard care along the coast really begins mid-late April.

Some communities in greater Portland have substantial muni laws around pesticides

Exactly

If the sugar house isn't just 3 old timers with a bean supper and a bottle of wild turkey watching the boil, I don't want any part of it

While it's a difficult hypothesis to examine in a controlled scientific setting, people acting on addiction has been evaluated in many studies to be linked to a sedentary lifestyle as well. So, it can be similarly hypothesized that active lifestyles hinder people with addictive genes from acting on them.

Anecdotally as someone who is personally genetically predisposed to addiction, I find myself to be much more focused when active, and as such have found a positive feedback loop on physical activity/often repetitive tasks with a level of thinking to be more focused than my peers while doing continuous focused work.

There is a viable link as well between ADHD and dopamine, and a similar link between ADHD and hyper focus while doing certain tasks.

As a result, perhaps additional research could focus on the benefits of dopamine on hunter/gatherer and agrarian tasks, and how ADHD and addiction are modern responses to changes in dopamine release from dietary change and changes in movement. There may be benefits to the mechanisms that modernly result in addiction, perhaps overeating and eating disorders, ADHD or other dopamine expressions that persisted through evolution, where those side effects were either null or mild compared to the benefits of dopamine release.

"Huge National Park Was Suggested For Around Katahdin Like 10 Years Ago" is a better title

It's the new one in River City

Oh, someone will always win in these situations, and it's usually the people who already have a shitload of money.

Portland has fewer residents and more housing than it did in the 1940s-1970s but somehow there's a housing crunch. It's a combo of people expecting more from their housing and people having for profit housing.

But hey, I'm sure Freeport really needs those lux apartments when a third of the storefronts are empty

OP is shitting on you for this suggestion but DOT and the Town already have a plan already to help solve this:

https://www.pressherald.com/2021/10/19/brunswick-moves-forward-with-4-5-million-improvements-on-congested-pleasant-street

https://www.brunswickme.org/DocumentCenter/View/6308/DRAFT---Pleasant-Street-Two-Way-Technical-Memorandum

Right??? It's like how fucking dare you have a functioning understanding of our government and request the public utilities commission do it's job instead of screaming into the sky about having a co-operative owned by 1.5M people - especially when this is a purple state and the results of removing a nonpartisan commission of professionals would be catastrophic if we went through 4-12 years of far-right ruling to completely defund the grid (looking at you, Texas).

It's like saying the only option to cleaning out a messy garage is to burn it down and build new.

"Do you like private ownership or not" is the real question that people will be asked when they vote in November, as well as "are you pissed at CMP?"

As we push forward, the reality is the bill is probably going to pass. These questions do not deal with the reality that switching management and ownership may not have all the positive impacts we are hoping for due to the fact power so difficult to deliver in a rural state.

While I'm not trying to nay-say the transfer of power, what is lacking from the conversation is an earnest discussion of what the benefits of switching to consumer owned really will be, how long the transition will be, where there are real concerns etc. etc. etc. so that the transition can be as helpful as possible to consumers.

The evidence for cost of delivery in Maine, and across the nation, directly correlates to the number of trees, the distance of overhead wires, and the number of customers. I don't have the PowerPoint with me but I'm sure you can find similar data from across the country that shows this information. Maine's consumer owned utilities are in more densely packed regions of the state, or in areas (I think Van Buren has one?) Where the number of trees are fewer due to agriculture uses.

The evidence for ability to respond to down times is basic logic which applies to anyone with experience working for very large companies and very small companies, and a point that line workers have made throughout this debate. It's a lot easier to react to emergencies when you have a bigger pool of people who's job it is to react to those emergencies.

CMP is owned by a regional company and as such they have direct ability to send trucks from their CT or wherever office if Maine is slammed with outages but not CT.

While we could absolutely create a regional response plan that shares resources with other utilities regardless of ownership, there is a real concern that response times to major outages would be less efficient if the combined ownership and sharing plan that exists currently is changed.

Switching ownership isn't going to change the fact Maine has a very large number of trees per mile of overhead line, that trees falling is what cause most outages, and also isn't going to change the fact that labor for trades jobs like line workers and cutters is incredibly tight right now.

While there are benefits to changing ownership, removing CMP from the holding group who also owns utility trucks and crews in southern New England limits the amount of regional workers available to respond to local outages.

Demanding power returns immediately following an outage is just not feasible or cost effective in most of our rural communities - and it has never been the case here. Hell, many of us have relatives who didn't even get power until the 1970s or 1960s. Same with roads, the reality used to be after a big storm you would just have to take it slow for a day or two - now people are demanding highway speeds resume the second the snow stops falling!

I would personally instead request we have the governor put additional financial restrictions in the top officers of CMP. It helps improve the financial ethics of their operation without forcing unintended consequences.

Fucking thank you so, so much for explaining so clearly what so many people see as a problem with zoning. While zoning regionally is a problem, it is not the only problem nor the cause of the investment class of houses being gobbled up.

... yeah I dumpster dive in literal dumpsters but if it's touched flood water on a day when something like 30 sewer utilities in the state overflowed from heavy rains? Absolutely not bringing in a free hutch. $600 brand new is not worth the potential for dookie drawers

Lmao I have 3 jobs delayed right now because there are no electricians.

This is a result of unions and apprentice programs getting gutted in the years following Reagan, not CMP specific.

The cost of putting lines underground is literally order of magnitude 10x the cost of maintaining overhead for, what, 2-5 days a year without power for rural people?

If CMP became public, doubled their staff, and burried lines we would have the most expensive utility in the country for the benefit of a handful of days a year off service.

You're getting downvoted because people hate CMP, not because you're wrong.

CMP has fucked up, and also the time to repair is a direct function of "Trees * service area / total customers". That variable doesn't change if it's run as a co-op.

And if it's run as a co-op, reminder that Paul LePage would have been able to appoint people to run (gut) the company over the last decade.

And before we start stomping our feet about hiring more electric workers to do the work, ask anyone in construction if they have enough electricians to complete their job.

A lot of people comparing Kennebunk and Kennebunkport to the rest of the state without factoring in lack of highway, interior weather differences, and the whole "density of customers to trees destroying lines ratio" completely missing the point of why power restoration is difficult for most of the state.

CMP has major problems which I'm hopeful state conversation can help solve; and KLPD is an apples to anchovies comparison of two types of electric utility that I hope isn't the basis of expectation for placing local control of a statewide utility. You're still gonna be without power for 4 days in the sticks after a storm like this regardless of who is in charge, unless they put 12x on your electric rates to put the wires underground.

Bunch of inbred fur traders!

Both of these border crossings go through some of the state's most mountainous regions. It's quite hilly on the other side of the border, with several provincial parks and national mountain parks on the PQ side.

Several cool mountain streams and some big rivers too - greaaaaat fishing in Quebec!

Hope Sherbrooke is nicer than the last time I was there.

I'm going to a CVS in Portland during lunch next week. Waiting another 10 days beat having to pick up the phone and call anywhere

It's not that bean boots are easy to slip in. It's that vibram soles came out decades ago and became the no-slip standard we now expect from boots.

Bean boots have as much grip as a half-worn tire, which isn't useless by any means but it's not a superior sole product to the $70 hiking boot or work boot.