I lived in a cheap studio in Boston that was infested with roaches. Every 3-4 months I would spray Raid where the walls met the floor and that always worked well until they gradually started appearing again.

I lived in another studio that got a bedbug infestation. My building’s management paid for the place to be heat treated – they wheeled in two giant space heaters and had them powered by a generator on a truck five stories below on the street. I never saw another one again, but it destroyed all my books.

Nowadays I’m way more picky about where I live and I haven’t had any pest issues in over a decade.

72 F / 22 C in winter and 68 F / 20 C in summer. We live in a LEED Platinum building and the electric bill for our 2-bedroom apartment never goes above $50, so we set it to whatever is most comfortable.

Mine has trekking poles! (Colorado)

I learned about this from a can of ///Fear.Movie.Lions beer from Stone Brewing:

What 3 words pinpoint where this indelible beast was born? The location is printed on the can. There’s a 3m x 3m square in our Richmond, VA brewery with these three words painted on it. What three words? Exactly! For the uninitiated, that’s What3Words.

Not really, my car was a mess! At least nothing was missing though.

I do the exact same thing, except instead of paying monthly for hosting, I pay $12/year for addy.io. Super reliable service and I can easily manage my email aliases with their phone app.

Haha, they just told me in a normal voice, but obviously I had to play along if I wanted to get back into the country. The experience was a bit dramatic, like something from TV, but it wasn’t actually scary because I had nothing to hide. They also asked if I had anything in my car they should know about, so I said I had a stash of liquor and explained that I was moving and wanted to bring my booze – but they didn’t care and didn’t touch my alcohol.

I was moving from Alaska to Boston, so I had to pass through Canada. Everything I owned was crammed into my Honda Element and I was driving it solo across North America.

I re-entered the US at a border crossing in North Dakota. I pulled up to the window and without saying anything else the officer pointed at a detached garage and told me to pull into it. As I slowly pulled into the garage, there was only enough light to see the outlines of the walls. When I turned off my car, super bright lights were switched on and I saw 6-8 heavily armed border officers with bulletproof vests on either side of the car. One of them instructed me to get out of the car and give him my keys. He also took my passport and took me into a small room in the garage that had 1-way mirrors (so they could observe me and I couldn’t see out) and then he locked me inside. There was nothing inside the room except a few folding plastic chairs – nothing to read and nothing to look at, nothing aesthetically pleasing at all. I could hear them going through my car, removing my plastic totes full of shit and searching through them. After what was probably 20 minutes, they opened the door, handed me my keys and passport and told me, “You’re free to go, welcome home.”

Good question, but we pay close attention to the news and hopefully we’ll get out before that’s a problem. If we’re unable to leave the country then I guess I’d contact the Swedish embassy to see if they can help.

Chile. Maybe it’s because I’m American but nobody there was interested in talking to me, sharing their culture or learning anything about me. I tried multiple times but all my interactions with Chileans were purely transactional and most of them seemed annoyed to have to deal with me. I’ve been to ~25 countries and wouldn’t bother returning to Chile.

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Not preparing at all, just living my life like normal. When things get really bad here I’ll sell my car and move to Europe with my girlfriend (I have dual citizenship and can sponsor her).