So update (for those interested).
House is still great, people are great, food is great, weather is...great, still 0 regrets, and no pangs of homesickness.
Found out today that the internet dish has a heater in it, that elon musk thinks of everything.
Bought a kubota sidekick. Pretty kickass little buggy. found out the first day why a winch is an absolute necessity.
So far I've had to chase off ~20 cows, 4 horses, half a dozen deer, a llama for some reason, and about a million chipmunks. going to be honest, some of them were less "chased off" than blown into a million pieces. I blame politics.
I also discovered that there is such a thing as a heated, padded lawn chair. It's my new mistress.
Trail cam has not picked up any glimpse of sasquatch, but I assure you, the search continues.
House wise, it's a great log cabin, but all the lipstick is crap. They have all the original "builder's grade" light fixtures, taps, doors, etc. So it's been a small fortune buying this that and the other.
The boiler conked out at 1am one night, got to test the backup propane system, AND learn how to rebuild a boiler.
Pipes backed up real fun like, right into the internal backup boiler, because I didn't know you can't put grease down the drain into the septic.
Oh, and the septic system is HUGE, the tank is humoungous and the bed is 1000 sq feet. BUT it reeked, like reeked so bad I called a dude to come scope/inspect/drain it. Found out that vegetarians have 1000x stinkier poop than meat eaters. Now this is an interesting, and evidently little known fact. When I tried to look it up, 99% of the results were vegan-friendly sites trying to convince people that vegan poop doesn't stink. HOWEVER, while the sanitation guy showed up, and we were digging out the tank cover (it's 2 feet down), he starts sniffing and says "did you say you just bought this place?" and I said "yes", he then said "were the old owners vegetarians? and I said "well...yes they were", and he said "vegan poop reeks, you can always tell the places owned by vegans. So we get done the job of removal, rinsing, removal and then video inspection, and the system is fine. "Really overbuilt" teh guy says. So because we checked the 3 ports in the system (from house, holding tank and weeping bed cleanout), and there was no reason the system should be stinking (I called to have it drained because I assumed it was full-to-the-top because I could smell that tank probably 200 feet away. So there you go. Don't be a stinky vegan (well we'll wait a year and see if it starts to reek again, maybe the guy was on crank or something who knows).
So how hard is it to get used to 100% absolute dead-crazy silence and darkness?
Well that's an interesting one. I don't recall the last time I've had actual silence. Like no crickets, wind, street noise, car alarms, screeching tires, trains, fornicating neighbours with unfortunately open windows, wheaton terriers etc etc etc. I looked it up before I moved here and "white noise" machines were suggested, or running fans, or leaving the tv on or whatever... but EFF that. Silence is absolutely incredible! I'm actually sleeping less, but better (garmin watch tracks it). I never realized how many times you maybe don't wake up, but some noise pulls you out of deep sleep. Anyway, it's phenomenal. The only noise at night is the boiler system heating the floors, which makes a few odd house noises.
As well, you never know just how dark night is. I guess I've always lived near a street light, or had house lights on or whatever, but it's always been relatively easy to see at night. In the woods, you really don't want to be advertising where you are by leaving lights on, and when there's no moon, HOLY CRAP it's like being 10 feet underground. As well, when it's a full moon, you realize just how much light the moon puts out, because this place has a billion windows, so moonlight looks like sunrise. You country folk probably know all this, but for city slicker, this is all new shit. Oh and I've heard people talk about just how many stars are visible when there's no light polution, but I had no idea you can see galaxies of stars.
So that's about it for now. Oh, and they're expensive, but the Garmin fenix watches are just out of this world. Not only do they track movement, heartrate, sleep patterns, stress, altitude etc, but the GPS service is incredible, and it also has an internal barometer, and it "reads" incoming storms (accurately too). We don't get cell service so it's not reading it from an external source, it just figures out that bad things are happening and warns you. I've never been a watch guy before, but damn, this thing is an absolute "must have" if you live in any kind of really rural area, oh such as say middle of nowhere rocky mountains
Only regret so far is not having done this a LONG time ago.
Oh, and it's weird that hockey games start at 4pm now, but since daylight savings it gets dark at 5, so it doesn't feel too weird
