OK. I just paid $3.95 a gallon for #2 heating oil to heat this house for the winter. That is .51

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31. I know the feeling

I advise you to think seriously about a move. My wife and I are from New York and back in 1996 we bought a big ol' 1919 Colonial cheap, a foreclosure with 'good bones' as they say, that was in desperate need of refurbishing. It was a 'dead' house, every wall, ceiling and floor needed repair. The furnace was one of those old, small automobile-sized coal burners converted to burn heating oil. It was bone-dry and winter was on us and we had to get heat in the house before the pipes froze. We got the tanks filled (twin 225 gallons) and the price for oil then was the same as for gas, around $1.15. If you locked in a contract price with the oil company you could get it for under a dollar a gallon and that's what we always did. Anyway, long story short, we began rehabbing the house as a labor of love. We couldn't move in for 4 months but did steady work until it was habitable enough to move in. It took us 4 years of going to Home Depot every weekend but we restored that house and bought it back to life, even put in a new, more efficient furnace along the way. The price of oil/gas stayed pretty stable until the mid-2000s until it shot up to over $4.00 a gallon for the first time with Bush allowing his oil company buddies/clients to gouge the country for a months-long-billions-of- dollars-profit, hog feast. Remember? It was summer driving season and we weren't using the furnace but I did some quick math and realized we couldn't afford to heat that house anymore at over $4.00 a gallon oil, with 5 refills needed to get through the winter. Even though the house now looked great, we put it on the market and sold it and moved to Las Vegas where we don't have the heating oil pegged to the price of gas problem, and no harsh winters. Hot summers, yes, but you won't freeze to death.