I can see them surviving in the wild in Vancouver, but here in MB it regularly gets to -30 to -40 for several months in the winter. I’m not sure they’d like that too much.
That said, maybe your dad’s house is a supermarket. Does he have lots of food in it?
I absolutely know how you feel. I’ll typically go 6 to 12 months at a time without playing because of that. I then strategically find a window between patches where most of my favorite mods are all up to date. It typically takes a solid 4 hours of work to fix up my modlist, and I then play obsessively for several weeks. Despite these huge breaks, I’m at almost 3500 hours in the game, though I’ve been playing since release.
My second fave game is Rimworld, and I follow a similar pattern there, though modding for that game seems much more resilient in the face of certain updates. Plus, Ludeon isn’t DLC-crazy like Paradox.