Node/npm install on Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon Errors

Getting into the new Angular Basics course and it linked to Treehouse install notes (http://treehouse.github.io/installation-guides/linux/node-linux.html). Followed along the instructions and appended the .bashrc file as mentioned but getting errors when I test for node -v and/or npm -v. Additionally, the "brew install node" command returns an "unsupported special dependency" error. Not sure what to do from here. Browsed Linuxbrew on github for issues or other install notes and didn't come across anything.

 ~ $ node -v
 Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix>
 Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix>
 Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
 Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: Unable to get the locale encoding
 ImportError: No module named 'encodings'

 Current thread 0x00007f331ecce740 (most recent call first):
 Aborted

 ~ $ npm -v
 Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix>
 Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix>
 Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
 Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: Unable to get the locale encoding
 ImportError: No module named 'encodings'

 Current thread 0x00007fad63317740 (most recent call first):
 Aborted



 ~ $ brew install node
Error: Unsupported special dependency :perl
 Please report this bug:

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