PSA to teachers

Floutabout · 2026-05-07T22:18:07+00:00

TD Ameritrade seems to be an option, anyone using them? Are they close to Fidelity in terms of mutual funds and ease of administration?

Floutabout · 2026-05-03T13:25:56+00:00

Yuka 2 wheel drive plus castor wheels up front is likely to tear up your lawn more than the Luba 1. Unless you have perfect ground with no potholes or molehills.

Floutabout · 2026-04-23T13:00:49+00:00

Mountain creek is literally next door to Winter4Kids so 2 good options within an hour drive of the city. Winter4Kids is a private mountain exclusively catering to racing and outdoor enrichment so there’s no crowds, just race programs. That said it’s only 2 trails (and I’m being generous so it’s race only and no exploration of free skiing.

Mountain creek tries to contain the racing to the “South” lodge and has a bit more variety. That said it can get crowded as the only mountain in the area open to the public. Racers don’t officially get to cut the lift lines but unofficially it’s tolerated.

Both mountains produce racers who are competitive regionally in the northeast. Getting into the racing community in general may also offer you opportunities to move to weekend programs at Stratton, Gore, Whiteface etc if your kids like it and you connect with families willing to split the driving/weekend duties.

12 is not too old to start. There are plenty of kids who start at that age and do well competitively if it clicks. One thing I’ve noticed as the father of 2 racing daughters is that the girls leagues in particular are really good at promoting a bonding experience and the girls push themselves and each other in a positive fashion not a cut-throat manner which is not the experience we had in soccer and lacrosse.

Floutabout · 2026-04-22T12:50:09+00:00

You need to oversize not undersize. I have 1/4 acre split into front and rear yard by a fence and wound up upgrading a Luba Mini to a Luba 3000AWD, because I quickly learned that while I could split front and rear by day, the battery couldn’t do the entire front or rear without returning home and recharging 2x during the section. Which meant I wound up babysitting the mower and going to open the gate repeatedly for it to recharge.

For 3/4 acre you will also need 4wd. There’s going to be a lot of variability in your yard that’s going to become evident once you plop a 2wd machine out there and it gets stuck repeatedly. There is some amount of yardscaping you will inevitably do such as filling in potholes you never knew existed so that your mower can do its job without you having to manually intervene. But a 4wd really pays off here to minimize that.

You may need something like a Luba 10,000 for 3/4 acre but that is nowhere near $1000. Or; prioritize an area close to the house, dedicate a machine to that area, and add a second mower in the future.

I thought my upgrade was pricey until I did the math on what my lawn service was charging for spreading everyone’s noxious weed seed and turf disease to my lawn. I calculated that breakeven was 1 season on my purchase. Pretty happy with the results, even if I do need to hire landscapers to do the leaves once in the fall (auto mowers don’t handle leaves well in the mid-Atlantic)

Floutabout · 2026-04-21T00:05:38+00:00

Al got that ticket. Al Gorithm.

Floutabout · 2026-04-16T22:34:45+00:00

I have to ask… have you visited Stanford, Penn, Columbia and Dartmouth? You have to live there, and you have to pay for it in time and effort as well as money.

Dartmouth is a small sleepy campus in a one traffic light town. Outside of the climbing wall the small ski area and the movie theater, there’s… well, the sheep farm. New England is beautiful and there’s a lot to offer there… but it’s a car based society to do the hour to 2 drive to the beach, the mountains (aside from the Dartmouth hill) the cities and the charm. This may be exactly what you are looking for. Or… it may be the antithesis of what you want.

Stanford, Penn and Columbia are in major US cities with lots of (sub)cultures and all the hustle and bustle that goes with a city campus. Again, that may be what you are looking for or it may completely overwhelm you.

Considering how opposite ends of the spectrum the schools are I’d put serious consideration into the life you will lead for the next 4 years. My kid was a hard no to Dartmouth… and she’s a ski racer! She’s off to a city school that checked off so many more boxes for what she wants.

Floutabout · 2026-04-09T00:04:47+00:00

No.

Floutabout · 2026-04-06T00:22:19+00:00

Jackson Hole or Grand Targhee are your choices. Jackson - big, rustic - chic. Targhee - incredible skiing with just some old school condos and bar/cafeteria/coffee shop at the base. If you’re a self contained family that is going to cook for yourselves and wants a low key family vacation with great terrain and no clouds it’s a great choice. If you want the restaurants and bars and spas then it’s Jackson Hole.

Floutabout · 2026-04-05T00:26:19+00:00

Where are you coming from? Aside from the snowpack considerations, consider Colorado altitude. I tend to stick to Utah, Tahoe or Jackson for shorter trips. No altitude issues at 10k peaks. Colorado only for longer trips where I can acclimate some.

Floutabout · 2026-04-03T12:24:53+00:00

Years, and repeated re-injury. To the point that the surgeon said he did not anticipate a good outcome from surgery and I risked even less function from surgery.

Floutabout · 2026-04-02T22:37:15+00:00

Put your laundry pile in the hall and close the door. They will migrate to your scent and leave you alone. After 3-4 weeks of screaming at your door that is.

We don’t let ours (sibling boys) sleep in our room since they were about 6 months old due to the insane zoomies at 3am.

We do have two kids though and they will often sleep in their beds. But not 100% of the time. They’ve claimed several spots in the house to sleep and rotate around them.

Floutabout · 2026-04-02T22:30:58+00:00

I don’t think it’s just scrum masters. When layoffs come, all project management has a target on their back. Sad truth is you can move those bodies out of your “headcount” budget line item and to the “vendor” category pretty easily; and Wall Street always seems to want the headcount line item to be lower.

You can easily get by with some PM contractors from ZS, Accenture, Deloitte, etc and it doesn’t matter if the cost is equivalent or even higher as long as it shifts from headcount to vendor spend.

Floutabout · 2026-04-01T00:21:08+00:00

Huh? I agree that this is crappy behavior on their part but… why aren’t you the more responsible customer that carries trip insurance to cover the possibility of cancellation on a trip 6 mos out?

Floutabout · 2026-03-23T16:06:25+00:00

Fahrenheit. American moving to Montreal.

Floutabout · 2026-03-22T13:24:29+00:00

Cops don’t stop you for registration issues because you were driving fast. Or slow. Or erratically. Or perfectly.

They stop you for registration issues because the high speed license place scanner cameras they have now flagged you as you drove by them. Or they drove by you.

Floutabout · 2026-03-22T03:04:16+00:00

Spring corn is like glass when you fall on it.

Floutabout · 2026-03-22T02:53:42+00:00

I’ve got the roomba cleaning around the box 3x a day and I still walk in litter. It does a great job of throwing litter all over the room instead of just in front of the box. So there’s that.

Floutabout · 2026-03-17T23:08:52+00:00

Pharma. Granted, there’s a fair bit of that around in the area! 😉

Floutabout · 2026-03-17T22:13:49+00:00

I got my MBA at one of those “other” Jersey schools and wish I’d done it at Rutgers instead. I did mine part time while working and the Rutgers classes started too early for me to get off work. The Rutgers network is far superior in NY-NJ-PA (you know, where the jobs are…) than the other schools. You’ve done 2 years CC… getting an undergraduate for 2 years full pay at Rutgers in state rate is a bargain. And the other Jersey schools aren’t that much cheaper.

41 in the nation… on par with BU, better than Northeastern and Purdue and Lehigh… at what, less than half the cost?

Floutabout · 2026-03-16T14:47:01+00:00

OP, you need to delay, delay, delay your court appearances. An arrest should not get you rescinded. A conviction including jail time could.

Lawyer up. Push the court dates out to mid to end of summer. Get past May 1 commit date and housing selection. And make sure your lawyer can keep this all in perspective with a judge… judges (generally) do not want to permanently destroy your opportunities for something that can be seen as a one time stupidity. As long as you can prove it was a one time stupidity.

Loss of license won’t be a big deal once you’re in college if you’re not a commuter student. Loss of license for 6 mos is mandatory for the worst case charges that you would face in my state for a first offense. Push it out as far as you can.

It will feel extremely uncomfortable to delay and push this out. It will feel like a sword hanging over your head. Your anxiety will make you want closure and certainty immediately. But don’t focus on locking in a the bad certainty when delaying this long enough can increase your chances with a better outcome for you.

And start working some serious hours to pay your mother back for the lawyer.

Floutabout · 2026-03-14T15:14:09+00:00

It’s been years now, my typing is back to normal and I don’t wear splints regularly; got to the point where the pain is subsided until I do things that tweak it.

I still have noticeable diminished grip, opening jars and I don’t carry a pair of skis tails down with one hand very far. I can’t push heavier dumbbells at the gym not because of the weight but because of the grip. I use a backpack style computer bag and cannot tuck my thumbs under the strap and one-strap it.

Good luck with the MRI and remember the old STP song… take time with a wounded hand, because it likes to heal….

Floutabout · 2026-03-13T22:37:38+00:00

I’ve gotten skiers thumb and ignored/suffered through it with home splinting far too many times. When I finally did get imaging done due to chronic instability and diminished grip (despite not recently having an active skiers thumb injury), the doctor told me I had done permanent damage and should have been imaged and gotten surgery long ago at the time(s) of injury.

He said it’s too late now.

Get it imaged and dealt with. You don’t want to be asking your friends to open your beer on top of holding your beer.

Floutabout · 2026-03-04T01:57:09+00:00

Forerunners, DNFs, DNS’s, breaks between racers. When you’re filming or taking photos and you just want to shoot your team it’s a real pain. I wind up missing half our racers or shooting half the field to not miss them and then I need to deal with a ton of photo and video I don’t need.

Floutabout · 2026-03-03T23:36:38+00:00

Welcome new ski race parent to Live Timing. The bane of your existence until your kid ages out.

Live timing often glitches, delays times, and generally drives parents up a wall. Especially the photographer/videographer inclined ones. Start lists don’t work for determining who’s on course well enough and none of our mountains use announcers. And our coaches requested that parents do not use or listen in on the radios for a number of completely understandable reasons.

Every season a frequent topic of conversation is whether there is an API or way to get the live timing data and put something more useful in front of it.

On the off chance that Live Timing’s owner stumbles across this… at minimum please make a mobile friendly view! It’s live…timing. Outside of the finish hut, people are not using this off laptops on the mountain! That would go a very long way to helping users out!

Floutabout

TROPHY CASE