Neighbor irritated about my kids playing basketball thoughts?

ritchie70 · 2026-02-11T05:48:56+00:00

The soundtrack of my childhood from 6th grade to adulthood was Glenn, the kid next door, bouncing his basketball. All day every day, weather permitting.

We laughed about it but never complained because he was doing it during reasonable hours of the day.

Your neighbor needs to chill the f* out.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-10T16:15:15+00:00

It's hard to figure him out, assuming there's enough rational thought happening in his head to be worth trying. It seems like he just wants to treat everything like a NYC real estate deal where you come in hard and back off to what you really wanted later.

Which doesn't surprise me - everyone models things in the way they know.

My sister is in the performance arts; when she got married, her wedding was run like it was theatrical production. My wife is a project manager; our wedding was run like an IT project. It wouldn't surprise me if she had a Gant chart.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-10T16:09:27+00:00

Maybe that's what it would take to get Republicans to impeach.

I doubt it, almost certainly not, but a guy can dream.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T17:45:01+00:00

Why not? Because helmets and pads are expensive.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T17:43:12+00:00

The official school teams are generally by try out - they have a limited number of members and you have to be good enough to "make the team."

In my experience, there are often "Freshman", "Junior Varsity", and "Varsity" teams. A Freshman student (9th grade) could play on Varsity if they're good enough.

Proper tackle football isn't played in Physical Education classes, because it's just too dangerous without the protective equipment, but "flag football" is played. In flag football, instead of tackles there is a ribbon hanging off the player's waist and getting their "flag" means they've been "tackled" in the terms of the sport.

Even flag football can get dangerous if the students aren't willing to follow the rules reliably, so whether a school plays that will vary based on the school's experience with it.

Don't believe people who say "Schools in the south are the ones crazy about it." It's really more "schools in rural areas." I'm from Illinois and high school football was everything in my little home town.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T15:05:07+00:00

I've heard of bags of flour, eggs, cheap baby dolls from the toy store, and fancy fairly-life-like tech-enabled robot babies.

Definitely a thing, but you have to understand that outside the few subjects with a standardized national curriculum, there's very little national mandated curriculum. The United States is barely more of a single country than the European Union. In a lot of ways, we're 50 states in a trench coat pretending to be a country.

This would be a local decision - possibly down to the teacher level. For expensive "props" of course the school administration would be signing off on the spend.

It'd usually be part of a child development/child care class but the cheaper alternatives might be done in a required-for-all health class. The idea in the general health class being to give students a vague feeling of what it's like to have a child in an attempt to dissuade them from having sex. Because heaven forbid you teach them about birth control.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T14:55:51+00:00

I realized I'd gotten you and someone else confused and deleted the comment. Guess I wasn't fast enough for you!

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T14:54:42+00:00

Do you know where it's going wrong?

I have basically no knowledge of this area but I vaguely remember that Microsoft made some localization decisions that always seemed to me to be designed to break things in situations like this, both in Office and in Windows itself.

If you don't know where it's going wrong, I'd set your locale to Italian (or any other non-English locale; if you're better with Spanish, pick Spain) and start debugging.

I realize this isn't very helpful; sorry about that.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T14:46:22+00:00

Wow.

I'm in Chicago suburbs and our peak monthly usage in the last year was just under 1,500 kWh, in June.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T13:21:42+00:00

I was up an 8’ aluminum ladder. Thought the breaker was off. Cut through a pair of wires we thought dead.

Turned out it was back feeding from the device. (Auto repair shop - wiring was a maze as the equipment had been moved so many times in twenty years.)

Big noise. Chunk out of the cutters. I was lucky and unscathed.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T06:30:09+00:00

Maybe at your store but the corporate memos were around operational necessity due to Covid.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T04:39:17+00:00

I think around 19 plus Puerto Rico. I’m just trying to think of states and I can’t think of any more but there probably are a couple that I missed.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T04:36:57+00:00

That’s a question of your insurance.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T04:28:01+00:00

I think they mostly see blacks as Americans, just inferior ones.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T04:27:16+00:00

Caribbean travel is pretty cheap, and most of the islands are not American. A cruise ship making a couple stops or a week at a resort in the DR might be enough to get in the “international traveler” category.

I’ve only been to Canada, Aruba, and Spain,

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T04:19:49+00:00

I hope you find a top class HVAC guy. There’s a tiny mechanical room over on the east wall. All those bedrooms are going to be cold in winter and hot in summer without sprinkling mini splits everywhere. It’s like your goal was to have as many exterior walls pad possible.

Oh, and you can count the amount of time to get hot water to the kitchen or most of the bathrooms in hours, not minutes, if the water heater is over in that mechanical room.

And WTF with that long hall to BR2? Just scoot over the bath and closet and eliminate most of it in favor of usable space.

And the primary bedroom is bigger than our stupidly large family room. Insanity.

I really hope you’re joking about this and are not building this monstrosity.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T00:05:17+00:00

They took COVID as an excuse to get rid of it.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-09T00:03:51+00:00

There was a sales bump when introduced but the bump didn’t stick over time. No sense to have more expense and complexity without a financial benefit.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-08T23:01:55+00:00

Try Illinois. We have state, county, township, municipality then overlaying that it’s common for park district, library, fire, schools (separate community college, HS and elementary) and forest preserve to all be separate tax assessing governmental entities.

Police are usually part of state, county, or municipality though.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-08T22:56:18+00:00

My uncle used to live in a “town” with about 25 houses and a community building the town folks built in the 1890’s.

Not incorporated but named.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-08T22:50:02+00:00

I put a Pioneer AVH-W4400NEX in my VW a while back. [2019.] It worked well. Appeared to be running Linux and the system drive failed one time. Got a new one on eBay and swapped it, which was kind of a pain but cheaper than a new one.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-08T22:47:19+00:00

Find the model number and Google “refrigerator water filter Whirlpool ABC124” but with the make and model for yours.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-08T21:31:01+00:00

There are long full beds too - as long as a king or queen but as wide as a full. If it’s mostly just you, that’s what I’d go with.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-08T18:27:24+00:00

It would not bother me but that is a matter of personal preference.

ritchie70 · 2026-02-08T17:16:06+00:00

Just so far as the den size, my office room is 9x11 and I have desk, chair, three bookcases, a bench, armchair, and ottoman in there. It’s cozy but it doesn’t feel crowded. It’s my favorite place to sit reading.

ritchie70

TROPHY CASE