What's Wrong With Next Door?

First, let me say that we love where we live. Most of the people we've met have been wonderful. (Actually, I can't think of any that aren't, just assuming that in four years, there must have been one or two that weren't.) So I was initially surprised by all the negativity on Next Door, which I'll discuss momentarily. 

For those who may not know, Next Door is a social media platform that is designed to be used by people in a designated neighborhood. You can't join a neighborhood that you don't live in. On the surface it seemed a great way to learn about what was going on in our neighborhood. I'd actually tried to join in our old town in Texas, but the way that was structured our neighborhood only consisted of a few streets. And the whole town there was only a few thousand people more than where we live now, except that now our neighborhood consists of not only our immediate neighborhood, but the entire subdivision and apparently every subdivision in the county - many of which I've never heard of. Consequently, much of what is posted there isn't even relevant to me, but I don't know that until I actually go to the post and look. So I was getting email notifications about things going on in places I never heard of and don't care about. 

The other problem with the email notifications on Next Door is that frequently the discussion was closed several hours or days before I got the notification. Not only is it closed to new comments, you cannot read the existing comments. I understand closing it to new comments, but not letting people see what the comments were is annoying. 

And of course there is the issue of the post being removed by the administrator. I think some of this is because the original post may have violated a community standard and contained racist or other unacceptable remarks. But sometimes the reason the post is removed is not clear. In fact, there is considerable complaining about this on the platform.

But the negativity. Oh my! When we first moved here, I had a question about noise levels. When we were in Texas, we were out in a small town with lots of space around us and no HOA rules. I wondered if the HOA had a rule about decibel levels? Thinking this was the type of question my neighbors might have answers to, I posed the question to Next Door. Not only did I not get a definitive answer, I was told that if I expected "peace and quiet" I had come to the wrong place. I was told to move out. I was told to stop being a grumpy old woman. I was told to stop complaining. It's important to understand that I did not complain about my neighbors being too loud. I only asked about limits on decibel levels. For all any of those people encouraging me to "get out of town" knew, I might be the one making noise. And for the record, I rarely hear my neighbors on either side and if they hear us when we have parties, they've never complained. 

The next time I was brave enough to make a post was when a car zoomed past us going so fast that we couldn't identify what kind of car it was - only that it was red. The speed limit is 25 mph on the main streets and only 20 mph on the side streets. In addition to the car going too fast, it passed us (we were in a golf cart) with another vehicle coming in the opposite direction. Again, it was suggested that I find another place to live - a place that was slower and quieter. I was admonished to stop complaining. I have to assume that the person with multiple posts on this one was probably the driver of the red car. 

Many people complain about the service or the food in the restaurants here. I often agree with much of what they say. However, airing it on Next Door doesn't accomplish anything. The restaurant management does not see Next Door. Every now and again, someone will advise the poster to talk to management, but they're rarely told to move.  

And then you have people who just grab hold of an issue - for instance replacing our cable service provider (paid by the HOA) with fiber optic service. Why didn't everyone get to vote on this? Can I keep the cable service? We should recall the HOA board. The fiber optic company will destroy my landscaping. The fiber optic company is not reliable. The fiber optic company has poor customer service ratings. The board should not make any decisions without getting the approval of every homeowner. Why didn't everyone get to vote on this? Who will pay for the replacement of my landscaping when they destroy it? I like the cable company. How will I get channel 84? We should sue the HOA board of directors. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You know, there were a couple of people I just had to block because I only have so much tolerance for beating dead horses. The questions were all asked and answered MULTIPLE times, yet one individual persisted. She may still be going on about it, but since I blocked her, I'll never know. Thankfully. 

And now the straw that broke this camel's back. We changed management companies this month. This was a developer decision, nothing to do with the HOA board. We were notified about two weeks before the change and told that our automated payments (if we had them) would need to be changed. Okay, they're waiving any late fees for August until they get it sorted out. But we have optional activities that require tickets. Right now, you can't use a credit card to buy tickets or print them off at home the way you could in the past. You can only reserve them until you can take a check to the office where they print them for you. Not convenient at all. I commented that I didn't think the transition was smooth and that they should have been better prepared. Comments from my neighbors?  I was just looking for something to complain about. The transition hasn't inconvenienced anyone (posted by someone who has probably never purchased a ticket to anything - on the other hand, I purchased $280 worth of tickets and had to take a check to the office so they could print my tickets. It was inconvenient.)  There is just too much negativity! Well, they got that part right. 

As a post script - I have turned off all notifications from Next Door so even if someone sends me a private message, I won't know about it. 

If you're on Next Door for my neighborhood, please let me know if there's something important. The only thing I'll miss is the occasional wildlife pictures. 

First Dates and Going Steady

Remember how awkward that first date was? Will he call me again? Will she go out with me again? It's almost the same for couples. As a couple, finding couple friends can be a challenge. Sometimes the women are friends to begin with but the men don't like each other. Or the other way around, the men were all long-time friends but the women all hated each other. Or maybe the woman is a real sweetheart but her husband/partner is a jerk or the man is a great guy but his wife/partner is overbearing.  So when all four of you like each other, it's great. And you find that out when you go on a "date". 

You meet at a community event, a neighborhood gathering, a friend's party or the local watering hole. Maybe you go to their house or have them over to your house for drinks or a meal. Maybe you go out somewhere. But in that time, you want to learn a little more about each other to decide whether you want to spend more time together. 

You're going to find out some basic information - how many kids/grandkids they have, where they're from, what types of food they like or dislike. Whether they have dogs, cats or both. You'll find out something about their work experience and their education. You'll probably find out something about their politics, even if you don't ask. But by the end of the evening you're going to have an idea of whether you want to spend more time with them. What you don't know is how they felt about it. 

You know your own feelings. You thought the "date" went well. You had a great evening.  You had so much to talk about. They seemed to enjoy the food, you got through several bottles of wine and you're looking forward to seeing them again and spending more time with them. But then they don't call you. They don't have you over. They don't even ask you to meet up for drinks at the bar. Nothing. A month or more goes by and they are silent and you're left wondering what happened. Are we too old? Too young? Wrong religion? Wrong politics? Are we more boring than we thought? No answers to those questions, but one thing is clear - you won't be going steady with that couple. 

After living in Solivita for nearly four years, we're going steady with several couples. Of course, it's not that "exclusive" thing we did in high school. No one is joined at the hip. We are not together every day and maybe not every week. Everyone spends time with other people. But we do get together on a regular basis. Not necessarily the same night of the week, like when we were younger and still working those 9 to 5 jobs. But we see these couples on a regular basis, at least once a month. We have dinner at each other's houses, we go out for dinner or to a concert, and we are always included if they have a party. Life is good and we're still open to "first dates". 

 

You Have Mail

 I stopped looking at email months ago - maybe over a year. I probably missed a few things but nothing of any social or poltical importance and when people understood that sending me an email is like sending something into a black hole, they started texting me. But while we were on vacation I was struck by the desire to start using email again. 

But in order to make it usable, I needed to clean it up. When we got back from our cruise last week, I had upwards of 135,000 unread emails. Mind you, they didn't all come in that week. They have been accumulating over the years. I'm not sure how many years exactly, but since before 2013, which is nine years ago. 

It just got to be too much to keep up with it. All it took was one week away on vacation and I couldn't catch up. Spam coming in from everybody. When I place an order for anything online, I look for those boxes that default to a check mark so that I do not accidentally opt-in to their marketing emails. I resent having to unsubscribe from stuff I never subscribed to in the first place. Last week I wanted to place an order on etsy. In the end, I didn't buy it because shipping it to the US would have cost three times the price of the item. So I asked the seller how much it would be to ship it to a UK address. And even though "James" usually responds to inquiries within 2 business days, as far as I know he never responded to my question. But I did start getting email from etsy. And I had to unsubscribe. Back when we were running the inspection business, I would get a system-generated email everytime a client paid by credit card. I rarely opened those because I didn't need to. But 10 or more clients per day - most of them paying by credit card. And to make matters worse, I'd get one email when the card was authorized and another when the payment was processed. This is how I ended up with 135K unread emails and if we count the ones that were read but not deleted, I think we're in the neighborhood of 150K

My plan was to "select all" and hit the delete button - well maybe the archive button. What I found was that gmail will only do this in blocks of 50. I'd  have to do it 3,000 times. 

And so here we are. It's Friday and I've been doing this all day every day for a week. No gym, no pool, no reading - just deleting and archiving emails. I'm now down to 44,000 and I'm back to 2013. So I am making progress.   

Pancakes and Waffles

 I'm not sure how old I was when I first went to spend a couple of weeks with my grandparents. Not very old, maybe 5 or 6. The first week was spent with Grandma Ash and the second week with Grandma Mohr. (Notice that I haven't mentioned either Grandpa because they were here, there, and busy most days and I spent most of my time hanging out with the Grandmas.) 

My Grandma Ash made the best pancakes. No Aunt Jemima mix for her. She made them from Robin Hood flour, eggs and whatever else you needed to make a perfect pancake. They were amazing! A beautiful golden color, piping hot and topped with plenty of butter and lots of maple syrup. My breakfast of choice. I had them every day I was there. 

And then I was delivered to Grandma Mohr. My first morning there she asked what I'd like for breakfast. I said I'd like a pancake. I sat down at the table and waited while she prepared my breakfast. The plate was placed before me and I'm sure I just looked at it for a bit. The pancake was not a beautiful golden color. It was mostly white with a few brown streaks in it. The syrup wasn't honey-colored either, it was clear. This was the most anemic looking pancake I'd ever seen and I didn't even know what anemic meant. It looked nothing like the pancakes I'd grown to love the week before. Not only did it not look right, it didn't taste right, either. I had no idea what she made it with. It wouldn't have mattered if I did. At that tender age, I assumed all pancakes were made the same way and I knew it wasn't "right". And that was when I announced to my Grandma Mohr that I wanted a pancake like my Grandma Ash made. 

I don't really remember what happened after that. I probably stopped asking Granny Mohr for pancakes. And that is undoubtedly why I was not named in her will. 

My own grandchildren were fairly easy when it came to breakfast. When they were 4 or 5 they mostly wanted toaster waffles. Without butter and without syrup. Dry. But okay, it's easy and it doesn't make much of a mess. But shortly after they'd moved from Texas to Oklahoma, they came back to Texas for a visit and while I was toasting their waffles, they announced that they no longer liked Texas waffles; they only liked Oklahoma waffles. 

Indeed. I explained to them that a Leggo waffle is the same no matter what state you buy it in. I'm not sure they believed me but these are the same kids who didn't like the fresh orange juice I made in my Breville juicer because it "tasted like oranges". It seemed they preferred Sunny Delite, but I could never bring myself to buy that. My best compromise was Tropicana. 

Revolutionary Ideas

Back in the early 70s there was a "special speaker" at church. I don't remember his name, and I don't remember much what he looked like, but I remember why he was there. I also remember the gist of what he said and at least one very specific thing he said. 

He was there to drum up support, mostly financial, for a private Christian academy. This was necessary because public schools were godless places that would corrupt children. He even asked the very attentive audience "Do you know what they are teaching your children in public school?? (He repeated the question for effect before answering it himself.) Your kids are being taught that our nation's founding fathers were a bunch of rebel-rousing revolutionaries!!" Well, I was probably the only person sitting in that congregation who didn't gasp and clutch my pearls. 

Why did he think it was called the American "Revolution"? Revolutionary wars typically involve revolutionaries. In my world, the word revolutionary has never had negative connotations. But just for the record, I wanted my child to be taught that the founding fathers were revolutionaries. Because they were. Regardless of their motivations, the American form of democracy was revolutionary in the 18th century. 

But apparently enough people were appalled at the idea of the truth being taught to their kids that they threw their support behind the idea and the Elyria Christian Academy opened around 1974, with the support of a number of churches. It operated for a couple of years before the Baptists and a large non-denominational church fell out and started their own schools. I wasn't privy to the source of the discord, probably something political or perhaps a finer point of theology, but I also wasn't surprised. I've known a lot of people who are "my way or the highway" kind of folks - we won't name names. 

At the time, the idea was to reject all state funds because the school would be exempt from state rules if they didn't take the money. I don't know if that worked out. My assumption is that the state could still impose some minimum standards on education, even if they didn't control the curriculum. I'm going to throw out a wild pitch here, but there are some faith-based schools in the UK where the students learn to read the Quran. That would be okay if they learned some other basics, too. But they don't. Needless to say, once they "graduate" they are not qualified to do anything but read the Quran. So I'm inclined to favor some minimum standards in education. 

But let's fast forward fifty years. They no longer want their own schools where they can teach their own world view. They want the the rest of us to pay for it. (And by "they" I'm not talking about these schools in particular but by Christian schools in general.) They want that government money, in the form of vouchers, to support their schools without losing their autonomy. They also want public schools to teach their world view. Because if they're paying tax, they should be able to dictate how things go. Fifty years ago I objected to the school because I found the idea of painting the founding fathers as something they were not objectionable. I also objected to placing a child in an environment where they would only be exposed to one viewpoint. But the fact that other people did not want their children exposed to ideas that might be different from their own didn't really bother me. But now they're trying to impose their own views on everyone, and that does bother me. 

Just a note before someone calls me out for sending my child to this school: It was never my idea and it's not something I would have paid for. My parents wanted to pay for it and the child wanted to go. I allowed it because I was in the process of moving from Ohio to Texas and knew that he would not be in that school longer than one semester. Turns out it was about 2 and 1/2 months in the fifth grade. We've never really had an in depth discussion about his time there. I do know that he had a wonderful, caring teacher, but then he had some of those in public schools, as well. 

The Original Fake News?

I joined a Facebook group that was supposed to be about growing up in the 50s and 60s. Nostalgia. How wonderful it was to grow up in that time. And then someone had the nerve to point out that it wasn't all as fine and dandy as we liked to remember. It made me think. In truth, I spent a year or so  living in fear. And I felt like I had to hide it. 

So what was I afraid of? In a word, Russia. I saw Nikita Krushchev pounding his shoe on the podium at the United Nations and threatening to bury us. As a nine year old, I didn't understand that a Russian plane could not get to Ohio without being intercepted or shot down. So every time a plane flew over, I was ready to run into the house if I saw bombs falling, which of course never happened. I prayed every night that Krushchev would find Jesus and stop being mean. 

I wanted to probe a little deeper into why I had what now seems an irrational fear. I wanted to explore whether I picked it up from my dad, or whether it was just being in the room when the news was on. Had I overheard adults discussing world affairs? I wanted to find the image of Krushchev pounding his shoe, because there are pictures or video of everything that ever happened. 

I googled it and to my shock, the Internet now says that it didn't happen. I was only nine years old but I believe it happened. I have talked to others my age and they believe it happened. But Google says it didn't happen, that the photos were "doctored" because that was before the days of Photoshop. 

So now I am torn between what I believe I saw with my own nine year old eyes or what Google says is true. If indeed it didn't happen and someone went to all that trouble to make us think it did - good job! You frightened the life out of nine year old kids. But in this case, I think I'll stay with what I know to be true, even though Google says it's not so. 

Driving Me Crazy

It seems the older I get, the easier it is to drive me crazy. And all this time I thought I was mellowing out. I was wrong. For example, I joined a Facebook Group that's supposed to be about growing up in the 50s and 60s. There are thousands of members - from around the world. Why should this drive me crazy? For starters I expected most members to be boomers, like me. What's known as a cohort. But there are people in the group who claim they got married in 1951 or 1952. I'm going to assume that if you got married in the early 50s, you probably grew up in the 30s and 40s. I'm okay with that, but if you grew up a decade or two before me, our collective memories are not the same. We didn't listen to the same music and our school experience would have been different. The point of the website is to share those common memories and experiences, but when you have a wide age group you don't have the shared experiences and that is the point of the website. 

Then you have a member asking other group members to name a song with the word "moon" in the title, That's Amore is not an appropriate response. Title and lyrics are not the same. Never have been. 

When asked to name our favorite school lunch, one woman replied that she attended an all girl business high school. What on earth does that have to do with any lunch, much less her favorite lunch?? Didn't girls in business high schools eat?

When asked whether your family used the word "supper" or "dinner" for the evening meal, one person responded with "I don't know". How important is it that the rest of us know that you "don't know"? 

Then there are what I call the scammers and the lonely hearts. The scammers are typically people with unfamiliar foreign names - I don't know whether they are male or female - who want you to click a link and collect $1000. Right. Get a life. I'm not stupid enough to click that link. The lonely hearts are typically men who have a canned message - "Hello. You are a beautiful woman. I enjoy your posts. I tried to send you a friend request but it didn't go through. Can you send me a friend request?" These people will send this to a dozen or more women on the same thread. Most ignore it, but one replied "How do I do that?" I just wanted to jump through the screen and say "Why would you do that??"

Then there are the self-promoters. These are the people who feel compelled to post a photo showing how wonderful they look at whatever age they are. Sometimes it's their birthday. How lonely are these people that they need thousands of people to tell them how good they look or wish them a happy birthday?

And then there are people like me who are wondering what's up with all the people driving us crazy. But unlike me, they are being rude on the forum. Just because you feel like saying something snarky doesn't mean you should. They are also announcing that they are leaving the group, which brings on a barrage of "oh, please stay" messages. Kind of like a girl I knew in high school who would always make a negative remark about her hair/makeup/dress so that everyone around her would respond with "oh no, your hair/makeup/dress looks great! That's such a great style/color/etc. on you!" Well, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to slip out the back door.