The cities also indexed their streets off of the same river, but at different places along the curving bank. As a result, traveling south in KCMO increments the street numbers, but in KCK, the numbers increment when you travel west.

For more hilarity, the cities to the south of KCK adopted the KCMO street number designations, so KCK is the odd city out.

My tin foil hat theory is that he was planning out another shooting and got interrupted.

Headline is a little silly. It didn’t ignite or stoke anything, really.

My issues with the health insurance system didn’t get worse as a result of this. I have just felt a sense of camaraderie that I haven’t felt in a long time. The discussion and shared consensus has been a good reminder that I’m not alone, and hopefully to other people, too, that they aren’t alone, either.

It’s not that folks suddenly realized they hated their health insurance. They’re just talking about the same thing for once, and generally have the same view about the industry. It’s a strange catalyst for discussion, but it is something universal that affects a lot of people in the U.S.

I would not have expected for a shooting to lead to that sort of unity, but I think it has. At least a little bit. My wife is on X and told me that even Ben Shapiro supporters were disagreeing with him when he said something political and divisive about the shooting. Just sort of shocking.

I have too many of each of those things, with more on the way. Literally, in the mail right now.

In the ultimate synthesis of things, I’m currently working on building a new bed frame/headboard. I’m building one that has flip down cushions at the headboard with storage behind them, and a shelf (or two) up top. It’ll have integrated sensors/buttons and lights for reading, viewing inside the storage area and adding mood lighting to the room. It’ll have a lot of available power inside the storage area, so we can keep our sex toys stored and charged there, and not in the bathroom where we have to wonder if we’ve hidden things appropriately before we have company, in totes (where they get forgotten) or like, on our bedside, where they wind up with dust or stolen by a pet that thinks it’s a chew toy. Oh, and it’ll have hard points, obviously.

This house used to be a duplex. It wasn’t built that way, and it’s not that way now, but there’s a patch of siding at the back of the house that’s the shape of a door. When I moved in, I had to pay the local utility company on two bills, because the electricity was being billed to my street address, and the water was billed to my street address, Fl 1. It was a huge pain in the rear, because the utility company just shrugged and said “Oh, you’re the landlord over both those units.” And set me up as a master account holder over them as if the floors of my house were rentals. (IT’s weird they saw that one that doesn’t get water, and one that doesn’t get electricity and just shrugged it off, but whatever.) I had to call the city to have them send a letter to the utility company to tell them that my house was a single family residence. They didn’t do anything, but I called a few months later to ask if they ever got the letter. They said they had, and about 9 more months after that, they started sending me a single bill. Mercifully. The utility company doesn’t bill on the same day each month. I don’t know what math they use, but it seems to shift. Maybe they bill every 4 weeks instead of every month, but as a landlord of the single family home that I solely inhabited, they enrolled me in paperless billing and didn’t send ‘the landlord’ any billing notifications, so paying the bill on time was contingent upon not just checking the site in accordance with the calendar I keep, but also randomly checking it, too, as the billing date moved around. Do you have any idea how hard that is for someone with ADHD?

Anyway - all that is to say this house is totally whack. The furnace is about 3x the size needed for the square footage, so the air coming out of the vents is like 20 degrees hotter than it should be, and the blower struggles to push the appropriate volume of air through the old, hodgepodge, and (in at least one case) improvised ductwork. Instead of cycling and like, circulating air properly, it just blasts the area around the vents with hot air, and leaves cold spots cold. The plus side is that our HVAC guy says he expects the heat exchanger to burn itself up any time now, and when that happens, I guess I’ll spend the money I’m saving up for a down payment on a new house to deal with it. Or take out a HELOC and hope that when the market turns we don’t lose that much equity. Then we’ll get a nice heat pump or something - you know, for the next person who lives here, because this house’s problems are many.
But for right now we’re just running the thing with the cheapest, crappiest air filters we can find so there isn’t much air impedance, and changing them often. Sometimes I feel like living here is like living on the Serenity.

My realtor really did me dirty with this one. I mean, I still bought in 2019 before the market went insane, but like, it was my first house, and I really needed him to do better.
Next time I house hunt, I have a plan. I already have topographic maps of the whole city saved on my computer to ensure I’m not buying a house at a low spot (water issues). The state government provides maps of noise and environmental pollution, so I won’t be dealing with train tracks I thought I wouldn’t hear, or a metal plating company 3/4 of a mile away that makes the neighborhood smell like hot metal sometimes. I also now have thermal imaging gear, boroscopes, all manner of outlet testing gear, and a ruthless determination to not have to worry about a house that clearly wants to fall down. I’m going to be an unholy terror of a traveling home inspection for any house we’re looking at next.

After having just deleted 3 paragraphs… uh. This one, I guess.

I just talk too much. Add too many details. And then realize that I am actually bored with what I’ve written, and it would be awful to subject others to that.

I could have a good ramble about just about anything. Just before this comment I wrote and deleted 3 paragraphs about what temperature I keep the house. Programmable thermostat. Different modes for different seasons. Special seasonal cycles for morning/evening. Old house, renovations done to it, and not a great HVAC system, so some choices made to work around that, etc. Just rambly stuff.

Random electronics components, tools, or sex toys.

I’d do the opposite. Crash the biggest event I can find with ample media coverage, grab a mic, explain that I’m projecting myself backward through time from 200 years from now, and that I don’t have much time, and now is when it all goes wrong. To save everyone we need to

[Teleport to my living room]

I’m kidding, of course. I’d probably just waste it on something dumb(er).

It’s not uncommon for ships to have a captain that commands and stays with the ship and a pilot that is familiar with and helps navigate regional waters, who takes over navigation and issues orders in the areas that they are qualified to operate.

I’m not saying that’s what happened here - I don’t know and haven’t seen any information that would support that idea - but it could explain the discrepancy.

I send all unknown calls to voice mail. I’ve had my carrier disable voice mail for my phone line.
My providers all use email or are ‘known’ by my phone. … I hope.