My cousin, who’s the same age as I am, was always amazed, when we were kids, that I didn’t know how to swim. His dad (my uncle), who had more of an old-school approach to parenting, “taught” my cousin to swim using pretty much that method.
Ditto. Living in Arizona it works out to once or twice per quarter. We drove up to the Mogollon Rim last week to ‘celebrate’ the 21st day of 110+ in a row for a few hours.
Fire department: We have a private FD here, Rural Metro, that covers folks living outside city limits. Their annual fee depends on your acreage and home square footage. Ours was 1,100 sf on a but more than a quarter-acre and the fee had edged just more than $150 before we left in 2016. If you were not a member, they’d put out the fire but the fee was several thousand.
Wow, do you live in my neighborhood???
@Spice_Weasel : there was a guy in my high school who also took all easy classes and ended up one of the Salutatorians. Nobody respected him.
I voted “once every year or two” in the road trip poll; but a better answer would be “several times a year for much of my adult life; also one trip in my late twenties that took an entire year, though I did stop several places for anywhere between a week or two and a couple of months; but less often in the last 20 years or so and not at all since 2019, though I’m not sure about this upcoming winter, maybe I will.”
For travel frequency, I visit my father and step-mother in Las Cruces NM about every other year. Since Las Cruces has functionally no airport, if I wanted to fly the best I could do is Colorado Spring → Denver → El Paso TX → Rent a Car and Drive to Las Cruces which is roughly an hour drive away. Factoring time to get to the airport and layover, it’s questionable if it would be cheaper/easier to drive to Denver, then take a direct Denver to El Paso flight and rent, and all of these options are far more expensive and save minimal time over the 630 mile direct Drive to Cruces. It’s darn silly!
Still, that’s basically an all day drive each way, which is why I only do it every year to every other year. Anyone else out of state that I want to visit is impractically far to drive to. And every where else I go drive-wise (the occasional trip to Denver or Boulder) is under the minimum for the poll.
Can’t swim. I sink like a brick in the water. School tried to teach me, others tried to teach me, all have failed.
I think my earliest experiences being taught were so shitty that I just never trusted anyone in the water ever again. Some tried to be gentle and nice, and I learned nothing. Others literally just threw me in the deep end and expected me to figure it out. They had to come rescue me every time, and I learned nothing.
Maybe if I had access to a shallow pool and nobody was fuckin’ with me about it, I might eventually figure it out, but everyone keeps insisting on giving me their useless tips.
I believe what I need is a teacher that was in my situation before and learned. All the people who have tried to teach me always act like I should just know how to do it, it was easy for them! They have zero understanding of where I’m coming from.
I haven’t ordered pizza in so long that I haven’t the faintest idea what’s now a fair price for it. But I’m not going to promise, even hypothetically, to never do so again. I think there is a place that will deliver out here.
My mother came from a family of competitive swimmers and our family owned a cabin on a lake not far from the Twin Cities. My parents rule of thumb for all us kids was to make it to Jr. Life Saver status. Swimming classes were offered for all ages at the local junior high schools (they had the pools, senior highs did not) so even in winter, we went off to lessons to get ourselves through the required classes.
After achieving the required status, my older brother was pushed to be a competitive swimmer but it wasn’t his thing so all pressure stopped at that point. Our parents were assured that we would not drown in our many lakes, streams, or rivers and all we wanted to do was go waterskiing. I haven’t been in the water in years now, but I am surely glad that I was taught to swim and got many summers of fun and even a few years of regular exercise doing it.
I took swimming lessons at the local high school over a few summers. I’m not sure exactly how old I was, but it was definitely single digits.
The lessons must have worked; I’ve been a strong swimmer for as long as I can remember.
My dad tried to teach me to swim when I was five, but between my fear, his impatience (my mom was the “good” parent; I chose to say he was “average,” although that’s average for a non- custodial father of his era), and the fact we lived an hour’s drive from any body of water, I didn’t actually learn. After the divorce, my mom got me lessons at the Y and I became a competent swimmer.
We take fewer road trips than we used to, but as @ParallelLines said, in this part of the country, it often makes more sense to drive than to fly. Now that recreational marijuana is legal in New Mexico, we don’t drive to southern Colorado nearly as often as we used to, but if we want to get away for a weekend trip, we head for a small southern Colorado town in summer and a small southern New Mexico one in winter.
Pardon the partial quote, but this is similar to what my folks did before a bad bout of pneumonia damaged my father’s lungs to the point that spending time over 5k was a bad idea. ‘Home of Record’ and autumn - winter - spring in Las Cruces, with all summer in Leadville CO or later in a cabin leased outside of Cotopaxi CO. My father saw no reason to spend too many summers in southern NM than needed.
In my place and time, every kid knew how to swim. The pool was in the neighborhood and we would walk there many a summer day, rolled up towel under our arms, for 4 hours of pool time for 25 cents. The deep end was 8 feet, the shallow end 4 feet, lifeguard on duty. There was a diving board in the he deep end.
All the kids in the neighborhood took swimming lessons at the pool at a young age. We also had swimming in school (PE was half gym / half swimming) grades 7-12.
mmm
We are beyond the delivery distance for pizza. Additionally we don’t really want people knowing our farm exists. We are on a private road that turns off of a back street. It’s actually difficult to find us even with GPS.
I answered “documents” in the “go all the way to work and forgot” poll, but really what I meant was “my work ID.”
I work on a DoD site and if you don’t have your Common Access Card (CAC) they simply will not let you in. There are alternative ways to gain entry but they require getting multiple supervisors involved and they practically snap on a rubber glove before they’ll let you in, whereas if you have your CAC, you basically just flash it at them and they wave you through.
I’ve worked for corporations that pretty much do the same thing. Or you have to wait for your boss to come and vouch for you, which means it might be quicker to go home to fetch the wayward ID.
Pizza delivery: I would never order a 1-topping pizza. Always at least two toppings.
Road tripping. I used to take road trips 3 out of 4 weeks in the summer. The nearest race track to me is 2-1/2 hours away and the next one I frequent is over 5 hours away. In winter, I’d be driving up to Canada or over to Wisconsin. Aging, bad back, and climate change are causing changes to my habits quickly.
I answered “other”, but really meant “my work id”. It takes an extra 5-10 minutes for me to get through security without the id, and for a few years it also meant i couldn’t use the printers. But it would take me 2+ hours to go home and fetch the id (varies based on train schedule) so I’ve just sucked it up, and asked my boss to print anything i needed printed.
My husband buys the pizza, and he picks it up. I have no idea what it costs to get a pizza delivered these days. And how much I’d be willing to pay might depend on all sorts of externalities (what are my other options? Did i promise pizza to someone?) If the poll had had broader options i might have thrown a dart at it, but my reaction was more just “i dunno?”
Most of my work is at home. During the times when I ordinarily went somewhere else to work, bringing a phone wasn’t even an option.
I have forgotten my wallet when I went to a planning board meeting. Does that count? (I haven’t, at least so far, voted in that poll.)
I have a long complicated checklist for things to take to farmers’ market. I have nevertheless occasionally forgotten my lunch, which doesn’t get added till the next morning. (Neither does the cash box; but my keys go into that the night before, so I can’t forget it.) Once, before the current packing shed was built, I forgot all the eggplant, which had been left in an odd spot in the old shed due to lack of room where it belonged; and I’d promised a case to a customer who was coming from a different village to get it. Prior to phones being common, I couldn’t call her. I had to ask another vendor to watch my stand while I drove back home and got it (if it hadn’t been for the promised case, I would just have done without it.)
Swimming: Getting me to take swim lessons when I was little was like pulling teeth, but we had a pool (as did everyone in Florida), so there was no getting out of it. Later, I earned my Life Guard and LGT certificates, so I guess it stuck. That’s also why I have to see a dermatologist every year now.
Road trips: When I was little every June, we would drive from Boca Raton to Litchfield, CT every summer, with stops in Daytona to see my Father’s father, and a stop outside Baltimore to see my Mother’s cousins. In Connecticut, we would “visit” my Mother’s father, and my brother and I would be put to work on either his brother’s dairy farm. Hoo-woo! Unpaid child farm labor! This lasted until I was fifteen, and we would drive from Raleigh to Litchfield in one twelve hour shot. To this day, I still feel a little nostalgic when I smell a dairy farm.
Going to work forgetfulness: I said other. I’d left my badge on my dresser more time than I can count, but I could always tailgate my way in. When I moved to the sales office in Nashville, the front door was left open (a carryover from when they had a receptionist), until an angry customer walked in and verbally abused an account manager. Doors were locked after that, and I started wearing my badge again.
In my class both the valedictorian – a girl – and the salutatorian – a boy – had a reputation for being bright. Not being in their circles I have no idea whether either took easy classes but I doubt it. I do know that when it became time to select them, they both had all As in their senior year, so the administration started going back through their transcripts. All As in their junior, sophomore, and freshman years so back to the elementary school records it was. There it was As all the way down to the second grade where the salutatorian got a B in reading.
I was literally taught to swim in the kitchen sink of my parents’ kitchen. Pretty much self-taught once they got me the basics (photos exist of me donning a large white float on my back in vacation pools while at age 2-3), tho I later was taught the 4 main strokes in grade school/summer camp (sidestroke tho vs. the butterfly which is a very challenging stroke).