Archive: August, 2017

We had a party last weekend to celebrate the end of summer, which it won't really feel like until late October, because Florida, but still. It's been at least a year since we've had a broad group of friends, coworkers and such over. We've acquired a surprisingly large group of friends and neighbors since moving here, and I feel like it's important to maintain that, and mix them up from time to time in the same spot.

I've been having parties for a long time, for as long as I've had a place to live bigger than 500 square feet. I think at first, my motivation was just that I didn't think I should wait for other people to decide, "Let's get together!" That may seem obvious, but as socially inept as I was in high school and college, it was a discovery for me. But as time went on, I found that people moved, changes jobs or simply fell off the radar (which was easier prior to social media). My motivation changed and it became more about appreciating time spent with your friends while you could. Since those earlier days, I've done a lot of moving myself, and some friends are no longer with us. Midlife seems to make celebrating the people in your life even more important.

You never know who is going to come to a party, but we had more than 40 this time, and most were here at the same time, which was a little challenging. We decided to get catered food from Tijuana Flats this time, which was great for ease of execution, but I probably should have looked at the cost before committing. Fortunately, the meat was gone before the last guest left, and we were mostly left with a metric ton of chips and salsa, cheese and some of the toppings.

Funny how small worlds happen. One of my current coworkers knew a former coworker, and his wife's father conducts the Candlelight Processional at Epcot, where one of Diana's friends works and sings in the show. One of our neighbors works at Universal, and she's occasionally in meetings with one of my roller coaster nerd friends. My direct neighbor is a teacher, and Simon's first grade teacher were here, and another current coworker's wife was a teacher before they moved here recently. And then she also had a conversation with another neighbor who previously worked for Disney and shared information about some of the education programs. It's also interesting that the coaster circle includes a bunch of us that all came from Ohio/Michigan area, and now we all live here.

The world is as big or small as you want to make it. I'm grateful to know so many excellent people from so many places. I almost had high school and college people represent, but both couldn't make it. That would have been wild. Still, happy to be here, and I feel fortunate to have the friendships that I do. Never take that for granted.

Earlier this week I finished up a story (that's a unit of work in agile software development) that I didn't finish the previous sprint (the unit of time between our releases). It was a performance refactoring thing that ended up taking longer than expected, and while not terribly difficult, it was pretty satisfying to get it done and see the results. Today I got pulled in a lot of directions, but later in the afternoon I started down a road looking at new things, and kind of forgot it was Friday night and I should, you know, spend time with my family.

I love my job, because it appeals to what I think are my strengths, and I've been fortunate enough to be in this sort of career appropriate mode now for about four years. Guiding a team, processes and filling in the blanks is a good fit, but while I enjoy the administrative duties, I like to get my hands dirty, too. Not only can I still do that, but I have to because we're not big enough for me not to.

So it's fun to nerd a little harder. I need some of that. In my spare time, which feels scarce at times, I'm trying to spend time with a new technology or framework I haven't messed with before. Orchestrating the success of others is satisfying, but making stuff yourself is too, in a different way. I need to remind myself to do that more.

It has been awhile since I've written about parenting. School started last week though, which has frankly been a relief for us, and especially for Diana. Summers are hard, because his neighborhood friends are mostly in daycare, so he doesn't see other kids as often as he does in school. And as much as we try to keep him busy, it's not always easy with the daily summer afternoon thunderstorm.

Parenting has been challenging. Last year's ADHD diagnosis was rough. While the amphetamine they prescribed definitely helps him in school, we think it causes his concentration to also reinforce his finger picking habit. It's not a great feeling when the school calls you and they say we need to do something about his bleeding fingers and constant need for bandages. And it's not his nails, it's the pads of his fingers. He can't control it. He has to wear socks at home so he doesn't do the same thing to his feet.

We strongly feel that Simon needs therapy along with the drugs, and one of his doctors agree, but the other problem he has is extraordinary anxiety. Because of that, working with him to develop coping strategies is a non-starter when he's anxious about success and doing the right thing. The doctor prescribed a drug that didn't work, but she recently switched to another and it seems a little better. As much as I am all about talking about these challenges openly, I hate the idea of all these medications. Fortunately, I don't think they change his personality

One of the doctors or therapists that he met with didn't feel he was dealing with ASD, which is a pretty ridiculous assessment after spending 15 minutes with him. Simon is still struggling with social contracts and you can see the frustration and energy he expends trying to reconcile the unreconcilable. For example, he interrupts with an "excuse me!" when we're talking, and despite correcting him and asking him to wait, he starts to get frustrated and angry because to him, he followed the rules. In more serious conditions, he loses privileges because he didn't follow directions, and he can't reconcile the punishment. To him, a "sorry" makes it better because that's what we taught him. So when we take away his favorite computer game for a few days, the frustration, and physical manifestation of it (a lot of shaking and convulsing), comes up every time he wants to talk about it. I used to think it was just him not getting his way, but the frustration is so deep and intense. He truly can't reconcile the cause and effect.

That favorite computer game, by the way, is called Planet Coaster. It's not so much a game as much as it is a construction kit for virtual theme parks and roller coasters. He's obsessed with it. He uses a combination of wood toy tracks, cars and blocks in the playroom to build "rides" patterned off of actual rides, and while he really uses his imagination, the constraints of the physical world sometimes frustrate him. But in the game, he can do whatever he imagines. If that weren't enough, he's able to operate a theme park, and he makes little announcements to the guests and analyzes every little 3D inch of the rides. He's even getting physics a little.

Aside from the fact that it's not a social activity, I can't think of any good reasons to keep him away from the game arbitrarily. We limit the time, but I won't forbid him. It brings him a lot of joy and I see the quality of what he's building improving. I also have the baggage that not only did adults not encourage me to use computers, many actively treated my interest as a nuisance. I can't repeat that history.

Simon is still a sweet kid most of the time, even though he has learned already to declare that he hates us from time to time. He's funny and charming. I'm acutely aware that the window for him to be my little boy is quickly closing, and that's the thing that reminds me to be as patient as I can.

We're now closing in on nearly three years since the announcement that Microsoft's .NET platform was going open source. I was pretty excited about that announcement because I imagined that the bits would come to be in the open and subject to feedback from the whole world. This has indeed been the case, but it's been something of a mixed blessing as .NET Core became a real thing.

I view the world through two lenses: work and POP Forums, my open source forum project. At work, there hasn't been any time where we've embraced .NET Core for a number of reasons. Either I was working on projects that were on long living code bases that couldn't be easily ported, or there was too much apprehension about the state of tooling and framework maturity to commit to it. That's unusual, because in the previous world of "closed" .NET, we'd usually move to the new hotness in a month or two, almost without fail.

POP Forums has been something else. I started to move to ASP.NET Core in September of 2015, during the preview phase, and I wanted to go all-Core, without relying on any of the "legacy" framework. It was pretty rough. Out of the box, I had to find something not in the framework to handle the sending of email via SMTP, and eventually settled on MailKit. I also needed something to resize profile images, since I previously relied on WPF classes. I eventually settled on ImageSharp, but after a few years, great as it is, they haven't done a general release yet. (Side note: If I did math good and understood image manipulation, this would be the first project I'd contribute to.) SignalR, used for the real-time updating of stuff, hasn't really made the journey with the rest of ASP.NET Core, but they're scheduling a release to come before the end of the year.

Then there was the constant churn of bigger picture things, like the project files. They changed those almost continuously. The CLI tooling mostly worked most of the time, but the visual tools did not. The Resharper test runner is broken again against Xunit tests. VSTS has never been able to keep up, so my CI builds are broken more often than they're working. Despite being in v2.0 now for .NET Core, the ecosystem really isn't very stable yet. The long and short of it is that I used to do forum releases almost simultaneously with framework releases, but my last release, for the legacy framework, came in February 2015. I haven't been at a point where I felt comfortable making a release just with feature parity. Every update to ASP.NET Core breaks stuff, and I spend a ton of time just updating references and fixing stuff.

All of that said, I do feel like we've turned a corner. It's not that it wasn't possible to ship stuff running on the platform (my simple blog has been on it for awhile), it's just been hard if you had a lot of moving parts, or you had dependencies you couldn't get. SignalR will be a solved problem soon, and it looks like the ImageSharp team is ready to a bona fide beta. With those two things in place, I'll be ready to finally get out a feature parity release to the old ASP.NET MVC (the version of which I no longer recall). I did some load testing on it last year, and whoa, it's not easily crushed.

Being open source, when something seems like a bit of a mystery, you can poke around the covers and find out how things work. Sure, sometimes I just wish there was better documentation, or I happened to read the announcements about an architectural change, but some things are pretty simple to dig into. You also get the kind of interaction with the developers that you didn't get when the code was mostly written in a bubble. (Though in early versions of MVC, I did have that interaction because I worked in the bubble.) I stumbled across a bug in 2.0 that is already on the list for getting fixed in 2.0.1, and you can see all of that happen right in front of you.

Oh, while not something I care that much about, it's admittedly pretty cool that I could build and run the forums on a Mac using JetBrains' Rider. That's pretty crazy.

It's been frustrating at times, but going open source with .NET has demonstrated that the stakes are very different for something that is quite literally at the core (pun intended) of everything that everyone using it wants to achieve. The two people that use the forum (OK, it's more than that) can generally roll with whatever I do, and fork it for their purposes, but .NET Core is subject to huge scrutiny. On one hand, you want to move quickly and be iterative, but significant changes cause a lot of pain. On the other hand, this was an enormous opportunity to break with more than 15 years of legacy, so the volatility is probably worth it in the long run.

For me, I look forward to eventually modernizing the forum app (the client side is stuck in 2012), and a year from now perhaps we can migrate the product at work to Core.

It's been a rough week or two for these United States. We now have a president that believes that some self-described Nazis and white nationalists are good people. There aren't many things that I would consider completely morally non-ambiguous, but people who want to oppress and kill Jews and minorities (or anyone) are definitely not good people. There are still people willing to defend the president over these remarks, though it seems that most people, including the elite of his own party, will not.

For years, I've complained that many Americans engage in politics as if it were a sports rivalry. It's not particularly rational, and it certainly doesn't move us forward. I can't entirely explain why people devote their love to the Cleveland Browns, but as a Clevelander, I can in fact understand it. A sense of home and origin can bring people together. But political parties and absolute ideologies? Why would you commit to those? The idea that a group of people would all feel the same about quite literally thousands of issues is insane to me. What's worse, your commitment and sports rivalry approach now require you to dislike and work against the other side, regardless of whether or not they have good ideas. In some cases, you'll stick with your "team" even if the only thing they've got is "not what they want."

There is a deeper problem, though, in that sports rivalry politics also draw you into false moral equivalence. A common refrain from those who defend the president goes somewhere along the lines of, "But Obama!" (or Clinton, or Sanders, or anyone else identified as the opposing team). I'm not even going to get into the merits of whether or not there is moral equivalence here, because there is no objective score card that could ever make the case. But for the moment, let's say for the sake of argument that Obama, et al, are morally equivalent to Trump. You're making the argument that, for as bad as Trump is, someone else is just as bad, and therefore he deserves a pass. In what universe is that an OK position? Regardless of the depth of the flaws, you're accepting the flaws instead of demanding something better. Is that the bar to set for our elected officials?

In reality, there is no moral equivalence. Let me be clear... I'm not picking a team here. I might not agree with their policies, but I would sooner see any mainstream Republican, McCain, Kasich, Romney, Ryan, any of the Bushes in the Oval Office. Because while I may disagree with them, there is no moral equivalence between them and the man who sits there now (when he's not golfing, at least). The pre-election behavior, with the pussy grabbing and veteran insulting all should have been disqualifiers, and the pattern has not changed.

As of today, we've been driving electric cars for two years straight. There are no tailpipes in our garage. I think I may take this arrangement for granted now, because if I put myself in the mindset of me even three years ago, I would not have guessed that this was possible, let alone our normal. That's why I probably need to cut people a break when they're still skeptical that driving EV's can be your everyday life.

We have a Tesla Model S and a Nissan Leaf, and while one costs more than twice what the other did at the time, the experience is remarkably similar. Have you ever driven an indoor electric go-kart? It's hard to get used to the insane amount of torque those things have, but that's what an EV is like. If you're sitting at a traffic light and you blast it when the light turns green, you'll be well into the next block before the car next to you has finished crossing the intersection. If you're in the Leaf, yeah, the other car may catch you, but this always available torque, and the precision that comes with it, is the joy of driving an EV.

The questions that people ask aren't really the right questions. It's different enough from driving gasoline cars that I think people overlook that you just operate differently.

"How long does it take to charge?"
Let me ask you this: Do you know how long it takes your phone to charge? Probably not, because you plug it in before you go to bed and it's charged when you wake up. This is exactly what you do with your electric car. Imagine if you started every day with a "full tank," because it's like that. You don't typically fill your tank every day, but with an EV, you've got the range you need every morning.

To answer the question, we charge the Leaf on a standard 110v outlet, which adds about 5 miles per hour. It's pretty slow, but our typical day of use involves at most 80 miles, so if you're in by 5, you're good by 8 the next morning. The Model S charges at home on a 240v/40a line at about 30-ish miles per hour. At a Tesla Supercharger, you can put on at least half of the electrons in 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the state of charge (like a laptop or phone, it's slower when near empty or full). And the charging rate isn't really the right question either... if you're doing road trips, the correct question is, "How long do I have to charge before I can go to the next stop?" In practice, we've been in the 20 to 30 minute range, though stopping for food almost always goes longer anyway. When the app says we've got enough to get to the next charger, we go.

[2022 edit: The scene for supercharging is even better now with faster charging. Also, the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y tend to operate at even lower miles per kWh.]

"Where do you charge?"
Home. People get really hung up on the presence of public charging (or lack thereof). I don't remember what the research says, but it was something around Americans averaging 30 miles of driving per day, and the distribution of those that exceeded 200 miles in a day, as a percentage of all people on all days, was less than 1%. In other words, if you've got an EV that can do 200 miles, and you have a garage, you likely won't need public charging ever. OK, it's unlikely at least. I can count the number of times on one hand over three years that we've needed public charging with the Leaf, which only has a range of 80-ish miles. The Model S can use the Tesla Supercharger network.

Even if range and charging was a serious challenge, the fact is that I'd roll with it and rent a gasoline car for the rare instances I need one. I admit, the older EV's are limited, but the only problem with the Tesla is cost, something mitigated with the Model 3. Long-range EV's have gone from $80k to $35k in two years.

Tesla definitely has an advantage here, as they've created this great network of chargers, and they're expanding it in a big way this year. We've used 14 different locations (see map below), and it has not changed our road trip behavior in any way other than having to plan a little about where we would stop. I've never been a car guy, but it has been a lot of fun to meet people at Superchargers and talk about their road tripping experiences.

"What if you run out of power?"
What if you run out of gas? I don't even understand this question.

"What about if you're stuck in traffic?"
You'll last a lot longer than you will in a gasoline car, because you're not having an engine idling the whole time. You'll use juice for the AC, but that's relatively efficient.

"When do you have to replace the battery?"
Probably never. Now that EV's have been around for awhile, and put through some extraordinary miles, it looks like they last a really long time. Of course they will degrade some, but it looks like it's fairly inconsequential unless you have a "bad" one. Tesla warrants their batteries for 8 years and unlimited miles, and I've never owned a car for eight years. I'm not particularly worried about it.

"Good luck finding a mechanic."
I don't understand this sentiment either. Dealers train their people because the manufacturers require it. In the case of Tesla, they don't operate maintenance as a profit center. Still, EV's have exponentially fewer parts to break. They don't have transmissions or pistons. They don't need oil changes. Heck, the brakes last "forever" because much of the stopping power is handled by the motor, recovering energy when you pull your foot off of the gas. Even if getting maintenance was an issue, EV's don't need much to begin with. With 50k miles between our cars, we've changed the wiper blades. The brakes are barely used.

"Green? Doesn't your electricity come from oil or coal?"
There's an enduring myth that driving an EV is environmentally pointless if the power is generated by fossil fuel burning plants. This just ain't true. The EPA says the average carbon footprint of driving a combustion engine car one mile is 411g of CO₂. Generating a single kWh of electricity from a coal plant generates about 900g of CO₂. So using our numbers below, the Leaf at 4 miles per kWh costs 225g, and the Model S at 3.5 miles per kWh costs 257g. Already, we're at a 38% reduction assuming it's 100% coal generated electricity. Natural gas generates on average 465g of CO₂ per kWh, so now we're at 116g for the Leaf and 132g for the Model S, a reduction of 72% and 68%, respectively, compared to burning gas. That's a massive difference.

And by the way, this is assuming that the power is all coming from fossil fuels. When some or most of it comes from nuclear, the carbon footprint goes even lower, and when it's from renewables, it's about as clean as it gets. We're hoping to install solar at house in the next year, and at that point our cars are powered by the sun. Not only does economy of scale allow for less carbon emission via traditional generation methods, it sets us up for zero.

"Yeah, the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process..."
This myth has been debunked countless times. Yes, the raw materials inside of an EV have a carbon cost, just as those do in a conventional car. Even if they were just as high (they're not, depending on who makes the battery), you've still got a lifetime of non-emission that would more than make up for it many times over. 

"I bet your electric bill sucks."
Not at all. My "gas" is regulated because electric utilities are regulated, so we spend around 13 cents per kWh, and that's more or less a fixed cost. The Leaf can do 4 miles per kWh, the Model S more like 3.5, but it depends on how much is on the highway. That means, worst case, the Model S costs 3.7 cents per mile to drive. If you drive a Toyota Corolla pushing 35 mpg and gas is $2/gallon, you're spending 5.7 cents per mile. A big SUV getting, at best, 15 mpg, will cost you 13 cents per mile. When gas goes back up to $4/gallon, and it will, double those numbers.

"EV's are too expensive."
This has been valid criticism for a long time, but consider this: Most hybrid cars with batteries cost very little more than their non-hybrid counterparts. Pure plug-in long-range EV's were $80k two years ago, now they start around $35k. This won't be a valid argument against electric vehicles for very long.

Electric vehicles are the future. There's no getting around it. It's not even an environmental issue, it just makes more sense, and it's a far more convenient way to drive. We won't go back.

All of the places we've used a Tesla Supercharger. Range is not an issue.

If you've seen the Internets in the last few days, you may have heard that this dude at Google got fired for writing a very long piece about how diversity efforts at the company are ill-conceived because women suffer from "neuroticism" and other apparent personality defects, and maybe that's why there aren't as many women writing code or working in technology. Certainly there is cause to talk about the absurdity of using "science" to make this case, and also the general morality of how humans treat other humans against logic, science, religion and other dimensions of our existence. We could talk about the need to pursue diversity, too. I'm not a good candidate for talking about those areas, because I'm pretty inflexible when it comes to people who disqualify subsets of humanity for anything, really. I've never been very good at finding empathy for that scenario.

So let me talk about empathy, and the single hardest thing I've had to work on in my ongoing journey as a developing human being.

My junior year of college, I was an RA on a floor with an openly gay freshman. I don't know if that's unusual today, but in 1993 at a rural Midwest school, honestly I felt like his safety was at risk. At some point, some people vandalized his door with all kinds of homophobic slurs, and I called a floor meeting. I laid into the residents with a fury of anger, with no regard to how anyone may take it. In retrospect, the vandal may not have even been on my floor. I lost half of the floor that day, because I had no regard for how people would take being accused of something they likely didn't do.

A few years later, in my first "real" job after college, I learned about a lack of empathy on the other end. I was almost three years in when I made a pitch for a raise, based on the salary of my peers in neighboring communities and national averages. As a government operation, I answered to a committee of people, one of whom was a teacher. His response was that we all made choices, being a teacher was hard, and I had to live with my own choices. Shortly thereafter, the high school principal explained that she didn't care for my strategic direction or desire to ethically shield the department from the politicians. That was fine, except that she said the root of the issue was that she saw me as one of her students. (I was 26.) These interactions clearly had no empathy, and the fact that I had hired someone myself made me more sensitive to the idea that you have to exercise empathy with your people or the good ones will leave.

I wish I could say that empathy was always at the top of my list for me in dealing with others going forward, but it was not. Nowhere was this more obvious than countless mistakes made while coaching volleyball. I realize that trying to manage and be considerate of the feelings of a dozen teenagers is potentially impossible, but sometimes it wasn't even on my radar, and I'm thankful that some of those "kids" even still talk to me.

It didn't end there. My empathetic score card wasn't great in my first marriage, and it's super hard with a kid who is wired a little differently.

Why is empathy so important? Because your words matter. We all have different experiences, and we need to be self-aware of how our words affect others. This isn't about being politically correct, because that term has been co-opted by people looking for an enemy, when originally it just meant not being an asshole toward your fellow humans.

I can leave a little room for the idea that the ex-Google dude really believed he was making a scientific argument, but if he really wanted to discuss the pros and cons of diversity in the workplace, he made the absolute worst case for even having that discussion.

One of the guys on my team officially became a Florida resident this week, moving from Oklahoma City. Today for lunch I brought him to Tijuana Flats, a chain that's confined to Florida. It made me kind of nostalgic for the time when we moved. It felt like there were so many adventures to have.

Four years later, we're still having adventures. Most of it isn't particularly exotic, because this is where people come to vacation. The theme parks are of course a huge part of our leisure time, and we still don't take that for granted. Most people visit at best every few years, and we enjoy it just because we can. The local, non-tourist scene has exceeded our expectations in every way, with a wonderful downtown area and mini-downtowns in the suburbs with restaurants and theaters and county parks. We have two amazing coast lines full of beaches on the Gulf and the Atlantic. If life is uninteresting here, you're doing it wrong.

Coincidentally, my coworker lived in the Pacific Northwest for awhile as well. We agree that summers out there are a huge win, but living in two places like that would be really hard when the biggest negative there is the cost of housing. I still think that Seattle is objectively "better" than Central Florida, but the pros and cons are pretty straight forward. Cost of housing is so high out there, winter is very wet and the closest serious theme parks are in California. It's not very "pretty" here, but winter is amazing and houses are stupid cheap. It's a strange feeling, missing another place but not so much that you want to leave where you are.

Those firsts when we moved here four years ago set the tone for some really great living. Life has been challenging at times, but the challenges are definitely not a symptom of where we live. Definitely one of our better decisions.

We recently broke the news to Simon that we were going to take a short cruise without him. I expected tears, but in explaining he'd be saying with my BFF and her husband, it was instant celebration.

This is the first time the two of us will take an overnight trip away since, I believe, the work holiday party in December, 2015. Before that, Jeff & David's wedding in January 2015. That's really bad. We do have a regular date night cadence during the Broadway season, but that's just once a month over the course of 8 shows. Otherwise, we don't get out together, alone, very much, and that's bad.

In terms of vacations, we always felt that we could and should travel with Simon. We went on a road trip with him when he was two months old, and his first flight was at five months. His first trip to Orlando was at 10 months (a few years before we moved there). He generally can travel like a pro. That said, there have been some times in the last year or so where we frankly could have used time separate of him. Last year on the Alaska trip, there were a few instances where he was uncooperative and unpleasant. He was mostly OK on our last cruise, but I felt kind of resentful toward him that we couldn't do some of the grown up stuff.

Perhaps it's the approach of midlife, but I am acutely aware of mortality and the passage of time. I don't know how many days we have left, but I can be sure that Simon won't be young forever. He'll never be 7 again. Also, we'll never be "young" again either, and because we had such a late start at marriage and procreation, we had very little "us only" time. We don't get a lot of exclusive couple time. These two things are kind of at war with each other, because outside of work, there are only so many hours left in the day.

Regardless, married time is in short supply, and it bothers me. This is obviously self-inflicted pain. We don't prioritize us enough. Having a child will do that, I guess, and when we're constantly thinking about ASD coping, anti-anxiety meds, therapy... there aren't a lot of brain cycles left. I'm hoping that this short cruise will be the thing that sets us on a new pattern of balancing things out.

The new Windermere High School had an open house tonight. As long as we stay put, this will be Simon's school eight years from now. It is desperately needed, because before being named, it was known as "West Orange Relief High School." West Orange has something like 4,000 kids.

(Sidebar: Interestingly, no one who actually lives in Windermere will go to this school. However, a lot of people who live in the zip code but not the municipality think they live there because people don't have any idea what "unincorporated Orange County" is. I don't know how they manage to vote or pay taxes. Sorry, but if Shaq isn't your neighbor, you don't live in Windermere.)

This new school is gigantic, though something like a fourth of it won't be used this year because kids who are seniors will mostly remain at West Orange. My high school was a typical cinder block thing built in stages from the late 60's to early 80's, but it had a vague warmth to it, I suppose because of the paint colors and some 70's green and 80's blue carpet in places. This building, on the inside, is strikingly utilitarian and cold. I might even call it depressing. No joke, they have stainless steel tables in the cafeteria that look straight out of a prison catalog.

I hate giant schools. I had 500 in my graduating class, and that was too big in some ways. The problem with big schools, and they're all big down here because they don't coincide with small municipalities and districts the way they do in Ohio, is that fewer kids get to have some of the opportunities. When I coached JO volleyball, my kids often came from a dozen different schools all on the far west side of Cleveland. There are only 20 high schools in OC total, and the county is massive. Cuyahoga County alone has more than 80 schools, and with the surrounding counties and Akron you likely double that. More kids play sports, get to be in band, show choir, clubs, etc.

I'm not suggesting that kids here don't get a solid education. They're all rated fairly well in the places where average incomes are high. I just think that high school is already a difficult time for people, so it would be nice if they were able to do more stuff.

The newest elementary school will probably not be built before Simon is done, but his was new last year, so that's OK. My hope is that the middle school is finished before he gets there in four years, because the one in our zone is also insanely overcrowded.

Interestingly, the schools here in Florida don't have to wait to pass a bond issue to build, as they do in the broken system in Ohio. They're still required to build to the eventual leveled off capacity, however, so most open with trailers. This high school took longer to start because of politics and fights with the county zoning board being pressured by assholes who really believe they live in a "rural" neighborhood. As it is, they won the fight to put the football stadium down the street, which is lame.

So here's to the Windermere Wolverines. Please make our kids read good and stuff.