I am mad at technical people right now. To do this properly, I must be untechnical. I don't want to hate me.

But I've been looking for an IIS subject matter expert here for weeks, and there's just ducking and fingerpointing, and less than a week before we're to go live with a new domain, I find out that it doesn't seem possible to use host headers and SSL without a wildcard certificate, which we aren't willing to pay for. I had all the tech folks on a call to discuss the feasibility of the switch to host headers, and this never came up. *I* am not supposed to discover this, and I'm not supposed to discover this now.

Damned technical people. I'm so glad I'm not one of them.

Oh, and the developer that watched me collate the errors from the log file he generated, and never mentioned that the numbers after the words "Application Error" weren't actually an error code, but let me tot up the "types" of application error and present them to management, all the while not saying that my totals were irrelevant...I had been asking him all day to do the numbers himself, but he just wouldn't do it. I wish I could work out how to deny people work product like that, but it must be hysterical to watch them do it wrong on top of it.

Damned technical people...

I saw a comment that he has become the Ted Baxter of politics.

Love it.

Kids aren't allowed to walk home by themselves? When I was in elementary school, I think the only parents who picked up kids to walk them home were the parents of kindergarteners who had no older siblings, and even then, most of the ones who didn't have to cross any streets alone walked by themselves after the first few weeks of school

Things have changed a great deal in the last couple of decades. Parents who let their kids walk or bike to school are cited for child endangerment. The NYC couple who let their 9-yo kid travel alone on the subway (he'd lived in the city all his life and was familiar with it) were vilified heinously.

When I was 9 or 10 I was riding my bicycle with my siblings three miles into The Center Of Town, where we would buy ice cream and hang around by the train station. (It was a small town, and there wasn't much to do.)

In the town where I grew up, and where my parents still live, plenty of elementary school kids walk or bike to school by themselves, but the only major road to cross has a crossing guard, and I don't think that anybody lives more than about 3/4 of a mile away from the school. There's also a railroad crossing to cross that I know terrifies some parents, but I've never seen an elementary-age kid do anything unsafe there. It's the high school kids who try to cross when the gates are down.

The elementary schools also still let kids go home for lunch if they want to.

Yeah, when I was a kid, there were crossing guards -- older kids at the smaller streets.

Of course, I also took a public bus home from day camp by myself when I was like 6.

Starting at 10, we could take the bus to the mall (it was a WHOLE QUARTER!) I think mom walked us to kinder but not after that. I know I was sometimes home alone from when I was 9. Rule was we could ride bikes around the neighborhood but not cross the 3 main busy streets until we were 12 and more road savvy, and only with permission. I remember walking to the Gulf gas station to buy soda, only a few blocks. We also used to walk to the 711 and TCBY about a mile away. That was definitely 5th grade.

Summers we got the ok to ride our bikes across Alameda (one of the 'busy' streets we had to cross it for school. At the time one wide lane each way, 30 mph limit. It's 4 lanes now....) to get ourselves to swim lessons. With a stop at Sonic afterwards for floats. Still within a couple miles.

Actually, a couple of the kids I grew up with in the neighborhood have since bought houses there (next door, the house she mostly grew up in, as did her mother, that her grandparents had built! And she's not the only 2nd or 3rd gen owner.) Their rules are fairly much the same as ours were. The neighborhood is really stable. The Miller house is still called that by people who moved into it decades after Mrs. Miller died.

At our school, the 3rd and 4th graders are allowed to walk home by themselves if you sign a form, but when Dylan's in 3rd grade, Aeryn will be in pre-k, so unless they have wildly different dismissal times it wouldn't really make sense for us.

We had neighborhood schools where I grew up, so there were no major/busy roads to cross, and at some of the other intersections were adult crossing guards. Everyone walked, kindergarten on up, and we also walked home for lunch and back again, unless you had no parents home during the day.

But we also were out riding bikes around our neighborhood all day in the summer, and we just knew to be home at dinner time. No way could a mom have found us at a particular moment -- we were all over.

We could walk home in kinder, parent discretion. Lots of kids had older sibs or just older neighborhood kids who were charged with that duty. And Mrs. Eubanks was always out on her porch on the corner at dismissal times. She bandaged many a skinned knee broke, broke up spats. And we thought she was MEAN. She was just no nonsense.

There are a lot of young kids around here fairly unsupervised. I'm sure the presence of the Y draws some, but the Y also fills an existing need. Now some of them, there's a clear bit of parenting-issues going on, but others remind me very much of us when we were little.