I am so happy to have come across this post! I purchased a condo 4 years ago and am now selling it. I live on the 3rd floor (1 bedroom) however the unit below me is considered one unit and is a 2 floor unit (2 bedrooms). My downstairs neighbor and I started off rocky and since then she's been constantly complaining about excessive noise from my unit. Stomping, slamming doors, using appliances etc in the late hours of the night. It's come to the point where she's escalating to the HOA BOD- however i'm also now selling my unit because I purchased a single family home in a new development and in order to save and put myself out of the misery of living with my neighbor will just live elsewhere while waiting for the new house to be built. If I had known what I know now I would not have opted to purchase a condo on the 3rd floor (in a 4 floor building). 1) Living on the 3rd floor I received noise complaints from my neighbor below me while I also had to endure noise from the person above me. (Being the understanding neighbor that I was I never once complained to the person above me since they have children so I opted for earplugs instead). Mind you I live in a one bedroom and so I never purposely tried to create noise but some things are inevitable like having to walk to my bathroom. I refuse to tiptoe in my own house but I assure you i'm not stomping i'm walking regularly! 2) As many people mentioned you cannot pick your neighbors! I'm going to be honest my community is filled with some downright nasty neighbors. If it's not me dealing with my crazy neighbor there's constantly complaints and random letters on our community corkboard. People complaining about how people park, how people throw away trash, how long the water is shut off for construction. People literally use a notice as a form of communication and will write on it and form conversations on that one piece of paper. 3) Your condo might look/seem nice now but you never know what it'll look like 20-30 years from now. Although i've only lived in my place for 4 years I have to say that I was shocked at the lack of care for the building. My boyfriend got stuck in the elevator once for an hour with a cancer patient in our building on a very hot day and there is barely any ventilation in the elevator and no air conditioning! I later learned from a neighbor that our elevator is the wrong type of elevator for our building. Additionally I think the materials used for our building are just downright poor. I can hear the person in the unit above me snoring. I can't tell the person above me to stop snoring, but that's just to show how it could be a mix of bad materials. At least with an apartment you know it's a somewhat temporary situation.. if you hate it you could potentially move elsewhere with not much risk. Honestly before purchasing my single family home I even considered a townhouse as an upgrade to my condo. I figured that sharing sidewalls with individuals is a lot less worse than sharing floors/ceilings which I think are just terrible and usually amplify noise. At the end of the day i'm happy to be moving away from this situation and moving to a place where I can run the dishwasher and use the overnight cycle at night without someone berating me! It came to the point where my neighbor's requests were aggressive and rude and made me feel uncomfortable living in my own condo.

Banning assault style weapons would not reduce these numbers hugely but would still be meaningful. And it seems like pretty low-hanging fruit, too, when you consider all the other guns do have some arguable use. Not sure what the legit argument for having military-type weapons is. Remember that the United States does NOT have an official manner to track gun deaths. There is no mandatory reporting guidelines by law enforcement agencies to give a true number. So it's probably worse than the charts show. Studies suggest that suicide by methods other than gun are often failures and the person usually regrets the attempt and sometimes even gets help. (Otherwise, why bother with the oops net under the Golden Gate bridge?) Nobody knows if gun attempts would be regretted cuz...they work better. Suicides by gun is a problem. It's a different problem than assault-style weapons being used for mass random murder. They can't be addressed the same way but they shouldn't be forgotten. Shame the CDC can't support studying gun violence or suicides. So yeah, my kids' schools have drills. The middle school might have a security guard; the elementary school doesn't. The typical mid-century California suburban school has no inner halls. It's just a conglomeration of buildings. If you didn't feel like entering by the kindergarten or the front office or the library, you could enter from the other side by sneaking through the backyard of one of the 20 or so homes that back onto the field.

I'm starting to see some judging of others' opinions and experiences ... Everyone is different. Some are paralyzed by the crisis and some spring up to make lemonade out of the lemons they are dealt, and others are somewhere in the middle. I have a high school senior too, but using the examples mentioned above, I don't see it the same, because I went to a school system overseas that had none of the graduation traditions that you have here in the US. There were no proms or big graduation ceremonies. You took your exams, school ended and you went onto the next steps in life. I also hear stories from many Americans that didn't go to prom and didn't particularly like their high school experience due to not being in the IN crowd. So maybe it shouldn't be such a big event? The school visits are great too, but I accepted and attended a graduate school without ever stepping foot in that State before, and that was before the internet and video tours existed. I feel bad my teen will miss out on some of these traditions, but I don't fell sorry for him. I see these as experiences that will help him grow and be more flexible when other crisis come his way during his lifetime. We've all had different experiences and handle adversity in different ways. Some curl up in a corner, some will tell you to pull yourself up from your bootstraps and the rest are somewhere in between. None of the reactions are better than the other, just different for different individuals. Maybe we don't understand that reaction, but unless you know exactly what that person has been through, I don't see how you can judge them ...

Fukushu on flying dragon 4 months old from bud swelling and growth. ------------ Fukushu on flying dragon 3 months old from bud swelling and growth More bud swell and growth starting. Fukushu on Flying Dragon ------------------------------------------------ 4 seed grown Meiwa kumquat trees 4 years old. Seed grown Fukushu kumquat tree 6 years old. In ground New Zealand Lemonade with fruit Steve