#3 Even better—it depends on the building. Some buildings in the US do have a ground floor and a first floor. I think it’s usually buildings with multiple entrances, where you can enter onto the ground floor from one side of the building or the first floor from the other (usually because it’s on a hill or something), but I’m not sure if that’s always the case. But if a building doesn’t have both, the terms “ground floor” and “first floor” are used interchangeably. Sorry about that. On the plus side, most buildings rooms’ are numbered so that the first floor is the 100s, the second is the 200s, and so on, and if the ground floor is separate from the first, it’ll usually be in single digits and may have a G in front (like G-07). We don’t even bother to say what floor things are on most of the time, because of that.

I’m pretty sure that IS how it’s said in Europe. Everything I’ve seen written by Europeans usually has 18 June, rather June 18 like we would write it. That doesn’t make them assholes, it just means they do it differently there.

Should you not be a fan of a school you never attended? I mean, people root for pro teams that they have literally nothing to do with (besides potentially being from the same geographic area). Why should college teams be any different? Most people seem to root for their local college team, even if they didn’t go there, or one of the Big 10 schools (I’m not sure which is more common, because the most popular local school where I’m from IS a Big 10 school). I personally don’t pay much attention to college sports, but I don’t see any problem with people being passionate about it.

I know this is an old post, but I want some good to come from my attempt to decipher that nonsense, so here you go: Ok, I don’t want one neighbor to complain about me dropping the f-bomb or being noisy anytime, because this apartment has rules and all of you know if it’s supposed to be quiet time from 9:00 PM to 9:00 AM that is what it means—you don’t vacuum at 10:00 PM or put up pictures at 9:00 PM, and the list goes on. And if you don’t think people should swear around you and your kids, and that I agree on, then you shouldn’t be calling your boyfriend’s little girl a whore right in front of her. When my neighbors complain that I’m a noisy, swearing neighbor, well I’ll tell you, yes I swear, but not around little ones, and if I do, they know that when they get to 18 years old and want to swear then go ahead, but not before that. And you don’t stomp down or up the stairs at 7:00 AM. At 9:00 AM you can make all the flipping noise you want, but from 9:00 PM to 9:00 AM please shut the fuck up. No noise means no fucking noise. Thank you. (Not sure if they deliberately type that way or if they’re just stupid, but man was that painful.)

Yeah, if Americans know Wales exists, it’s usually just because it sounds like “whales,” so there are puns about it that show up from time to time. My best friend growing up was Welsh (I mean, she was American, but she had a Welsh surname). She had red hair, and everyone would always ask her if she was Irish, and when she told them she was Welsh, most people would just kind of stare blankly at her.

But I don’t want to be Sir Ophelia…

The $2.50 has several things listed by it, including bbq sauce and split plate. I would assume the $2.50 was really for sharing (a lot of restaurants charge extra for that) and possibly for the sauce. It doesn’t look to me like they actually charged extra for the “needy kids,” just that it was included on the receipt with other stuff they really were charged extra for.

I’m not convinced anyone on the internet knows the meaning of “ironic.” At this point, everyone should probably just stop using it.

Should’ve kept those instead of the Beanie Babies, huh?

I’ve always found they’re actually a huge pain to try to open with scissors. I assume most people do, since that’s the reason there are suggestions for easier ways to open them in the first place (unless people are dumb enough to think you can actually open that type of packaging with your hands). There is no way scented oil is cheaper than vanilla extract. Amazon has listed at $3.75 for 10 mL (discounted from about $6, depending on scent). They have a 16 oz (473 mL) bottle of pure vanilla extract for $12.78. That’s $0.375/mL for oil and $0.027 for vanilla. The oils are 14 times more expensive.

My grandparents always used to put a pan with water and cinammon on the stove to make the house smell good (and add some moisture, without having to bother with a humidifier). The scent wasn’t particularly strong, but it did work.

That makes me think of Blo-Pens. I had some of those as a kid, and it was a little tricky to find the happy medium where the color would come out but not just in a big glob.

It’s not technically summer, but it’s during summer vacation (for those who get that), unless you go to one of the handful of schools that runs through the end of June, so it counts as a summer birthday in that context.

Their experience resembles mine pretty well. My school didn’t do anything special for summer birthdays, except for their usual once-a-month pieces of cake in the cafeteria, which in June became “for all summer birthdays” instead of just “for everyone with a birthday this month.” I was always jealous of the kids who got to have birthday parties in class.  I also couldn’t really have birthday parties because 1. getting ahold of anyone besides you’re closest friends is kind of difficult in the summer (as opposed to during the school year, when you can just hand everyone an invitation), and 2. actually coordinating plans in the summer is almost impossible, since people are usually busy doing family stuff.  And you can only have a beach or pool party if you happen to have a beach or a pool, which not everyone does. Plus, where I’m from summer is filled with very frequent thunderstorms, so an outdoor party has about a 75% chance of being canceled or needing to be moved indoors. I agree that having a birthday near Christmas is the worst, but summer birthdays really do have their downsides, especially as a kid.

It’s not possible for your birthday to be on Thanksgiving every year, though. Having a birthday that coincides with a moving holiday like Thanksgiving or Easter sort of pales in comparison to being born on, say, Christmas.

My school (high school and college) always started in August. If you’d gone to the same college I did, your birthday weekend would’ve been a huge party weekend since it was usually the first (sometimes the second) of the school year. I’m not sure whether you’d consider that a pro or a con.

The cutoff for starting school where you live is February? It’s September where I’m from, so kids with fall birthdays turn 6 shortly after starting school, whereas kids with summer birthdays have just turned 5 when they start (unless their parents choose to keep them back a year and have them start at age 6). The idea of a kid not turning 5 until halfway through kindergarten without having started school a year early is incredibly bizarre to me (I don’t have a problem with it, but it’s completely foreign to my experience—the county next to mine was trying to move their cutoff back so you had to turn 5 before the end of the previous school year, in June).

What holiday is in June? And is Valentine’s Day a significant enough holiday to matter in terms of birthday celebration (unless you were born ON the 14th)?

No, it has nothing to do with it being “too hard for him to understand.” I’m sure he’s perfectly capable of understanding that, but feels (rightfully) that it’s not fair. I don’t see why it’s hard for you to understand that people want to celebrate their birthdays on or around (the week of, at least) their actual birthdays, not have to choose between waiting three weeks (to which people will just respond by thinking you’re being obnoxious, anyway) or having it be ignored entirely. People who were born in late December or early January get the short end of the stick when it comes to birthdays, period. Trying to argue with that, especially by acting like it’s their fault for not “understanding” that people are too busy with holidays to care that they have a birthday, is ridiculous. (And my birthday is in July, so I have no vested interest in the matter, in case you were wondering.) That said, there was an entire post about that not too long ago, so the people with December/January birthdays can stop complaining about this post anytime now.

I only made it through the first few because my head started to hurt from all the flashing, but I do have a response to the comments: I’m pretty sure this post isn’t telling people, “Go to Starbucks and ask for a cotton candy Frappuccino!” The intro says “Here are 10 off-the-menu combinations and how to order them,” which I read as saying the combo is cotton candy and you order it by asking for a Vanilla Bean Frappuccino with raspberry syrup (side note: since when does cotton candy taste anything like raspberry?). As far as I can tell, they’re telling you to use the listed ingredients to order it, not the flavor the combination makes. I don’t see why that would be a problem. Also, it’s an officially sponsored Starbucks post, so I’d think these should all be completely plausible combinations for them to make (if you ask for it by ingredients, not by name, although I’m pretty sure the Tuxedo one is a common/simple enough concept they should be able to figure that one out). If they aren’t allowed to use some of these items, then someone at Starbucks needs to have a talk with their marketing team about that. And as for complaining about overly complicated coffee orders..sure, but a Frappuccino is more like a milkshake, really. Calling it coffee is a bit misleading, especially since there are some flavors that don’t even contain coffee.