PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

This is the house in Oak Harbor, where we lived from 2000 to 2002 while my dad was stationed at NAS Whidbey Island...

I obscured the street/address info, because if I become famous or even relatively well-known, I don't want my fans going to the house and harassing whoever lives there now!



It's a 4-bedroom/2.5-bathroom rancher, approximately 2,300 square feet and built in 1988. I have a bit of a thing for ranch houses, so this house was one of my favorites of all the houses we lived in. My dad rented it from a Navy buddy who bought it in the late 1990s and was transferring to a Navy base in Maine at the same time my dad got transferred to Whidbey. My dad was transferred back to Virginia in 2002, and his buddy wasn't coming back to Oak Harbor so he sold the house. I have no idea if the same people still own it...

Anyway, even though the house was not terribly old when we moved in (we moved there in July or August 2000, and it was built in about 1988, so 12 years old at the time), it was really outdated. It was not in bad condition at all. Military guys tend to be OCD about maintenance on things like homes and vehicles, my dad and the guy he rented the house from included, so the house was in very good shape. Looking back, my biggest complaint about this house was the abundance of wood trim everywhere. The doors, the door frames, the florescent lights in the family room and kitchen...

All made out of wood. Yes, it was real wood and not veneer or thinly disguised laminate, but wood trim in anything but a mountain house/cabin went out of style right about the time I was born (which is coincidentally the year after this house was built).

The house had hardwood "tile" flooring in the foyer (I think it's called parquet...? Correct me if I'm wrong), typical late-1980s linoleum in the kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry room, and white wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere else. The kitchen was typical 1980s, with laminate counters, a butcher block island, dark wood cabinets, and appliances that were probably original to the house. Even though the house natural gas heat, it had an electric stove (my dad has always been partial to gas stove and passed that to me). I do not mind electric stoves in the slightest, especially if natural gas or propane is not readily available, or even if the previous owner preferred electric for whatever reason. However, if you must have electric, at least get a smooth cooktop. This house, just like every house we lived in that had an electric stove, had one of those ugly coil-element cooktops... UGH!

The house had forced air gas central heat, with a furnace located out in the garage, but it did not have air-conditioning. Almost no residential buildings (single-family homes, townhouses, apartment/multifamily, etc) had central air. Commercial buildings like the grocery store, the Walmart, the movie theater, the car dealerships, most restaurants, and even the pet shop, had central air. However, it was so mild in that part of Washington, that air-conditioning was rarely ever needed, and the cost of installing it was simply not justified in entry-level homes. Even some of the really expensive homes in that area did not have central air! However, if central air was desired, a lot of the houses built after the mid-1970s did have forced air head, and installing central air after the fact could be done by a competent technician in about a day...

Other cool and interesting features of our Oak Harbor rancher included the following:

1. A fully-functional hot tub in the backyard; This was one of two houses we had, both rentals, that came with a hot tub. The other hot tub, located at the house in Doylestown where lived from 2005 to 2007, was nonfunctional and had been sitting for years!

2. A functioning central vacuum system; I was fascinated by the damn thing; My mom initially loved this feature because it was the first time in the history of, like, ever that I'd vacuumed the house without being asked to do so! However, the central vacuum was rather cumbersome compared to the two traditional upright vacuum cleaners we had (a 1989-1990 Oreck XL that we still have, and a newish Hoover Wind Tunnel), my grew tired of having to help me put the hose away when I was done vacuuming, and I eventually lost interest...

3. Pocket doors! The most prominent one was located in the foyer, and granted one passage from the foyer into the family room. There was at least one more, which separated the powder room from the laundry room if I remember correctly. The foyer-to-family room door was somehow kept in perfect working order for the first twelve years of its life. Unless my dad's Navy buddy did not buy the house from the original owner, I'm presuming he was the second owner of the house (I know he did not buy it new; I think he bought it in 1997 or 1998). The key thing is that for the first twelve years after the house was built, I didn't live there and thus did pass through that door on a daily basis...

I did not go out of my way to manhandle the sliding door, but I am unintentionally rough on things. Within, I'd say the first six months we lived there, it didn't operate anywhere near as smoothly as it did the day we moved in. Less than a year after we moved in, it got stuck in the closed position and my mom had to force it open. My mom gave me explicit instructions not to mess with the door anymore, and it stayed open until the day we moved out...

4. A childproof lock on the kitchen pantry door! My dad's Navy buddy who he rented the house from had two boys; one was closer to my age, and one was probably five or so. The younger one loved to snack, and his mom fitted this childproof lock on the pantry door to keep him from spoiling his dinner and just to keep him from gorging himself on junkfood whenever he felt like it. We did a walk-through of the place when the owner and his family were still living there, and I asked the mom what "that weird thing on the pantry door" was. Please read this paragraph and you'll see exactly what she told me. By the summer of 2000, I was plenty tall and could reach the lock. I was also somewhat underweight at the time and my mom didn't care so much if I stuffed my face so she didn't see a need to use the lock anyway. One day, not long after we moved into the house, I flipped the lock into place to see exactly how it worked and could not the damn thing open again. My mom had to open it, and even she had a difficult time, so she told me not to mess with it anymore...

5. A three-car garage! The ranch in Oak Harbor is the second rancher we've lived in, but holds the distinction of being the only house we've ever lived in that had a 3-car garage! My parents bought their first house in 1987 or 1988, and that's where they were living when I was born in 1989. Not including the apartment in Pennsylvania my parents rented during the summer of 1990 when we first moved, we have lived in 10 different houses in 4 different states (California twice, Pennsylvania twice, Virginia twice, and Washington once, respectively) between 1987 and 2016. Of those 10 houses, 6 were purchased and thus owned by parents, and 4 were rentals. If you want to break it down even more, two of those rentals were government-owned multifamily homes, and the other two were owned by Navy guys my dad knew.

 

A further breakdown of what my parents' houses had and didn't have...

Again, we lived in ten houses from 1988 to 2016. Of those, six were owned by parents and four were rented.

Of those ten houses, six of them had central air-conditioning, and all of them were located on the East Coast (four in the Philly suburbs, one in Virginia Beach, and one in Northern Virginia).

Of those six houses with central air, only one was a rental. That single rented house with central air also holds the distinction of being the only house we lived in, EVER, that had oil heat. Because of the ridiculous amounts of money my dad spent on heating oil during the time we lived in that house, he refused to ever buy a house with oil heat. The other five all had gas forced air heat. The three houses in Northern California had electric heat, but to date, we have never lived in a house with a heat pump. The apartment in Montgomery County where we lived briefly in the summer of 1990 did have central air and probably had electric heat (most apartment complexes around here do), but I am not sure it was a heat pump, and I'm not including the apartment in this tally anyway.

Of those six houses with central air, all six were two stories. One of them was a townhouse and the other five were single-family homes. Four of those five single-family homes were traditional colonial-style homes, and one was more of a contemporary. Three of four colonials had four bedrooms, two full bathrooms including the master bath, and a half bath or "powder room." One of those colonials, a big box of a house in the DC suburbs (Northern Virginia) was originally a 4 bedroom/2.5 bathroom house, but one of the previous owners (I believe we were the third owners) finished the basement. If you count the bedroom and full bathroom in the basement (Zillow does not), it is a 5-bedroom/3.5-bathroom house. The contemporary house (located in Virginia beach) and the townhouse (Buckingham Township, PA) were both 3-bedroom/2.5-bathroom homes.

Of those six houses with central A/C, only two of them had dual-zone A/C (as in two separate A/C units and furnaces; one for the 1st floor/basement and one for the 2nd floor). Those to houses are/were the 3-bedroom townhouse in Buckingham (lived there from September 2007-March 2016) and the house we're in now. I believe the house in Doylestown we rented from 2005-2007 (the one with oil heat) had zoned A/C and heat, with an iconic Honeywell "round" thermostat upstairs and downstairs, but it still only had one unit and it cooled very unevenly.

 

The 5-bedroom monstrosity in Northern Virginia (technically about 3,000 square feet and 4-bedroom/2.5-bath, but 5-bed/3.5-bath and closer to 4,000 square feet if the finished basement is included) probably had the worst-performing central air of any of the six houses with central air that we lived in!

That house was built in 1989, and my parents bought it in the summer of 2002. When they bought the house, it had the original Trane XE 900 air-conditioner and I'm guessing a Trane 80% efficiency gas furnace. It is entirely possible that the original unit crapped out prior to about 1992 and had to be replaced.

When we were living in Buckingham, the compressor at our neighbor's house totally died, when the house was only 6 months old! Luckily, the house was practically new and still under warranty, so Toll Brothers (the builder) fixed it for free. It was just a standard efficiency builder-grade Carrier air-conditioner, either a 3.5-ton or 4-ton, matched up with a roughly 90% efficiency Carrier gas furnace.

Some of you know what SEER is, but chances are that a good number of people don't so I'll tell ya...

SEER on a central air-conditioner is just like MPG (miles per gallon) in a vehicle. SEER stands for Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio. If the unit is a heat pump, the heating efficiency is measured by the HSPF, or Heating Seasonal Performance Factor. Beginning in 2006, the feds required all new air-conditioners and heat pumps manufactured after January of that year to have a minimum SEER rating of 13 (I think; I just know it was early 2006). As of 2018, I believe the minimum HSPF for heat pumps is 7.7 or so. It might be higher now. In 2016 or so, the minimum SEER rating was upped to 14 or 15, which isn't that big a change considering how high they raised it from the previous number in 2006. From 1992 until 2006, the minimum mandatory SEER rating was 10. I have no idea when the government started regulating the efficiency of residential central air-conditioners and heat pumps, but I believe it was the early 1980s. Prior to 1992, the minimum efficiency was 8 SEER. I have no idea what the minimum required HSPF rating was prior to about a decade ago...

However, just because 8 was the minimum doesn't mean there weren't more efficient options. I could be wrong, but I don't think they started giving SEER ratings until 1985 or so. In 1987-1988, Trane came out with the first true variable-speed heat pump, the XV15. As if it weren't obvious, the 15 in that moniker stands for 15 SEER, which was unheard of at the time. The next-most-efficient Trane heat pump (and it's similar straight-cool A/C counterpart) was 12 SEER.

Unfortunately, while the XV15 lived up to Trane's reputation for quality and durability, it was considerably more expensive than the aforementioned Trane XL1200 heat pump (which looked virtually identical from the outside) being sold at the same time, and required specialized training for techs to service it. On the rare occasion that something did break, in addition to requiring a specially-trained technician, the unit also required specialized parts that were unsurprisingly very expensive. I believe production ended sometime in the early nineties. There are some still in service around the country, but I've never personally seen one.

By at least 1987, at least based on what I've gotten from serial numbers on older units in 2009-2018 and from looking at old magazine ads, all were at least 8 SEER by 1986. The higher-end Lennox and Trane units were 10-12 SEER. HSPF did not progress at the same rate as SEER, and as recently as the mid 1990s, heat pumps were only rated at about 6 SEER. Even today, only some units are rated at 9-9.5 HSPF, and only the most expensive ones are 10 HSPF or higher.

In 1990, my parents bought a brand new house in Montgomeryville. That house had a huge 3.5-ton or 4-ton (maybe even 5-ton) Comfortmaker central air-conditioner on the side, matched up to a huge gas furnace that was located in the basement. Ground was broken on that development in 1989 or so, and a few houses had been built by the time we moved into ours in 1990. Ours may have been started in 1989, but most construction took place in 1990s, and thus all public records show that it was built in 1990. Many of the houses were built in 1990-1991, and the builder probably cut corners wherever it was legally possible to do so. I guarantee you that every house in that neighborhood that was built prior to 1992 had an 8 SEER unit. I'm sure they had some 8 SEER units sitting in a warehouse that slipped through the cracks after the mandatory SEER increase of 1992. The newest houses in that neighborhood were built in 1993, and I remember that the neighborhood was completely done by 1994. I drive through my old neighborhood from time to time, the last time being in about September 2017, and I am surprised to say that almost 25 years after construction ended, I saw probably five or six houses that still had the original Comfortmaker air-conditioners. I actually happened to drive by while the guy who owns my old house was outside and we chatted. This is the same guy who bought the house from us in 1996 and is still living there more than twenty years later. He told me that the compressor original A/C unit went in 1999, when the unit would have been 9 years old. He replaced the whole system, including the furnace. In 2006 or 2007, the air-conditioner failed again and was replaced with the Bryant A/C unit that is still in service. There's a good chance that if the furnace from 1999 didn't break, it's still in use today, especially if the Bryant is R-22.

 

Comfortmaker is presently one of about 6 brands used on identical lines of air-conditioners produced by a company called ICP (International Comfort Products), which is a subsidiary United Technologies (which also owns Carrier and Bryant), since the late 1990s. I think it was the late 1990s; United may have taken over in like 2000 or so, because I've seen Comfortmaker units from the late 1990s that look nothing like anything Carrier was producing at the time, or as has produced since. Production of the distinct, perfectly-round units that the houses in my old neighborhood came with ended in 1994 or 1995 (the newest one I've seen had a manufacture date of 1994).

The Comfortmaker units made for the last 12 years or so are nothing more than rebadged low-end Carriers. Until 1994-1995 or so, the Comfortmaker brand was one of three or so (including Arcoaire) used on the distinctive perfectly-round units mentioned above, which were produced by a company called Snyder General. I did not start researching these units until 2008 at the earliest, and I only started doing so because my mom would drive me through out old neighborhood in 2006-2008 (when the surprising majority of the houses seemed to have the original units), and they were like nothing else I'd seen. It was only in 2008 when my parents and I went to an open house that was not only the same builder but the same model we lived in, and I got an up close look at the air-conditioner, that I got a brand name. David Cutler Group, the builder, seems to have exclusively used Comfortmaker HVAC products until about 2000 based on what I've seen looking at open houses. That particular house that we looked at it in 2008 was built in 1993, which means it had a 10 SEER unit. I've talked to a few self-proclaimed HVAC experts, and they say those distinctive round Snyder General units have been around since about the late 1970s. I managed to find a video of a 1983 Arcoaire model on YouTube, and I've also heard 1978 tossed around...

Snyder General either went under or was absorbed by a large corporation sometime in the late 1990s. The round Snyder General units were available in a heat pump version, but the straight-cool A/C version was the most common (I have yet to see a heat pump version in person or in a YouTube video).

My general opinion of the Arcoaire/Comfortmaker units is very good. Like most air-conditioners produced during that time, they were seemingly built to last, with more emphasis being placed on overall quality than on outright efficiency. Here in the Bux-Mont area, tere are still a good number of them chugging along 24 years after the newest ones were built. The primary reason they get replaced, based on what I've seen, is not because they fail completely. Instead, seemingly minor parts fail and these parts are not easy to find. They also develop leaks, and since production ended about two years the first R410a/Puron units were produced, even the newest Snyder General units use R-22 Freon. Old air-conditioners with seemingly minor problems are often replaced solely because R-22 is harder to get nowadays and thus more expensive. If the compressor fails, then it's totally not worth it to replace an old unit. A veteran technician also told me that he thinks these units are relatively difficult to work on because of their design. That said, the old Snyder General units are very good units and the fact that there are so many of them around here still in operation should reflect this.

 

Going back to the discussion of SEER ratings, the minimum from 1992 to 2006 was 10 SEER. In 2006, this was increased to 13 SEER. My parents' previous house, a townhouse built in 2007, had dual 13 SEER Carrier units. I read the data sheets on the units at the decorated model homes, and if I remembered correctly they all gave a manufacture date of sometime in 2004 (it may have been 2005). This would make sense since construction began in 2004-2005. Toll Brothers, the builder, is well known for cutting corners (most builders do), so I guarantee with the utmost certainty that the units in every house built prior to 2006 were 10 SEER. Construction started in I believe late 2004, and the final building (consisting of 4 townhomes) was built in 2010 if I remember correctly. 2009-2010 is also when the EPA mandated that all new air-conditioners and heat pumps used R410a instead of R-22. As a result, the remaining 12 or so homes in the neighborhood have R410a systems! My old house was built in 2007, so it has a 13 SEER R-22 system. The first two air-conditioners on my street to be replaced were in the range of 2010-2012, due to premature failure. When we moved out in 2016, the oldest houses in that neighborhood were 11 years old, with the vast majority of the homes being built in 2006-2009. In 2016, almost all of the houses that I could see had the original A/C units, so they've held up well! When I'm in the area again, I'll drive through and see what has changed in terms of air-conditioners...

 

Going back to the 5-bedroom monstrosity, the only way that air-conditioner wasn't original was if the original died prior to 1992 when the new EPA regulations regarding SEER ratings went into effect. That air-conditioner was an XE 900, which means it was 9 SEER. If it had been replaced after 1992, it would have been an XE1000 or an XE1200 (10 and 12 SEER, respectively). I'm pretty sure the XE 800 (8 SEER; yes, it was a thing; There was one in operation at a commercial property in Newtown until 5 years ago or so) was only available as a heat pump and that house most certainly did not have a heat pump. Every house in that neighborhood had gas heat, while the adjacent townhouse development (built 1986-1987) has electric heat, and thus those places have heat pumps (I didn't even know what a heat pump as until about 2007; I learned what kind of heat these houses have by looking at Zillow listings; On recent listings with pictures, a gas stove in the kitchen is also a good sign that the house has gas heat).

 

As both an Aspie and the parent of Aspies, and the husband of someone on the spectrum, where do you stand in terms of when it's appropriate to tell a child about the diagnosis?

I was diagnosed in about November 1998, at the age of 9. My parents decided not to tell me at first, because they saw no point and didn't think I'd understand. I found out I had Aspergers at the age of 11, quite accidentally, in about August 2000. It was right after we moved to Oak Harbor, and my parents were in the process of enrolling me in the local middle school. I was alone with my mom's paperwork in the school's library, and like the curious (and nosy) little boy I was, I went through her stuff. It was at this time that I discovered a whole file about me, and specifically found a memo for my future teachers stating that I had Aspergers Syndrome and that as a result kids tended to tease me a bit more. That is all I remember about that, and I was understandably annoyed. I confronted my mom and she was not the least bit annoyed at me for going through her stuff like I thought she would be. She willingly answered all of my questions, but she never said that AS was on the autism spectrum. In all fairness to her, I think this because my mom is just like me with regards to her beliefs being that Aspergers and the other various Autism Spectrum Disorders are different than actual autism...

In 8th grade and the first half of high school (9th and 10th grade in the particular school district I was in; Fairfax County Public Schools, in Virginia), one of the things that pissed me off was that my IEP categorized me as having autism. This didn't just piss me off...

It downright ENRAGED and INFURIATED ME, GODDAMN IT!

I know you (@booted ) more than likely know what an IEP is, but I'm sure many people don't so I will explain...

An IEP, or Individualized Education Plan is basically something that students of varying functionalities have to help make things easier. While kids with mental retardation, low-functioning autism, and other intellectual disabilities have IEPs, high-functioning individuals like myself (who was never in a stereotypical special ed class) and my cousin (who has ADD/ADHD but not any form of autism) also have them as well...

There was a time when I was extraordinarily secretive about the fact that I had Aspergers, but now I am incredibly open about it (perhaps too open). Some people tell me they never would have guessed I had Aspergers if I hadn't told them. Other people, like my boss, knew that "something was up" the moment they met for the first time even if they didn't know it was Aspergers at first.

NOTE: My boss, who briefly pursued a degree in special education before changing her major to business management or something, obviously has an advantage over a lot of people because of her brief special ed background.

 

So here's why I think the central A/C in the 5-bedroom monstrosity was among the worst-performing system of the six houses we lived in that had central A/C...

In terms of reliability and install quality, the system was pretty damn good. It was a late 1980s Trane, after all, and older Trane products are known for their reliability. The system worked just fine. This was Northern Virginia, where A/C was obligatory. Summers with six-digit temperatures were normal. After a few hours of playing outside during the summer, one of my favorite things to do was to come inside and hold my head over one of the floor vents in the family room. I don't know why I favored this particular vent, but all I know is that the cold air felt good blowing on my sweaty head!

The air-conditioner was already 13 years old when my parents bought the house, and though I don't remember anything about the furnace or even where it was located in the house (almost the entire basement was finished, leaving very little unfinished space; I'm guessing the furnace and water heater were in that small area), I'm guessing it was original too. The A/C and the heat in that house worked flawlessly, despite being 13 years old when my parents bought the place. We lived there from 2002 until 2005, and in the three years we lived there, we never had a problem. The entire system was 16 years old when we sold the house, and still functioning perfectly!

My mom and I drove through that neighborhood a few years ago while visiting family who still lived in the area, and from what I could tell looking at the house from the street, it still had that same Trane unit! It is worth noting that production of the Trane XE-series ceased in 2002, so there's no way they replaced it with another XE-series! This was in 2012 or 2013, maybe 2014. I remember that another house directly across the street had a Trane XE 900. The neighborhood was built in stages between 1988 and 2003. The section my house was in was the oldest, and my house was built in 1989. The second stage was built in about 1995-1996, and third stage (containing just 10 super-expensive McMansion-like houses) was built in 2002-2003. At the height of the housing bubble in '05, I vaguely remember one of those newer McMansions hitting the market for almost a million dollars! According to Zillow, the most expensive of those ten houses is estimated at $734K, and the cheapest is just $606K. If I told you how little my parents paid for their house in 2002, and how much they got for it in 2005, you might have a heart attack! By the way, those 10 McMansions all have dual-zone A/C, and public record shows one of them going for just over $452K when it was brand new in 2002!

 

My kids are 11 and 8 and they both know that they are AS and they both have IEPs. I don't have any negative stigma towards AS. And I make sure my kids don't either. As far as I'm concerned, I view AS as human evolution. I may not think like other people do, but because of that, I can do things that others can't. My job is very technical and because of the extreme focus that I get from Autism, I can solve problems others would give up on. I also love figuring out how things work. Other people have zero interest in that. Maybe our human brains are evolving and changing, and AS is the diagnosis now. But who knows what it will change to in the future.

 

So, the central A/C in "5-bedroom monstrosity" was reliable and kept the house comfortable during those brutal Virginia summers. What was wrong...?

Well, it worked in most of the house. Since cold air falls and heat rises, the house was most comfortable on the lower levels. The thermostat was located in front hallway between the foyer and the kitchen, so the system went by the temperature at the thermostat's location and not necessarily the temperature in the whole house.

As is the case in most multi-story structures, the temperature increased the farther up you go. In our house, if you walked upstairs even on just a warm day, you noticed a difference in temperature almost immediately. Even with the thermostat set at 68-70 and the A/C running, it was noticeably warmer upstairs. This is normal. Luckily, all four upstairs bedrooms had ceiling fans. My bedroom was located on the same side of the house as the air-conditioner, and while I do not know if this was a contributing factor to the comfort level in my room, I never had any complaints about the temperature. As stated before, the ceiling fan probably mitigated this. If you walked into the master bedroom, you would have known why my parents had so many complaints about the central air in that house. My parents' bedroom was located directly above the two-car garage, and it also had a vaulted ceiling. In the winter, and in mild weather, this was not a problem. However, in the summer, even with the ceiling fan on the thermostat set to 68, my parents were miserable. My room was actually more comfortable than my parents'! Imagine that! My dad didn't get offered the opportunity to move back to Pennsylvania and start flying on P3s again until probably October 2004 at the earliest, so after a full two years in that house we had no reason to think we wouldn't be staying put for a while. My parents strongly considered installing one of those huge thru-the-wall A/C units (like a window unit) in the master bedroom to supplement the overworked central A/C system. The fact that the house had a two-story family room did not help things in the slightest. Basically, that old Trane was not unreliable or ineffective in the slightest. It was simply overworked! Installing one of those Mitsubishi Mr. Slim ductless units in the master bedroom probably would have solved the problem. However, we had a family meeting at the kitchen table in late 2004 and unanimously agreed that moving to Pennsylvania for a second time would be the way to go. Needless to say, the focus went from improving the house to selling it.

 

Dude, don't you know how to use Photoshop or Microsoft Paint?!?! You gotta start blacking out those license plates!

 

And speaking of license plates, you still have the colored Texas plates, not the boring white ones...

 

@Jamesboy2233
@Plain Jane Taco
@Iamraiderpower

Here is the "5-bedroom monstrosity" my parents and I called home from July 2002 until July 2005! My bedroom window is circled in red and the approximate location of the air-conditioner is marked with a red X. This Bing Maps imagery is from September 11, 2014...

 

More pictures of the same house (Bing Maps; imagery from September 11, 2014)...

 

Use them? Unless they physically stole them off your truck or somehow counterfeited them, I don't think they could "use" them? However, I know from experience that it's possible to tell the exact town where a vehicle was registered just by punching a license plate number into CARFAX. Somebody who really knows what they're doing or who knows the right people could get more info. I mainly just black out license plates as an extra precaution...

 

Here more some pictures I took of my MacBook screen while looking at a newer section of my old neighborhood in Northern Virginia. Again, all pictures are from September 11th, 2014 unless otherwise stated!

This picture shows a Trane XE 900 air-conditioner at the house next door to the house directly across the street from our old house. According to Zillow, this house is just under 2,600 square feet (2,592 to be exact; not including the finished basement) and was built in 1989, just like our old house...

 

You're probably right with regards to having nothing to worry about, but I do it as an extra precaution, and to humor the sometimes overly-paranoid vehicle owners I encounter (and my overly-paranoid parents)!

 

See that yellow Ford Ranger parked at the curb? My neighbor bought that truck brand new in 2003 or so, and I remember when he brought it home! This imagery is apparently from September 2014, so that means my neighbor not only still lives there, but is still driving the same truck 11 years later. I was almost old enough to drive when my neighbor bought this truck, an Edge (basically a sporty trim package for the base XL) with automatic, A/C, and a even a 6-disc in-dash CD changer, and I was jealous! Looks like he's kept it in good shape, too!

 

A First Gen DCSB TRD, which I am 99% sure is owned by a certain former neighbor who didn't like me for reasons still not fully known to this day! The incident in question took place like 15 years ago, so his son is probably in his late teens or early twenties, and this beautiful Taco could very well be his...