On topic stuff first:
New Pet Peeve (just to keep to topic...and it just happened): Cartos that I have used a few times and have plenty of
juice and suddenly taste like plastic? Never had that happen before. Mind you, I'm a new vaper. Is that common?
Never happened to me, really. When my Smoktech cartos fail, they just start flooding without warning. It's scared me from using them because I never like wasting that much juice, and it always seems to happen pretty close to re-filling a tank.
If I haven't listed that as a pet peeve yet, I should have…it's becoming my biggest.
Off Topic (feel free to skip):
"Atlanta" is a small town.

Not even half a million people in it.
Within the city limits itself, yes. Metro Atlanta is more like 5 million with most of that living in "urban" areas. I'm not sure where Wikipedia draws the border (probably along county lines for some antiquated reason) You kinda just have to drive around to figure it out. Basically, if you're not a local, you're out of the city when the roads start making sense and everything starts looking cleaner. If you're a local, you're out of the city when everything starts looking the same and you're surprised that the street name hasn't changed for a few miles.
the best part is never having to leave to visit the gun range. Its in the back yard. Can also launch the boat in like 15 minutes. I love it here.
Atlanta Yacht club is like an hour away. There are 2 or 3 big lakes about the same distance (Alatoona and Lanier at least), and the "benefit" of having to go somewhere is that your trips end up being a small vacation instead of just something else you do during a normal day. At least that's how I feel.
I hear you about the range thing, but for the type of shooting I like, there's only one range in the Southeast that's actually right; it's on Ft. Benning. The range that hosted the '96 olympics is just outside the perimeter and like 15 minutes from where I used to live, but the evil, corrupt Fulton County Commissioners decided to make it a concert venue or something stupid like that. We had a lot of competitors, coaches, athletes, families, life-long NRA members–basically everyone involved in international shooting sports in GA pledging to vote Democrat because the incumbent Governor promised to use something like eminent domain to stop them from doing it and keep running it as a shooting range………and it was the first time since the Civil War that a Republican won the Governorship of GA……and the ..... who won apparently decided not to tow the party line on the
one issue we cared about at the time. I don't care what your politics are, that

just isn't fair.
I just wish there was a range less than 2 hours away. Then again, my life would be very different if I'd been able to go to college and shoot at the same time, but traveling 4 hours a day, shooting 20-30 hours a week, and being a full time student just wasn't in the cards and I (probably stupidly) chose academics over athletics.
What did it for me when I lived in the city. Last 18 months I called the cops 8 times for people breaking windows, spray painting, and stealing out of my back yard.
That sucks, but unless you live in Compton or a bad part of Detroit, I'll take petty crimes over ridiculously higher rates of unplanned teenage pregnancy, hard drug production and abuse (and associated crimes), domestic violence, hate groups, and Christian Fundamentalism any day.
(note: I'm not anti-Christian by any stretch of the imagination…I just think Fundamentalists get it blatantly and explicitly wrong because they can't read well enough)
<some stuff about small towns and suburbs being good>
Maybe I'm biased because I lived through Rockdale County circa 1996-1999, but…………
I knew 4 people in middle school that committed suicide in 3 years.
A lot of the people I knew were affected by a syphilis outbreak in the middle and high schools (yes, I said middle schools) that got so bad they forced nearly everyone to get tested and gave
everyone either treatments or placebo so the ridiculous extent of it wouldn't immediately be known.
I was 11 the first time I was offered hard drugs……at a middle school dance.
There was a shooting in one of the High Schools that hurt a lot of people and ruined one girl's capability of ever having children.
There was almost another one in one of the middle schools a year before that that got stopped because someone
thankfully ratted them out based on nothing but hearsay and happened to be right.
When we finally fled for the hills (skyscrapers), the school changed my grades and those of a few friends to make us fail 8th grade in an attempt to keep us from transferring to a private school. Apparently the 3 or 4 of us that planned to leave were responsible for increasing the school's ITBS scores enough that it got a budget increase.
Fortunately, the private schools–3 different schools all within Metro Atlanta–didn't care.
And because some of you are wondering……yes, those ridiculous, out of control private school parties you've probably heard about or imagined did happen………40 miles south of the city.
All of that happened in a suburb of Atlanta. My family moved there because it had a great reputation for good schools and the small community atmosphere.
Oh…also, riding a bike in the city is perfectly doable if you're not stupid. An ex-girlfriend's dad routinely came home from rides (in one of the other "really nice" suburbs) bleeding because people in cars would throw cigarette butts, trash, and
batteries at him while he was riding.
In this same upscale suburb, a local church reacted to the opening of an Inserection ("adult toy" store and smoke shop) by camping the parking lot and publishing the license plate numbers, descriptions, and in some cases
names of people who shopped there in the Sunday paper………in a county that has
repeatedly been reported to have the highest per capita .... production in the state. It seems like they should have better things to do with their time……like raising their own kids to not be a complete waste of food. But, no, they had to publish the names of people who bought clove cigarettes, condoms, and occasionally vibrators.
And, I don't know about you, but I personally prefer paying a homeless person a couple bucks to go away and spare me the sob story every now and then to being offered hard drugs in parking lots for no reason except that I went to wal mart at 10pm and decided I wanted to have a cigarette in the parking lot instead of smoking in my car (back when I smoked).
Maybe the entirety of Georgia is just a cesspool and Atlanta is one bright, shining light of average while the rest of the world actually lives the myth I grew up believing……but I really just don't believe it when anyone says that living in a small town or a suburb has any advantages at all. If I ever end up raising a family, there is no way in

that they're growing up in a suburb or a small town; they're just too dangerous.