You live near Disneyland and you have skunk problems? I know we have them here, I see the roadkill, but I have yet to see a live skunk or raccoon. Lot’s of possums though.
What are you doing for parking? Spring for the ultimate pass? We did this a couple of years ago and it was a lot of fun, going at least every other week. I would just keep it up in perpetuity if it wasn’t for the parking situation - the resident pass is what you want because the blackout dates are a handy reference to when you do not want to go anyways. But then you have to pay for parking every time. Bleh.
I smell them from the roads every once in a great while but I have never seen one in Socal.
We got two of the Signature passes with free parking and two Deluxe for the girls. Figured it was worth it for the parking and extra discount on food/merch.
Nice, let us know how it goes. I am curious how your experience will be if you go on dates that are blacked out for the residence pass. Our experience was to avoid those like the plague.
Part of the reason we didn’t renew was the crazy overcrowding we experienced and partly because we just got tired of it after a year. It’s been long enough now that I am thinking it would be fun again, but I think I will wait until after Star Wars is open and not crazy. Also for the additional parking structure to be built because the whole $18 parking really puts a crimp on the visits just from a psychology perspective. If that never gets resolved we will probably just by the cheapest version with parking for one person and resident passes for the other two.
I haven’t really smelled skunk in urban areas. Something must kill them. I’ve seen possums, fox, and even coyote in our urban area, but I’ve never seen a skunk or smelled any evidence of one. They are definitely out in the country, though. I’ve driven through the smell many times.
I am in a city next door to Fresno that, because of the school district mainly, is where people who can afford it move to. My area is however still a little rural. Within a 1/2 mile of my house there are still homes on a couple acres, raising sheep, goats, horses and even llamas. There was a donkey but I haven’t heard it lately.
So I have had possum trouble and seen skunk roadkill but never a live one, thankfully. We even have a pair of hawks living in the neighborhood now.
There are bald eagles near where I live! Only time I’ve seen them in the wild, and wow they’re bigger than you think.
We have those in the foothills near me. One of the lakes even does tours to look at them during the summer.
They have nests along the river. Some of the tours point them out, and there are a couple that are well known here. They’re beautiful animals, and yeah, due to their size, I would not want one angry with me.
I don’t live in a rural area though, I’m in Seattle! Kind of nuts.
There’s that one that seems to live on the Seattle side of the 520 bridge.
Yeah, I’m not right beside Disney, kind of in the foothills near there. It’s definitely more wilderness here. We can’t walk there or anything.
Also, my dog is a sweet girl but will go chasing after any prey animal. She likely just charged right up to the skunk and got her nose filled, bark alert at all. She was snorting when she came back and didn’t freak out, she went for a normal pee and seemed fine, no hurry. It was only after she ran into the house we we’re like “Oh crap, did you get sprayed?! You dum dum!”.
Living in Wisconsin, I see bald eagles fairly regularly. My parents live on a lake in northern Wisconsin, and one day I was taking their little dog for a walk when we surprised an eagle on the ground about 15-20 feet away that had been eating a dead fish (we must have been upwind of it, though, as the dog, who was fearless, never barked or strained to go after the eagle). Anyway, when we surprised the eagle it immediately took off, and the sound from it’s wings flapping will always stick with me—WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP! They are, indeed, a very big bird.
Tony
We just ate out at a nice Italian place that was getting a ton of great reviews, and it did not disappoint.
The interesting part is after my 2nd bite of short rib pasta I bit into a bone. Odd I thought, they must have missed a sliver somehow. So I worked it around in my mouth until I realized this was not a bone and it was really long. I ended up pulling out an inch and a half of twisted, sharp, thick wire. The kind you would use to tie something heavy together, not flexible at all.
Kind of freaked me out when I pulled it from my mouth and just looked at it. So I called for a waitress who said ‘let me get you another one right away’ and took the bowl away. I was too stupefied at this point but 5 seconds later I was thinking that very much would not be a proportional response.
I had anther 30 seconds of thinking that before the manager came over, trying hard to disguise how much he was freaking out. They handled it well, comped the entire meal, told us to order drinks and desert, etc on the house. He made a big production of finding out why it had happened and what they were going to do to fix it. Turns out it was the wire basket they use to lower the fresh pasta they make into the water, so he was in the process of pulling all those out and making sure their sister restaurants replaced theirs as well.
Everybody got lucky today. Very glad it didn’t end up in my sons meal or I had a hole punched through my cheek or dug into my gums. My wife is still freaked out imagining my son with blood coming out of his mouth.
It would have been life threatening if you had swallowed it.
There is a pleasant thought. It was pretty big, like kind of amazing it was hidden in a piece of pasta and small chunk of short rib. I think it was probably speared through both, because I was looking at what I was eating - the pasta was Radiatori which I had never had before and pretty neat looking so I was scrutinizing every bite.
So, almost two weeks ago I told a long and somewhat prosaic story about a trip to my local post office.
I shall now follow-up with a similar story about my local post office. Since I love the people who work there, and I love my little post office.
Here’s a visual example why I love this place:
I just think it’s so cute that they make a hand-lettered sign for that. On top of that, this “Trainee” was so freaking nice to me!
Fast-forward to yesterday when I mailed a bunch of letters, including one of my Star Wars postcards (it’s a project…such as it is) to a friend in Canada. I just put stamps on them and put them in the box during a dog walk in the morning.
Later that day I was driving and I realized I had put the wrong postage on the card to Canada. I’d put a Forever stamp on it, but postage for that kind of thing to Canada requires $1.15. I usually know this, since there are a couple of folks I write to in Canada. I’d just forgotten since I was sending a bunch of mail.
Crap. This was a postcard. And one of my really cool Ralph McQuarrie postcards, dangit. Which means no return address. Which means either the person receiving it will have to pay the extra, or it will just…what? Disappear?
So I go to the post office right before closing and sheepishly ask the woman working the register (not the “Trainee” this time) what will happen. She is exasperated. It’s the end of her day. But she can see I’m all worried. I really want this card to get to this person. She needs it. Sometimes people just need to get something in the mail randomly and you can tell. And she doesn’t need to be asked to pay the make-up postage.
“When did you put it in the box?” the woman behind the counter asks me.
“Before the 2:30 pickup. At around 2:15. But that was two hours ago. So it’s probably been picked up.”
She smiles. Her name is Dulce. She says, “It hasn’t been picked up yet. Because I haven’t done it yet.”
Then she runs to the back and asks her co-worker Jerry to come cover the counter and hurries up with her keys to the blue boxes up on the hill, above the parking lot. I show her a picture of the postcard I sent. I take pictures of all of them on my phone, because…well…it’s a project.
She pulls out the postcard and shows it to me, leads me back into the post office, takes my dollar (seventy-one cents actually), and says it’s taken care of and not to worry about it.
I love my post office.
-xtien
She sounds sweet. :)
Four year old daughter broke her arm today. Landed on her elbow, pretty obvious it hurt bad. Decided to go to the urgent care center in Brampton (suburb of Toronto), on the guess that the wait time would be shorter than the closer, but busy, hospital. The wait was short at least. The doctor said the break is just away from where it would be much more serious, and the cast goes on Thursday for three weeks only (temporary cast for now). Pretty sad to see her passed out in the car with eyes so swollen, but by bedtime we had gotten her to laugh a few times.
Awww, hope she heals up fast.