wild_turkey

??? The website says August 9 to September 5.

In order… 1a. Dayne’s 1b. Panther City 3. Heim If it’s a weekend for lunch, pick one of the first two. If it’s evening, then Heim is probably the only available option. Disclaimer: have yet to try Brix but keep hearing good things.

At one point I thought they were saying ~150 unaccounted for? So that would suggest ~10 people turned up elsewhere?

That’s actually not true. When we missed a flight last month and spent a “penalty night” in CLT, we checked in that night for the flight the next day, just to avoid the airline agent fiasco the day of the flight. That was AA with a checked bag. For our United flight tomorrow, DFW-IAD-FRA-ZAG, they let us check-in today and get boarding passes so we just need to clear TSA tomorrow. I think their policy is that you can check-in in person within 24 hours but you can’t hand over checked baggage until 6 hours pre-flight. We did have to check-in in person for this trip because an agent needed to verify our vaccine cards, but we’re good on that now.

I’m really curious in the legal side of this when it comes to insurance. For the initial collapse, for owners that survived, will they get a full payout or will there be insurance exclusions on the basis of not maintaining the property? For the secondary planned demolition, same thing except that in this case it was an intentional (yet necessary) destruction of property that was at this point beyond the control of the owners. What about possessions that were all left in the remaining units up until it’s destruction? What about vehicles which I assume were left in their parking spaces below and are now presumably collateral damage? Also, with regards to the other unrelated Miami condo that has now been evacuated on the basis of an engineering report, I expect that to become a much more common occurrence as every building safety concern is looked at under a microscope.

Maybe it’s destination dependent then. Mexico doesn’t require COVID testing so that probably made it easier for you. Or maybe it’s airline dependent. This was on AA, early June, flying DFW-MIA-SXM. Like I said, it was the only time we experienced it since the start of COVID, so it caught us by surprise as well.

I’ve been to St Barth 3 times since COVID started and Tulum once, and this was the first time I’ve experienced this. I think it’s a recent problem for airlines with the influx of travelers post-COVID.

Champlain Towers address is 8855 Collins Ave. A quick Zillow search for recently sold properties at that address shows a unit that sold on 6/18/21 and another on 4/16/21. Imagine being the previous owners that got out right before disaster struck. Imagine being family of the new owners, knowing your loved ones moved into a condo shortly before in collapsed with them inside.

Who in their right mind would ever live in the remaining 1/3 of the building? How would you ever sell a unit? The remaining property owners are probably hoping for a complete demo and some degree of insurance settlement because their property is nearly worthless even while still standing.

Leaving for Croatia next week. We have a connection in Germany but neither Croatia nor Germany require vaccinated U.S. citizens to have COVID tests, just the vaccine card. We went to St. Barth a few weeks ago and missed our departure flight out of DFW due to long check-in lines at the airport. International travel requires check-in with the agents (no phones or kiosks) so they can verify COVID requirements prior to boarding. Needless to say, I'm a little concerned about the upcoming flights to Croatia for the same reasons, and unfortunately, we have a time constraint that will limit our ability to get to the airport more than 2 hours early. Is there anything that stops us from going to DFW the night before our flights (within 24 hours of departure) to do the check-in process and get our boarding passes, then return home to sleep before returning to the airport the following day for the actual flights? We will only have carry-on bags, no checked bags, and we are flying United. I think this should streamline things on the actual day of departure so that we just need to get through TSA, which we have Pre-check for. Is there an unforeseen wrinkle in my plan I should know about?

Yeah that sounds cheap and the opposite of what you want from room service in a luxury hotel.

I don’t like Southwest mainly for their boarding policies. I would like to know my seat in advance, and if I’m paying extra for a better seat, I want to know specifically which better seat. Agree with being able to stay at the bar, bookstore, bathroom, etc until the plane is near the end of boarding. Rushing to get in line for a good seat is ridiculous to me. Beyond that, I’m based out of DFW and it seems AA is much more likely to have direct flights to the places I want to go. I don’t like AA much either, but that’s for different reasons.

Wife got her Model Y on Wednesday. The drop off and trade-in were surprisingly simple. A guy showed up, we traded keys, he took a few pictures of each car and that was it. She traded in a 2007 4Runner with 200k+ miles on it and they gave us $5,900 which seems very high, and the whole thing was done virtually with no full inspection of the car. It runs fine for its age, but it still surprised me how much they offered and how few questions were asked. She only drove the Model Y for a day before leaving for vacation but says she loves it so far.

Not only that, but the technology appears to be a massive leap from where we are (everyone is) currently. It would be like going from the corded home telephone to the iPhone and bypassing all the generations of cell phones that came between. I personally don’t think the Chinese or Russians could make those advancements while maintaining complete secrecy over decades of research, and having the self control to not deploy their vastly superior technology against the rest of the world. They would be playing an extreme long game when they could’ve demonstrated their power long ago and used it for an extreme upper hand in global politics.

Watched it a couple nights ago. Didn’t love it but didn’t hate it. I was entertained enough, it was free through HBO, and I appreciate that it was 1h40m instead of 3hr like many newer movies tend to be. Agree with the criticisms about Jolie’s model appearance throughout the movie. It was distracting. For any GoT fans, the movie might be worth the watch just to see Littlefinger’s end.

That was great. Once I realized who the actual killer was, everything made complete sense to the point that I felt a bit dumb for not realizing it in advance. But definitely a well written conclusion. The only thing I’m a little disappointed about is Dylan’s role, or lack thereof. He seemed pretty intent to burn Erin’s journals, then he became a psychopath chasing down Jess and telling her something about how they were now joined for life, as if to suggest they shared a pretty dark secret. Then in the finale, he simply shows up at Lori’s door and gives her the money. I guess he was just a red herring, but they maybe overplayed that angle a little bit.

Any update? My wife changed the exterior color a few weeks back and it pushed the estimated delivery window out to June 18-30, then suddenly today they said it’s actually ready and delivery is now scheduled for June 2.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that Congress wants this because the presence of UAPs off our coasts is a significant national security concern. So we need answers, or at the very least, a formal action plan.

Nora is broken for the 523rd time. She had had CCL tear on her back RIGHT leg and underwent TPLO surgery in December 2019 to fix it. It took about 3 months to heal but she finally got back to using her leg and was 99% normal. She then tore her meniscus on her back RIGHT leg in February of this year and had meniscus surgery on March 29. They also removed a plate from the prior TPLO surgery that they said was no longer needed. She still hasn’t fully recovered from that surgery. She can walk on it but she limps a little bit, maybe 80% normal. She turned a corner this past week right up until yesterday when her back LEFT leg gave out. It seems that she has now torn her left CCL, which is not totally unexpected because 60% of dogs tear the other side within 1 year, but it’s shitty timing because the right leg isn’t very good and it makes walking very difficult. The vet today agreed that it is likely torn so she is now on the schedule for left TPLO surgery in June. The previous surgeon’s office was being very unhelpful with all of this, which blows my mind as a human surgeon who goes out of my way for my own post-op patients, so we have tentatively switched to a different vet surgeon for the next time around. If anyone has personal experience with these types of problems and surgery/recovery, I’d love to hear it.

I had the same thought but I really hope it doesn’t go that route. There are enough deplorable characters with potential motives for murder that they don’t need a last minute reveal of an unlikely killer to make the show great. They’ve done a great job telling the story thus far, now just wrap it up in a way that explains how John, Billy, Frank, and Dylan are all involved.

Which makes you wonder if they are saying the same thing about us, which is exactly what we want them to think because this is our own technology that has everyone worked up. Maybe we’ve been working on this stuff for years and other people are starting to notice, so we had to spook our own Navy and cause a public frenzy to make it look like we’re just as clueless as everyone else. Some version of that explanation makes the most sense to me. It’s the most boring explanation but also the most comforting when the alternatives are China/Russia/aliens.

Also, we have 2 full episodes left which seems like a lot of time to investigate Erin’s murder. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have another victim in the next episode.

The only issue there is that Katie Bailey refers to her captor as “he” and not “they”, so if the dead kidnapper guy has a partner, the partner must not interact with the girls much. I’m leaning towards Erin’s killer being a second person who is mostly unrelated to the kidnapper.

I'm a little bit with you on that, but I'm more concerned about the idea that an ex-husband would willingly buy a house that shares a back fence with his ex-wife. That's harder for me to wrap my mind around, so maybe the details of Zabel's residence didn't register as high.

I don’t necessarily agree with this. It could be true but there’s no reason to believe it has to be true. Humans sent Voyager beyond our solar system while playing Johnny B Goode. Sure, it hasn’t gone light years, but it’s out there with no attempts to avoid detection. We’ve sent electromagnetic communication even farther, perhaps 120 light years away. Proxima Centauri is ~4 light years away and for all we know has habitable planets orbiting it. There are already plans being made for us to explore it. Do you think we will develop that technology and then decide not to explore Proxima Centauri until we can safely determine any and all possible lifeforms present and then further improve our technology to avoid detection? Absolutely not. In the infinite vastness of the universe it seems likely that there are alien species less advanced than us, more advanced than us, and roughly similar to us in both technology and behavior. Whether or not we ever encounter them is obviously debatable, but it‘s illogical to think that every version of intelligent life that could possibly exist is both technologically superior and has the intelligence and self control to withhold their own interstellar exploration until they completely understand human technology and how to hide from us. Maybe they are imperfect creatures as well and maybe their curiosity of other worlds outweighs their caution to interact with another species. Or maybe they don’t even recognize us as living creatures because a blue planet with an oxygen atmosphere appears so different from their own habitat and they aren’t used to observing carbon-based creatures that walk on a solid surface. Or maybe they’ve been watching us for a while but our own technology and detection capabilities have rapidly improved in the past 50 years and it takes them light years to send new stealthier drones here. Or maybe they are exploring thousands of worlds simultaneously and they actually don’t care about us anymore than the average Texan cares about sharks in the Arctic Ocean. There are endless maybes regarding the identity, technology capabilities, and behavior patterns of alien life. It seems foolish to write this off under the assumption that alien technology must be sufficiently superior and aliens must be sufficiently disciplined to avoid us. We don’t know either of those to be remotely true, and even if it’s true for aliens at Alpha Centauri A, it might not be true for aliens at Alpha Centauri B.