*sniff* What's that smell?

Baby skunk
Originally uploaded by ResQgeek.

Saturday evening, we went out to dinner with my parents, two of my father's brothers and their families and my grandfather. As we were finishing up the meal, our waitress told us about the family of skunks in the field across the street. They'd been watching the skunk cubs for several weeks, and they had just come out for the evening. She suggested that our daughters might enjoy watching them from the safety of the restaurant porch.

Now my wife has a serious dare devil streak in her, and she got her camera out of the car, cross the street and walked right up to the cubs and started taking pictures. When I came out of the restaurant, I saw that she was focused entirely on the playful cubs, and didn't see the full grown skunk coming her direction from the other end of the field. I yelled to get attention, warning her that if she got sprayed I wasn't going to let her ride in the car with me!

The mother skunk never came over to where the cubs were, and my wife got a lot of pictures of the cubs, including some of our younger daughter standing near them, enthralled by these cute little critters. No one got sprayed, but I was a bit nervous about how casually she acted around these potentially stinky animals...

More WWII tidbits

In addition to my grandfather and the great-uncles I've previously mentioned, another of my father's uncles also served in World War II. Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about his service. I think he served in Africa and Italy, and I also think he served in a support role (such as motor pool maintenance or some other position behind the lines). But I don't know for sure. Like so many veterans of that war, he doesn't talk about the war and his part in it. I don't know him well enough to feel comfortable asking him about it, and I'm not sure who would be the best person to approach about this. I'll have to think about it.

My project to produce a new edition of the book by my ex-POW great-uncle about his wartime experiences has taken a big step forward. I met with his daughter over the weekend, and she gave me another copy of the book (since I can't find mine), so I've started re-typing the text. My uncle's widow contacted her and she's excited about the idea, so I have permission from both his widow and daughter. They are going to gather up the original pictures and documents used to produce the original edition and send them to me so I can do high-quality scans for this new edition. If they can get that done soon, I should be able to pull all the material together and get it formatted for publication by the end of the summer.