The town I grew up in has a ski resort in it, so there's a fair amount of shops and restaurants that have opened over the years for the tourists. A lot of the ones that were around when I was a kid are closed now, but I feel like talking about them anyway. (The closed restaurants will be marked as such, all others are still open.)

1. The Cupboard Deli: One of the most popular places in town. Everyone goes here for sandwiches, baked goods, and snacks. They have a huge variety of wraps, of which my favorite is the meatballs with marinara sauce. Their donuts are delicious as well, though those are put out in the morning and are usually gone by 10:30-11. The chocolate ones with whipped cream filling are the best. They also have a seasonal ice cream window that's open in the summer. Get the maple creemee.

2. Dinner's Dunne at the Windridge Bakery (closed): I'm pretty sure that's how it was spelled. This place closed when I was in middle/high school. It was open for breakfast and lunch, but my family mostly went to breakfast there. The one time I remember going there for lunch, I got chili. It was good. Usually, when we got breakfast, I got pancakes or biscuits and sausage gravy. It was good food. They baked all their own bread, too, so the toast was always tasty.

3. 158 Maine: The current restaurant in the space Dinner's Dunne was in. It's fancier and serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I've had their biscuits and sausage gravy, which is very tasty. At dinner, they have a really good scallop dish that's kind of like chowder, and it's topped with fried onion strings. Their hot chocolate is also really good.

4. Cafe Banditos (closed): This was a Mexican restaurant that closed in 2001ish. I went there a couple of times. I remember getting a chicken dish with cheese and salsa that was really good. There's an Italian restaurant where this used to be that I have never been to, though it opened in 2002 or so.

5. Brewster River Pub and Brewery: I haven't been here for a while, but it has good food. They have music sometimes (or did) and they have a volleyball court and a horseshoe area. The fish and chips are very good. They have a nice deck where you can eat if the weather is nice.

6. The Mix (closed): I loved this place and went to it a lot. It closed in the summer of 2016. They served breakfast and dinner; I was usually there for breakfast (often with my mother). I nearly always got the creme brulee french toast with drunken blueberries (seriously drunken blueberries, they made my mouth numb), which was delicious. Their omelettes were great as well, as was the breakfast flatbread. I did go there a couple of times for lunch, but I don't really remember what I got those times. It was always good food, though.

One of the things I always hated about where I grew up was the long bus ride I had to take to get to school, from kindergarten through 12th grade. It took half an hour to get to the elementary school on the bus (a five minute drive, otherwise) and nearly an hour one way to get to the high school (25 minute drive).

The wait for the bus was also hard. I was never one of the lucky people who lived in a place where they could see the bus coming from inside. I had to walk to the stop before hand or else miss the bus. At least there was a gas station across the street from my first bus stop that I could stand inside to wait when it was really cold. Starting in 7th grade, I was at different stops that didn't have places nearby where I could wait where it was warm. (Some of the kids who waited at my later stops got to wait in a car, but they never invited me to.)

At least I never got car sick, so I was able to read on the bus. I read a lot of books there, especially when I was in high school.

Did schools stop teaching kids that dialogue needs to have punctuation at the end of it? Because I see entirely too much dialogue in fics that is completely unpunctuated. It's just "I am an example", no period, no question mark, sometimes no commas. Why???

Book 3!

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I have found a couple of links here and here for The Cambridge Pharmacy, Inc., which was apparently started in 1980. I think it's meant to be the same place, though the info is, of course, outdated.

1. The Saddest Strip Mall That Ever Existed: This doesn't physically exist, there's a Lowe's superstore there now. However, from 2001ish to 2008, when that moved in, this was a decaying, mostly empty strip mall. In the late 90s, there was an Ames Department Store, a Grand Union grocery store, a Fashion Bug, and a Chittenden Bank (a local bank chain now owned by People's United). The bank moved across the parking lot to it's own building, and the Ames and Grand Union closed within a year of each other. For about seven years, then, all there was was the Fashion Bug. They were lucky if they got two or three people in the parking lot at once. I went in there with my mom to buy something once, it wasn't that great.

2. Champlain Mill: This one still physically exists, and I think it's trying to be a commercial space again, but apart from the new Waterworks restaurant, all the places that used to be there are gone. It's a building by the Winooski River that's mostly offices, but before they put a huge roundabout in downtown Winooski, there were a couple of floors of stores in it, too. There was the official store for the minor league baseball team (then the Vermont Expos), a sock store, and a stationary store (called the Paper Peddler), among others. The one I went to most was the Book Rack and Children's Pages, an independent bookstore that moved to Essex after the shops closed, before closing in 2008 or so. Brian Jacques, the author of the Redwall books did a reading and signing there that I went to, and got my copy of Legend of Luke signed.

3. Burlington Square Mall/Burlington City Center: This place only recently ceased to physically exist and is supposedly under redevelopment, though that's taking a while. When I went down to Church Street in Burlington, I'd spend at least some of the time here. It was a small mall, with a Filene's/Macy's at one end and the entrance to Church Street at the other. There were two restaurants as a "food court", a Chinese restaurant and a pizza place. The first Hot Topic I ever went to was there, as well as a Walden Books before that chain went out of business. There was an fye store, PacSun, a Spencer's, a Payless shoes, and I think there was a Claire's there, too, though that may have been at the University Mall. There was also a place called Tradewinds, that sold imported crafts and home goods. There were also a few other stores I don't remember.

When I was a kid, maybe 8 or so, Star Wars started to show up a lot. In hindsight, it was probably because of the 20th anniversary of the first film in 1997 and the buildup to the prequels. At the time, all I knew was that there was this new thing that looked interesting, but I didn't know much about. I didn't see the movies until a couple years later, so all I had to go on was the character names and a very basic plot. Beyond that, I had to make it up myself.

One of the things I did was pretend that I was Han Solo's little sister. At the time, I had a tea party cookbook that I read a lot. It was sort of a picture book, and the tea parties were often illustrated with pictures of four kids, two girls and two boys. So, what I would do was pretend that the kids were Luke, Leia, Han, and me, having various tea parties.

IDK, it made sense at the time.

muccamukk Three favourite scenes in Band of Brothers.

This is a tough one. These aren't in any particular order.

1. Speirs and Lipton in the church at the end of The Breaking Point. The lighting is wonderful, they both look great, and Lip finally gets acknowledgment that he was the leader of Easy Company while they were at Bastogne. He's all modest about it, but he earned that promotion and it's nice that Speirs tells him about it at that point.

2. When Bull gets back to the rest of Easy in Replacements. They're all so happy to see him, Johnny Martin in particular. And Michael Cudlitz looks fantastic.

3. Winters and Lipton telling Nixon, Welsh, and Speirs that their part of the war is over. Another very well lit scene where everyone looks good and there's humor. And everyone's grinning at each other. It's great.

Honorable Mention: Speirs holding Grant's hand while he gets brain surgery.

Did anyone else have a best friend as a kid that they ended up growing apart from?

I was best friends with a girl who lived across the street from me from when I was just an infant through middle school. Then we went in different directions, and we weren't friends anymore. I had other friends, who I had more in common with, but it still kind of sucked.

Has anyone else eaten Sky Bars? They're chocolate bars made by Necco, which closed last year (I only became aware of this when I googled them to post this). They were never the greatest candy, but I loved them when I was a kid.

Sky Bars had four filled compartments, one chocolate fudge, one vanilla fudge, one caramel, one peanut caramel. The mere fact that they had four separate flavors in one made them fancy. The fact that I could save my allowance fairly easily to buy them made them even better. I'd carefully split off each piece and nibble them starting at the skinny end, to make it last as long as possible.

With Necco no longer around, Sky Bars are probably forever gone as well. Too bad. I enjoyed eating them occasionally, even when I got access to better chocolate, for the nostalgia value.