Happy New Year's

I just wanted to let you know that we will be closing at noon today! We wish you a very Happy New Year's Eve!! Be sure to be careful tonight and enjoy yourself.

Since We Are All Still On Holiday Burn Out

And, even worse, some of you lucky people are still on vacation. I thought you would enjoy this:

New Year Resolutions for Pets

13. I do not need to suddenly stand straight up when I'm lying under the coffee table.

12. My head does not belong in the refrigerator.

11. I will no longer be beholden to the sound of the can opener.

10. Cats: Circulate a petition that sleeping become a juried competition in major animal shows.

9. Come to understand that cats are from Venus; dogs are from Mars.

8. Take time from busy schedule to stop and smell the behinds.

7. Hamster: Don't let them figure out I'm just a rat on steroids, or they'll flush me!

6. Get a bite in on that freak who gives me that shot every year.

5. Grow opposable thumb; break into pantry; decide for MYSELF how much food is *too* much.

4. Cats: Use new living room sofa as scratching post.

3. January 1st: Kill the sock! Must kill the sock!
January 2nd - December 31: Re-live victory over the sock.

2. The garbage collector is NOT stealing our stuff.

AND the Number 1 New Year's Resolutions Made by Pets...

1. I will NOT chase the stick until I see it LEAVE THE IDIOT'S HAND

Hopefully this will give your some inspiration for your New Years Resolutions!!

Today

I just wanted to let you know that we will be closed today. We hope you all had a lovely holiday yesterday and we wish you a Happy Kwanzaa today!

We will be back on Monday!

Merry Christmas

We wish you a very Merry Christmas!!!! Don't be a Grinch this holiday season!!!

Happy Hanukkah

The Festival of Lights begins today!!!

Happy Friday

I hope you all have a great Friday and a wonderful weekend.

More Letters to Santat

I love these stories! Put's me in the holiday spirit!

Chattanooga: Postal workers ‘help’ Santa with letters

Santa has some pretty high expectations to meet.

Just in the Chattanooga area, children have asked for their own personal elf, a girlfriend for daddy and plenty of puppies in addition to more conventional presents like Hannah Montana gear and video games.

“We’ve actually gotten one saying, ‘Don’t bring my brother anything; he doesn’t deserve anything,’” said Judy Mahaffey, customer service supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service General Mail Facility on Shallowford Road.

Ms. Mahaffey and two other postal service workers in Chattanooga are deputized as elves every Christmas when bundles of letters addressed to the North Pole with backward letters and drawn-on postage stamps start coming in.

“We’re Santa’s helpers. We make sure he gets his letters and make sure he gets the responses back,” she said.

Some of the letters written to Santa are repentant: One writer swore to never play with matches again if he could only have one particular gift.

Others are more demanding.

“He said, ‘Bring that fat boy or don’t come at all,’” Ms. Mahaffey said of one letter writer.

At times the letters tug at heart strings. Last year a letter came telling Santa the writer had been really, really good this year and beged him to not forget her — like he did the year before.

“They’re funny, they’re touching and some of them are actually sad,” Ms. Mahaffey said.

Ms. Mahaffey and others receive about 300 to 700 letters to Santa and see to it that those with return addresses get responses.

Debbie Birchfield, a clerk in Ms. Mahaffey’s office who helps with the letters, said the letters come in year-round. They’ve already gotten a letter written to the Easter Bunny for next year.

“You’ll get one here and there all year,” she said. “You wouldn’t think they’d even be thinking about Christmas in April.”

The writers use crayons, markers, pencil and drawing or stickers when words fail to get their point across. Some even include packets of sunflower seeds for the reindeer.

“You can tell the ones that are like 2 or 3 (years old),” said Rhonda Layne, the plant manager’s secretary who helps with the letters. “There are a lot of zeros.”

It’s usually easy to tell where the writers intended for their letters to go — whether it’s addressed to Santa, HoHo or simply the North Pole.

“We’re pretty sure that’s to Santa,” said Ms. Mahaffey, holding a letter with two Christmas trees, a big S and several illegible letters penciled on it.

Sometimes parents might wish the letters were a little less readable, according to Ms. Mahaffey who guessed parents didn’t read some of the letters. One of the letters asked for Santa to take care of the writer’s mother who had just “had surgery on her private part.”

“I think if parents knew what some of these letters said they’d be mortified,” Ms. Mahaffey said.

A Lovely Holiday Story

Postman Delivers On Santa Letters

Stonington mail carrier makes sure kids' requests get a response

Mail carrier Greg Kuflik delivers mail on his route in Stonington. When children send off their “Dear Santa” letters each December, they anxiously wait until Christmas to see if Santa thinks they have been naughty or nice. But for the past several years some lucky children who live just outside Stonington Borough have been finding letters from Santa in their mailbox a few days after they sent off their lists to the North Pole. A recent letter to two children on stationery featuring an angel whispering into the ear of St. Nick, and a return address on the envelope of a drawing of Santa's face, reads: ”It is wonderful to hear from you both. It is nice that you wrote me so soon, you know this is my busy time of the year! From what I know, you have been good at home for Mom & Dad, and are doing well at school. All these things are very important. As for what you kindly asked for on Christmas Day, I'm hard at work and I'm sure you won't be disappointed. I'll be visiting soon.” Santa P.S. The reindeer and elves send their greetings.” It's enough to keep some children believing. For the past several years, mail carrier Greg Kuflik has taken home the Santa letters left in the mailboxes on his route and crafted replies. A few days later, in the time it would take for the letters to get to the North Pole and back, he slips the letter from Santa into the children's mailboxes. In a separate plain envelope he includes the original letter, which some parents have not yet seen, so they know what their child has asked for. ”I love my job. I love talking to the people on my route,” he said. “I look at it as just a nice thing to do for the kids. They deserve the special attention.” He said some other carriers do the same thing. ”By no means am I special,” he said. Kuflik said it's nice when parents come outside when he delivers their mail and thank him. ”They say, 'I can't believe you did that.' It's nice to know they appreciate it,” he said. A native of Detroit, Kuflik first came to the area to serve aboard the USS Minneapolis-St. Paul and was stationed at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton. It was during that time that he met his wife, and today they have a 16-year-old daughter and a son in college. After serving four years in the Navy, he worked at several other jobs before joining the Postal Service a dozen years ago. He has had his current route for the past 3 1/2 years. Kuflik said his daughter helps him decipher some of the writing. In some cases, he may just receive a drawing. ”I'm not up on the latest electronic toys, so she helps with that. We have a good time at home doing it,” he said. Kuflik said he tries to personalizes each letter and includes information he knows about the children from their parents. ”I try not to say they're getting everything on the list,” he said laughing. “I don't want to put their parents in a difficult position.”

I love the title of this article!

Inauguration the 'Super Bowl' for
Portable Toilet Providers

WASHINGTON - For Ariel Gonzalez and her brother Raul, the owners of Jiffy Johns in Capitol Heights, Md., "[t]his is the Super Bowl of toilet events." The company has supplied portable toilets for many mega events in Washington, including the Million Man March, Fourths of July on the National Mall and previous inaugurations. Those events required between 250 and 300 units. The National Park Service hasn't publicly released any numbers for this coming Inauguration, but Jiffy Johns says it will be big.

"From the figures ... I was going over with them, they're estimating they're going to need at least 4,000 to 5,000 portable toilets," said Raul Gonzalez.

"I love being in the portable toilet business," added Ariel Gonzalez.

Jiffy Johns has a big inventory, but it says they have nowhere near enough for this event. The company is partnering with other providers that are part of national chains.

"They do have other offices in the country that they can get portable toilets from, have them trucked in here and we can work with them, delivering to different sites in the District, where the National Park Service would instruct us to place them," said Raul Gonzalez.

D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has called for both government and private buildings to open areas to the public 'for cold weather and access to restrooms.'

Some area churches, such as Capitol Hill United Methodist, also plan to stay open on Inauguration day.

"You can walk on in here," said Rev. Alisa Lasater. "We will have something warm for you to drink and a place where you can watch the festivities."

The National Park Service's Web site says it requires one portable toilet for every 300. Estimates for the number of inaugural attendees have ranged between 1.5 million and 5 million. According to the Park Service's requirements, the estimates would require between 5,000 and 17,000 units.

Welcome to Philadelphia

A Royal Flush, Inc. is pleased to announce the expansion of our company into the City of Philadelphia and the surrounding regions. As of the end of this year, we will be operating in Philadelphia under the name of ARF Rental Services, Inc. We are immensely proud of this expansion, as it will allow us to work with new and exciting customers and events. In addition, we are hoping that our current customers will be able to grow with us, in the form of construction jobs and new events in the Philadelphia market.

As an added bonus, we were just awarded a contract to provide portable restroom service to the City of Philadelphia. We are very excited to begin working with the city!!!

Inauguration

We left DC too soon...Just kidding.

Inaugural squeeze on the Mall?

The biggest crowd ever could gather on Jan. 20.

By Jeff Gammage

Officials in Washington expect up to four million people to attend the presidential inauguration, most of them gathered on the National Mall.

Think about that.

Four million is nearly seven times the population of the city itself.

It's more than twice the size of the crowd that cheered the Phillies World Series parade.

It's the number of people who have attended the Eagles' regular-season home games - for the last seven years. Except at the inauguration they'd be at the same place at the same time.

Even if that four million estimate is off, and some believe it's way off, the volume of humanity that promises to press onto the Mall and its environs Jan. 20 will present unusual challenges:

Like, what happens when a crowd that size needs to go to the bathroom?

Mesa Waste Services, a national toilet-rental cooperative, estimates the need at 40,240 Port-a-Potties, minimum.

A four-million-person inauguration would rank among the biggest crowds to have gathered anywhere at any time. It would easily be the all-time-largest assembly in the United States.

"I haven't found anything that big," said Temple University instructor Ira Rosen, who studies crowds and who has put on big public events through his company, Entertainment on Location. "When they say unprecedented, they really do mean it."

In 2007, 70 million Hindus descended on the Indian city of Allahabad for Ardh Kumbh Mela, the world's largest religious festival. Three years earlier, about 30 million Hindus traveled to Ujjain.

But those events lasted weeks. The largest crowd for a single event?

Four million attended the closing Catholic Mass at World Youth Day in Manila in the Philippines in 1995. Pope John Paul II spoke to three million in Poland in 1979, and between two million and four million attended his funeral in Rome in 2005. A crowd of 750,000 to 1.5 million celebrated Earth Day in New York in 1990.

The largest gathering in Washington is said to be the 1965 inauguration of Lyndon B. Johnson, which drew 1.2 million, according to newspaper articles. But those accounts were almost surely in error because Johnson was inaugurated on the east side of the Capitol, facing a sea of buildings, not the expanse of the Mall. The next-largest crowds were one million for the 1976 Bicentennial Celebration and 800,000 for the first inauguration of Bill Clinton.

During the fall campaign, President-elect Barack Obama routinely drew enormous crowds: 75,000 for a rally in Portland, Ore.; 84,000 to hear him accept the Democratic nomination in Denver; 200,000 in Chicago on the night of his election.

But Clark McPhail says there is no way four million people will be standing on the Mall on Inauguration Day.

And he should know.

'Junior high math'

McPhail, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Illinois and author of The Myth of the Madding Crowd, has spent decades studying ways to produce reliable estimates. His laboratories have ranged from 1960s civil-rights rallies to more recent events such as the March for Life, which he has studied for 25 years. He has attended several inaugurations.

He says that if people fill every available space on the Mall and its immediate surroundings on Jan. 20, the crowd will total about two million.

Tops.

"It's a junior high school math problem," McPhail says.

Traditionally, the people responsible for estimating crowds have been elected officials, police, journalists and event organizers. The big problem for them is that when viewed from street level or slightly above, such as from a stage, crowds appear much more densely packed than they are. And because the view narrows over distance - down a railroad track, for instance - the crowd can appear uniformly thick.

Actually, crowds are invariably thickest at the front, near the stage, and thinner on the sides and at the rear.

McPhail credits Herb Jacobs, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with creating the gold standard for divining trustworthy estimates.

Jacobs photographed rallies from overhead so he could count the people. By calculating the square footage of the demonstration site, the density of the crowd, and the percentage of the site that was occupied, he developed a measure that could be widely applied.

At an event where everyone is standing, Jacobs determined, people shoulder to shoulder at the front cover 21/2 square feet each. That space increases through the middle of the crowd, reaching a relatively roomy 71/2 square feet per person at the back.

On average, a person at a typical event covers about five square feet - slightly larger than two newspaper pages. That figure was adopted by the U.S. Park Police in Washington.

The Mall runs from Third Street near the Capitol to 14th Street near the Washington Monument, 4,261 feet by 615 feet. That's 2,620,515 square feet.

So, McPhail calculates, if everyone stands close together and the crowd is uniformly dense so that people at the back take up the same 21/2 square feet as people at the front, the Mall could support 1,048,206 people.

That's a long way from four million.

But McPhail is willing to go further. If you include the grounds of the Washington Monument, 1,875,000 square feet, and the Ellipse, 696,960 square feet, you could fit an additional 1,028,784 people.

Include also the 240,000 who'll get free tickets for the area closest to the swearing-in at the Capitol. Grand total: 2,316,990 people.

Cold calculation

Inauguration planners say they'll place giant TV screens on the Mall so people can see and hear what they're there for. Security will be strict. People near the Capitol won't be allowed to carry so much as an umbrella, even if it's raining.

"It's going to be like a major military maneuver," says Temple University tourism professor Michael Jackson.

He and McPhail share a big worry: The potential for freezing weather.

"When you continue to hear this number, four million, popping up again and again, people say, 'Let's go,' " McPhail says. "I hope the excitement of being there and watching this on a Jumbotron will offset the frostbitten toes."

More Fires

I found this article online. Somebody needs a hobby!

CHICAGO-- An 18-year-old man from Big Rock, Ill., allegedly set fire to a church bathroom stall and burned two portable toilets in a single night, police said.

Police in Cary, Ill., said Thomas J. Meehan allegedly set fire to a St. Peter and Paul Church bathroom stall on Oct. 10, before conducting similar arson with two portable toilets, the Daily Herald newspaper in Arlington Heights, Ill., reported Thursday.

Cary Police Detective Susan Ellis said an anonymous tip linked Meehan to the three fires, which caused limited damage and resulted in no injuries.

Ellis said Meehan allegedly admitted to the three acts of arson but offered no explanation for the motive for his crimes.

The Daily Herald said after being arrested last Friday on an unrelated criminal trespass charge, the suspected toilet arsonist was held on $70,000 bond pending a court appearance on the criminal charges.

Fred Lebow Movie

Fred's Statue in Central Park

Last night I watched the Fred Lebow Movie. It is a movie by Judd Ehrlich, that tells the story of Fred Lebow, the founder of the New York City Marathon.

The movie was amazing to watch and so moving. Because it was filmed after Fred's death, in 1994, the movie consists of interviews of friends, family members, members of the New York Road Runners and various winners of the NYC marathon, such as Grete Waitz and Alberto Salazar.

The movie chronicles how he started the marathon in Central Park. It was originally four laps of the park. In 1976, he was able to move the race, as it is today, to encompass all of the five boroughs. It was amazing to see how the marathon started with just 55 finishers in 1970 and became one of the world's largest marathons, with 37,899 finishers this year.

You can visit the movie's website by clicking here. Be sure to pick this one up, especially if you are interested in running.