random animal note
When I was driving home from the train station last night, I saw an animal that I've never seen alive before - an opossum, the only marsupial native to the United States. It doesn't look like any other animal that lives around here, though - the long snout with white fur was the giveaway. I've seen them in pictures, and a couple of them that had been run over, but never a living one. They're actually pretty common, but they are very shy and nocturnal, so people don't see them very often unless they are deliberately looking for them. This one was out in the road, and fortunately this was a residential street and I wasn't going very fast, so I could drive around it. It barely moved.