I went to the store today and picked up one of those rolls of cookie dough (among other things). I figured we could use a treat, and I didn’t have time to make them from scratch. You know? They’re pretty good this way and WAY easier.
I didn’t space them out appropriately, so they all kind melted together, but I can pretend I was making a cookie cake, right?
They’re not as good as mine, but they’ll do. And it was awfully nice to have fresh warm cookies after dinner tonight.
I am going outside. I know – AGAIN. But it’s the first time today, so you know I’m not overdoing it. We wouldn’t want that.
I’m just going to sit in the backyard for a few minutes to read. The backyard that needs mowing and watering and weeding.
The front yard needs almost as much work, but I cleverly took a picture that shows the sidewalk and the neighbor’s yard up the street instead.
Some days, the whole getting up really early and immediately working thing is hard. It’s dark, it’s chilly, and I want to go back to bed. It’s going to get darker and chillier (not today – that would be apocalyptic). I need to start searching for a really good incentive. Right now, I’ve been awake for 40 minutes, contacts in for 20 of those minutes, and I’m about to start a 90-minute conference call. Maybe they won’t notice that I’m barely following along.
I was a little blue when I left the house for my run today, but being outside (or running or time or podcasts or ducks) lifted my mood. My run was chock full of what passes for excitement during the week. First, I freaked myself out. I ran on a new part of the path, and just as I entered this very cool tunnel of trees, where it got darker and atmospherically creepy, a character in my podcast started describing the time she saw a little boy at the end of her bed, and you know what? I’m not going to keep telling that story because I’m in bed now and I’m freaking myself out again. Trust me – it was scary and I was in a scary part of the trail that I didn’t know existed and now kind of want to avoid. Except it was cool.
Later, I saw a heron/stork-type bird (skinny legs, long beak) staring intently into the rapids of this little creek. He looked like he was fishing, like he might dart forward and grab a fish any second, so I stopped to watch. He gave me a look, went back to staring at the water. Gave me another look, stared at the water. After the third look, I left. I was cramping his style.
On my way home, I saw a family of four feeding dozens of ducks while leaning on the sign that describes the harmful effects of feeding the waterfowl. The ducks didn’t seem to mind.
That’s it. That’s my exciting afternoon. Don’t mock – I felt better.
I’d like to start by assuring you all that we did NOT watch anything scary Friday night, unless you consider Gilmore Girls scary. Christina loves that show, and I had never seen it, so we started it from the beginning and watched five episodes before getting sleepy enough to quit for the night. I like it, enough that I watched three more episodes this afternoon.
It’s funny – it’s somehow both exactly what I expected and not at all what I expected, and I am so far kind of surprised that it did as well as it did. It’s not bad, I don’t mean that. It’s just not a sweeping drama or a comedy or anything big. It’s quiet, and it’s kind of funny, and Lorelai Gilmore is occasionally irritating (but I expected that because that’s mostly how I feel about Lauren Graham), and it’s hilarious to see Sam Winchester in baby form with his brother’s name. And the town is ridiculously cute.
Anyway, my weekend has been at 30% Gilmore Girls, and that’s okay. It’s been raining off and on all day today – perfect weather for watching some light TV and finishing my book. Oh, I didn’t really like my book (Girls On Fire). Too much over the top teenage drama: violent, emotionally charged, and trying to be realistic but carrying the plot points too far so that I couldn’t just treat it like a thriller and go along for the ride. I’m glad it’s done, and my next book will be a silly novel about a woman on her 20s who protects the not-really-harmful monsters in NYC from humanity and sometimes has to protect NYC from the actually-harmful monsters. Much more fun.
Rough outline of today:
We’re walking over to meet everyone (it’s about a mile and a half away, and we don’t want to have to drive home), so we have to get moving, but I plan to have time to write tomorrow. I hope everyone else’s Saturday has been as pleasant as ours!
John and Will have a gig tonight, a late one, so I’m going to hang out with Christina, eat Indian food, drink wine, and maybe watch a movie or something. That is a perfect night out. Hey, it’s out for me – not my house.
I just have to make sure it’s not a scary movie (I don’t think that’ll be a problem) because the Black Tapes podcast keeps creeping me out. Just a little. And John will be out late, so I’ll probably be coming home to a dark, empty house. Happy movies for me!
I really don’t know why I keep getting this urge to watch scary movies. I don’t want to watch the gory ones. I want to watch the scary thrillers, or the ones that are just different enough, like Cabin in the Woods. But when even Stranger Things can get to me, it seems really stupid to want to watch more things like that. And seriously, Stranger Things isn’t scary. It just had that one thing that got stuck in my imagination.
So worst case scenario: I come home, it’s dark, and I’m scared. Solution: Watch Friends on Netflix downstairs with all the lights on until John comes home. That’ll do.
I was only disappointed by one thing at Disney World – we missed the Main Street Electrical Parade. They don’t do it every night anymore (and they didn’t do it the nights we were at the Magic Kingdom), and they’re moving it to only Disneyland after October 9th this year (thank you, Brian, for breaking the news to us). There’s a Fantasyland parade they do every day at 3pm, but it’s not the same. First of all, it’s at 3pm. Second of all, it’s mostly princesses and not much else (from what I remember, anyway). I mean, I liked it, and the mechanical Maleficent-as-dragon is pretty darn cool, but nothing can replace the Main Street Electrical Parade.
Oh no! I just looked it up, and it’s only going to Disneyland for a “limited-time encore engagement.” What the hell, Disney? You can’t retire that parade! Maybe there’s a petition I can sign.
We are grilling steaks tonight! So yeah – that delicious smell that’s wafting through the neighborhood? For once, it’s coming from OUR backyard. Dinner is corn (also grilled), steak, and a salad, and I am SO hungry right now.
This will be the…third(?) time we’ve used our little charcoal grill. Most of that is because it’s a PAIN. Next time, gas grill. Definitely. Forever. Or no grill. With as little use as this one has gotten (and with the rain that is supposed to arrive in a month), we could have gone without. Like we’ve gone without a microwave for over five months now. We hardly miss it. It would make a couple of things easier (like reheating leftovers), but that’s what ovens and stoves are for.
Anyway, dinner will be yum, and it’s almost done, and I have to go eat it.
Lately (and by lately, I mean all summer long), my workouts have been much more enjoyable because I’ve been listening to podcasts. I caught up on Welcome to Night Vale in mid-July, right before the live show, and then they went on hiatus, so I had to find something else. I like the Thrilling Adventure Hour very much (that’s their website, but I download them from here), but I’m not always in the mood for it, and John and I listen to Hello from the Magic Tavern together in the car, so I couldn’t use that. Someone I follow on Twitter was raving about The Bright Sessions, and it looked interesting, so I gave it a try. SO GOOD. The Bright Sessions is about a psychiatrist who only treats “unusual” patients. Her definition of “unusual” is right up my alley. I raced through both seasons, and I’m eagerly awaiting the beginning of the next season. Once I finished The Bright Sessions, to avoid withdrawal before the next season starts, I started another podcast called Ars Paradoxica, about a scientist who accidentally time travels to 1943 while she’s conducting an experiment to do something else. That one is ALSO great, and the only reason I’m not caught up is that I’m having trouble downloading episodes 12 through 16. Not everyone streams all the time, podcasters. So while I figure THAT out, I started a new one called The Black Tapes. It’s also a fictional podcast (all of my favorite podcasts are fiction ones), but it sounds the most like a real radio show. A journalist from a fictional NPR-type station starts a series about people with interesting jobs and gets pulled into investigating supernatural events. The person she works with debunks those events. It’s a little eerie, but it was the fourth one that really creeped me out (just yesterday), so I might limit myself to listening to those outside on sunny days only. I’ve heard those will be in short supply in another month.
There’s good stuff out there!
In the tiki tiki tiki tiki tiki room…
Stuck in my head forever. I’m not complaining.
Thursday I sat on the front step for 15 minutes. Friday I put on real clothes and went to the store for essentials. John was doing a wonderful job taking care of me, but he started to go downhill Thursday night and was heading towards misery all day Friday. Friday was when I took over as caregiver, and I have survived! Saturday, I attempted (successfully? Ish.) to exercise again because really – it had been over two weeks, and we can’t have that. Then today I actually went OUTSIDE and saw OTHER PEOPLE and, best of all, RODE A HORSE. More on that later.
So yeah, I think I’m improving, healthwise. I’m still congested, and I’m still trying to take it easy, but it’s no longer preventing me from doing normal things. Mostly.
We went into every gift shop in each of the three Disney parks we visited. That’s not an exaggeration – we went into every single one. For the most part, they carry the same stuff. Ride gift shops had some ride-specific toys and shirts, and the other shops had some park-specific stuff, but mostly they were the same. The World Showcase shops in Epcot had the most variation, and it was there I saw the most disturbing thing.
We were in fake Mexico, in the fake market inside. I leaned forward to look at an anklet, and then threw myself backwards when I got a closer look at the mannequin ankle it was displayed on. (I may have overreacted a bit, but it took me by surprise.)
It’s unnerving, right? Is it a heeled shoe with toes? A bare foot with a built-in heel? Makes me shudder just thinking about it. Someone miscalculated with this one.
Seriously, the Star Wars stuff was COOL. The fireworks that night ended with an enormous lightsaber pointing up into the sky. We all lost our minds.
If you stay at a Disney resort, they send you a Magic Band (which I have already shown you) that acts as your park ticket, your room key, and your FastPass (skipping long lines for rides), and if you link your credit card to it (and a PIN), you can use it to pay for EVERYTHING. (If you don’t stay at a resort, you can still buy one and use it the same way.) It was incredibly convenient, and it meant we could really pare down what we had to carry. It’s making me reconsider services like Google Wallet and Apple Pay. There are still security concerns, and I’d always have to have my phone, but I always DO have my phone. Obviously, there are still places that don’t use those services, so I couldn’t use it all the time, but I’m willing to bet it’ll become more and more common, just like it’s more and more common for even street vendors to take credit cards. It’s something I’m thinking about, anyway.
Summer appears to be over in the Pacific Northwest. (Actually, the forecast says we’re going to be in the low 80s this weekend, but go with me here.) We spent our last week of summer in Disney World, and when we got back to Portland on Friday, it was overcast and 70 degrees out. It was chillier than that (and rainy) on Saturday, and I think the season change shocked me into a cold. Or maybe it’s allergies. It’s hard to tell, but either way, I spent Labor Day on the couch with a sore throat and a box of kleenex. It looked beautiful out, but all I got was a look out the window.
I’m not feeling much better today, either, so now that I’m done with work for the day, it’s back to the couch I go. Maybe I can rest enough to feel like a human being tomorrow. I would like to go back outside (and enjoy it).
Earlier in our Epcot day, we had actual sunshine and clear skies (well, by midday it was clear – it went downhill from there). We got to the park mid-morning and headed straight to fake France for coffee and croissants.
After breakfast we went back to the front of the park (the fake-future part) to see Spaceship Earth and The Land and The Sea, where we found these guys.
Then we went back to the World Showcase and got rained on.
I mentioned the rain the day we went to Epcot, right? Well, I forgot I had proof on video. While everyone with any sense was hiding out under every structure with a roof in the park, one duck took the opportunity to scout for food.
We were hoping for a break in the rain so I could make a dash for the nearest bathroom. Over the course of our four days in Disney parks, I got very familiar with the bathrooms. Surprisingly, the one in fake Canada was the worst. Fake Morocco’s was great.
We spent 15 minutes in the hotel hot tub last night, and I can STILL smell the chlorine. Also, I’m still sweating. Today’s high didn’t even hit 70 degrees.
(Written on the plane, posted later)
At the end of most vacations, while I haven’t been happy for the vacation to end, I’ve been happy to be going home, or at least ready for it. Not so much with this one. I’m not sure what’s different. I’ve hardly thought about work, and I still have days before I have to, so I don’t think it’s work avoidance. I’m not reluctant to go back to Oregon – I like it there, and there are things I’m planning to do once we get home. As much as I love Disney World and I hated to leave it last night (even though it was POURING DOWN RAIN again during the fireworks and as we were leaving), we had done everything there was to do, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything by leaving it. But after fewer than four hours of sleep, a five-and-a-half hour cross-country flight, and a two-hour layover in LAX, I was fighting this urge to postpone our flight to Oregon for a couple of days and check out LA. Maybe it’s sleep deprivation. I overcame that urge and got on the plane to Portland, and we’re not even going straight home, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about anymore. Maybe it’s sleep deprivation. The plan is to spend the afternoon and night in Portland (bedtime will be SO early), meet up with Will and Christina in the morning, and go to this fairy/fantasy-themed festival thing tomorrow. I’m picturing a renaissance fair with fairies, but I don’t really know what it’ll be like. I’ll let you know how it goes. THEN we go home.
Oh, but now I’m on the plane to Portland, NOT sitting next to John because the airline surprised us with upgrades to first class. I have no idea why we got the upgrades, and I’m not complaining. I can manage being two rows away from him for less than three hours. American is my new favorite airline.
I usually have Disney songs within easy reach in my brain (most of the time it’s “Part of Your World” and “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes”), but for the last three days, I’ve been cycling through “Let It Go”, “Be Our Guest”, and “We Can Fly”. Can’t get rid of them. Not sure I want to (although “Let It Go” is free to go away whenever it wants). Maybe it’s sleep deprivation.
I probably won’t have time to write tomorrow, but hopefully I’ll be back to my regular posting schedule by Sunday. With pictures.