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Published On: Jun 08, 2009 09:25 AM
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Published On: Jun 08, 2009 09:25 AM
Up, up and away...
Busy weekend.
We had a great time going down to Florida to see my niece graduate from High School. (Not only did she graduate from high school, but I think she completed enough college credits to get a couple of Masters degrees. Clearly she takes after her Uncle Alan in the brains department.) Soon she's off to college, with enough merit scholarships to pay down the national debt.
I've only been to Florida a couple times, but it always strikes me as a strange place. To my Michigan eyes the vegetation looks like something out of a Star Trek episode and the weather is odd and there are all these weird animals wandering around. For example, lizards. I don't think Michigan really has any lizards at all. We have reptiles (snakes), but that's about it, and except for the massasauga (the Michigan rattle snake, which is very rare and not even all that venomous and will almost always run away instead of strike) none of them are poisonous. We don't, for example, have little lizards that crawl into bed with you, nor do we have big lizards living in the nearest pond waiting to eat you (never smile at a crocodile). Nor do we have bugs that, when splattered on your car, contain ichor that will eat through the paint of your car (so-called "love bugs"). We have black bears, but they'll run away if you yell at them. We have wolves, but no one ever sees them. We don't have panthers. We don't have dangerous herds of wild hogs.
We have deer. We have robins. We have squirrels. Meh.
Let me put it this way ... no one would ever choose Michigan to go on a safari.
And the weather? Usually when we go somewhere requiring a rental car we get the funnest thing we can find. Convertibles, for example. Convertibles aren't all that useful when it rains every 15 minutes.
Florida is like Land of the Lost without the laugh track.
What's funny is that we went down there and stayed at Disney but never went into the parks (we got a discount on the hotel). What's even more amusing is that it was, apparently, Gay Days at Disney and we didn't even know it. So we flew all the way to Orlando for the entire weekend, on Gay Days, and didn't even see the parks. We didn't see any gays either. (I suspect Gay Days is a hoax cooked up by Disney to increase tourism amongst those with disposable income.) Oh well. Even if we had known, I doubt we'd have gone into the parks, anyway. We like roller coasters of which there are only a couple, and Disney has always seemed two steps creepier than Stepford to both Brian and me. Plus it's like Amazon hot down there, and who wants to wander around a theme park when the souls of your shoes are melting into the pavement? (BTW, my insider information informs me that the restaurants at Disney stock up on salad during Gay Days, and that the only other obvious difference is that the visitors to the parks tend to be much more polite. Apparently it's a popular weekend to work.)
Insert rant about air travel here. I keep trying to remind myself when I fly that I really should be spending the entire time with my hands in the air shouting "Wheeeeee!!!!!" given that I'm sitting in a tin can with 200 other people doing something that is physically impossible for us, but that we've figured out how to do through sheer force of will, and that anything else on the planet that can do this took millions of years of evolution at the cost of all their brains and thus their chances of ever inventing an iPhone. But it's hard to get that worked up about the experience when I'm totally surrounded by fat midwesterners, sitting there like Custer at the Little Big Horn but if the natives had cottage cheese thighs and two bags of cheesy poofs, with one in front of me leaning back far enough to do dental work (that molar should really come out, sir), and some old broad sitting behind me kicking my chair every 5 minutes (She was 2'5" tall. WTF?!), leaving me exactly 1.5 square inches of seat space, wishing I'd have been able to take a pocket knife onto the plane so I could amputate my legs above the knee so that I'd at least be spared the pain of having my knee caps crushed into powder. (I'm not limber enough to chew off my own legs, but I contemplated it for most of the flight.)
Breathe.
Anyway, while we were down there we went to see UP. A beautiful movie visually, and everything else about the movie, the characters, the acting, the dialogue, etc. was great. My highest recommendation: Just go see it. Now. In 3D if possible.
We had a great time going down to Florida to see my niece graduate from High School. (Not only did she graduate from high school, but I think she completed enough college credits to get a couple of Masters degrees. Clearly she takes after her Uncle Alan in the brains department.) Soon she's off to college, with enough merit scholarships to pay down the national debt.
I've only been to Florida a couple times, but it always strikes me as a strange place. To my Michigan eyes the vegetation looks like something out of a Star Trek episode and the weather is odd and there are all these weird animals wandering around. For example, lizards. I don't think Michigan really has any lizards at all. We have reptiles (snakes), but that's about it, and except for the massasauga (the Michigan rattle snake, which is very rare and not even all that venomous and will almost always run away instead of strike) none of them are poisonous. We don't, for example, have little lizards that crawl into bed with you, nor do we have big lizards living in the nearest pond waiting to eat you (never smile at a crocodile). Nor do we have bugs that, when splattered on your car, contain ichor that will eat through the paint of your car (so-called "love bugs"). We have black bears, but they'll run away if you yell at them. We have wolves, but no one ever sees them. We don't have panthers. We don't have dangerous herds of wild hogs.
We have deer. We have robins. We have squirrels. Meh.
Let me put it this way ... no one would ever choose Michigan to go on a safari.
And the weather? Usually when we go somewhere requiring a rental car we get the funnest thing we can find. Convertibles, for example. Convertibles aren't all that useful when it rains every 15 minutes.
Florida is like Land of the Lost without the laugh track.
What's funny is that we went down there and stayed at Disney but never went into the parks (we got a discount on the hotel). What's even more amusing is that it was, apparently, Gay Days at Disney and we didn't even know it. So we flew all the way to Orlando for the entire weekend, on Gay Days, and didn't even see the parks. We didn't see any gays either. (I suspect Gay Days is a hoax cooked up by Disney to increase tourism amongst those with disposable income.) Oh well. Even if we had known, I doubt we'd have gone into the parks, anyway. We like roller coasters of which there are only a couple, and Disney has always seemed two steps creepier than Stepford to both Brian and me. Plus it's like Amazon hot down there, and who wants to wander around a theme park when the souls of your shoes are melting into the pavement? (BTW, my insider information informs me that the restaurants at Disney stock up on salad during Gay Days, and that the only other obvious difference is that the visitors to the parks tend to be much more polite. Apparently it's a popular weekend to work.)
Insert rant about air travel here. I keep trying to remind myself when I fly that I really should be spending the entire time with my hands in the air shouting "Wheeeeee!!!!!" given that I'm sitting in a tin can with 200 other people doing something that is physically impossible for us, but that we've figured out how to do through sheer force of will, and that anything else on the planet that can do this took millions of years of evolution at the cost of all their brains and thus their chances of ever inventing an iPhone. But it's hard to get that worked up about the experience when I'm totally surrounded by fat midwesterners, sitting there like Custer at the Little Big Horn but if the natives had cottage cheese thighs and two bags of cheesy poofs, with one in front of me leaning back far enough to do dental work (that molar should really come out, sir), and some old broad sitting behind me kicking my chair every 5 minutes (She was 2'5" tall. WTF?!), leaving me exactly 1.5 square inches of seat space, wishing I'd have been able to take a pocket knife onto the plane so I could amputate my legs above the knee so that I'd at least be spared the pain of having my knee caps crushed into powder. (I'm not limber enough to chew off my own legs, but I contemplated it for most of the flight.)
Breathe.
Anyway, while we were down there we went to see UP. A beautiful movie visually, and everything else about the movie, the characters, the acting, the dialogue, etc. was great. My highest recommendation: Just go see it. Now. In 3D if possible.
Posted: Mon - June 8, 2009 at 09:25 AM