Oy! Rish continues his massive report about his trip to Europe, including his time in England, jetlag, the Rish-eating turnstile, Jack the Ripper, the exploding Coke Zero, and the Phantom Manor (cue Vincent Price laugh).
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Logo by Gino "EuroStrip" Moretto.
Day 9
I think I'm pretty good at blogging, and pretty good at taking pictures. What I'm not good at is sitting down and uploading my pictures and publishing my blog. Not sure why you'd care about that, since I sure don't.
I haven't really gone into the amount of money Jeff has been spending on this trip. It boggles the mind, really. If I had to guess, he's spent on these two weeks approximately what I make in six months. Maybe that's an exaggeration, so let's say it's what I make in 150 days. For example, we went to the Chicago Steakhouse to eat dinner yesterday, and Jeff said, "This is our only meal today, so order whatever you want." I looked for something cheap, but the cheapest meal on the menu cost abount what I typically spend on food in a week. And Jeff paid for all three of us.* Does food taste better when paid for by someone else? Maybe, but I always feel guilty about it, and each day, something new (like him buying me a five dollar Coke Zero) makes me feel guilty.
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| Sunrise outside the window of our hotel room. |
This was main Disneyland Paris day for us, where he told me to go on as many rides as I can, because tomorrow we'll be back in Paris. Jeff's favorite ride at Disneyland is the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, which I believe no longer exists anywhere else (I had gone on it once, back in 2002 or so, when the California Adventure still had it). It's one of those Take You Up In The Air And Then Drop You rides, which scare the ever-lovin' crap out of me, but Jeff was determined to go, and I was just as determined not to be a spoilsport.
The line was very twisty, but since it was first thing in the morning, we didn't have to wait long. Rod Serling's speech was all in French, but I vaguely remembered the English version two decades back (which feels more like four years, by the way). We got on the elevator, and . . . basically, my body thought that it was dying the whole three or four minutes it was in it. My brain knew it was supposed to be a fun ride, but the rest of my body didn't buy the pitch. Jeff loves it, but I preferred waking up in London with a sore throat a couple of days before.
The second ride we lined up for was the Avengers one, a roller coaster they put in just recently (actually, it used to be an Aerosmith ride, but they refitted). And it was fun, a roller coaster in the dark with projected videos of Iron Man and Captain Marvel in it, but I'd have liked it better with only a half hour wait.
After that, it was my idea to get in the line for the Spider-man ride, which is only a couple of months old, because I mis-read the sign out front as only having a forty minute wait time** (it turned out to be a forty minute wait for single riders, but an interminable one for everybody else). There was a maze, as usual, that hardly ever moved, and a couple of posters to look at (exactly half in French and half in English), but nothing else. So, not to bury the lead, but we spent the whole morning and into the afternoon in line for it. I've heard people talk about a two or three hour line at Disneyland before, but never experienced it before today. They played Michael Giacchino's Spidey theme from speakers all around us, but after an hour or two, we were in Hell. I used to call Giacchino the John Williams of Tomorrow, but now I frankly have to assassinate him. Sorry, Mike.
The Spidey ride, when we finally rode on it in early 2024, wasn't a ride at all. It was a video game on a moving vehicle. But since I'd not been on one of those before, I thought it was rad. There was a man in the group before us who was pulled away from his family and forced to sit with us (there wasn't room in the previous car), and as protest, he sat there scowling the whole ride. After each level/room, the screen would flash our individual scores, and then our team score, and he consistently got zero, even at the end, because he was unwilling to play the game. Can you imagine waiting nearly three hours to go on a ride, and then deliberately ignoring it when you finally got on it?
After that, all the other lines were bearable, if only by comparison. We went on Pirates of the Carribean, which was very different from how I remembered it in Anaheim (the layout is different, beyond how they recently Depped it up), Star Tours (our planet was Naboo, and I gladly would've gone a few more times to see which other worlds we got, but was outvoted), Phantom Manor again (the ride shut down on us again--like it did last night--but this time, it was right in front of one of the big setpieces, and we were able to take more of it in), Buzz Lightyear, Indiana Jones during the day (not so impressive, really), and Hyperspace Mountain, which was just Space Mountain retrofitted to be Star Warsy (actually, it was worse than that, as this used to be a Jules Verne-inspired retro sci-fi flight to the moon ride before it got homogenized). There was a malfunction on Hyperspace Mountain and it slammed to a stop right before the end, bashing my head pretty good in the process. I didn't hear anybody else complaining, but overall, I noticed the rides were a bit more potentially-deadly here than back home (heck, everything was, from giant drop-offs beside trains to boats where you were expected to simply jump across to dry land). The only ride (except for the kiddie ones) we didn't manage to get on was Big Thunder Mountain, but the line was always too long every time we made our way over there.
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| Can't really blame 'em, though. |
I had heard about the Droid Factory they have at Disney parks outside Star Tours, and put together my own astromech droid. Despite them not having the matching color for the legs (something that should've been a deal-breaker, now that I think about it), I bought one each day, despite the fact that they let kids and adults build them for free, and then an employee comes by and separates all the pieces again if you're not going to buy it. Huh.
We ate at yet another overpriced restaurant, this one inside Disneyland, and I discovered that they had renamed their menu items in honor of Halloween. One of the items they were selling was called Evil Burger (Burger Des Tenebres). This pleased me to no end, and I even took two pictures of the sign (neither one coming out well) to remember it by.
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| Y'know, any hamburger can be an evil burger with enough jalapeños on it. |
I wish I were better at this blogging, but man, it's hard to remember every little funny or interesting, moving or surprising thing from each day. A clue to the difficulty of this might be that we're weeks later in real time and I'm still working on it. Sigh.
Toward the end of the night, a group of teens was cutting in line ahead of us, and Jeff shouted, "Oy! Get to the back of the line!" They turned to tell him off, but saw he was walking with a cane, and decided that if he could walk all the way to the ride's entrance, then they could too (or they worried he would whack them with it . . . I know I would).
We stayed as late as we could stand it, but it's tiring to stand in lines, ride rides, and walk around the second-largest Disney park in the world. Jeff and Emily are on different time schedules than I am, so nine o'clock is pretty late to them. We'd have an hour or so the next morning to buy whatever we still hadn't gotten yet before it was time to check out of the hotel, hit the bus to the train station, and go back to Paris, before going back to Germany.
Emily took this picture while we were in line for Phantom Manor, and it's really rad.
*He told me today, "I keep forgetting that when I retire in a year and a half, you're not also retiring." In fact, I'll still have to work until the day I die, or shortly thereafter.
**English I can read and understand, French I can read but not understand the language, but German I can neither read nor make sense of. I wonder how useful I will be when we go to Italy, since I've been pretty useless throughout this trip. God, did I talk about this earlier? I have been so dependant on Jeff and Emily to get me around and communicate for me, that I have pretty much reverted to childhood, just following them and hoping they will book train rides and make decisions and take me by the hand and explain anything I might need to know on my own. More on that later, if I remember.
Well, when it did, I found a puddle inside the tray: the Coke Zero had seemingly leaked and/or exploded inside the backpack. This was unfortunate and did not please me, despite what you would guess. I carried my more-than-dripping backpack to the nearest trash can and emptied it as best I could into it. A row or two away, an employee was cleaning up the floor where someone had dropped their coffee cup, and when I asked her for some paper towels, Jeff looked at me like I had decided to start beefing my stroganoff there in the terminal. That also did not please me.
Eventually, I made it through customs and found a restroom where I could try to clean out my backpack. They had no paper towels there (which again, unfortunate), but I held the bag open in front of the air hand dryers over and over again as their five second cycles ended and started again. Yippee.
Finally, I thought I had it dry enough, but after we stood to get on the train to Paris, I noticed yet another unsightly puddle where my bag had sat. Happy Halloween.
Now we're leaving England and on our way to Paris. The celebrity of this visit, sleeping next to Emily, is Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff. I've never liked her or found her very attractive, but this look-alike is nice.
The ride was uneventful, but when we got to Paris rail station, I didn't know how to do things, and had a bit of an incident because of it. So, in England they have these things called Oyster cards, where you put money on a card, and swipe the card going into and out of the Underground stations (it also works on the big double-decker buses too). It is pretty brilliant, and supremely useful. In Paris, you have to buy your ticket from a little kiosk, then feed that ticket (about the size of a movie stub back in the day) into a machine that eats it and spits it out at the top. Emily explained it to me, but when we were going through a checkpoint, I expected the ticket to come out where I'd inserted it, not at the top, so while I looked for it, the five or six seconds they give you to get through the gate were counting down, so when I tried to go through, the doors closed on me. Literally, I was stuck in there, with my shoulder, arm, and backpack on one side of the entrance and the rest of me on the other.
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| The offending ticket. |
Now, thank God Jeff and Emily were there with me, because Jeff used his hands to pry the doors open again, while Emily pulled my backpack inside, or I would've been stuck there, calling for help in a language nobody around me understood. It bothered me for, oh, the next hour, thinking about it. And now it's bothered me again . . . just like those damned self-closing doors in Cloud City bothered me as a little kid, wondering what would happen if you waited just a second too long stepping through one of them. Fudge, now I'm thinking of old people or fat people or little kids going through, not knowing you have a very short time limit to get through the gates, and getting stuck, caught, or smashed in there like a mouse in a trap. Shudder.
Eventually, we took a subterranean train to take us to Chessy, which I believe was the city Disneyland is in. It went fast, up and down, underground and over it. I've been on more trains this week than I have my whole life leading up to this trip. An old beggar lady (she might have been a nun, I'm not judging) approached me on the train for a hand-out, and it was the first time that had happened this trip. I would be approached twice more on that same train (once by a child, once by a twenty-something kid), but I find it odd that there were only beggars in Paris, of all the places we went (there were bullshit artists in Venice, but that ain't the same thing).
We were staying in the Hotel New York, which Jeff had stayed in before and said I would like because it had--get this--a Marvel Comics theme. And man, it was not subtle. There were paintings everywhere, decor, memorabilia, and life-sized statues of Iron Man (three inside and one outside).
We had to go through Security to get in the building (which was unusual), and our room was on the Captain America floor, with a huge mural outside the elevator doors (the floor above us was dedicated to Thor).
This ain't a great picture (or even good), but the soap was molded into the shape of the Avengers logo.
There are two Disney parks, just like in Anaheim, and we had those tickets where you could go to either one. They had been there a bunch of times, so the only thing they hadn't been on were the two Marvel rides, built since their last visit.
Before we went into the park, Jeff wanted to eat (pretty much the default mode for him), and proposed we go to the big steakhouse beside the park. But I was worried about the prices, and Jeff said, "Don't worry, I got it." That was super generous, in a week of unbelievable generosity, but man, when I saw the prices . . . I felt dirty about it. I'm talking: putting on your big sister's bra and prancing around in front of her mirror-level dirty.* This effing place was so expensive that when I asked for ketchup, they provided me with a little personal two Euro bottle, that was just for me.
The Disney parks were open, and the crowds were very, very large, which (it turned out) was due to it being a fall break at many schools in the European Union, and also Halloween Day. When leaving London and entering Paris, I had waved at and/or congratulated anyone I saw wearing a costume, but by the time we'd walked through the strip mall of Disney shops outside the parks, I had stopped doing so--there were just too many.
I have to tip my hat to the thousands of European souls that liked Halloween enough to go somewhere to collectively celebrate it, but it did make for a lot of congestion, especially trying to get into the park's gates, and anywhere there were rides. We went into Disneyland, and headed toward Phantom Manor, and just before we got there, a huge spider was crossing the cobblestone sidewalk, and the attendees were shrieking and pointing at it. It was not quite tarantula-sized, but it was bigger than any spider I've run into outside of the desert. I took it as a cool Halloween omen . . . until Jeff said that somebody was bound to stomp on it.
We made our way to the Phantom Manor, where the line was insanely long (understandably so, considering the date). But that's what we were there for.
I had wanted to see Phantom Manor for years, and I had plenty of time to wait, as the line snaked all around the property, and we watched those with the new Fastpass-equivalents bypass all of us to go on ahead (this was a delightful scam wherein those willing to pay nine Euros FOR EACH RIDE could skip the line and enter on the other side, when, honestly, part of going to parks like this is standing in the line . . . heck, it may be an integral part). It's very similar to Disneyland's The Haunted Mansion, but all in French--just like all the rides there--but with a more morbid, actively scary theme to it.
Basically, Phantom Manor has a story to it, about a beautiful young woman named Melanie, whose evil father (I didn't realize he was the father on the ride, I just figured he was basically me) keeps her from her interested male suitors, and locks her away in a haunted house until she gives in to despair and essentially becomes a ghost. The Phantom is a very coolly-designed ghost that shows up multiple times during the ride, and was initially voiced by Vincent Price, only to have all that dropped when French officials insisted the dialogue be in French instead of English.
A couple of years ago, however, they came up with a way to have their gâteau and eat it too by having one line in English, followed by one line in French, and they restored Vincent Price's narration, at least in part.
It has a lot of the Anaheim park's charming characters, like the singing busts and Madame Leota, but at the beginning, you get this awesome scene of the broken-hearted bride standing by a huge window with a raging storm outside, and at the end, there are all these rotting corpses popping up and reaching for you in a delightfully non-kid-friendly way.
I've mentioned that I haven't written anything but this (damned) blog on my Eurotrip, but at the end of the ride, when the ghost of Melanie the Bride appeared and said (in English and French), "Will YOU marry me?" it really made me want to write a scary story where that exact thing happens.
I mentioned congestion in the park before, and while it did exist, it was in certain parts of the park, like where the parade or fireworks were, but in other spots, there was virtually nobody. We went into the section where the Indiana Jones ride was, and the sign said the wait was thirty minutes, so we went inside. The wait wasn't thirty minutes, though . . . it was nothing. There was literally no line for Indiana Jones et le Temple du Peril, but there were also no lights once you got on it. So, we went on an outdoor rollercoaster in the dark, cool night, and then got off, went around, and got on it again. It's a fun coaster, but it didn't even have John Williams music playing on it, so it didn't feel like Indy Jones in any way to me. We did it three times (still with zero line) until Jeff said he couldn't stand it anymore, then we walked through the COCO-decorated Mexican Afterlife portion of the park, and then . . . well, nothing.
They seemed to be closing early (to me, anyway, I don't know what was really going on), but while the fireworks went off over Sleeping Beauty's castle, a mass exodus out of the park was created by the employees, and oddly, instead of making everyone go out through the main gates, they opened the backstage portions of the park where only employees are allowed, and that's how we left Disneyland.**
The other park, Walt Disney Studios Park, was open an hour later, and we went inside, but only to look at the souvenir shops, which all had the same things for sale, and do battle with the crowds, all of whom had the same idea as us.
They had these big inflatable ghosts outside the park, and Emily wanted to take a picture with them, but the crowds were thick enough we told ourselves we'd hit it up the next day, when the crowds were thinner. But the next day, they were gone.
Had they ever truly been there to begin with?
We made our way back to the New York Hotel, which was about a half mile away, but Jeff was grateful it wasn't the hotel he'd stayed in the first time, which was another mile down the road.
But wait, there's more!
*Jeff spent on this one meal what I spend in an entire week on food.
**It may sound cool that we got to go through a section nobody gets to go through, but it was just trailers and tables and the backs of attractions, and felt like we were walking behind a Walmart or something.
Last week, I woke up with no internet. I couldn't get my laptop to connect, no matter what I tried. My brother-in-law was watching football in the living room, so our cable wasn't out (I assume they have the same source), and I restarted my laptop, in case that would fix it, but it didn't. So, I went down to the basement and unplugged the router for a few seconds, then plugged it back in. And my laptop connected.
Well, that's the case right now. I woke up and my laptop had turned off during the night (no big deal, except that all the audio files I had been editing last night were closed, and they took about ten minutes to reload (and every fifth time or so, one will become corrupted and I'll have to start over on it), and I can't connect to the net. My morning alarm will go off in five minutes, and I guess I'll get up, get showered, and try to make something of myself . . . at long last.
Sit-ups Today: 150
Sit-ups In January: 2305
I didn't much want to go hiking today. That ship has sailed. But I believe I set it as one of my goals for the year, like last year, and the sun was shining today.
I didn't spend much time up there. I should have been eager to hike around (maybe even record a Tales of eBay Horror video about the guy who said I sent him a broken item, then claimed it hadn't arrived), but I pretty much put on a forty minute YouTube video on my phone, listened to it, and when it was done, I was ready to go.
Push-ups Today: 111
Push-ups In January: 2189
As far as "Hatchling" goes, I read half of Chapter 31 tonight (of 33 chapters), and found a place where I could split it into two. Then I stopped, as I was out of recording space. But I had been thinking of a bit I wished I had written earlier in the story, so I stayed sitting and briefly typed up the scene. Then I found a place for it in the narrative, inserted it, and fleshed it out a little so it could be its own (short) chapter. And that makes what I recorded tonight Chapter 32 (of 34). I wish I had the ambition of just sitting at the desk, turning on the recorder, and going all the way through to the end of the book. Then I'd publish it and move on (at least until these Daily Outcasts are finished, then I'd have to finish the audio editing and see if I couldn't publish that version as well). I recall a year ago saying that 2021 would be the year of me publishing things, and I published almost nothing. Instead, I wrote and blogged, but when I stop doing that in February, there will be nothing holding me back. Right?
Words Today: 1138 (like that terrible George Lucas movie!)
Words In January:13,483
I've decided to stop blogging on the thirty-first, so this will be the last time you hear me (read me) say that I hate that the library closes three hours early on Saturdays. It was pretty much packed with people today, maybe a record, and I could have finished "The Dark Gift" if I'd been more dedicated.*
Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In January: 2155
Tonight was Saturday, my eleven year old nephew didn't want to go to bed, and I told him he could stay up and watch "Saturday Night Live" with me. It was something my own uncle did with me from when I was about eight years old (I would struggle soooooooo hard to make it to 11:30, and end up falling asleep five minutes in), but my sister told me my nephew had to go to bed. "But he and I are going to watch THE BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW," I whined.
"Absolutely not!" she said, which was funnier than my joke suggestion.
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| ** |
"But what about ENCANTO?" I asked. "I need to find out why they don't talk about Bruno."
She said okay, so we sat down and started watching that. And I gotta say, it was fantastic, right up there with the best Disney has produced, and I was crying within ten minutes, those lovely flowing tears that drip constantly onto my shirt and ensure I'll be sleeping alone for the rest of my days. I had heard pretty good things about the movie, but the only thing people said that was great about it was the songs, and the sound on the television was bad enough I couldn't really understand the lyrics (my brother-in-law put one of those soundbars in to fix that problem, but I never turn it on, since I only watch the TV at night).
The animation was astounding good, the character designs were unique and hyper-detailed, the color palate was so broad and wild it made me think I'd been licking toads again, and the storyline was solid and compelling from the fudgin' beginning. Wow.
And then the movie just ended. I swear I hadn't fallen asleep (I had run on the treadmill and told myself I would do double the push-ups and sit-ups than I usually do--only managed half my goal), but there was all this disaster, all this problem, and then, everything was fine. I somehow missed how they fixed everything, and how Mirabel used her gift of determination to restore everyone's magical gifts. I find that puzzling.
Push-ups Today: 200
Push-ups In January: 2078
Well, I probably listened to "We Don't Talk About Bruno" twenty times on Sunday. Guess it's true what they say.
Words Today: 669
Words In January: 12,345 (wow, look at that--12345!)
*Yeah, yeah, you could say that about everything.
**I did end up watching this movie a couple of nights later, but it was very weak and mostly boring.
So, back to the cabin again. I believe I complained about fall having arrived so fast the last time I was here. Even more so now, not only have the leaves changed their colors up here (there are still some green leaves, maybe 15% of the trees have not yet changed), but more than half of the trees are now completely bare, the leaves having fallen in the week since I was here. Things look dead, the grass is brown, the water at the lake looks shrunken and sad, and there is a chill in the air that made it difficult to do my run on the dam, much less stand in the spot with a phone signal and check my messages (I had zero text messages, always an unhappy discovery).
It's probably something that I have said before, but summers are very short way up here in the mountains. There is probably a three week stretch every summer where it gets hot enough up here to open the windows and leave them open at night (and that's still only on days when it's a hundred degrees or so back home), and of course, winter lasts a lot longer up here. It was cold enough that I put a long sleeved shirt on over my long sleeved shirt once I got here, and didn't take my shoes off for a couple of hours.
I went outside and gathered ten logs for the fire (there are downed trees that my brother cut down earlier this summer, and though he chainsawed them into stove-sized lengths, they hadn't been collected or stacked), and then grabbed a bucket and filled it with kindling--branches and pieces of bark that would easily burn and, hopefully, start a fire that wouldn't just go out in two minutes like mine usually do.
To my surprise, once it started up, it never went out, burning as long as I continued to feed the flames, and I even went out and filled the bucket with more kindling right before it got dark. It took a long while to get the temperature in here up, though (I think it had gone from 49 to 55 an hour after I got the fire going), but once the logs started to burn, it warmed right up so well that, when the fire burned out sometime in the dark of night, it only dropped a few degrees by the morning.
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In September: 3185
I've been reading a really thick biography on Walt Disney the last few weeks, and it has been kind of thrilling, but also very, very frustrating. The author clearly puts you on the side of Disney (and his studio)*, and you root for him, want him to succeed, want the cash to come pouring in. But the man was apparently so terrible with money, so unconcerned with the bottom line and budgets, and such an irresponsible perfectionist, that after the first three or four times that something ends up costing way more than it was supposed to (sometimes more than double) or doesn't come out when it was planned to (sometimes by more than a year, and in the case of BAMBI, more than three years), you start to shake your head and see the same crazy pattern repeating.
The worst, in my mind, was Walt's obsession with an animated concert feature film about classical music, which he put all his focus on, despite having other projects much further along and closer to completion. The weeks he works and reworks and imagines and reimagines what will be called FANTASIA are so frustrating, that it starts to feel like one of those mad scientist pictures where the creation no longer can be considered noble or an understandable scientific endeavor, but is the textbook definition of a monster.
When FANTASIA was finally completed, it clocked in at two hours and five minutes long, and that's completed hand-drawn animation with effects (they ended up cutting out a half hour or so of that footage when it hit wide release). It's a movie celebrating classical music with no real story, an active effort to get away from narrative and be more artsy, and Roy Disney (the financial half of the company) keeps having to borrow more and more money to get it finished. Walt's studio keeps teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, only staying alive due to bank loans and Mickey Mouse merchandise . . . and he then puts all his eggs in the FANTASIA basket. Because of stuff like that, the book reads like a horror novel.**
Sorry to keep going on about the book, but I don't have Big Anklevich to call and bother, telling him crazy bits of trivia and sharing Walt's triumph with SNOW WHITE with him. But it's particularly fascinating to see projects that the Disney company spends weeks or months developing (like a Rold Dahl collaboration about gremlins, or a film with Salvador Dali exploring surrealism) that never came out, despite the thousands of manhours dedicated to them.
Push-ups Today: 111
Push-ups In September: 3633
As far as writing goes, sigh. I've been working on this super quick Will Choner follow-up story (I was considering calling it "The Case of the Grandma's Bracelet" or maybe something more alliterative, like "The Case of the Beauty's Bracelet"), that I could have finished at any time, but instead have only contributed a couple of paragraphs to here and there, at the end of long days. In the heyday of my daily writing, I'd have completed it in less than a week, but here we are, dipping our foot in October, and it's not quite done.
Even so, I had hoped that hanging out with Will and Beth again might give me the energy to go back to the story I was writing last year (the last time I touched it was November 28th), in which they create a sort of detective agency to find missing items. While it would be good to finish something I started and abandoned (right, Mister Disney?), I'd love nothing more than to bang out a couple of really short stories based on website prompts or Marshal Latham suggestions, getting them finished in two or three days each.
To make matters worse, I went out and shoveled gravel for a little while, and while doing so, I got this idea for a Dead & Breakfast Christmas story (I tend to write a holiday tale every year, and this should be no exception), where the staff (which ought to include housekeepers, janitors, and the handyman that we've never really met before) get together and tell of the experiences they've had there. I sat down after my run and jotted down everything that had popped into my head while I was shoveling, but I don't know if I'll end up writing it.*** It's one of those projects where I need one more good idea--like a cool ending or a twist or something big to work toward--and I could jump into it and start writing.
Words Today: 331
Words In September: 19,935
*There is the lengthy section with Walt versus his striking animators who want a union and better pay and working hours, and only in that chapter does the author paint Walt as less than noble, less than sympathetic.
**Of course, I hate FANTASIA. I have always been baffled and bored by it, so I knew from the outset that it was going to crash and burn. If you're a big fan, maybe you'd view its development as far less damning, though it's impossible to justify its budget or think it was bound to succeed (where even the excellent PINOCCHIO failed to recoup its budget by almost a million dollars--and this was back when a Disney animated feature was budgeted at $900,000 or so).
***I establish in "Meet the New Clerk, Same As the Old Clerk," that Meeshelle has never worked there at night since being rehired until the last Saturday in December), and I don't want to contradict that. Can she have attended a holiday party, say, from 5:30pm to 7:30pm, a week before, and not have mentioned it in "Last Friday In December?"
I didn't mention it yesterday, but I took a little nap in the afternoon when I shouldn't have, just closed my eyes "for a minute," and when I opened them, over an hour had passed. It was not something I was proud of . . . but today, while driving toward the cabin, I didn't get sleepy even once, and that was new.
Part of me says, I need to not be lazy EVER, I need to stretch myself further and work harder and be better. But another part says, "See, you took a nap yesterday, and now that you're at the cabin today, you'll make better use of your time. So the nap was a good thing." Maybe both are right.
Sit-ups Today: 250 (I wanted to give the sit-ups a healthy head start this month)
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| I did a search for "DSLR Camera," and this was among the pictures that came up. Not sure why I picked this one, though. |
It is my brother's rifle, but just left where anybody could see it, or indeed, grab it.** Well, I picked it up, just to see if it was loaded--it was--and took aim at a tree stump just past the shed where we keep the shovels and the emergency generator. I thought I'd see if I could still shoot straight, after thirty-something years.
But right before I pulled the trigger, I saw an animal's face looking my way just past the stump. There was a deer laying down in the grass there, watching me, right where I was about to shoot my brother's rifle. There was something mortifying about that to me, so I turned in the other direction and took aim at a tree trunk up high. I pulled the trigger, and (like the Sting song) a shot rang out throughout the land--MUCH louder than I ever would have guessed. And those poor deer behind the shed (there were at least three of them) started bounding for the hills.
Push-ups Today: 55 (push-ups are hard at this elevation, on a wood floor)
***Apparently, Travers really did weep through the screening of MARY POPPINS at the premiere, but the story goes that she did so, not because she was so moved, but because she so hated what they had done to her beloved book.
