Homewood Suites has an excellent breakfast. Scrambled eggs, sausage, bagels, toast, cereal, milk, three kinds of juice, yogurt, and lots of toppings for everything.

Knowing that food is expensive in Disneyland, Kathy and I loaded up on a protien-oriented breakfast so that it would really last. The kids all ate mostly carbohydrates, despite our dire warnings about going hungry until lunchtime to encourage otherwise.

After breakfast, we went back up to the room and proceeded to get everything ready. We brought snacks, water bottles, sweatshirts, and my fancy (heavy) new digital camera with its brand new (heavy) telephoto lens.

February is off-peak time for the park, so they are only open until 11:00 PM on weekends and holidays, and 8:00 pm on normal weekdays. Kathy’s good friend had told us that this was the best time to go to Disneyland because hardly anyone is there. We would learn over the course of our day today (Sunday) that this does not apply to weekends and holidays.

Our first lesson in a crowded day was the 9:30 AM shuttle to the park. The shuttle that the hotel uses is a big tour bus, and the hotel is the second of three being served by this bus. The first hotel on the stop is bigger and has many more people that use the shuttle, so the bus was already packed when we got on. We ended up standing in the rear of the bus for the 10 minute trip.

The part of Disneyland that is used as a shuttle drop off has several zones, each with a specific color, like Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, and so on. We discovered that the Green zone, which was closest to the outside gate of the parking lot, was being used to shuttle employees to work. Homewood Suites must spend a fortune on their breakfast, because they don’t have anything left to hire a decent service to Disneyland. We were dropped off at the White zone, outside the gate. Only taxicabs and city buses are forced to park further from the actual park entrance, and that’s only by about 20 feet. I don’t have an exact figure, but I would say that it is probably 1/3 to 1/2 a mile from the White zone to the bag inspection point.

It took about 5 minutes to get through the bag inspection, and another 15 to get through the entrance line.

Prior to today, our kids had very little theme park experience. Two of the older kids had spent a day at Lagoon, which is only about half an hour away from home. One of the older kids and the three year old had never experienced one. Imagine a kid who had never experienced candy suddenly being dropped into Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

We rented a stroller and proceeded into the park. Kathy fell into the role of designated stuff-watcher and I took the kids on rides. It took about 15 minutes of waiting in line for each ride. Try to imagine those kids who have just been dropped into the chocolate factory being forced to wait for 15 minutes, and then only being able to stuff themselves for a minute or two and then forced to wait again. We got a few pictures, one of which shows me and all four kids on the Go Coaster.

By about 3 PM everyone was tired, cranky, and in some cases, both. We decided to go back to the hotel to let Ben (the three year old) have a nap. We gave back our stroller, walked back out to the White zone, and caught the shuttle. At the hotel, the kids watched Nick Jr. while Kathy and I crashed for about an hour. When we came to, we realized that we were sunburned and dehydrated.

For our second foray into Walt’s playland, we got a little smarter. We grabbed sweatshirts, fanny packs, water bottles, diapers, and Ben’s diabetes kit. Everything else got left behind. The camera spent the rest of the trip in the hotel room, so we did not get any more pictures.

Travelling light was a good thing. We could now leave the stroller completely unattended because there was nothing in it, and we still had our receipt in case someone decided to walk off with it. Kathy now got to actually go on rides and enjoy the park. We went on Small World only once. I don’t think I could handle hearing that song again for more than about a minute without clawing my ears off.

Pirates of the Carribean was really really cool. It’s interesting to see how various portions of the ride were incorporated into the movie. The Haunted Mansion was also very cool, though since I have not seen the movie I cannot compare the two.

At 10:00 PM, there was a show called Fantasmic. This is a combination of stage, animation, and fireworks that was very well done. It featured Mickey Mouse’s dreams, which were very much like Fantasia, being invaded by all the evil witches from various Disney movies. At the end of it, Mickey defeats a dragon, which starts out animated but ends up an actual life-sized fire-breathing animatronic puppet. All the kids enjoyed it. Ben was alternating between telling us how much he liked it and hiding his face from the witches and the dragon.

When we left the park, we had to carry Ben all the way to the White zone because he was just too tired to walk it.

The continental breakfast at the hotel in Vegas was decent, but not very filling. The cinnamon rolls, which are a Holiday Inn Express specialty were the best part of the breakfast. Milk, yogurt, and hard-boiled eggs were the only choices in the protein department. We got on the road about 9:00 AM, and headed south towards California.

One thing that’s been in the news is how much rainwater Southern California has received recently. Just outside Primm, we were given first-hand evidence of this. Kathy took this picture from the front passenger seat of the van, while it was moving, through the rear window, at least five miles past the casinos just behind the lakes. This is what you can do with a Nikon D70 and a telephoto lens.

I’ve driven this way before, and have never seen anything in this area other than typical Nevada desert. Standing water and visibly green vegetation are not a normal part of this landscape. Through the rest of the day we continued to see green plants and wildflowers where there is normally only dirt, sagebrush, and joshua trees.

A couple of hours after we snapped the picture above, we stopped at a gas station at the exit for a town called Calico. We did this because we hoped to avoid the heavily populated city of Barstow. Just like in Cedar City, we chose badly. The bathrooms were very dirty and stinky. If I am ever doing this drive again, I will go on to Barstow and visit one of the larger chains for a bathroom break.

We arrived at about 2:30 PM in Escondido, which is in the northern part of San Diego County. There we spent a few hours with Kathy’s grandmother, where the kids were in rare grouchy form, especially Benjamin, our three year old. When we tried to get back on the road, and start the movies back up, we found that our power inverter had died. We bought a better one from Target, which informed us that the power supply for my newer laptop was causing a short circuit. This turned out not to be the case, but I did not learn this until more than a week after we got back home. My guess is that the power supply simply draws too much current for a small inverter.

It was about 6:00 PM when we finally left Escondido. It only took an hour to get to the hotel in Anaheim, but without the movies running, many variations on “are we there yet” began. “Are we still in Utah? Are we in California yet? What time are we going to get there?” When we finally arrived, we crashed in the hotel and let the kids vegetate in front of cable TV, something they don’t get at home.

I left work at about 3:30 PM with the idea that we would be on the road by 5:00. A series of sitcom-like problems conspired to delay that until after 6:30 PM.

We had the kids watching movies on our two laptop computers, powered by an inverter and hooked to headphones. We secured the laptops in the car using bungee cords and small tables so that they would not become missiles in the event of an accident.

Children normally make a long roadtrip unbearable because they get bored ten minutes after you leave and start looking for ways to entertain themselves. This usually means they will consciously or subconsciously irritate everyone else around them. By the time you have reached an hour, that irritation has reached the adults in the front of the car and everyone wants to kill everyone else. Movies with headphones take care of that problem, making it possible to actually enjoy the trip.

With only a few quick stops to use the bathroom and change drivers, we arrived in Cedar City about 10:30 PM, where we filled up the gas tank at a Sinclair where the store was closed but the pumps accepted credit cards. We wanted to get a snack but not pay for a fast food restaurant so we went to a convenience store. Between the four kids and some other people, we spent over half an hour getting everyone through the single bathroom. In retrospect, going someplace like McDonalds would have been better just from the bathroom aspect, and after all was said and done, possibly even cheaper from the food aspect.

From Cedar City, we drove pretty much straight through to Las Vegas. We had told the hotel we would be arriving around 1:00 AM. Due mostly to the horrendously long bathroom stop in Cedar City, the clock read about 1:30 when we finally arrived. I had been driving 85 MPH for the last hour of that trip trying to beat the clock. I realized after I had obtained the room keys that Las Vegas is in the Pacific timezone, so we were actually in no danger of losing our room.

That night we snacked on food that we brought with us and crashed out. We discovered that their idea of a room that sleeps six is two queen beds and a sofa sleeper about three quarters the width of a twin bed. We made it work, putting the boys on the sleeper with the three year old’s head by the nine year old’s feet and the 11 year old twin girls on one of the beds.

This is a backdated post — we’ve already returned from the entire trip. Several other backdated posts will follow. At this point I plan on doing one post for each day of the trip, but that may not be the way it ends up.

This trip was my wife Kathy’s idea. On February 21st (President’s Day) 2005 while I was home for the holiday, she told me about her dream the night before. In the usual manner of dreams, it was convoluted and odd. It left her wanting to get out of town and away from normal life. The last real vacation we took was our seven day honeymoon to Disney World in January 2001. At that time, we promised the kids a big family vacation, and until now we have not yet delivered on that promise.

Kathy initially wanted to pack up and leave that day, but in the interests of staying employed, we delayed departure until Friday February 25th so that I could notify my boss and get permission. We were also able to get some better room rates by giving ourselves a few extra days of lead time. Those four days were spent preparing everything for the trip. This was managed almost completely by a very exhausted Kathy.

My friend Nat has posted about a family dinner at which he was thoroughly disgusted by the items that his in-laws brought to eat.

The name of both his post and my post matches the name of a forum that used to exist on Lower Lights. When I first set up the forum system on the Lower Lights domain, I began to have problems with several of the users posting material not suitable for a general audience.

At first, I instituted word censors to curb the language, but that didn’t really help. Most of the material was not actually swearing. It took the form of sexually explicit banter, pictures, or links. I began to be concerned about kids logging onto my forum system and then having their parents try to sue me. The fact that I would probably win any suit brought was not the issue — I would not be able to pay for a lawyer to defend me.

I created a special forum and gave it the name “Sick and Wrong.” This forum had restricted access, which required you to sign up and be approved. The idea was that if someone specifically requested access, it was not my problem if they saw something they did not want to see. I don’t know if this idea would stand up to a legal challenge, but I considered it a good faith effort on my part.

This kept most questionable material out of the main public forums, but not all. I had to move a lot of posts to the restricted forum that should have been created there in the first pace. A few months ago I realized that my choice of forum name was probably making people feel that it was a place of banishment and embarrasment, and therefore they were unwilling to post there deliberately, and felt punished when they had a post moved.

The original Lower Lights BBS had a message board called “Hot Tub” that was meant for adults only. I decided to rename my Sick and Wrong forum to Hot Tub and designate it as a place to post things of an adult or offensive nature. It still has the same “application only” status, and everyone who applies is granted access.

I also changed all forum permissions so that registration is required to read everything except the Announcements forum. In that forum regular users can respond to existing topics but only moderators and admins can post new topics.

I still have to move the occasional post out of the general forums, but it’s not as bad as it was.

Continue reading →

I’ve done a little work on making my blog look more like Nat’s. In the end, I want it to look different from his, but he has a great look already that is better than the wordpress defaults.

Not knowing CSS, this is a slow-going adventure! CSS looks extremely powerful, and the only way to go for designing anything beyond a simple one or two page site. I should probably dust off my programming brain and actually learn this stuff.

It’s Valentine’s Day. Have you remembered to obtain SOMETHING for your significant other today?

For those of the male species who may not be aware, we cannot EVER ignore any Hallmark Holiday (birthdays, mother’s day, anniversary, TODAY, etc.), even if she tells you that you don’t need to get her anything. The fact that you remembered the day will bring her joy. If you forget or take her “no gift” request literally, it will break her heart and forgiveness will be slow. If she really loves you, only time and extreme grovelling will soothe the hurt — the most expensive gift in the world might actually make it worse.

People who are single tend to hate Valentine’s Day. Is there anyone who hasn’t heard it bitterly referred to as “Single Awareness Day” — a day that single people are cruelly reminded by everyone around them that they have no love life?

I enjoy Valentine’s Day myself. I have been married for just over four years, and the relationship is still going strong. I love my wife very much, and all evidence says she loves me. Last year I bought my wife concert tickets for a show that played on her birthday, and gave them to her on Valentine’s Day. I’m afraid that the budget keeps me from doing something so flashy this year.

UPDATE: I didn’t intend the focus of my second paragraph above to be gifts. I was trying to say that you must show, in some way, that the day is important to you and that you remembered it. The problem arises when the man inteprets “don’t get me anything” as “today means nothing, don’t worry about it.”

The quote in my last post got my brain thinking on a tangent.

People waste an amazing amount of energy doing things that are either pointless or harmful, myself included. I have a tendency to get lost in my computer or a movie and ignore everything else around me, especially if it involves getting up and actually doing something. I’ve been trying to change that, and having mixed results.

There are naturally more examples I could mention about myself, but this is my blog, and therefore I’m not going to dwell on my flaws. Instead, I’ll talk about the kids!

When it comes to cleaning rooms, taking baths, or other basic household chores, my kids will spend more time and energy at one or more of the following than it would take to just complete the task:

• Insist, often in the form of screaming, that they WILL NOT DO IT.
• Tell me that I am mean and unfair.
• Mention the things that siblings have not yet completed in an attempt to direct my attention elsewhere.
• Remind me that they have to complete the task that I requested two hours earlier, which they have not yet started.
• Completely ignore me.
• Say “ok,” go off as if to do the task, and play with toys instead.

Usually I feel I’m alone in having this trouble with my kids, but intellectually I know I’m not. I already have one teenager, and the others aren’t far behind. I fear for my sanity.

I came across a quote today that someone on an open source mailing list was using as their signature.

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy with the proof. — J.K. Galbraith

It is amazing that we have progressed as far as we have, given this tendency in human nature.