Amaryllis sillyramA

Just now I saw something strange out the window, looking east. At night we often see the bright white lights of airplanes as they turn west and then south toward the airport, so at first I thought it was four or five airplanes in close succession… except they looked too close together, and they were bright red lights. As I watched, more appeared. Six, seven. Two that had been so close together I’d thought they were from one plane separated and became two planes. Eight, nine. That was enough to drive me back down the stairs and get the binoculars. By the time I’d made it out onto the deck the clouds had obscured all but two of the lights. I raised the binoculars, found one of the lights, and saw that there were more coming up from the far ridge, and that they were indeed quite red. Bing! Aha! Lanterns! Burning lanterns being sent up, like the ones we saw in Yachats last July before the fireworks show started. I must say I was relieved. I’ve seen other weird inexplicable stuff up in the night sky, and it was a very nice feeling to figure out a sane, normal reason for this weird sight. Came back upstairs, announced my findings to Big M, and he said “Oh yeah! Chinese New Year!”

Of course!

Happy New Year!

Nine years! Nine years! We have a niner!
Stats today:

$38,365.71 not spent on cigarettes, and

115,097 cigarettes not smoked.

[takes a bow]
That is all.

Actually there’s one other thing. I decided this year that instead of finding a groundhog picture on the internet, I would make my own. Partly because I couldn’t find any suitable images that I haven’t already used, and partly because I don’t really enjoy using other people’s images. I’ve been drawing a bit lately, getting more practice in than I have in years, and so I’m looking forward to continuing the habit and seeing how much better my groundhog drawing turns out next year. Luckily this year’s drawing leaves a lot of room for improvement!

Growing up, I never had strong feelings one way or another about Disney. I wasn’t big into the princesses or the movies. We did go to Disneyland as a family when I was around 12 or 13, but I don’t remember a lot from that trip. I remember posing for a picture with Tigger (my namesake — my dad’s been calling me Tigger the Tiger since I was little) and feeling so utterly embarrassed that I couldn’t bring myself to address him or touch him. I stood next to him, sort of behind him, hoping that I wasn’t bothering him, and I faked resting my hand on his shoulder and tried to smile for the picture. I thought I was so clever holding my hand there, but in the photo, the gap between hand and shoulder is clearly visible. Doh! I also remember a few of the rides, especially Pirates of the Caribbean (pre-Depp era) and It’s a Small World, which we went on twice. It was a fun day, but I distinctly remember liking Knott’s Berry Farm better.

Later, when I went to college, I met someone who did have strong opinions about Disney — as a corporate entity. She opened my eyes about how Disney’s success is based on the wanton appropriation of shared cultural artifacts and others’ intellectual property. Or something like that. You know — Winnie the Pooh, for instance, was not originally Disney. And Disney took it and changed it. And Snow White was not originally Disney. And Cinderella wasn’t either. Etc., etc. I couldn’t argue with that, and so then I held this bad opinion of Disney as well.

Some years later, I had children. Two little girls. And lo, the Disney movies came into the house. I’m not sure how they got here but they are here and the girlies love them. I found I didn’t exactly hate them, but I didn’t rush to pick them either for the girls’ tv time. (On the other hand, I had no problem rushing to put on any Pixar movie. I especially love Wall*e. Love love love.)

Also, around the same time, along came Regretsy*. This is a web site of which you may have heard. If you have not, then in a nutshell: there is another site, etsy.com, which purports to sell handmade items, vintage items, and crafting supplies. A great many listings on the site are for items that are clearly not handcrafted, or are handcrafted very very badly. One of Regretsy’s missions is to bring the crap parts of Etsy to our attention and to mock these crappy crafts (or mass produced crap) mercilessly. Another mission is to showcase really great stuff, and really great crafters and artists, so that the real crafters may prosper. And another mission — a very successful one — is to raise money for charity.

April Winchell is the evil mastermind behind Regretsy. She’s brilliant and crazy funny and I admire her no end. In real life she has done a huge amount of voice work for tv and movies. Also in real life she is the daughter of the late Paul Winchell, who also did a great deal of voice acting. He was the voice of Gargamel, for instance. And he was the voice of Tigger! Be still my heart!

A year or two ago, April published a photo essay about a visit to the Disney lot. The introduction to the piece is at the link below. There is some profanity. The password is cf4l (cee eff four ell).

Introduction

And here is a link to the first of the pictures. Look. Read. Click Next up in the right hand corner. Repeat.

Walt Sent Me

[Well. I’ve come back to read this after a few years (planning another trip to D-land & getting excited yay!) and I find that these links no longer work. I don’t know of a way to show you the pictures, but I did happen to keep a copy of the intro and the accompanying text. It’s all written by April Winchell, and I hope hope hope it’s okay for me to put it up here. Again, there is some profanity, and the password is cf4l (cee eff four ell).]

Walt Sent Me

Upon reading that last caption, my opinion of Disney changed completely. Now, instead of tolerating/deploring Disney, I love Disney. I get little hearts in my eyes when I think of Disney. I love Disney so much that when my husband suggested we take the girlies to Disneyland last March, I was totally on board.

And what a trip it was! It was the four of us plus Big M’s mom. We made a wonderful traveling group. Gram Gail is great company, and having her along to help with the girls was AWESOME. We stayed a week and visited the park 5 days in a row. I was sick as a dog the whole time. But I dragged myself out of bed every morning, doped myself up with cold medicine, and staggered out to make the most of it.

One of the things the 5 year old liked best was meeting the princesses. Apparently this is a thing now. You look at the schedule, then go stand in line, then after a while you get to where there’s a princess, or a fairy, or some other character, and then you get to pose for a picture and maybe get an autograph. And — this is an aside, having little to do with Disney, but I can’t resist — during one of these meet-the-princesses sessions, Big M decided to put on the horse head.

The horse head! No doubt you’ve seen these things. There are some really funny pictures in the amazon.com listing. …Ha! Ha ha! I haven’t looked there lately but I just did just now. Some really funny, brilliant ones. I even saw one that was taken at Disney World! And here I thought we were original with the Disneyland idea. Anyway: Big M brought the horse head on this trip, and he had people laughing in the airport, on the plane, at restaurants, and — by smuggling it in — inside the park. He had to smuggle it since apparently the wearing of costumes inside the park is not allowed. Or maybe it’s just masks? Anyway he would hide it every morning in the bottom of his backpack. Once we were inside, he’d put it on whenever the situation demanded it. A few highlights:

Riding the teacups.

Walt’s favorite, Autopia.

Fisticuffs with Tigger.

Tiana was game. The other princesses were not particularly enthusiastic. Perfectly pleasant, just… not sufficiently impressed. But Tiana actually requested that he put on the horse head after she saw him wearing it with another princess. Ha! We love Tiana!

Time to cool down.

On day four, Big M, thinking the security people had been fairly relaxed about searching his bag, didn’t hide the horse quite as well as he had before, and they found it.

“Sir, what’s this?”

“It’s a horse mask.”

“A horse mask? I don’t think you can bring this into the park.”

” …I’m not going to wear it.”

“Oh, well then. Huh. Okay, if you’re not going to wear it, then it’s okay.”

After that M was a bit more discerning about when to deploy the mask inside the park, and a bit more careful when concealing it in the pack.

On our last day, we went over to California Adventure for the morning. It was fun, but going back to Disneyland in the afternoon felt like coming home. I love that place and I can’t wait to go back. (There are lots more highlights of the trip (like when we got stuck on the caterpillar ride!), email me if you want to hear.)

One last thing about my newfound love of Disney. One afternoon in the middle of our week at the park, while we were sitting relaxing on the parade route waiting for the parade to start, I wandered down Main Street and found a place to pick up a Mickey Mouse watch. One with the arms that move around as the watch’s hands. I wasn’t even in the habit of wearing a watch! But I am now. I’ve worn that watch so much I wore out the band and had to get a new one. Yay Mickey! (I’m not wearing it right now; today I’ve got on my Star Trek watch. But that’s a different fangirl story altogether.)

—————————–

* Huh. Well. Two days after I put this up, and 3+ years after Regretsy began, April announces that it is all done. It’s still going to be available as an archive, though. And she’s still working on other things (OMGMLPFIM!!). But. I am sad. (…Oh damn. Apparently the archive was taken down sometime between when I wrote this and March 2014. Sob!)

Oh no! I’ve got the pine mouth again. I don’t know if this has happened to you, or if you’ve heard of it, but it’s the weirdest thing. You eat the wrong kind of pine nuts (there is a wrong kind!) and a few days later, everything you eat has a really bad aftertaste. For DAYS. Big M and I have both gotten the pine mouth in the past, and so we’ve avoided eating pine nuts just in case. Even though we love pine nuts. Because the pine mouth, it is awful. This time, I think the culprit was some pesto on a sandwich I had from this great subs place near my house. I forgot that pesto can have pine nuts in it. Doh!

Also this time, I got a bit more curious about it (why, oh WHY??), so I read a few things on the internet. Starting with Wikipedia (of course) which led me to an interesting article by a Dr. Gregory Möller. The article is pretty thorough in covering all the things that pine mouth, or Pine Nut Syndrome (PNS) is not. It’s not a food allergy, for instance, nor is it a food intolerance.

Here I’ll interrupt myself and say to you, I’m not going to tell you everything in the article because you can read, and also because I read it yesterday and that is way too long ago for me to remember what was in it. Except! There was one really cool thing in there.

Apparently there are taste buds in the gastrointestinal tract (also known as the GI tract, and also known at my house as the tummy*). Specifically, there are bitter taste buds in there. And when our GI tract tastes something bitter and therefore possibly poisonous, maybe it’s more likely to send that something back up? But here’s the weird thing. When the taste buds down in there taste a bitter thing, we don’t sense it that way. We sense it as a taste in the mouth. WEIRD! And that could go a long way to explain the whole phenomenon of aftertaste, or at least bitter aftertaste.

Any case, judging by this article, we do know quite a lot about exactly what’s happening in our tummies, but there is still so much we just do not know. I’m glad the scientists are on this though, because it’s really no fun to think about life without pine nuts forever, and even more no-fun to deal with the PNS when I slip up. Boo hoo, I know, first world problems.

Also, PNS.

———

* And to Bart Simpson, scrambling to recover his dignity: No it’s not, it’s my tummy. I mean stomach…gut… crap factory!

So, there’s an article in last week’s Stranger about how The Sound of Music turned the author gay. I just got around to reading it, and at the end it said Julie Andrews will be in town this weekend singing her new children’s book.

!!!

So I went to the bookstore website, it says it’s already sold out, doh,
but seemed to be focused on the meet-Julie-and-get-her-autograph part. So I was like, well, we could still go and hear her sing, right?

Doh again. Not singing. Signing.

Sigh.