The eyeballing game. LIttle browser game that you make geometry estimations. Find the midpoint of the line, bisect and angle, etc… I think woodworkers have an edge on that, but it’s pretty fun.
Mightygodking.com » Blog Archive » MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits
Awesome photoshop friday-like take of old sf/fantasy favorites
Last week we loaded up the car and headed down to mickeyville, staying at my brother’s place (thanks Ed!)
Sunday is definitely the best day for the magic kingdom. low crowds. and if you get your tickets through AAA you get a voucher to park in the diamond parking area, which tends to be over near disabled parking and a lot nearer to the park. you still have to pay for the privilege of parking, of course. The Small Daughter’s favorite ride at magic kingdom was a tossup between Splash Mountain, and Big Thunder Mountain. She is still too short for space mountain.
Oddly enough, pirates of the caribbean has just about zero line to ride it, but they added a cool effect near the begining. There’s a “screen” of mist across the path of the boat onto which they project an image of a waterfall and davey jones talking to you, so it really looks like you’re about to plunge through a waterfall and get wet, and then it’s just vapor as you go through it.
Epcot, which we were going to skip but decided to do anyhow, was a LOT more kid friendly than it used to be a decade ago. Primarily through the addition of more character-greetings scattered around for pictures and autographs, plus kidcraft areas in each country pavilion with a table that had an ink stamp for the country and a paper cutout for the kids to color on. So Small Daughter was happy to find the next table to get the next stamp and paper thing to attach to the mask on a stick they gave out.
Two of my favorite rides were at epcot. The Test-Track was a roller coaster in car form, and Soaring, was one of those bigscreen movies, but you sit down on and buckle onto bench seats, which then get pivoted forward and up so the rows are stacked on top of each other (extreme stadium seating?) and hidden vents blew on you while the movie (and the seats) dipped and banked like you were swooping around. The blowing air really helped prevent motion sickness too. It certainly made it seem like you were soaring. And they piped in orange blossom scent when you are flying through an orange grove. It was really nice. (come to think of it, Mission to Mars also blows cool air on your face while it’s spinning you to simulate g force. Speaking as someone who can be prone to motionsickness if I get too hot, it was very nice and I didn’t feel sick at all.)
We lucked into a Dream FastPass at epcot. Fast passes were new about 9 years ago. Popular rides let have an option to scan your ticket and give you a voucher to come back in a specified time window. For really popular rides it can be several hours later. When you come back at that time, you get to cut to almost the very front of the queue. It’s really nice, but can result in a lot of running back and forth across the park with all the “ok, while waiting for that time window, lets go ride that thing way over there”. And you can’t get another pass until the time window for your existing pass arrives.
The Dream FastPass is a badge with breakoff tabs, one for each ride that does fastpass. you walk up, break off the tab, and hand it over. No waiting for the right time window. That was really cool. They had a dream squad who seem to go to kinda out of the way ride exits for a while, and hand out a certain number. I bet they enjoy their job.
We actually got Dream fastpasses at TWO parks (which has made our neighborhood friends jealous when they hear about it, since they didn’t get any). It was cool
We had bad luck with Disney Hollywood studios (was MGM, name’s changed), though. we got there a bit late because we were planning on taking that day off and decided another day would be better at the last minute. And then we got fastpasses for the roller coaster instead of the toystory ride, which turned out to be more in demand. Then the toy story ride broke down after we’d been in line for 40 minutes or so. And when we came back later it was fixed, but all the fastpasses were given out for the day, and the line then was up to an hour. aiyiyiyi…
Daughter got picked to say welcome to the crowd at the little mermaid show, though, and got a certificate for it.
Oh, and it started raining, too.
The big problem at Hollywood is there are more shows and fewer rides. Shows have set times and durations, and you’re always just missing something.
We took the next day off and relaxed and read lots of books (my sister-in-law is a preschool teacher, so has a whole lot of age appropriate stuff around the place).
Then we went to Animal Kingdom. The Everest coaster was fun, and we rode the raft ride (I got soaked and pretty much didn’t get dried out all day long, which is always the problem with those, innit?) They had an outstanding musical adaptation of Finding Nemo (sort of Cirque de Soleil style) with big puppets and special effects and things. That was great. There was a dinosaurs coaster closed for refurbishment that looked like it would have been fun, though. And we got our other Dream Fastpass, although that park didn’t really need it the day we were there. They seemed to give out more of those on less crowded days. we hardly saw anyone with one on friday.
Friday was back to Magic Kingdom to get certain characters autographs (princess, natch), ride the coasters etc…, before having dinner with Cinderella and co. over at the grand floridian resort. Friday was a lot more crowded than sunday had been. And yes, earplugs help when riding “It’s a Small World”
The wicked stepmother and stepsisters were at the character dinner, and you just know they were having a ball, because they got to be rude to people, since they’re badguys after all. One of the sisters asked a girl (in a princess gown and wearing Crocs) at the next table over if she’d been feeding chickens, because Cinderella wore shoes like that when she fed the chickens. Princess girl was not pleased about that comment.
Saturday was drive drive drive all the way home.
Followed by recovery day.
the lovely wife made a chocolate orange torte thingy.
when the small daughter tried it she announced she didn’t like the green things.
“that’s orange rind from the marmalade” offered mommy, for covered in chocolate the threads of rind did appear a somewhat greenish yellow.
“Did they put it in there to make you sick?”
after a brief stop at REI on saturday to get some bike gear for the lovely wife who’s been doing triathalon training with some of her neighborhood friends, the small daughter was utterly entranced by the climbing pylon (it being open for climbing at the time). Which got me thinking that it’s been a LOOOONG time since I’ve climbed at all (back in highschool I went to Seneca Rocks for a weeklong summer program).
My big problem has always been footwear. Climbing shoes are notoriously narrow and my feet aren’t. Plus the new balance shoes I used to wear in highschool had lots of padding for running, which did not make for good edging ability.
But I guess technology moves on over the years. A search on the internet turns up a few references to climbing shoes that actually have a wide toebox. And aren’t terribly expensive. Even better, I also discovered that in addition to the pinnacle at REI (open a couple weeknights and saturday morning, free for co-op members) there are not one, but two indoor climbing gyms close to home. One in Morrisville proper and one up on 70 between miami blvd and page road. They each have around 9000 sq feet of walls, a proshop, and run classes. One’s a few bucks cheaper, but I’ll probably check them both out and see about shoes. Because if I can find shoes that fit without causing excessive pain, then I think I may start climbing.
I was discussing preschool/kindergarten with some friends at work, and the topic turned around to really blantant spelling/grammar errors on notes the teachers sent home.
The worst I’d seen was “site words” that the kids are supposed to learn by site. But what if you want them to know the words every?
The coworker’s Kindergarten teach sent home a list of the class rules.
Rule #1: Gentile Touches only.
still, I suppose there is a worse option possible there.
Sometimes you just have to use the “does this make sense?” test when cooking.
“There was a mistake in a recipe for apple cake. Instead of calling for two pinches of nutmeg it said 20 nutmeg nuts were needed,” Matmagasinet’s chief editor Ulla Cocke told AFP…”
Small daughter learned a few knock knock jokes a while back, so we taught her the banana one. you know, banana, banana, banana, orange you glad I didn’t say banana?She thought it was funny, but wanted to make up a princess joke a week or two later, and what came out ran something like this:
Knock-knock
Who’s there?
Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty who?
Sleeping Beauty
Sleeping Beauty who?
Sleeping Beauty
Sleepeing Beauty who?
Cinderella.
Cindelella who?
Cinderalla glad I didn’t say Sleeping Beauty.
It actually ended up being pretty funny, in a sort of surreal way.
I had a boatload of plaster left over from my 3-D Settlers of Catan board, and when I saw the instructions over at Hirst Arts I knew what my next project would be. It’s a modular board where the individual segments have enough heft to stay in place without needing interlocking tabs, even the 1″x2″ pieces.