A Pirate's Life For Me.....

Disneyland is possibly even more fun as an adult than it was the last time I visited when I was a young boy. Many of the rides have been updated, some for the better as in the addition of Captain Jack Sparrow robots in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and some for the not so better, like the Nightmare Before Christmas presents riding in your car with you instead of the hitchhiking ghosts in the Haunted Mansion. Mostly though, Disneyland hasn't changed since I was there last and it is, I feel, continually getting closer to the magical world Walt Disney envisioned. They're even using the same funky smelling water in the rides that was there when I was a kid!

Rachel and I attacked Disneyland with gusto, fueled by over-priced bottled water and humongous M&M encrusted Rice Krispy treats. On Saturday we pulled a 16 hour shift at the park that had us limping back to our hotel with delirious Disneyland grins on our faces at almost one o' clock in the morning. We did it all, well, except for the Matterhorn, it's sinking into the ground, oh, and Small World was closed for Christmas decorating but other than that, we did it all!!! Rachel insisted that no matter what, we had to ride the Indiana Jones ride, multiple times. This ride was not there last time I visited and WOW, IT IS AWESOME!!! You ride in a funky military Jeep-hummer thing that rides very similar to my Jeep, so it instantly got huge bonus points from me, there's fire and lava and bugs and the Jeep JUMPS onto a rope bridge, then at the end you're nearly crushed to death by a large boulder!! So, so, so, so cool!!

I spent a good deal of time in the "50 years of Disneyland" museum where some of Walt Disney's conceptual drawings for the park and a scale model of Disneyland as it looked on Opening Day are on display. As a kid, I'm sure this building did not even register in my brain, but it was really exciting to me to see a little bit of Walt Disney's creative powers in a raw form.
Thank you Mr. Disney, it is truly a magical place ;)

Extravagant Halloween decorations were everywhere!

Me, facing my fear of Merry-go-Rounds, they're too fast......
or
This is my horse, there are many like it, but this one is MINE.

Splash Mountain! Zippa-dee-doo-dah!!!

Interesting fact, the Matterhorn is the tallest man-made
mountain in all of Disneyland.......

I suffered a massive protein overdose after eating this
humongous chunk of animal but it was SOOO worth it....

Awww.....cute kids....Rach became so excited a few times
that she went into uncontrollable fits of bouncing and squeaking...

Rocky's Fortress of Solitude

Otherwise known as "Plan D," I believe I have finally figured a way to keep Rocky from destroying everything we own and making himself sick. He can't stay inside by himself because he eats or destroys as many things as he can before we get home. He can't stay outside by himself because he eats destroys as many things as he can before we get home. He is a model of good behavior while we are with him , but left to his own devices he is an absolute terror!! A brief sample of what he has eaten recently:

-nearly every plant I've planted in the backyard
-tape
-toilet paper
-garden hose
-pool filter
-a pool
-pond liner
-countless pounds of spoiled plums and apples from our fruit trees
-spatulas
-books
-welcome mat
-a rat
-a dead bird
-dog bowls
-BBQ tarp
-BBQ utensils
-pieces of the stairs going up to the deck
-Solar powered garden lights
-The DirecTV cable going to our bedroom
-lawn sprinkler

The list goes on. He's also figured out how to open doors and gates and has escaped from the backyard a few times. He is recovering from a sickness that he got from eating or drinking something in the backyard. To keep him safe from himself, we started leaving him in the downstairs bathroom, he knows how to operate a sliding door and easily escaped a few nights ago and went on a rampage in the house. When considering my options for puppy-containment solutions, the movie Hannibal came to mind. We could put him into a large glass box and cart him around on a dolly when taking him for a walk. Due to high cost, I dropped that plan and went down to the Home Depot for supplies. Thirty bucks later and Rocky now has his own escape-proof padded room, well except for the padding, he would eat it. He can't even have a dog bed in there because he ate his last one. I think I've finally outsmarted my wily, clever foe.........
So, I'm off to Chinese class right now and the Rocky Containment facility is getting it's trial run. Tomorrow I'm off to DISNEYLAND!!!!!

The Wanderlust Rules My Life

In keeping with our summer tradition of somehow spending as little time as possible in Seattle, Rach and I are halfway through a busy couple months of travel and fun. We spent another weekend in the San Juan Islands with Rachel's parents at a wonderful vacation home they had rented.

Panorama of the San Juans from the Anacortes Ferry

Then the following weekend we made a quick trip to Montana to visit our friend Mike who became fed up with the city and has been living in Montana since the spring. It was really great to see him, he's really in his element up there and him and Brett were both very excited to show me what Montana's all about.

Sittin at the Top of Thompson Falls

Now, with the Fall Quarter in full swing and school keeping me happily employed, Rachel is preparing for a trip to India (the videos I posted this week are themed for her trip). The day she gets back stateside we will be meeting up in Omaha for my cousin Erica's wedding. I'll be in Omaha for a very short time, as usual, but really hope to make the most of it. I arrive on Friday the 20th and leave at 5:00 AM on Sunday, can't wait to see all you Omaha types!!!

As if that's not enough, Rachel then leaves to go to Anaheim where I will meet her for the weekend so we can do Disneyland! I'm hoping they'll have something really cool for Halloween. Then I come back to Seattle and Rach continues out to Jacksonville, WOW!! Travelin' fools I tell ya!

The downside, Rachel will not be having her annual Halloween Party that she's been putting on for longer than I've even known her. I do hope to deck out the front porch as Davy Jones' Haunted Locker for the Trick-or-Treaters if I get some time though.....

A last note, I fixed the Pirates vs. Ninjas video from a couple posts ago, what a rookie mistake to promise you guys a great video and then fail to put the internet address into the HTML. Give it a look, it's worth the eight minutes!!!

The Chinese Dr. Evil

Fall quarter has begun at South Seattle Community College and after adding two classes to my schedule and dropping one I feel as though I am finally in the right place. My schedule includes Intro to engineering graphics, Intro to CAD, Manufacturing processes and Mandarin Chinese. My engineering instructor is an excitable, demanding little vietnamese guy that can't really speak english all that well. Whenever he talks about my generation he points at me and says "You young folk," except his accent makes it sound like he's calling me a young f**k. He's VERY demanding, I watched him hound one of his advanced students, he said, "very good work but you take too long, YOU MUST WORK FASTER!! Quickly, quickly, quickly!!!" Luckily he is extremely knowledgeable of his craft and has been teaching it for a very long time so I think I will learn a lot from him. He's also a Buddhist monk and part of my grade this quarter will be on pride and honor! My Chinese teacher is very funny and very good, when he learned English he learned to overpronounce words and to use his lips a lot(Chinese sounds do not require as much movement of the lips as English sounds), so when he speaks he sounds and looks a lot like Dr. Evil, sometimes I can't hold back my laughter when he speaks.

Pirates vs. Ninjas

I wanted to post this great short movie a few days ago on Talk Like a Pirate day but blogger's image uploader is being temperamental.......

No offense to the Home Improvement Ninja.......... :)

Avast ye scurvy bilge rats....

Yar, it be talk like a pirate day and ye best be talkin' like a pirate or we will be personally keel haulin' ye and sending yer chum-sucking carcass to the deep to spend eternity in Davy Jones' locker.....

Arrrrr........bloody landlubbers....dead men tell no tales.......

Orcas Island, Hold the Orcas

I spent my Labor Day Weekend with Rach in the San Juan Islands, specifically Orcas Island. Although we didn't catch a peek of any of the Orca whales that frequent these beautiful islands we had an awesome time. Rachel's friend Nicole had her wedding at Resario Resort on the Eastern half of the island. We spent the first night in a "cottage" in Deer Harbor, in all honesty, this cottage was more a big vacation house. It had a two-person hot-tub overlooking the water and one of those cool fireplaces that turn on with the flick of a switch. The next morning at breakfast I was having trouble getting my toast out of the toaster and a big friendly trucker looking guy helped me by jabbing two metal butter knives into the thing. "Ummmm, aren't you NOT supposed to do that?" I said, "You just gotta be careful man, watch," he replied. "Okay, I'll be over here.....far away from you.........and your butter knife experiment......."

After Breakfast we headed out to the resort which is actually the site of a historic mansion built by a man named Robert Moran. I love, LOVE places like this, I eat the history up!! I told Rach I wanted to see if I could figure out how to get to the behind the scenes parts of the mansion.....little did I know.....

After the open bar meet and greet hosted by the bride and groom we headed up to the lounge in what used to be Mr. Moran's living room. Rach and I were on a mission to get onto one of the many awesome sailboats and yachts at the resort marina. We chatted up the boaters and made some pretty good friends, particularly a guy named Aaron and his girlfriend Linda who have agreed to take us sailing sometime soon and were nice enough to buy us more rounds of Petron than we probably needed. Then, just before midnight, this goofy older guy came up and offered to take us on the midnight tour of the mansion to go meet a ghost. Rach, always the thinker, declined so she could stick around and make sure Aaron and Linda didn't escape before promising to take us sailing. I immediately volunteered, knowing this was my chance to see the parts of the mansion I REALLY wanted to see.

So, this guy and I headed up a few flights of stairs and past all of the "employees only" signs until we reached a huge mahogany door at the end of a long hallway. Upon reaching the door the guy whispers, "OK, this is the attic, this is where the ghost of Mrs. Reames lives. She used to like to ride into town on her motorcycle to play cards all night long with the local fellas. She's kind of a wild spirit, hopefully she'll be OK with me bringing you up to see her." I whisper back, "Here's a light switch, can we turn on the lights?" He says "Of course not, don't you know anything about ghosts, they don't like light!" So I grabbed the back of the guy's shirt and we pulled the huge door open and headed up into the darkness.

Now, at this point I am thinking that this guy is probably a hotel employee or something and they like to play this joke on us big city Seattle types. I'm expecting at every turn to have somebody jump out and scare the living daylights out of me. We get to the top of the stairs and there are two chairs on the left. He explains to me that this is where he sits and talks to Mrs. Reames. To my right and left about a hundred feet away on each side are windows glowing with the light from the resort below, everything else is darkness. We sit in the chairs and he tells me she is here tonight and asks if I can feel her presence. I feel nothing unfortunately but he tells me she is very near me and is inspecting me. I tell him I can feel her near me even though I can't, I'm still on guard for the flashlight guy with a scary mask on...he's just excited that he has somebody along who appreciates the history of the place and is open to the idea of phantoms.

We walk down to the end of the attic to one of the windows and pop it open. We can hear people on the patio below so, like all good troublemakers we start hollering things at them... Then we leave the attic, now he wants to show me the basement, cool, I'm game. We sneak through many doors that say "keep out" and finally arrive at the basement where we can hear employess on their break. He explains that we'll have to sneak past them and time it just right so we're not caught. So he gives me a silent count of three and we walk as stealthily as two Petron-happy adventurers can to another door leading to the sub-basement. I close the door silently behind us and we head down to the old cold-rooms where Mr. Moran used to store his meat and perishables. I inspect the double doors that look like the kind you would see on an old-west bank vault and point out the date to him, the doors had been built in 1893!! We go into the coldroom and he tried to coax me ionto stealing something nice for my girlfriend, I take a small orange ticket from a roll like you might see at a county fair or something just to make the guy happy.

We close the cold room door and head back up the stairs. After gracefully sneaking past the employees again with our best "what? we belong here." walk. We head up a narrow staircase about as wide as my shoulders and emerge into a fancy hallway, He says "look where you are!" with a big smile on his face. We're back where we started in the first floor lobby of the mansion. We head back to the lounge grinning from ear to ear, pleased with our own bravery and sneakiness. Rach explains that she just overheard the front desk calling security and telling them to investigate some noises in the attic. We're safe and sound back on our barstools again though.

After saying goodnight to our new friends, Rach and I headed back to the room and got some shuteye. The rest of the weekend was fun, the wedding was lavish and gorgeous, all of the people were very friendly and we took a little sidetrip to the top of Mt. Constitution, the highest point on the island. On our last day there we saw my midnight tour-guide's wife on the boat docks and she explained that he had been kicked out of the kitchen and the wine cellar the night before and was caught trying to steal a nice bottle of wine for them. She was so funny, she said it with the tone of a woman who has been putting up with her husband's mischief for decades and has long since given up trying to change his ways. A picnic on the ferry dock and a long boatride home and our adventure to the islands was over........for now........we will be heading back up in a couple of weeks to join Rachel's parents on Orcas again. I can't wait!!