So far, it’s been a brisk pace for us all. Notwithstanding my attempts to moderate our activities by building in rest days after every theme-park day, it still feels like we are motoring through this holiday at a high pace. Every day has been full-on with something or other. Today, we get a chance to stop and let the world catch up with us a bit. The kids have nothing to do, while Sandy and I have only one fun thing on the agenda: meet up for lunch with one of Sandy’s online friends, Wendy, and her husband, Bob.
Joey’s toys use a special type of screw that can only be unscrewed with a specialist screwdriver: a tri-wing screwdriver. Where a flathead screwdriver has two ends, and a Philips screwdriver has four, a tri-wing screwdriver has three. These are much harder to find. He couldn’t find the one he had at home a few weeks ago, and it was quite the hunt across the city to locate a new one at the time. He apparently needed one of these again this morning, so Sandy took him out shopping. She also wanted to feed him so that we would be free for our lunch appointment with Wendy and Bob.
For my part, I have finished my blog for day 10 at EPCOT, but I still needed to proofread it and correct any grammar and readability issues. Unfortunately, my Grammarly software had stopped working. It was no longer recognising any problems to be fixed anywhere in the text. Under no stretch of the imagination did I conclude I had written perfect prose: my spelling is atrocious if left to my own devices. Since I’ve been using a newly purchased laptop, I wondered whether there might be some system-wide setting or global permission issue that had glitched. I spent the better part of a couple of hours trying to figure it out. Eventually, I stumbled upon a message on Grammarly’s website indicating there was a known issue with their services today. Although I could find no direct proof, I strongly suspect that Grammarly’s issues were tied to the massive Amazon AWS outage plastered across the news. Either way, it perfectly explained the issues I was having, so I gave up proofreading until the problem was resolved on their end. This is another reminder of how dependent I’ve become on the modern internet and cloud-based services.
Not long after Joey and Sandy had disappeared, one of Sandy’s two phones started ringing in the front room. It was Joey. I answered the call, much to Joey’s confusion, and was told, “I’ve lost Mum in Walmart. I think she left her other phone in the car.” Oh, shit! I had been concerned about something like this happening from the get-go. We even bought special wristbands with our contact details for Joey to wear at the theme parks. If he ever got lost or separated from us, that would at least be a backup to ensure a cast member could contact us and help reunite us. For the first few days, I stressed each time he raced ahead in the park. However, as this holiday has progressed, we’ve become a lot more comfortable with Joey wandering off, since he’s always found us again, so we haven’t felt as anxious about it all. And now here we are in an actual parent/child separation situation. And now what? Fortunately, Joey had his phone with him. I reassured Joey that Mum would realise she had left the phone in the car and would retrieve it before long. In the meantime, he could go looking for her or wait near the registers for her to find him. I did try to call Sandy right after I hung up on Joey. Coincidentally, she had literally just returned to the car to retrieve her phone when I called.
Expecting a couple of guests to pop in later this afternoon, and now climbing down from the anxiety of the potential lost Joey incident (I tried not to think about how this might otherwise have played out), I pottered around the house doing a bit of tidying up to give the place at least a semblance of presentability.
Sandy and Joey eventually returned, toting more plastic shopping bags. For fear of receiving an answer, I spared myself the depression of asking what was in them. I’ve already had adrenaline pumping through my veins once this morning, and it’s still only 9 am. I figured I could do without feeling baffled about why Sandy and Joey chose to buy whatever they did, to say nothing of how much they spent. Sometimes, it’s just best not to know. Once all the bags were emptied and everything was put away, Sandy and I then left to keep our lunch appointment with Wendy and Bob.
Sandy’s online friends are lovely people. Although I’ve never met them (indeed, neither has Sandy), it felt like a reunion all the same. They are a few years older than we are and already enjoying their retirement years. Bob is much taller than Wendy, who is a real motherly figure. We had a great time getting to know them some more. They mentioned associations with their church a few times, so I surmised they were both religious. Many Americans are—more so than back home. They spoke of their travels and cruise excursions over the years. Having travelled extensively ourselves, this resonated with us. Wendy is one of a group of random people Sandy has met online playing her June’s Journey game. It has been something of an addiction for Sandy, though she won’t thank me for saying that. It has also been a terrific tool for getting to know people, which has been fantastic for Sandy. Through their association with this online game, a group of widely dispersed people have found each other and created a community. Christy is also a member of the same June’s Journey community that Sandy organises.
We met with Wendy and Bob at a Chilli’s restaurant we hadn’t been to yet. It was lovely getting to know them more. We just seemed to click. I didn’t feel like I had to be on my best behaviour with them. We split up, boys in one car and girls in the other, for the drive back to our place for some more pleasant chit-chat. Bob and I exchanged anecdotes about the inevitable deterioration of our bodies as we succumb to the ravages of age. We also bonded over our common disdain for other road users who are distracted, failing to use their indicators correctly, etc.
Getting through the security gate into the subdivision was mildly amusing. I had already provided the management company with the appropriate details, but still had to explain who was who at the manned checkpoint. Since I wasn’t driving our car, but was a passenger in our guest’s car, I mentally prepared myself for a confusing explanation. When we wound down the window as we approached the security gate, the guard first addressed Bob, but I called out, “He’s with me.” Naturally, I’d not seen this guard before, so he didn’t know who I was. He asked a couple of simple questions, but both Bob and I tried to answer each time, leaving the poor man confused. To make matters worse, his words were hard to understand, so the responses we provided didn’t really line up with what he was asking. We were volunteering information we thought he needed, like our address, street name, etc. Eventually, he asked Bob for his driver’s license, which was duly handed over. The guard looked at it for all of half a second before handing it back and waving us through. The communication with the guard was borderline slapstick. I’m sure we would have gotten in even if we had announced we were Libyan terrorists.
The backyard pool was a serene setting for us to relax and socialise for the next couple of hours, but Wendy and Bob eventually had to head back home, so we bid them both a fond farewell. It was lovely catching up with them, and we can now finally put a real face to the online presence.
Dinner this evening was at our favourite Waffle House, though a misunderstanding from our regular waitress about who was eating what unnecessarily bumped up the bill. Deedee was there, of course, and went into her bobbly routine of trying to guess what we all wanted. She didn’t guess correctly for everyone, but everyone’s reactions to that in and of themselves were already hilarious as Deedee attempted to feign excuses for why she was getting it all wrong. To cut a long story short, nothing was her fault. By the end of the meal, it was clear that not everyone had what they actually thought they ordered, but it didn’t really matter. We probably overpaid a little, but that was made up for in entertainment value.
We detoured to a nearby Dollar Tree on the way home to pick up a selection of everyday essentials. While driving from there to home, Jae casually mentioned something that stopped me dead in my tracks, sending another jolt of anxiety through my veins (how many is that today already?). Earlier, Joey had apparently asked her what to do if he got glue all over his hands. Some of my life flashed before my eyes briefly when the penny dropped that Sandy had earlier given him a tube of superglue. I had visions of his hands stuck to each other, and then stuck to his face or worse, while we were all sitting in the ER surrounded by nurses trying to pry Joey’s fingers loose. It was only a fleeting moment of abject terror until I realised Joey’s comment was from earlier in the day. Had he actually glued himself into oblivion, we would have been dealing with the fallout from that long ago. Armagluedon would wait for another day.
Back at the laptop, it appeared my Grammarly was working again, so I tidied up the blog entry a little and uploaded it. The truth is that I had been feeling the effects of withdrawal all day. This technical glitch effectively removed my ability to continue writing, which, along with things like lost children getting superglued together, was making me anxious. I’m happiest when I’m writing, so I was glad to be back to some semblance of normality. I could start using the laptop more freely again.
Our Disney tickets include Memory Maker, and we have been steadily accumulating photos from each park visit, either through Disney photographers scattered throughout the parks or while riding the attractions. These photos are immediately visible in the app, which we can download one at a time. Whenever we do a character meet-and-greet, several dozen photos could be added to our account in one go, so the one-by-one approach gets tedious after a while. After a bit of research, I figured out how to download all those photos to my laptop in one go. It can be done on the website, though finding those controls isn’t intuitive. If you weren’t told where to look, it’s easy to overlook. Photos would still be visible in the app, even if you don’t download them safely to your own device or networked folder, but they permanently disappear after 45 days, so it was a good idea to download them all in the meantime.
With barely enough energy left to write up my blog notes for the day, it was time to turn in. I’ve been getting into the habit of writing up the notes and then completing my blog writing the following day. This allows me to sleep on my thoughts and to come to the blog fresh every morning.
Today was supposed to be a rest day, when nothing stressful was supposed to happen. And relatively speaking, that turned out to be true. We are now a third of the way through this trip, and I am starting to feel more relaxed. Nothing too stressful happened. Well, there was the lost child incident. And I did have to suffer through technical issues with my blog-writing software. Sandy was let loose in Target with a fully loaded credit card. We had the security gate incident, and one of my kids narrowly escaped supergluing himself into oblivion. But aside from all that, it was really quite a relaxing day. I wonder what tomorrow will bring—nighty night.