Bad Mom posted up this fun fill-in. She gave it to her creative writing students with interesting results. I decided it was meme worthy and copied it accordingly.

If I were a:

If I were a shoe, I’d be a brightly colored tennis shoe.

If I were a city, I’d be a seaside resort town.

If I were a season, I’d be spring.

If I were a car, I’d be a  ‘73 VW Beetle. Convertible.

If I were a vegetable, I’d be a cucumber.

If I were a fruit, I’d be a melon .

If I were a color, I’d be bright green .

If I were furniture, I’d be a park bench.

If I were a song, I’d be smooth jazz.

If I were a country, I’d be Switzerland (neutral due to fear of conflict).

If I were a beverage, I’d be  mountain spring water .

If I were clothing, I’d be fuzzy socks.

If I were weather, I’d be full to partly sunny.

If I were an animal, I’d be a sea turtle.

If I were a dessert, I’d be pumpkin pie with whip cream.

If I were a plant, I’d be an orange Gerber Daisy.

If I were a word, I’d be a verb.

One of the coolest things at Disneyland: the Jedi Training Academy. A few Jedi came out in brown robes and pulled some kids from the audience. Since it was January and the audience was sparse, both of my kids were chosen.

The Jedi give some brown robes to the kids, and these “padawans” are trained in the ways of the force. Then — very suddenly and without warning — two Storm Troopers bust onto the scene, followed by Darth Vader and a very menacing looking Darth Maul (no joke… he was very creepy). The newly trained padawans must put their new skills to the test! Will they be strong enough to defeat the dark side??

Few things are more depressing than Las Vegas in the early morning. (Sorry if any of you are from Vegas.) We got the smaller-town version of this last week when we passed through Mesquite, Nevada, another casino town about an hour north of Vegas. Mesquite boasts all of the same lost hopes and dreams of Vegas, but with fewer naked girls on billboards. We decided to stay at this Junior-Vegas on the way to California. We pulled into town at about 10:30pm Thursday night to the welcoming flash of bright lights and the empty promises of the loosest slots in Nevada. We pulled into the casino/motel that advertised “rooms from $24.99 a night”.

If you’ve ever wondered what a $24.99 room looks like, I can now (sadly) tell you. It looks kind of like a room at the Bates Motel, only not as clean… and the stains on the carpet are a mystery; not necessarily blood, but possibly just as gross. As I sat in the small bathroom (after four hours in the car drinking Diet Coke and painfully listening to the rain hit the windshield),  I studied the pummeled bathroom door, wondering about the sad souls who had stayed there before me. Why was the door broken from the inside? I imagined a sad, drunk girl, locked in the bathroom by some jerk whom she wasn’t all that well acquainted with. I imagined how hard she was wishing that she had made very different choices. Choices that would have led her anywhere else but a gross bathroom in Mesquite, Nevada.

The emergency sprinkler head was pulled from the ceiling and dangled by some cords. I turned on the faucet at the sink to wash my hands, and yellow-orange water sputtered from the tap. We brushed our teeth with toothpaste and apple juice we squeezed from juice boxes.

The kids were excited to be on vacation, to be sleeping in exciting, foreign beds that weren’t their own. “This hotel is awesome!” Zoe exclaimed. I did not get into the semantics of hotel/motel, but rather allowed her to be impressed with our horrid surroundings. “Look, we get our own heater!” She turned the knob on the independent heating unit by the window and the fan churned loudly. I can’t say for sure that the air pumping out was any warmer or cooler than the air already in the room. We climbed into bed, doing our best not to touch anything more than necessary.

In the morning we woke early and dressed. We opened the front door to dreary, rain drenched streets. Gone were the flashy, colorful lights of the night before. The town that touted excitement and riches looked bleak and empty. Trash littered the sides of the streets. A few people milled around in front of the gas pumps across the street.

“I wish we could stay here for our vacation,” Zoe said.

“Disneyland will be even better than this,” I promised, wholeheartedly.

At 7:45 AM we walked through the casino to the buffet. The slot machines stood in rows, with cracked, empty seats sitting in front of each one. The bartender slowly wiped glasses, and one lonely soul sat at the bar, drinking whiskey and filling out a Keno sheet. He still had a few dollars to gamble away before going to sleep in his car.

Sitting at a table in the restaurant, the kids glanced around at the gaudy decor. Jachin remarked that the huge ”gold” picture frame hanging above our table must be worth a fortune. No doubt it was purchased with money that spilled from the loosest slots in Nevada. Zoe looked around the restaurant at the other early morning patrons. She then scooted closer to me in the booth and whispered, “Mom, mostly everybody in here is really old except for us.” It was true. We were the only people at the breakfast buffet under 65 years of age. At 8 AM, all of the young people had gambled away their money and passed out in a $24.99 room. Only the old fogies were up for breakfast. They gambled away their saving during the day, like rational, mature people. I looked at their old, sad faces. This was where they thought they were supposed to be. This is where you came when you retired, to either ”have fun” with that retirement savings, or for those who didn’t plan ahead, to win that retirement money. They slowly ate their pancakes, bored and unspeaking, and tried to think big.

The kids were excited that the guy working at the long buffet table made their pancakes right in front of their eyes. Each pancake was uniform and fluffy. It was culinary magic. 

We pulled away from Mesquite 20 minutes later, leaving behind the sadness that drained the soul. Behind us were the unlit casinos and drunk people and unlucky people.  We set out through an hour of empty desert. We finally passed through Las Vegas, with the skies clearing and the sun peaking out of the clouds. Billboards advertised sales at the Adult Mega Store, and sultry young girls with pouty lips and heavy eyeliner promised the best show in town. Even poor Toni Braxton had to advertise all but the very sweetest of her parts to get you go come to her show; her long, bare legs beaconed: come hear me sing. Please. I can still sing.

It was still trashy, even in the sunshine; the bright, flashy lights that made it all seem exciting were missing, and now it just seemed sad. I turned on a movie for the kids to divert their attention from the “Thunder From Down Under” billboard, and we pressed on towards Disneyland. I reminded myself for next time why flying is better.

First let me tell you that if you want an uncrowded, line-free Disney vacation, January, mid-week, is the time to go. Even better, go after dark. For the last two hours prior to closing, you’ve practically got the place to yourself. My kids loved the one kiddie-coaster in Toon Town, and one evening they rode it over and over without any lines.

  And I do mean over, and over, and over.

Secondly, let me tell you that Disneyland becomes even less crowded when it is pouring down raining. And for good reason. If you’re thinking, “oh, big deal… a little rain can’t spoil Disneyland”… well, you couldn’t be more wrong. Disneyland can be quite un-enchanting and frickin cold when it’s raining in January. Disneyland sells Disney brand rain ponchos for $50 (or some such crazy price) but we laughed in the frickin cold face of big business and instead packed an umbrella from Target.

It’s hard to tell just how entirely soaked we are… but Jachin’s jacket is normally light blue.

The umbrella worked alright when we weren’t on rides, but what about keeping dry when actually riding the rides? Well, I was one of those annoying people who didn’t want to ride the log ride because the water would make my hair all big and Chia-pet looking. I bundled as best as I could. I thought of wearing the shower cap from the hotel room, but figured that may have looked silly. I opted for this more chic look:

 (ps- my butt got soaked)

I learned on this trip that my children are very brave. Jachin was finally tall enough to ride California Screamin’ on this trip, and he rode it three times in a row. Here was his first time out of the gates:

The key to working up courage for big rides is to first browse the gift shop for courage-encouraging swag. Like this:

Zoe took on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Space Mountain, and a bunch of other scary rides. Her courageous attire looked a little different.

 That’s one badass, pink cowgirl. 

She drew the line, though, at Tower of Terror. She would. not. do. it. So I wandered around the gift shop with Zoe, checking out cute Jack Skelington garb while Jachin and Jon rode Tower of Terror. Then I rode the T.o.T. by my lonesome. Jon took a blurry picture of the screen:

That’s me with fun Chia hair on the front row,  grinning like a dork. If I would have known that the flash was coming, I would have done a sweet thumbs-up like the bell-hop in the second row, or a “shocked” face like the other bell-hop in the front row.  But no, that terrified glee was my real face.

Mostly we stuck with the rides that the four of us could do together, which was a lot of them. The kids are both tall enough and gutsy enough to ride mostly everything.

 I love my family.

The ride home was NOT fun. The usual 9 hour car ride took a full 11 hours. There was heavy snow for hours. In our attempts to make “good time” we didn’t stop for meals. The kids ate crackers and Chewy bars and fruit snacks… for 11 hours. It ended with Zoe throwing up in the car. She gave me just enough warning to empty the Target bag (holding all of the snacks) and put it under her mouth. Poor sweetie. On top of the barfing, the windshield washer fluid stopped working. Each time a truck passed us, spraying filthy snow unto the windshield, we were pretty much blind. Jon had to pull over repeatedly and manually pour washer fluid on the windshield to clean it off. It was tedious and a little scary. When we finally pulled into the garage at 11:30pm, the kids cheered.

As we tucked ourselves into our own beds in our own home last night, Jachin said, “It’s nice to go to Disneyland, but it’s nice to sleep in my own bed again, too.” It was the perfect amount of trip; just enough to make home seem really nice again.

We returned late last night from our trip to Disneyland. I had intended to blog daily while there, letting you in on all of the rides, and making quips about the price of all things Disney. But because of the price of all things Disney, we had to forgo the $14.99 daily internet fee.

I will sit later today to do a proper Disneyland blitz post. A small teaser, though, the trip included lots of Dramamine, lots of rollercoasters (my kids are brave!), rain, hotel shuttles, more rain, and an 11 hour car ride home last night that featured heavy snow, an inept driver flipping us the bird (when he really should have had both hands on the wheel), and vomited Cheez Its in Target bags. Have I said too much??

I’m off to put in a load of darks.

Jon got a wild idea about doing our part to conserve energy. It wasn’t so much in order to make smaller our carbon footprint or any such nonsense; it was in hopes of making smaller our power bill. I know, we are shallow and ignorant. Anyhoo, we went to Costco a few weeks ago and bought 5 boxes of the compact fluorescent bulbs and replaced every single bulb in the house. (We then filled up 1/5 of our local landfill with the old, non-economical bulbs. Take that, carbon footprint.)

The immediate impression that we had was that our house was overall “dimmer”. The compacts aren’t as bright. I now find myself walking into things, knocking over plant stands, and banging my shins on furniture corners. Which is kind of weird, because the furniture hasn’t moved or anything… But I now walk around my house with a perpetual squint, which really does nothing to improve the crow’s feet around my aging eyes.

The second thing we noticed is that there is a nano-second delay when you flip the light switch, which also feels a little foreign when you are used to the light flooding the room immediately upon flipping the switch. When I walk into the bathroom and flip the switch, I will occasionally walk into the toilet bowl before the light comes on. I think the toilet bowl may have actually been moved, though… aliens or prankster pixies or something. The bowl seems — in the dull glow of the bathroom light — to be situated about 1/8 of an inch further to left than it was when we moved into the house. (I will further investigate this anomaly at a later time.)

The third thing I noticed is that the light in the master bathroom is terrible. It has a yellow, pallid glow that makes me cringe when I look at myself. (At least, I think I’m cringing; like I said, it’s hard to see myself.) Each morning I imagine that I look jaundiced and therefore overcompensate with the blue-hued make-up. The end result is me leaving the house looking like this guy:

He had to drink colloidal silver daily for 8 years to look like this.

I only had to change my light bulbs.

The plus side to all of the shin-whacking and hideous outward appearance is that over 10 years time, we will save about 46 cents on our power bill. Again, I’m kidding… it will actually be more like 96 cents.  Which is nothing to shake a dim, jaundiced stick at.

Hey Gale family, what are you going to do now that Jon is laid off from his job?

We’re going to Disneyland!

Yeah, seriously, we are. We decided today that we may as well put Jon’s recent time off of work to good use. We leave in a couple days. Yay! Maybe I can get a part-time gig as Sleeping Beauty or something.

(Don’t fret for Jon, he starts a new job in two weeks… which is why we felt okay about taking off on a crazy trip.)

(ps- Zoe wants me to tell you that SHE CAN’T WAIT to go to Disneyland. And I have great disciplining leverage for the next few days.)

Zoe had her 6th birthday party today. It was a hot pink, magical afternoon.

Jon — doing his usual amateur cake decorating — pulled off another sweet cake. It’s … you guessed it… a princess. A princess with a pink dress.

Now I have a mystery picture, for your gaming pleasure. Study the following picture carefully and then choose the best answer.

The following picture is of:

a) Detainees at Abu Ghraib prison using a broom stick to whack a colorful backwards 6 as part of a new form of “interrogation”

b) My son wearing a chef’s hat over his face while he whacks a colorful pinata with a broken broomstick in our miserable looking unfinished basement.

I know, I know… you’re asking what’s up with the chef’s hat. I simply couldn’t find a bandana.  And yes, it was a ghetto party, indeed.

I took pictures of each and every one of Zoe’s friends wearing the chef’s hat over their faces and smacking the pinata with a broken broom, but… well, the pictures were very creepy looking and I erased them before any parents saw. No one would have been allowed to play at our house again.

Last night I had to ground the kids. It was 9:14pm and I came upstairs from the computer room to find them drawing and giggling and getting along together in Jachin’s bedroom. Well, I had to put a stop to that… the part about them being up 44 minutes past their bedtime, not the getting along part.  I hastily blurted out that they were grounded from TV today.

As soon as I said the words, I knew that I had resigned myself to an afternoon of bored kindergartener wrath.

And so it is this afternoon. Zoe has been home from school for 38 minutes (not that I’m counting or anything) and she is already driving me absolutely insane. She has nothing to do! Going to clean her room would be boring. Playing in the playroom without the background noise of the television would also be sooooo boring. She follows behind me telling me of her lack-of-entertainment woes, and each time I stop walking she crashes into my butt. (My butt is also boring.) As I type this, she slouches (in a very bored looking posture) on my arm, and says the word “boring” over and over and helpfully presses random buttons on my keyboard with a bored index finger. She asks me (in a bored voice) what the “Ctrl” button does. q Yes, she just pressed q.

For the record, there are many days when our TV is hardly watched. Lots of afternoons go by without the power button being pressed, and Legos are built, and Barbies are played with, and all is fine. But when the TV is forcibly taken away by a mean ‘ol mommy, suddenly the world cannot possibly continue to turn and life ceases to exist.

7 hours and 46 minutes until bedtime. Not that I’m counting or anything.

Next time I will really think twice before disciplining my children.

My hubby is a runner. I am not. But today I tried. I tried to run to impress my man. What happened, instead, is that he was confirmed in his suspicions that I am slow and chubby. It was a sad, sad showing on my part. You see, I can only run for about 100 feet at a time, before stopping to gasp for air and clutch my cramping ribs. So that’s what we did. We’d run for 1 minute, stop and hyperventilate for 2 minutes, and repeat for… 1.7 miles. Jon was a sweetheart and called it “interval training”.

Jon has a Garmin Forerunner watch that keeps track of where you run, your pace, blah blah, and then you can upload your stuff in order to track your progress… or in my case, track my humiliation.

So here’s our run for the day.

Jon asked if I was going to blog about how great I did. I said no, that it was too embarrassing. He said to lie and tell you guys that I did it in, like, six minutes. But I didn’t do it in six minutes. I can’t lie. However, I don’t have to overly tell the truth, either. So I’ll just omit my time completely. Make up a time that sounds good to you, and then assume that I did it in that time.

Jon told me a story that he’d read somewhere about some guy who decided to kill himself by running. (He swears it’s a true story.) The guy wanted to die, so he went out one night and ran a total, all-out sprint for as long as he could (like, hopefully, until he died), and he ended up sprinting for about 18 minutes. And he didn’t die. He went out the next night and tried again. This time he sprinted for about 25 minutes; and again, didn’t die. The next night he went longer. In the end, instead of dying he figured out that he was a really good runner, and he’d discovered a reason to live. A good runner, he may be… but an Einstein he is not. Seriously, death by running?? I almost died today, but it didn’t take me that long to feel death looming. If you sprint 5 miles and you’re not dead yet, assume that you are in excellent cardiovascular health and find another way…  just buy a gun like normal, out of shape people do.