Ice Cold Mug

When we went to Disney World last November, one of the souvenirs I decided I wanted was a freezer cup — one of those cups that has special materials so that when you freeze it, it holds the cold longer. I had a mug like this already, but it hda a liquid in it that would freeze while I had seen newer versions that appeared to have a solid material that I anticipated would be more effective.

While shopping for souvenirs, I saw a few of these cups, but most of them were smaller than what I wanted. Eventually, I found one that I liked:

(I don’t have Dave‘s hang-up about Caucasian Mickey, though mostly out of laziness.)

Here are close-up shots of the freezing material before and after being frozen, just ’cause I find it interesting. These are of the same area of the cup and you can click on the images to see the full-size versions to better see the detail.

Not frozen: hard to see, but there are spaces between the crystals (click image for full-size)

Frozen -- focus is on the surface rather than the interior, but maybe you can still tell that the spaces between the crystals are gone (click image for full-size)

I’ve been using this cup for soda since I got it and I’m very happy with it. I’m thinking I should get a couple of these for work….

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Hiatus and Our Disney World Trip

It’s been over two weeks since we left for Orlando and 11 days since we got home and had Thanksgiving. Before leaving, I had gotten much better about blogging more regularly. In fact, November was my most prolific blogging month since 2005, and back then I used to post a blog entry for each new set of photos on my album page as well as an entry for each time I went for a run.

Well, lack of (free) internet access from the Disney resort (Pop Century), resulted in no blogging during the trip. After we got home, there was a lot to deal with (sadly, mostly a lot of TV recorded on the TiVo to watch), and I just never got around to blogging. I thought about it, but an old problem reared its ugly head again.

Speaking of Disney, we had a wonderful time. It turned out that Marci’s sister and her family were able to be there at the same time, which was very nice. We had 5-day tickets and were thus able to allocate a full day to each of the four parks, with an extra day to spend as we wished. We had park-hopper tickets, but did not make use of that fact this time. When we went two years ago, we only had 3-day tickets and we spent each day divided between two of the parks.

We based our schedule on Disney’s Magic Hours, which put us at Hollywood Studios (formerly MGM) on Saturday. We had arrived at our hotel pretty late the night before, so when we woke up early in the morning, Marci decided we should just sleep in for a while and not worry about getting to the park early. I decided not to go along with this and went ahead to the park on my own. This started what ended up being our pattern for several of the days — though Brittney came along for the other days, leaving just Marci and McKenzie getting extra sleep.

Next up was Magic Kingdom, the one day when everyone was up early to enjoy some morning park time. Magic Kingdom certainly offers the most variety of activities (discounting Epcot’s World Showcase). The fact that my two nieces were with us also helped make this park the highlight. I had expected us to go back to the hotel for a while, but the way things worked out we just stayed straight through the fireworks. We had planned to stay for some of the three Magic Hours from 11pm to 2am, but we were simply too tired and headed back to the hotel at around 11:30.

The weather cooperated for Monday as it ended up being the warmest day of our trip while also being the day we planned to go to Animal Kingdom. Animal Kingdom is almost completely an outdoor park, and much of it is shady, so having it be the warmest day was very convenient. As I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere, there isn’t really that much to do at Animal Kingdom. There aren’t very many rides, though they do have on of my family’s (excluding me) favorites, Primeval Whirl. Unfortunately, it was closed. I’d probably appreciate Animal Kingdom more if it weren’t for our periodic trips to the San Antonio Zoo.We did have a very nice buffet lunch in the Africa section, though I don’t recall the name of the restaurant. Coming to each park early caught up with me this day and I decided to head back to the hotel early, though it ended up being only an hour or so earlier than the rest of the group. I didn’t even fall asleep before the rest of the family got back to the hotel.

Tuesday took us to Epcot, which has been my favorite since childhood (though, of course, it was just Magic Kingdom and Epcot then). We didn’t end up staying as long as I expected, partly because they ran out of FastPass tickets for Test Track and I thought we’d return on our final day. I think I need to plan to have some adults only time to more leisurely tour of Word Showcase.

Our final day ended up being spent back at Magic Kingdom, which I suppose is appropriate. Somehow, I ended up choosing the two days we spent at Magic Kingdom as the days without my camera. Luckily, I have lots and lots of pictures from 2006.

All-in-all, we had a fabulous time, and it was really nice to come home to Thanksgiving break so we didn’t have to go straight back to work and school. Looking forward to Christmas break….

Disney World

We’re going to Disney World tomorrow (well, Orlando tomorrow, Disney World on Saturday)! Yeah!

Amazing that mine also references golf…

I don’t jump on meme bandwagons very often, but this one I saw on philosulfur‘s blog piqued my interest.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

“The recreation area has both a kids’ pool and a putting green.”

(We’ve been planning or Disney World vacation for later this month.)