Disney World - Downtown Disney

Here we go, I have tons to post, so get ready! I'm breaking it out in several posts, hopefully that makes it easier to read and follow. To begin, Joe and I went to Disney World over the week of October 18th through the 25th, and it was totally awesome! This was our second time going (as a couple) and definitely the better time. We don't have a for sure reason why it was so much better, but we narrowed it down to better attitudes and paying cash for everything.

On the 18th we decided to leave our house around 10 and start the trek down to Orlando. We figured it would be like a Vegas drive from SLC. It was pretty close, around 6.5 hours, but a much prettier drive, no deserts.

We arrived at our not-as-nice-as-anticipated timeshare swap the Marriott Sabal Palms. The way the Marriott resort was laid out, you felt like you were headed back to the dumps and then came upon the Sabal Palms "Villas". Honestly, I don't know why I ever trust pictures that resorts post. Oh well, it was sufficiently sized and provided us with our needs, not necessarily our wants. When we checked in we learned that they did not offer shuttle service to the parks (during our last experience, the resort had buses that would drive you to and from Universal and Disney). We were very disappointed by this news because we were told they did offer free shuttles, they only offered a pay shuttle service for $15 per person! to take you to the park. We decided that we would just drive to the parks and pay the $12 parking fee.

After unloading the car we decided to make the most of our week and went to Downtown Disney. I wish we had gone to previous time because Disney is revamping Pleasure Island, and all of the fun clubs were closed for renovations; it looked like The Explorers Club would have been a lot of fun, but alas, we were too late to see it. For the most part Downtown Disney is shopping and eating, but Disney style. They had fun looking restaurants, like the T-Rex one, or the huge paddle boat turned fancy seafood restaurant. There was also the biggest Disney store I've experienced, along with an awesome Lego store (where I wanted all of the legos) and a large pin trading store. It was fun to walk around and get ready for a week full of Disney!

Here's Joe with some Lego men, along with a wall with over 4,000! The Lego Loch Ness in the water was totally awesome. And I really enjoyed the city scapes, I took a picture of Lego Paris and Lego London.

Sisters

I have been horrible at blogging, so I'll do a mini post.

Here I am with my two awesome sisters Rachael (the blond) and Becky (the brunette that isn't me) - we were at Training Table on Thursday 11/6.

I think this is a great picture of us. I love my sisters, they are totally fantastic and very special to me. I am so grateful for their advice, love, and support.

Lots of love to my awesome sisters!

Camping?

Joe and I went camping! I know, we really aren't campers, and I got a lot of responses like "But you don't camp..." when I said we were going camping (September 26 & 27).

We drove up after work on Friday, unfortunately we got up there after dark. Luckily our friends Bob and Jason helped us set up our tent (Bob and his family have our same tent!) Once we were set up and moved all of our stuff into the tent, we all sat around the camp fire to get the camping started. Of course we had smores, which are always fun.

Saturday morning we all got up and had pancakes and bacon for breakfast. Luckily the Lunt's and MacPherson's have camping stoves, so that cooking was easier.

Bob, Diana, & Chad
The MacPherson's tent and ours behind itThe Lunt's trifecta tent

The Poole's tent

After breakfast we decided it would be fun to go the the Amicalola Falls State Park (http://www.gastateparks.org/info/amicalola/) and check out the water fall, apparently it's the tallest East of the Mississippi River! Of course, we had to get there first, and Google Maps has a hard time with Georgia roads. We all got a little lost, but then Chad Poole used his trusty iPhone and GPS'd us there. The state park was really nice. We walked along a path that took us to the ridiculous staircase up to the top of the falls, it was something over 400 steps to get there AND you had to walk back down the stairs to finish out the trail. It was worth the climb, even though I paid for it later in weird muscles I didn't know I had. The wilderness in Georgia is definitely different than in Utah (obviously), they each offer their own awesomeness. I'm glad we were able to see some of it.

After the state park visit, some of us needed to go into town, Dahlonega, and get some groceries and things. We drove through their totally cute downtown/main street area (http://www.dahlonega.org/index.php/visitors/visitors.html) there's something to be said for smallish towns.

When we got back to the campsite we had some awesome slaw dogs, Bob made some homemade slaw that was awesome, even Joe enjoyed it. Then Bill, Emily & Sally showed up to hang out for the evening (Emily was basically 9 months pregnant and didn't want to sleep on the ground). The kids played around in the creek along our campsite while the boys did manly things, like splitting wood. Really though, it was scary to watch, so I'm glad Joe didn't do it very long.
For dinner Saturday night, we all brought steak and potatoes! I have never done steak on an open fire grill. Both turned out awesome. Joe totally enjoyed the steak, my was a little under done (cause I'm a woos), but it all tasted good. After we did more smores, fire toasted marshmallows are so good.

Everything turned out well, even though sleeping wasn't that awesome. Next time we'll bring some sort of air mattress or padding. I can't sleep on the ground like I used to at girl's camp. I was also a little freaked out by all the spiders and bugs. All the creepy crawly things in Georgia seem way bigger than in Utah, even the daddy long legs. Perhaps we'll go camping a few times next year, and maybe when we return to Utah, we'll see if we have become adventurers.

Air Popcorn Popper

I came across this picture in my internet browsing and I immediately thought of an unfortunate experience I had with one when I was young.
We used to air pop our popcorn all of the time in one of these sweet babies. I liked to watch the kernels expand into the fluffiness, so to get the best view I was sitting on the counter looking into the machine. For some reason I was sitting there in my underwear....anyway, a rogue kernel popped out of the thing and went into my underwear! It was red hot and horrible! I survived and I learned to get over the experience, and still eat popcorn.

A friend's personal story

Joe mentioned to me this morning that he had started reading Lissa Lander's novella that she posted online with an author tool, you can check it out here: www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=1375 She is hoping people can back the book so that it will make it to the editor's desk at HarperCollins - I borrowed her picture from flickr cause it's awesome.

I decided to check it out, and see about supporting a friend. I read the prologue and hoped that my workload would be light today at work so that I could finish reading her book. Luckily, it was meant to be, I just finished the book. I think I read it for about 6 hours with a few work related interruptions and a 30 minute lunch break :)

If you are interested, I'm sure Lissa wouldn't mind you reading and backing her book.

I have to admit, it was hard to read something that is so personal, and so closely protected for so many years. I almost cried several times, and I think the only thing that stopped me from letting the tears out was that I was at work. I had to look at the ceiling, hoping that the tears would drain back into the ducts and take my mind off the story for a minute.

After reading it all, I'm so happy for Lissa, Kris, and Rosie; I'm happy they have each other. I'm happy they can grow together and that they love each other so much.

Twitter is to IM as Blog is to Email

Listen: I once read an article from an economist stating that emails were wasted keystrokes. This was at the beginning the Blog era. At the time it was common to receive form emails sent out to numerous people, or party invites forwarded from friend to friend. The argument was that sending individual emails was a waste of time and energy. If you had something going on in your life then you could post it to a Weblog and move on.

Emailing is all well and good. If you want to send a private message or question, email's a fine option.

I like chatting. It's good to know if I want a more immediate response to a question I can pull up the chatter and if my contact is online I can ask it. In the past, programs like AIM had an option to invite multiple people to chat. MSN had a similar feature. This was fun for collaborating on certain things, just like a conference call on a cell phone.

Enter Twitter and micro-blogging. There are other options out there, I'm not familiar with them though. Twitter is based on similar ideas of text messaging, you can only post 140 characters at a time, it's meant for small messages. Now that most of my friends and I are following each other's feeds it's a Permachat Blogette.

It's awesome to check the feed in the morning and see what everyone was doing last night, it's awesome to read complaints as the day goes on. Have something funny to say? A new word you just coined?

Permachat blogette!

You're invited to sign up at twitter.com and add us,



MrGrigg

EmilyGrigg

You can tweet and receive on your cellphone, email, direct, or side programs like Twhirl. Get with it!

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Tent = camping

Here's our new tent! We've decided that we want to try camping. Some of our friends are into it and have asked us to go at the end of the month. We'll see how we take to camping, maybe it will become a new hobby<

We also justified the purchase of the tent and some other camping gear because it can be considered part of our emergency preparedness stuff! We still need to work on our food storage, but at least we're getting started. Also, the tent was really inexpensive; we found it at Sam's club for a really good price considering the size. It was pretty easy to put up, awesome color coded poles and the bag has wheels which is great for transporting, since it's way heavy. Apparently the tent can sleep 8, so I guess if we have 6 kids, we'll be set!