August 1, 2011 – Write From Karen

(Not my eye. Click on it for credit).

Good grief, this day passed in a blur.

I dug my heels in and answered ALL of my emails (well, almost, I got a few more just now, but those are going to have to wait until the morning because my brain? It’s mush[ier] than usual). In addition, I dug my heels in and worked on designing a website for some high school counselors and oh! I just remembered, I need to send a list of questions to a new client.

In between all of this, I hounded Dude to get up, take a shower BEFORE getting on the computer (unbeknownst to him, this will be his new habit), and to start researching places he wants to work at. “I don’t know” won’t cut it anymore, we want concrete answers – short term and long term goals. I told him this morning that summer vacation? Is over for him. Also? Childhood is over – he’s a man now and it’s time to figure out what he’s going to do with himself. We’re making him dress up in slacks and a nice shirt (not a t-shirt) and come up to the office tomorrow so we can conduct mock interviews with him. Then, he’s going to drive a few places and pick up some applications.

Yep. We’re pushing him. Because we have to. If we waited for him to do something, we’d both be walking with canes.

Mean? Perhaps. But sometimes ya gotta do what’s necessary and this is necessary.

****

I also took Jazz to a dentist appointment today. He has to wear rubber bands for six weeks. Something about correcting his bite.

He’s NOT happy. And his mouth is sore right now, but I’m HOPING that this means we’re nearing the end of the treatment because I seem to recall rubber bands being the last step before the braces come off.

I hope so.

Especially since his mouth is now paid for.

At least he has a week to get used to the things before band camp starts next week.

Eight to five, Monday through Friday (and the following Monday). It’ll be grueling, for all of us, I assure you.

****

Speaking of teeth…

Mine have been giving me problems. I bit down on something the other day and OUCH. I thought at first I had lost a filling (nearly all of my molars have fillings, in fact, one molar is one big filling. No joke), but I don’t feel anything unusual in there, so now I’m thinking maybe I have some food caught in there so I’ll floss tonight. If that doesn’t help, then I’m thinking maybe I have some decay under my filling which means … I’ll be making an appointment to get my teeth cleaned to see what’s going on.

I really dread this and not just because going to the dentist is SO MUCH FUN, but because we don’t have dental insurance.

Swell.

But if I don’t treat this now, it might get worse and REALLY expensive, so it’s probably wiser to nip this thing in the bud … or the root, whatever the case may be.

****

I took Jazz out driving yesterday and we went on the side streets. Only, I took him a bit too far and we ended up on a curvy road and we nearly had a head-on collision with a pretty red pick up truck.

Now Jazz is scared to drive. *SIGH*

I was going to take him back out tonight after dinner, but I was so wrapped up in trying to get my emails under control, that I lost track of time and now it’s dark so … we’ll have to go tomorrow. I can’t let too much time go by though or he’ll be blow this incident up so much that he’ll be a petrified stump whenever we do go out.

Life is fun, isn’t it?

****

I was sort of a jerk to a family member yesterday. He wanted to go out to eat and I flat out said no. I hate eating out for two reasons:

The time. I would MUCH rather spend that time doing something OTHER than waiting in line or waiting for food. Just blech.

And two: the cost. I’d rather stick a $50 dollar bill in my mouth and chew, that’s how much of a waste eating out is to me.

I’m stressed because of the work I need to do and trying to find a part-time job and when I’m stressed, I have zero patience for crap.

It’s probably best just to steer clear of me for a while.

****

It’s 8:30 p.m. and still 95 degrees. It’s supposed to be 104 degrees tomorrow.

GOOD GRIEF!

And we haven’t had rain in about two weeks – MAJOR drought.

I’m writing this down so that next year, when we have a wet and/or cool summer, I can point to this summer, look Global Warming alarmists in the face and say, “It’s called CYCLICAL!”

See? Cranky.

I’m leaving now.

So Disney World … was fun.

The parks were awesome. But it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever go back. And it’s mainly because we’re just not that into all things Disney. But another big reason is because of the food prices.

Seriously. EIGHT dollars for ONE hotdog?!?!? That is insane, people. We were at Disney World for two days and I never ate a whole meal the whole time we were there; I just nibbled on the guys’ plates. I couldn’t bring myself to eat my own plate considering each plate cost a minimum of $7.00. I was very disappointed that everything was so expensive. I mean, I GET that they need to pay for all of their awesome “free” stuff, (i.e. transportation), but geez louise, talk about a kick in the teeth for families once they get there. And what are you going to do? You’re stuck. The food prices pretty much soured my Disney World experience, I’m sorry to say.

(I most likely dropped the ball on the food thing, though. Disney has dining options and I just sort of shrugged them off thinking, “we’ll just eat at cheap places.” The only problem with that is: there are no cheap eating places! So, if you’re looking into going to Disney World any time soon, I would highly recommend you check out the dining options and seriously consider going that route because winging it? Doesn’t work! And OW, my pocketbook).

I can’t say that I wasn’t warned, though. My mom and dad went a few years back with my brother and his family and mom did warn me about the food prices. But I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be THAT bad. Granted, I have a problem paying for food anyway, hence the reason we rarely go out to eat when we’re home, (at least in sit down restaurants), but I guess I was doubly annoyed because what choice did we have? We were sort of stuck on the Disney resort and short of taking a taxi somewhere to eat for cheaper, we really didn’t have a choice.

Stay on the grounds and pay the insanely expensive prices, or pay for a taxi AND THEN pay to eat somewhere else.

Staying on grounds was the lesser of two evils.

We stayed at the All-Star Music Resort. I picked that hotel because of Kevin and Jazz’s interest in music.

It was a nice enough hotel room, albeit small. In fact, the bathroom was so small that the door barely cleared the toilet when you entered the room. (Kevin bumped his shins I don’t know how many times). But I’m not complaining, hotel rooms have never been high on our priority list anyway. I mean, it’s somewhere to sleep, it wasn’t as if we planned on spending the whole vacation there, right?

Let’s back up a bit …

We flew out of St. Louis. We had to pick this route because it was way cheaper than flying out of Springfield and considering we didn’t have enough frequent flyer miles to cash in with American Airlines, we had to pay for our flights this go around. We ended up picking Air Trans because they had the best prices. We reserved our seats online (which, cool), and we left our house at 9:30 in the morning and made it into St. Louis about 2:00 p.m. (after stopping for lunch and making a quick trip to Wal-Mart because someone in our family *cough-Dude-cough* was having, erhm, stomach issues. He will die if he knows I just shared that with you all).

We parked our car at EZ Park, (which is convenient and way cheaper than surrounding car parks), and hitched a ride to the airport. Since we checked in online and had already printed out our boarding passes, (save yourself the hassle of waiting in line at the airport and check in online, ya’ll), all we had to do was check our baggage and go through security.

I always worry when we go through security because I never know if the detectors will pick up all of the metal in Kevin’s pelvis. But I needn’t have worried because Kevin sailed through security, but Jazz did not. He was tagged and they pulled him aside to give him a body pat. The guy was very respectful and told Jazz everything he was going to do before he did it. (And I stood by and watched him like a hawk. Though I was annoyed they were patting my 16-year old son down, I didn’t get upset. If we want to be safe when we fly, then we must endure the searches. Blame the terrorists).

Though I wasn’t too happy that Jazz was being manhandled by a stranger, I think I was more concerned that Kevin wasn’t flagged. (He wasn’t flagged on the way home, either). I don’t know if you guys have heard or not, but terrorists are now implanting bombs inside their bodies and if the detectors don’t detect all of the metal plates and pins inside Kevin’s body, what makes us think they’re going to detect a bomb inside a terrorist’s body?

It’s a little alarming, if you want the truth.

At any rate, our plane was waiting for us and our flight straight to Orlando went off without a hitch. We landed around 8:30 and by the time we got onto the Disney Magical Express and to our hotel, it was nearly 10:00 p.m.

The place was CRAWLING with people. And the pool was packed with screaming teenagers.

We dumped our baggage in our room and then we went back to the main building to grab something to eat – none of us had eaten since lunch – ten hours earlier. That’s when I nearly had a heart attack after seeing the prices.

The hotel was huge. As in, NINE buildings huge. Luckily, we stayed in building two, so though we still had a ways to walk back to the main building, it was nothing compared to the poor folks in the ninth building.

Our room was a corner room and right across from that piano pool you see above. Though it was pretty noisy at 10:00 o’clock at night, it was surprisingly quiet in the room. I’m a light sleeper, so I was concerned I would be up all night listening to rowdy teenagers. There was also some sleep sounds in the room alarm clock and I put it on the beach sounds to help drown out any potential noise.

Kevin ended up getting up about 3:00 o’clock in the morning to turn it off because there were these annoying sea gull sounds that would periodically cry out and wake us up. (Seriously – what wise guy thought adding periodic shrill sea gulls sounds to peaceful water gently coming onto shore would be a good idea? Gah).

Needless to say, we didn’t use the sleep sounds function the other nights we were there.

The boys have a hard time sleeping together. Jazz is a restless sleeper and moves around a lot and Dude snores, though not in an obnoxious way, but rather in a cute, little sea saw way, but loud enough to wake us up sometimes. Kevin took his cPap machine, thank God, so we didn’t have to endure his crazy loud, inconsistent snoring.

We meant to wake up and take advantage of the early park hours at Epcot the next day, but we didn’t make it. We ended up getting into the bus line about 9:30 – just in time to endure about 150 annoying Brazilian girls.

To be continued …