Flash Mountain

All right, all right, I know this has been a very emotionally draining week for everyone. Some of you may be hung over. I wanted to talk to you all about National Animal Shelter Appreciation Week, and I will, but I think I’ll wait until everyone has calmed down a little from whatever ecstatic/ despairing/ ambivalent coma in which you were left yesterday, and for today, I’m just going to talk about Disneyland in a nice, calm voice.

Pretty, pretty lights. Benign Mouse.

Yes, I went to Disneyland last week. I don’t know if it was the wisest choice to leave two days after we moved into a new apartment, but we planned it, so there you go. I spent half the time on rides and the other half on the phone sorting out disaster relief arrangements, so it was a little hectic. But you know, that’s how life has been rolling these days, so it’s all good.

They were filming their Christmas parade out there in the 90 degree heat, so some poor kid in a nuclear Goofy suit had to dance down Main Street through 4 hours’ worth of takes while a cannon shot what passes for snowflakes in Anaheim.

After an hour of walking around dragging what looked like little bits of toilet paper glued to my feet through the Magic Kingdom, I finally found a coffee cart. Now if you know me, there is one thing and one thing only I need to survive, and it’s coffee. As in, if we were in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and I had to run into a deserted store to loot it for essential supplies, it would be coffee first, then chocolate, then medicine.

I don’t give up my coffee easily. So I held onto it through the Splash Mountain line, and realized when I got to the front that there was no trash can in sight. No worries, I thought, it can come with me. So my coffee and I rode Splash Mountain. I didn’t spill. It was fine.

When we got to the end of the ride, we went to the photo booth to buy the picture, because it’s one of those things you do on family vacations. We gave the woman the number of our photo, and she dutifully pulled it up.

Then her face froze into a sneering rictus, a stern schoolmarm of disapproval as she quickly deleted the picture off the screen.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “this picture will not be available for purchase.”

“Oh, was there a problem?” my husband asked.

“YOU CAN’T BUY IT,” she repeated, in a civil but firm tone.

“I wonder what that was about,” he said.

Now, as some of you may know, there is a long and storied history of people goofing off on this ride and doing inappropriate things as the log goes over the top. Usually this involves nudity and/or other forms of lewd behavior. While such photos do occasionally make their way to the internet, usually they just disappear under some pretense of “technical difficulty.” This is why they put the stern older people in charge of the photo booth, people unlikely to be moved by such nonsense. No shenanigans for you. You sit on the ride and you enjoy it properly, the way Walt Disney intended.

I think I did something I wasn’t supposed to.

I kept my shirt on, by the way.

I still don’t see what the problem was.

Yeah, pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to take a picture of the picture either, but since we’d already determined I was a troublemaker, I figured I’d live up to her low expectations.

I realize this has nothing to do with pets, but as anyone who’s ever worked with me will agree, a post about coffee is very much in the wheelhouse of every medical professional.