January 4: Bulldozer, Typhoon Lagoon, Frozen Ride

The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with.

The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one.

He stared at it.

"Yellow," he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed.

Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and another.  He began to suspect that he was hung over.  Why was he hung over?  Had he been drinking the night before?  He supposed that he must have been.  H caught a glint in the shaving mirror.  "Yellow," he thought and stomped on to the bedroom.

He stood and thought.  The pub, he thought.  Oh dear, the pub.  He vaguely remembered being angry, angry about something that seemed important.  He'd been telling people about it, telling people about it at great length, he rather suspected:  his clearest visual recollection was of glazed looks on other people's faces.  Something about a new bypass he had just found out about.  It had been in the pipeline for months only no one seemed to have known about it.  Ridiculous.  He took a swig of water.  It would sort itself out, he'd decided, no one wanted a bypass, the council didn't have a leg to stand on.  It would sort itself out.

Obviously, Arthur Dent's morning is not going to go well.  Bulldozers are sitting outside his house.  He's hungover, barely remembers the night before.  That's not the recipe for a good day.

Welcome to day two of Orlando.  It is still 75 degrees outside.  It's 9 a.m., and a little cloudy.  But the breeze is warm and the palm trees are waving at me.  That is the recipe for a good day.

Spent most of yesterday at Typhoon Lagoon, which is a huge water park here at Disney.  Water parks are not my favorite, but my son was, again, over-the-Perseids excited.  As the surfers say, "The waves were bitchin'."  We got a little bit of a later start than I wanted.  Got to the park at around 12:30 p.m., which, in my mind, is a waste of about a half day.

But there was my wife, floating in a tube on the lazy river beside me, saying, "We are NOT on any schedule."

That's difficult for me to take.  I'm a schedule kind of person, from sunup to sundown and into the night.  I don't take many vacations like this, so I have a tendency to try to turn them into work.  You know, Typhoon Lagoon--10 a.m.; EPCOT--2 p.m. for Spaceship Earth; Lunch--hot dogs or something; World Showcase--4 p.m. to 6 p.m.; Frozen ride Fast Pass--6:10 p.m. to 7:10 p.m.; Fireball Cocoa in Canada--7:30 p.m. . . . Well, you get the idea.

We did get to EPCOT around 5:30 p.m. and made our ambling way back to Norway in the World Showcase for the Frozen ride.  Then it was Spaceship Earth, which stunned my son, especially when we got to the top, with Earth floating above us surrounded by stars.  Then we did a ride called Soarin', which was not on my itinerary, but was also amazing.  By then, the park was closing, so we headed off to the bus stop to get back to our hotel.

On the bus, we met a guy who is a Disney animator.  He works for Disney in California and was on vacation at Walt Disney World with his wife and daughter.  A Christmas/birthday present to his little girl.  He said he works as a storyboard artist for the TV show Big Hero 6.  It's his dream job.  For some reason, meeting someone who has the job that he's wanted since he was a kid filled me with a kind of hope.

Well, today's itinerary includes an Uber ride to Harry Potter World.  After that, I have no idea what the day holds for us.  Butterbeer at Hogsmeade?  Wand shopping at Ollivander's?  Who knows?

Maybe Saint Marty is growing as a person.

January 3: Toothpaste on the Brush, the Most Magical Place on Earth, 75 Degrees

The house stood on a slight rise just on the edge of the village.  It stood on its own and looked over a broad spread of West Country farmland.  Not a remarkable house by any means--it was about thirty years old, squattish, squarish, made of brick, and had four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye.  

The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in.  He had lived in it for about three years, ever since he had moved out of London because it made him nervous and irritable.  He was about thirty as well, dark haired and never quite at ease with himself.  The thing that used to worry him most was the fact that people always used to ask him what he was looking so worried about.  He worked in local radio which he always used to tell his friends was a lot more interesting than they probably thought.  It was, too--most of his friends worked in advertising.

It hadn't properly registered with Arthur that the council wanted to knock down his house and build a bypass instead.


At eight o'clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good.  He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.

Toothpaste on the brush--so.  Scrub.

Shaving mirror--pointed at the ceiling.  He adjusted it.  For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window.  Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent's bristles.  He shaved them off, washed, dried, and stomped off to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.

Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee.  Yawn.

An ordinary-sounding morning for Arthur Dent, save for the bulldozers.  Obviously, something momentous is about to happen that will change his life forever.  But, for Arthur, it's all about the morning rituals--toilet, shaving, brushing his teeth, breakfast, coffee.

Welcome to my adventures in Orlando.  Yes, this blog post is coming to you from the happiest place on Earth, as I have been reminded hundreds of times by various employees in the last 24 hours.  And I AM happy.  The flights down to Florida were fairly non-exceptional, except for a mad dash through the Minneapolis airport and some air turbulence.

Now, I begin my first morning in this magical place.  And I begin it, as I always do:  toilet, brushing my teeth, shaving, showering.  Pretty soon, I will be seeking about some overpriced breakfast food somewhere.  (Everything is overpriced here, because it can be.)

Last night, we went to the Magic Kingdom, which was crowded to the point of insanity.  Trying to push through the crowds was like trying to get home by cutting through Times Square on New Year's Eve.  But my son, who has never been to Walt Disney World, was over-the-Milky-Way excited.  There was Cinderella's Castle, still decked out for the holidays with lights.  There were Christmas trees and wreaths and happily exhausted people with mouse ears walking around.  Music everywhere you went.

We only went on a couple rides last night--Big Thunder Mountain and Space Mountain.  Both roller coasters.  My son loved the first, wasn't too fond of the second.  My daughter, who has been here before, loved hearing me, sitting behind her, screaming my head off.  I love roller coasters, but they scare the crap out of me.

And then, to cap off the night, the fireworks over the castle.  That's where things went a little off the rails.  My son, who had been up since 4 a.m., was a little overstimulated.  He started having a meltdown.  There were so many people.  We literally couldn't move more than five feet in any direction.  So we just stood in the middle of Main Street and watched the show, which, because my son is only ten and not very tall, my son couldn't really see all that well.  AND he was thirsty.  AND he was hungry.

Needless to say, after the fireworks were over, we found a bus and got back to our hotel to find something to eat and drink.

And now, this morning, it is 75 degrees outside.  The palm trees are swaying in the breeze.  It's the start of our first morning in the most magical place on Earth (as I'm sure I'll be reminded dozens of times throughout the day).  There is not a bulldozer in sight.

Saint Marty is thankful for magic this morning.

January 1: Western Spiral Arm, House in Disarray, Florida Bound

Welcome to 2019, or, as it shall from henceforth be known, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Year.

That's right.  This year's book is Douglas Adams' sci-fi comedy classic.  I was looking for something a little lighter after spending a year chasing a white whale aboard the Pequod with Ahab and company.  I like to think of Hitchhiker's Guide as the anti-Melville.

It starts out like this:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has--or rather had--a problem, which was this:  most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.  Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place.  And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place.  This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to be nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost for ever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible, stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book called The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy--not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or even heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.

In fact, it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor--of which no Earthman had ever heard either.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one--more popular that the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Who Is This God Person, Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.

It begins with a house.

So, there you have it.  The beginning of a new year.  And it really all begins with a house.  My house, in a disarray of packing for Florida.  It's late at night.  My son is sleeping fitfully, dreams of castles and magic wands and Mickey Mouse dancing in his head.  My wife is making a list and checking it twice.  And I am doing some last minute computer work.

The next post you read on this blog will be coming from a much warmer place, probably after some fireworks.  I'm determined to make this Hitchhiker's Guide year happier, funnier, less stressful.

Saint Marty is tired of chasing white whales.

January 1: Margaret Avison, "New Year's Poem," Feast of the Solemnity of Mary

New Year's Poem

by:  Margaret Avison

The Christmas twigs crispen and needles rattle
Along the window-ledge.
             A solitary pearl
Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party
Lies in the suety, snow-luminous plainness
Of morning, on the window-ledge beside them.   
And all the furniture that circled stately
And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed
With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver
Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses
Into its previous largeness.
             I remember   
Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave
Where cold so little can contain;
I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones
Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust,
And the long loop of winter wind
Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus down
To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard,
And the still window-ledge.
             Gentle and just pleasure
It is, being human, to have won from space
This unchill, habitable interior
Which mirrors quietly the light
Of the snow, and the new year.

_____________________________

A poem to start off the new year.

This morning I played the pipe organ for Mass--the Feast of the Solemnity of Mary.  It was cold and snowy, the aftermath of a little storm that blew in on New Year's Eve.  It was a peaceful, beautiful beginning.

Saint Marty is ready for joy, happiness, and laughter.