NaNoWriMo 2010 Here I come

It's that time of year again.  NaNoWriMo is upon us.  I'm pumped.  This will be my third year of stabbing away at the keyboard.  But really, consider it more my second.  Year one really amounted to very little because I didn't take it seriously enough. I've been doing a lot of stretching of the writing fingers this year: September I logged 40k words, averaging almost 10k a week.  This month I've kind of slacked off, but I keep telling myself that I'm just pacing myself so that I don't get burned out in mid November.

This years NaNoWriMo project will be a continuation of last year's--the Shadowman Project (for lack of a better name).

More later.

30/5 Birth-iversary, or, The Weekend We Spent in Toronto Celebrating our Fifth Anniversary and Sue’s 30th Birthday

Part1: Inception

Way back in July, I hatched a plan.  I wanted our fifth anniversary to be something special, and on top  of that, since generally our birthdays are usually overshadowed by some other event that ensures we don’t get to enjoy our birthdays, I wanted to also make sure that Sue’s 30th was one to remember.  So after a little thinking cap work, I figured we’d go to Toronto.  But I wanted all of this to be a surprise.  And so between July and Now, I secretly planned our trip to Toronto while a number of things happened to derail said surprise.  Including but not limited to:

• AAA, the first travel agency I signed up for called the house, and divulged a bunch of travel information to Sue when I was at work.  Sue was very upset and  they really didn’t care that they screwed up a secret.  Fortunately they didn’t mention the destination. But I canceled the trip from them immediately and booked through Expedia like I should have in the first place.
• Then in August I remembered that Sue’s passport was still in her maiden name. I spent a week scanning the web to figure out if the boarder control would give her hell.  The short answer: no if you don’t have kids.  But if you do have kids, the passport better show the married name, and the kids better all have the same last name, or the Canadians will assume you’re trafficking children and feed you to a Moose.
• So I had to say to her, “I need you to get a passport photo, but don’t ask why.”
• Four weeks after I sent out the passport renewal for her, the Passport office called and told her that she was lying on her form, that she couldn’t possibly be married under the license we supplied.  He claimed that the type of license we had was outlawed fully two years before we got married.  And he was being a jerk about it.  And he also was very adamant that the passport would not be completed by 10/8, and that Sue would have to jump through several dozen flaming hoops to prove that she did get a legal name change.
• So we called the court house; they said the passport office was full of shit.  AND they said if the passport office continued to be full of shit, they’d sue the shit out of them for us for infringing on our rights.
• We got a fancier version of the same marriage license and mailed it off.
• The passport guy, when he received the  fancy version of the same marriage license, said, “Oh well since you didn’t send me the fancy version in the first place, I just assumed you were lying.  I will process your request in time.”
• In September an out of state lady driving a rental (which she declined insurance on) hit Sue and the kids up at the mall.  And because the lovely lady didn’t want to take responsibility for her actions, we had to play the insurance runaround game, which offset the repair time until dangerously close to the time in which we were planning on leaving.
• Sue tried very hard to pump everyone she thought might know about what was going on for information.  I had to have her boss lie, making her think that she still had to work on her birthday.  I guess Pam went so far as to keep a hidden layout of her schedule that way so Sue would actually think she had to work.
• Almost to Canada, and I found out that Sue’s dad’s Garmin we were borrowing didn’t include Canadian maps.  And since I didn’t want her thinking we were going to Canada until we were in the line for the boarder, I had to cheat the GPS a bit to get us the last leg.

Part 2: Getting There

To appropriately whip my wife into a fervor of excitement, I was purposefully vague about how many hours I’d be working on Friday the 8th (half day).  I also left her with a letter explaining that she needed to pack, and that she did indeed have the weekend off.  But that’s about all it said beyond basic here’s what you need stuff.   To help tide her over, I had a little edible arrangements thing delivered to the house.

So then we packed up and left.   And as we drove, I used several devices of misdirection to keep her guessing where we were going.   Molly kept telling her we were going to see horsies.  And much of the trip, Sue figured it would be Belhurst Castle, but she was wrong there.  I also hinted at one point that we were heading to NYC; however the drive to Toronto was perilous enough—I can’t imagine 7 hours of under 4 backseat insanity.

On the way up through Buffalo, traffic wasn’t too bad (though Eastbound I-90 was an insanity construction traffic jam for miles and miles—needless to say we took the backroads home once we came back into the states). 

We stopped at Red Robin In Buffalo to eat, because Erie is one of those places with the IHOP/Red Robin Commercials, yet neither restaurant.  So for the rest of the world that has these standard chains, they’re strangely fantastic to us.  And our late lunch at Red Robin was indeed strangely fantastic.  At this point I also took advantage of poisoning Molly by telling her we were going to a castle.  Then once Molly started talking about going to the castle and seeing the horsies, Sue really started to get excited.

As mentioned above in Part 1, the GPS promptly failed as I tried to program in our destination in Toronto, so I did a Niagara Falls cheat, and stayed on the bridge to Cana-da.   At which point Sue put it all together and correctly guessed Toronto, thinking that we might be going to Medieval Times.

Now, I forgot to mention, that in the letter that she read Friday morning, it specifically said she didn’t need her passport.  Well, that’s because I had it stashed in the car. In fact, I had several envelopes stashed in the car, each containing more information about what we were doing.  The first envelope had our passports and birth certificates in it.  The second had  an anniversary letter and some spending cash (in Looneys of course).  The third had a pile of google maps to various locations I thought might be interesting.

So we rolled through the boarder and promptly joined about a hundred million other people all on the road to Toronto.  I didn’t realize that we happened to book our trip to Toronto during Canada’s Thanksgiving weekend.  And whiile the speed limit for most of the trip between the border and Toronto was 100kph, we were lucky to stay at 50.  It was slow going.  Oh and Jack, good well-behaved child as he is, decided not too long after we entered Canada that he was done with being in the car. Much to our good fortune, Molly decided to be actually really good, and she did everything she could to help calm Jack down.  She gave him toys, tried to hold his hand, and then started singing songs.  Molly loves to sing, and while many of her songs have interesting verses like:

 

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells

All far away

Oh what fun to ride far away hey

Old mcdonald had a farm

 

So we got to singing  The Wheels on the Bus, and Sue and I couldn’t remember more verses than Wheels, Wipers, and People, so we started to ad lib, much to Molly’s delight (and to some degree Jack too—he calmed down a bit when Molly started cackling).

Here are some additional Verses to the song:

The Grammas on the bus go have some snacks

The Papas on the bus go Where’s my Train

The Yams (Aunt Yam) go Where’s my Ant

The Daddy’s on the bus go <fart noise> <fart noise> <fart noise> / I hate traffic

The Mommy’s on the bus go I need snacks

The Jacks on the bus go Daa daa daa

The Chus on the bus go Yuck Yuck Yuck

The Kon’s on the bus go Where’s my cake? / Is it Fish? / I want cake (Kon’s part got sung a lot so we kept changing it up)

 

This worked for a while, but then Molly started getting tired, and when Molly’s tired she becomes a very much broken record.  And so she started saying “I want to go to the castle” over and over and over.  Fortunately we were actually in the city by this time, and coming in off the Gardinier Expressway, there were lots of “castles” to be seen. 

Park.  Valet? Yes. I’m too tired to park myself.  Check-in. Unpack.  And while we unpacked, Jack got his wish: some time to zoom about, free from the carseat: Molly was also happy to be free from the car seat, and quickly claimed the Chaise lounge and settled down with bunny, Bubbles and a good book (I love you, Stinky Face)

And Sue took some pictures of the sunset outside our hotel window:

A quick kiss,    and we were on our way to part 3

Part 3 – Dinner Crash

The Concierge directed us over to The Old Spaghetti Warehouse as a fine family type eatery.  And by the time we got there and were seated, it was pushing 7:15.  The place had a lot of character.  It reminded me of backstage in an old theater, where the restaurant was carved out around all the old props that weren’t in use.  We sat in a carousel.  There was also a trolley car, a british style phone booth, and a bunch of other interesting rebuilds containing tables with people eating copious amounts of pasta.  Here are some pre-meltdown pictures:

And though it was incredibly cute when Jack discovered the fun of playing with spoons, and Molly learned about the world of blowing bubbles in her milk, our food didn’t really arrive until about 8:00, which was exactly Jack’s bedtime, and the little man, after a a good many hours crabbing about being in the car for too long, was DONE. So he proceeded to FLIP-OUT (Adventure Time style).  Despite the fact that dessert was included in the price of our meal, we had to skip out on it and head back to the hotel, where we all promptly crashed.  Molly insisted on sleeping with us, which meant that she bed hogged big time, leaving me with next to nothing for mattress and a constant arm, leg, or head resting on me.  Still, at least she didn’t do the cry-whine/itch thing she did last week (that was a true hideous night).

Part 4 – Sue’s 30th Birthday, or, Saturday in Toronto

Originally we were planning on hitting up the Toronto Zoo on saturday, but seeing how I had no working GPS, and was still fatigued from Friday’s driving, I suggested that we leave the car where it was and took advantage of the public transit system to tool around downtown Toronto.  Sue was down with the idea, and Molly was pretty jazzed about taking the trains, so after some breakfast purchased at the little grocery store across the street from the hotel, we were off to Union Station.

You know, Japan, our first real experience with subway systems, trains and the like, really spoiled us.  Ever since, we have forever been mildly confused with American, and now Also Canadian mass transit systems.  In Japan, there were big maps of destinations, with prices on them.  It was very easy to navigate even without know much of the language.  Toronto was ok to navigate, but buying tokens was a bit confusing, and in the end, we got a family day pass, but that was after I ignored Sue’s good advice to ask before purchasing anything.  Oh well, we have 4 souvenir subway tokens.

We took the subway to Yonge and Queen street and started out in the Yonge Street shopping district with the intent to hit up the Eaton Center.  It wasn’t quite open yet, so we headed into an egg restaurant, and ordered up some more breakfast for Molly; because the kid never eats enough.  

After second breakfast, we went into the Eaton Center, which had some very cool fake Geese flying in from the ceiling.   They also had Flying Kitties:

Molly wanted one.  Can you imagine the damage a flying kitty would cause in your house?  Despite being heavily under construction, the mall turned out being quite good.  There was a Godiva store, and Sue got her high-end chocolate fix (The Blood Orange Bats are fantastic if you need a fix yourself).  She also landed some super deals at The Body shop and got a bunch of free stuff for use with Massages.  I was wishing that I didn’t buy her boots in Houston, and instead saved the money for Toronto, because Toronto is apparently a boot mecca.  They had lots of very cool boots there.  Molly got herself Blaze from the Tinkerbell series, and I picked up a new GPS, so we’d be able to navigate home and other places in the future.

Here’s a picture of Jack and I before we  then exited part 4 for

Part 5 – Chinatown, or the best part

Sue was pretty excited when she saw on our hotel map of Toronto that there was  a pretty big Chinatown section.  And we definitely weren’t disappointed. We walked down a nostalgic lane pretty much immediately upon entering Chinatown (via street car this time), when we found an Anime store. Though it was cool to browse through all the anime stuff, I think it just made us feel old.  Still it was kind of cool.

We then started looking around for lunch, and stopped in a bakery for some Chinese buns.  We were almost going to settle for that, but I knew Jack would be needing a pile o carrots soon, so we pressed on a little more, looking for the perfect lunch place. And we found it: an authentic ramen shop.  And if you know Sue at all, you know that she will stop at nothing to get a good honest bowl of Japanese noodles.  And this place, was by far the best Ramen we’ve had since Japan.  We both ate EVERYTHING. And to make the lunch all the better, they actually had Black Sesame Ice Cream, another favorite we haven’t really been able to have since going to Japan. It was super lovely.  And I think the high point of our vacation.  The food was that good.

 

Sue also found a very cool bamboo shop that fulfilled another longterm search of hers: wooden rice hats.  Back when we were on our honeymoon, her mission was to find one, and we never saw anything beyond some cheap touristy kind that you can get over here.  But this place had some very nice ones and Sue bought two as well as a very nice paper umbrella.

A little ways further and we went into a teashop where Molly made friends with the little girl of the shop owners.  The two of them ran around the shop like little banshees in this roller-racer type car while we looked at the teas.  We talked to the owners a bit, so the kids could play some before heading back to dump off our bags.

Part 6 – Why Kids need naps, or, the shittiest part of the trip

We got back to the hotel, dumped off our bags, and I sent Sue down for "the weirdest Swedish Massage she’d ever had” with the hopes that Molly would take a bit of a nap, because she was starting to go crazy.  Well naps didn’t happen.  And when Sue got back, we decided to hop the ferry and check out the islands in the bay.

Supposedly there was a harvest festival going on over on the Island.  But as we walked around, we didn’t see anything like that.  We did, however, find a really cool Labyrinth made out of cedar trees, which Molly dubbed Owiee’s house (Owiee is Molly’s imaginary friend.  He lives in trees, and is green with green pants and brown shoes.  He doesn’t wear a shirt and keeps his towel in his belly button.)  So we tromped around in Owiee’s house for a bit, finally coaxing him out to walk with us (Molly kept calling the island Owiee’s island, by the way).  

We walked down to the far side near the beaches, and they were all closed for the season—everything was closed.  So we went over towards  a playground.  Then everything went downhill.  Molly played the brown note in the playground.   Crapped her pants big time.  Didn’t even tell us she had to go, despite constant asking her if she needed to go potty.  We made her walk back to the beach area, so we could get her cleaned up, but the restrooms were also closed for the season.  We walked back further, to some other restrooms we saw on the way into the island.  Also closed.  Sue and I are both furious now.  Not only has Molly made a mess of herself, but it seems like we’re stuck on a series of interconnected islands populated by hundreds of people that came with our ferry alone, and no public restrooms.  Fortunately, right by the ferry drop, the restrooms were open, and Sue performed magic by turning her hoodie into a makeshift skirt for Molly. 

Standing in line to catch the ferry back, we were somewhat alleviated to see we weren’t the only parents with this plight; some filthy and poorly mannered Swiss or Austrian (not sure which nationality beyond the fact that their German was really sloppy awful sounding) kid had done the same.  Except the Swiss parents really weren’t doing much about it, and letting their filthy crap pants child all over the place.  But, we did get some nice pictures of the city waiting for the ferry:

Part 7 – Dinner and a Movie

We were pretty much done after the big letdown of the Islands.  So we hit up this little Gyro place right next door to the hotel and ordered up Iron Man 2 from the hotel tv.  The gyros were super fantastic, and despite the ridiculous fee for the movie, Iron Man 2 was really enjoyable.  Both kids were completely exhausted and slept very well…Molly even left our bed and laid down on the little chaise lounge at some point, which, though confusing, was really nice too.

Part 8 – Toronto Zoo

So Sunday we packed up, got breakfast from the Kitchen Corner grocery store again (they had some super wonderful hard crusty bread, and aloe vera water), and then checked out.   With new GPS in hand, I programmed in our destination, and we zipped off to the zoo, all of us sad that the new GPS didn’t have Dr. Nightmare’s voice loaded in it.  If you don’t own a garmin, they have customizeable voices you can download.  one of them, Dr. NIghtmare makes constant ghoulish comments as you’re driving, like “Can we stop for some rope and a shovel” Or “I think you’re being followed.” or “There’s a goblin behind you.”  Etc.He’s quite fun, and we generally combine him with the hearse car marker (because if Sue had the money, she’d be tooling around town in a hearse.)  Traffic was again hideous.

Once we got to the zoo, we kind of balked at the price--$23/adult.  We balked again when we saw that some parts of the zoo, like their new Shark section and Kids section required additional fees.  Screw that. We skipped those parts.  Some pictures from the zoo:

The Toronto zoo had some pretty cool exhibit houses.  The above picture of the alligator snapping turtle was amazing; that thing was easily 40 pounds or so; it would have no trouble taking a foot and not even saying what.  Molly got a kick out of the baby lizards and flamingos.  Sue got to see a bunch of arctic foxes.  But the biggest drawback was that the Toronto zoo was way too spread out.  It made Cleveland’s overly spread out zoo look like the Erie zoo.  Not only did you have to walk forever between zones, but some places like the Ruined Mayan Temple, were islands of stuff that were one way in/out, requiring you to backtrack a lot.  We got there at 10, and by 2, we were done, and we hadn’t seen about 1/3 of the zoo yet.   So we ended up just skipping the rest in favor of trying to get out of Dodge before the traffic got too bad.

Part 9 – Journey’s End

Canadian traffic jams center themselves around on/off ramps.  All the way back to the states, every time we got near an exit, the traffic would lock up and we’d be down under 40kph.  As soon as we got past the exit, it was back up to 70-90.  It stayed like this all the way to the QEW, which was pretty close to the last leg on the way out of Canada.  And aside from a few “why are you taking me this way” Moments from the garmin as it led us on the backroads back to Erie (so we’d avoid the awful traffic jam on I90 we saw on Friday), we made it back home by 9PM.

All in all, our Birth-iversary trip was a hoot.  I know we’ll travel to Toronto again, but probably not until both kids are potty trained.  There was so much more we could have done there.

Coming Soon!

An account of our Birth-iversary Trip to Toronto!

Yeah we just throw our kids in with the laundry. Keeps em fresh and clean, but they can be staticky at times.