May 7, 2007

Today begins my short week at the office. Dominica found out on Friday that she is being given Friday as a “holiday” the same as I am. That is awesome. That will help a lot to offset the cost of our mini-vacation. So she doesn’t have to go crazy working through her lunches and staying late every night trying to make up time. It is especially helpful since she is taking some time off on Wednesday afternoon, at least an hour, to go to take her CompTIA A+ exam. So we both have four day work weeks. I am hoping to be able to work from home on Wednesday so that I will get a day with Oreo before he spends the long weekend at day care without seeing us. He will really miss us and he will be really exhausted after all that so we want to make sure that he gets his usual sleep-in-the-sun day. So I will probably only be going into the office three days this week and Thursday is going to be a really early day for me so that I can leave the office by three thirty.

We are already packed for the trip. Dominica did that while studying over the weekend. So we are almost ready to walk out the door as it is. We just have to get dressed after work, get a ride to the airport and off we go. Dominica is exceptionally excited about this trip. She gets really worked up about trips to Walt Disney World. Min did a little looking and discovered that there is a new way to do Mission: Space that does not include the motion-sickness inducing centrifuge which means that we can now do the ride which is one of EPCOT’s biggest attractions. We are really excited about that because it provides a completely new and highly anticipated experience in EPCOT. Mission: Space replaced by former favourite EPCOT attraction – Horizons presented by General Electric. My parents and I rode Horizons three times when we went there in 1987. This is very exciting as on our last trip we really felt that we had exhausted the “attraction” portion of WDW and were very tired of the rides. Having something big and new to go to will really help.

So our new EPCOT stuff to experience include: The Seas (re-opened since our 2005 trip), Spaceship Earth (modified so that I can ride it without becoming ill), The Land (same ride but the human narrator has been replaced with pre-recorded audio) and the Gran Fiesta Tour in Mexico (replaces the aged El Rio del Tiempo.) Outside of EPCOT there is the new Laugh Floor Comedy Club in the Magic Kingdom and a Narnia museum exhibit in Disney Studios. Both are very unlikely to justify trips to those parks though.

We have checked the weather and it is going to be extremely hot while we are in WDW. It will be in the low 90s each day that we are there. That is not what we had been hoping for. We are not well prepared to be spending a weekend in that kind of heat. That is going to add a layer of complication to the weekend. At least we are arriving in the middle of the night so it shouldn’t be too bad at that point.

Today is pretty slow as it is a bank holiday in the UK. So I have very little to do. A nice day to relax and get caught up with some stuff. I actually did get a bit of “catch up” work done and got a chance to get a little breather. Dominica had a really busy day, though, which is not what she needs leading up to her big exam.

Before leaving home this morning I finished reading “DV Filmaking” from O’Reilly Publishing that I started a few weeks ago. I also wrapped up my textbook “A Gift of Fire” by Sara Baase. I skipped most of the book as it didn’t really apply that much to my class. Really it was just an expensive assignment sheet for us. The book was pretty good considering the subject matter but nothing that I feel the need to pour over or keep. I will probably sell it used in the hopes that someone will need it for another class.

I left work at a quarter till six.  Tonight will be nothing but studying for Dominica and I.

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