It’s seemed like a long time, but it’s only been . . . let’s see . . . December 17th . . . holy crap! I’ve gone 12 days without a post! Let me do a quick catch up:

We made a gingerbread house.

We made Christmas cupcakes to take on our Christmas Day visits.

We made Christmas cookies for Santa’s visit.

Santa came over Christmas Eve night and left toys for the boys.

I had to put together the toys Christmas morning.

^^ That’s 933 pieces of Lego!

Christmas afternoon and evening, we went to two other Christmas in my hometown; it was a whirlwind of Christmas Day activity.

It snowed about 5 inches Christmas night, starting just after we got back home.

There, that catches up by skipping over all the really interesting details. I’ll fill in the details soon.

Apologies all around for being a slackass over the past two weeks.

Bullgrit

Our flight from Orlando last week had a very interesting start. A couple minutes after all passengers were seated, one of the flight attendants came on the PA and said that because the plane had to take on a lot of fuel, it couldn’t take everyone that was currently aboard. Five passengers needed to get off.

The airline offered a decent deal for anyone who volunteered to remove themselves: $300 plus the price of their ticket, in return for just taking another flight 5 hours later. That’s a pretty good deal for someone who can take hanging out in the airport terminal for five more hours. But as tempting as that deal was, we didn’t think the boys could handle hanging out in the airport terminal for another 5 hours, especially considering we had already been hanging out for nearly 2 hours. (Read: we didn’t think we could handle the boys hanging out in the airport terminal for another 5 hours.) So we just sat there. As did every other passenger in the cabin.

After a minute, two passengers volunteered to get off the plane. After that, the flight attendant announced that if no one else volunteered, they would have to force the three passengers who boarded last to get off. After another minute, she announced that she was going to get the information for who boarded last. She left the plane briefly, and came back with three names.

Two of the three named passengers were a husband and wife, and they immediately got up and started gathering their carry-ons. The third named passenger to be deplaned turned out to be a mother with a baby.

Since there was other stuff and movement going on in the cabin, it wasn’t immediately apparent that the mother and baby were the ones being ejected. But when I realized what was going on, I leaned to Cowgrit and said, “They’re kicking a mother with a baby off the plane? If you and my mom can handle the boys, I’m willing to take her place. She can’t wait five hours in an airport with a baby.”

Cowgrit immediately nodded and said, “Yeah, do it.”

I stood up and started heading forward. (I’d come back and get my carry-on after I talked with the flight attendants.) When I was about half-way to the front of the plane, I saw the mother and baby returning to their seat. And then everyone on the plane applauded. Huh?

I stopped. I heard someone near me say, to someone else, “Someone took her place.” Oh. As the mother and baby returned to their seat, I turned around and headed back to my own. The suspense and drama was over, and the flight attendants started preparing everyone for departure.

But this whole situation made me wonder: don’t airlines know how much fuel they have to put on a plane for a flight before they sell tickets on the flight? Is this just a version of the old, “the flight is overbooked,” aggravation? Ain’t it kind of rude to kick people off a plane? Ain’t it downright cold to kick a mother and baby off a flight?

Bullgrit

We’re back home from week in Walt Disney World. Because we’re busy with wrapping up and winding down from our adventures, I’ll just throw out some scattered anecdotes for this post:

One day we had a lunch reservation at the Hollywood & Vine restaurant in the Disney Hollywood Studios park. H&V is a buffet, with all kinds of foods, but there was no pizza. Calfgrit9 wanted pizza — in his experience, buffets have pizza; Golden Corral has pizza. He was so disappointed that he was ornery and stubborn, and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) find anything else on display that he wanted.

We explained that our plans were to go to Pizza Planet for dinner — a restaurant with pretty much nothing but pizza — but he wanted pizza now. We got him to nibble on a few things, but he did it with a big ol’ pout on his face the whole time. I even took a picture of him pouting, (bottom lip stuck out), over a big bowl of chocolate ice cream with a chocolate chip cookie dipped in it. Poor thing.

Immediately after this “terrible” lunch, he was laughing out loud at a group of Disney street performers acting as a incompetent public works team.

Kids. They can go from one extreme emotion to another in seconds. It makes me dizzy.

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Both boys created a double-bladed lightsaber in the Star Wars store.

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They spent nearly an hour building and racing Lego vehicles in the Lego store in Downtown Disney.

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They could both outscore their mom on Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin, but no one could even get in the same ballpark of my scores.

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They got me to join them in the outdoor pool, after the sun went down — 45-50 degrees even in Florida. The lifeguards were wearing full coats with hoods. Supposedly the pools are heated to 85 degrees, but only the hot tubs, heated to 104 degrees, were comfortable.

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They loved the Wilderness Lodge resort we stayed at, but they both claimed the video game arcade made it the best hotel we’ve stayed at in WDW.

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None of us had to deal with the naked body scanners or the grope pat downs in the airports. But standing in the huge line, with a couple or three hundred other travelers showed that if a terrorist really wanted to kill a bunch of people, all he’d have to do is set off a suitcase bomb at the security checkpoint. No need to bother trying to get a bomb through the security and onto a plane.

Bullgrit

Bullgrit