On Icing Buckets, Oil Paintings, and Disneyland Passes

I'll try to be brief covering all the above-listed topics, but you know me...brevity doesn't come naturally.

Anyway, here goes: My folks, seeing our crazy urban-garden-loving backyard, bought us a book on Square Foot Gardening...and it rocks. It suggested also planting in buckets, and we thought we were so clever, spending $2.78/5 gallon Home Depot bucket...until it recommended stopping by our local bakery and asking for their empty icing food-grade plastic buckets. Uh...we can do that? So we hit up Food 4 Less, Costco, and Vons this weekend, and scored no less than 10 buckets! (Believe it or not, Costco offered us ONE...Vons gave us two - AND steam-cleaned them for me!!! - and Food 4 Less coughed up FOUR icing buckets and THREE MORE Crema Mexicana buckets!!!) ALL FOR FREE!!! Bye, bye, $2.78/bucket! We're gonna be planting in food-grade plastics! (Yeah, yeah, I know...but we're excited.) I mean, take a look at how these tomato plants GROW in buckets! Scroll back a few entries and compare our tomato plants...a couple weeks ago they were healthy, but now they're out of control!!! They've even got blooming flowers where shortly beautiful yellow cherry tomatoes will be sprouting! HOW STOKED AM I?!?!?! (Remember people, we're talking ME and FOOD...and creating my OWN food. This is a DREAM!)

Jason bought me an oil paint set at Christmas, and I've been trying to get up the courage to suck at oil painting...so I just busted 'em out and painted last night. It's abstract, yes, and it's also a test...but for those of you already aware, I'm trying to write a book, and it's exactly where one of the characters IS right now, so...yeah. I won't say I'm super-proud of it or anything, but...I did that. So. Yeah.

So Jason and I got back our Disneyland passes. Yes, it's true, we caved...and now we can go any day, anytime, all the time. Why, you ask, would we blow so much money (plus upgrade Tyler's pass to premium, too)? Well, a few reasons: It kills us when family comes into town and we CAN'T just bomb off to Disney with them...that we don't have free parking to help them drop cars in the lot...that we don't have the 15% food discount or 10% merchandise discount (for them OR us, considering how much we love Steakhouse 55 but can't afford their prices, and this is just the bump we need to enjoy our potato stacks and seven onion soups)...you name it. Plus, now we have a (paid once, now free) date night activity, and we can take the kids every Saturday morning like we used to...only now we're diaper-bag-free and our kids will actually REMEMBER going! (Okay, at least Tyler will!)

In other words...if you have a Disneyland pass or are planning to hit up the park anytime soon, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!! We'd love to go with you, or hook you up somehow...after all, we live 5 minutes from the park in heavy traffic!

SINCE we have Disney passes, what did we do for date night Saturday? You guessed it. It was fun, of course, and we did Space Mountain and Soarin' Over CA, but then we decided to head out, and I've just gotta tell you what happened.

So we get on the tram to head, and get around that first bend to go back to the structure, when the tram DIES. So another tram swings around the corner and parks next to us so we can transfer to a working tram, no problem. We're about to go when we hear some women behind us screaming at each other, and a Disney tram dude flipping out. To top it off, he was very gay and had a major lisp (why on earth would you want to adopt a stereotype like that, really?) and half-running along the tram toward the front yelling "Call Security!" Suddenly everyone wants to know what's going on, we're all stuck there waiting for security to show, and the tram behind us and the tram behind them are stopped dead waiting for either our tram or the dead tram to get the heck out of the way.

In other words, ain't nobody goin' nowhere.

So we're hearing women yelling at each other about "assault" and "pressing charges" and thinking WHAT THE HECK!??! Security shows up...followed by no less than SIX police officers (the Downtown Disney cops, no doubt) and another half-dozen Disney employees, and three women get off the tram to kavetch to the officers and offer "their side" of the story, with one of the women's FOUR children getting off 10 minutes later. It's was close to half an hour from the time our original tram tried to leave until we finally were on our way to the parking structure.

So here's what I deduced: A & B were sisters; A had a newborn in arms. C had her four kids. During the tram swap, A was trying to move to the next tram, C was helping her kids on, and A, a very large, portly (read: grossly obese) woman was attempting to shield her baby from the commotion of a slew of kids and adults trying to switch trams. C accused A of "bumping" her, so C bumped back. B stepped in to bump C for bumping A, who was "just trying to protect her baby", so C bumped B, who bumped C back, and then C took things up a notch: she PINCHED B...HARD on the arm. I mean, instant black-and-blue welt-hard. Unreal. So then the screaming, the accusations, the crazy Disney employee stepping in, and basically just complete chaos...plus three or four white trash individuals loudly expressing their intellectually-challenged opinions to add to the insanity.

Did I mention these women were all well into their 40's and 50's?

The saddest part to me was watching those four little kids, all under 8 if a day, disembark from the tram to stand by their mother (C, the pincher) who was being questioned by police. Happiest place on Earth, right? Yeah, it might've been, if their Mom could've only recognized A as a human being trying to care for her baby.

Can I get a YIKES?

Anyway...if you want to grow tomato plants in buckets, go to Food 4 Less. If you want to learn to Oil Paint, talk to somebody else, like my friend Cory, who is not only able, she's GOOD. If you want to go to Disneyland, LET US KNOW!

And for anything else, well, we're leaving for AZ tomorrow, so don't expect much! Sayonara, and I'll be posting again come next week!