Month: March 2021

Thinking and Perkins

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

If you thought last week’s post was a hot mess of confusion with absolutely no value, help or conclusions on when holidays may happen, you’d be right, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The only thing I am more sure of seven days later, is that my burning desire to be there is multiplying rapidly.

My twitter feed is a stream of contradictory thoughts and predictions which, tweet by tweet, see me swinging from “Where are the suitcases, I’m gonna pack” to “I’m burning my passport as nobody will ever travel internationally for leisure ever again”.

I still don’t think the 14th of June will happen though.

A week on post vaccination and I have seen no side effects beyond an arm that isn’t really sore, it just feels like I need to scratch it. If that isn’t a metaphor for my desire to be travelling to WDW I don’t know what is. I have been scratching that itch since 1980.

So with the unchangeable and unstoppable passing of time, Easter is nearly up on us and the clocks have gone forward, robbing us of an hour in bed, but delivering on the promise of lighter nights and maybe a summer. For some reason since moving in here I have been awake before 7am every day. I really hope that stops soon.

With those significant changes and events, let’s hope that my longed for step change in our collective fortunes comes soon after. Restrictions start to be lifted, more people get more jabs and hospital and death rates become something we don’t need to be looking at graphs of every day.

With the US going gangbusters on the vaccine, surely at some point this summer, Brits will be eating themselves to death in an Applebees or an Olive Garden in Orlando as God intended. One thing I need to share with you, linked to the topic of eating yourself to death, is a strange fascination I have developed for an email I get every day.

On our last trip we visited Perkins. It was an unplanned breakfast and was glorious. By using their free Wifi they had gained my email address and I figured getting the odd email was a fair price for using their internet. Well, I love it. I look forward to it every day, no doubt driven by my sad longing to be anywhere in Florida, but these emails are great and demonstrate the incredible value and quality you can get in these “lower end” eateries should you want or need to. Look at what they send me….

If $20 gets you all that I could be dead within a week. Honestly, whether you ever intend to eat there or not, sign up to their emails. It’s like a ray of sunshine into your inbox, but it will make you hungry.

On the subject of my waistline let us all hope for the existence of a definite trip soon. Lockdown has made it clear to me that the only things preventing me from appearing on My 600lb Life have been having to go into the office for work and knowing I had to keep my weight down in preparation for a WDW holiday. Without either, things are not good in the scales department right now and I need some form of carrot and stick to help me, although neither of those sound very tasty.

With my employer announcing a “hybrid” working policy this week, which is basically don’t take the piss and work from home all the time but broadly do what you want, I fear it may only be a holiday that is going to save me from buying a whole new set of clothes with size tags that begin with multiple X’s.

Away from Florida, and believe me I am aware that I am every single day, today is Louise’s birthday. Hopefully it will be the last family birthday where we can’t do what we want with who we want as it’s getting a bit tiresome now. I am not one to leave the buying of birthday gifts to the last minute, as you may imagine, but today I have been unable to give Louise hers. Why you ask?

Well, I ordered it in plenty of time. It is a present from myself, Emily and Rebecca and Tom so I had collective responsibility to get it here on time. It was due to arrive last Monday and after the time slot for delivery changing all day, just after 8pm I had a message that delivery was attempted at 8.01 and failed. Well, we were in. Where else can we go? A further attempt was scheduled for the day after.

This time it did arrive and luckily and unusually, before wrapping the thing I opened the packaging to have a look. Inside were two large boxes of washing powder. How lucky is Louise, I hear you cry. Well, this year as a change, I had not ordered her domestic cleaning products and I was shocked to see that had been sent. Clearly, some thieving rat had clocked what was in the box, had it away and swapped the contents.

I contacted the seller, and was given a returns label and a speedy refund. I re-ordered. When the delivery of that item followed the same pattern as the first, missing its original day and then arriving the day after, with obvious resealing having happened, I knew what I would find in the box. As an added surprise, this time it was washing powder and dog food.

Another return was arranged and it sits awaiting collection as did the last.

In the end, I have ordered another from a totally different company, but as this had taken us up until 6.30pm on Friday, it could not get here quickly enough and it may be Monday or Tuesday when it does. What a mess.

I can’t tell you what the thing is yet of course, as Louise doesn’t know, but it turns out they are more sought after than class A drugs. Let’s hope Louise actually likes the thing when it arrives.

Right, I am off to go and stare at Twitter a bit more and endure the rollercoaster of emotions caused by the varying rumours and predictions of when folks can travel for fun again.

Till the next time……

My Little Prick

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

Sure, I may have missed out on my long-awaited 50th birthday WDW trip due to a deadly virus but now that I am that old, on Friday I was able to have the jab that will hopefully prevent me from dying from it and also maybe help prevent me passing it on to someone else who might.

The experience was quick and I hardly noticed. If that isn’t a perfect sentence for a blog post with this title I don’t know what is.

My arm is a little bit sore and I felt extra tired yesterday but that may just have been the fact that I didn’t sleep very much on Friday night due to a bout of heartburn brought on by my own gluttony.

By the 5th of June, I will have had both shots and a little while after that will benefit from the full effects. Ironically, that would make me holiday-ready for our current date of the 14th of June, but my expectation of that trip going ahead is very low currently. This is based entirely on WDW’s mask policy, to be honest, as each day seems to hint that the US might be getting its act together now the orange blancmange isn’t in the White House.

Just this week, Fauci hinted that masks and social distancing might be relaxed around the 4th of July, and then Biden was said to be considering relaxing travel restrictions by mid-May. Whilst I am delighted to see the US vaccinate literally millions of people every day I still think I’ll be rearranging stuff again.

To highlight the constant conflicting thoughts as we all try to interpret the signs and signals, in the same week, a UK government minister was talking to the press and telling them that any chance of summer holidays abroad this year was unlikely. Now, his lips were moving at the time, and if, as he said, they were concerned about new variants being brought back to the UK by returning holidaymakers it does make you wonder why then it took them twelve months of the pandemic to introduce proper controls on who was entering the country and where they went. Someone more cynical than me may also think that they want everyone to spend their pent up holiday cash in the UK this year rather than let Johnny Foreigner have it.

So new dates and more rearranging will probably be needed. But rearranging to when? It’s a tricky one this, as you may have gathered by now that I like to have things sorted and if I could, I would be battling with call centres already, trying to move everything for the third time (is it the third? I’ve lost count) but until we know when masks will no longer be required at the parks, I don’t think I can.

I would imagine that the travel companies current approach of “Yes, book something, book anything, and you can change it for free a million times if Covid affects it” will very quickly revert to “You want to add a full stop to your booking? Well, that will be £6000 please,” once things start to return to some form of normality, so I imagine this next change will need to be the last.

The challenge will come if the US does allow us in by mid-May, and then the UK also allow international travel on their May 17th timeline (to the US, not Europe I expect, as they seem to be struggling with a potential 3rd wave) but the mask policy is still in place in the parks. We just don’t want to have to battle with Freddie about wearing a mask as he will not understand or tolerate it for that length of time. Hopefully, we will still be allowed to shift the thing without enormous penalty.

One outsider in this list of options is, should we able to travel in June, but masks still be required, then we could still go, skip the parks and just have some time in the sun, eating to life threatening levels and having some sort of holiday at least.

Ideally, we’d like to go this September. Well, no, ideally we’d like to go asap and not have to wear a mask, but we are where we are. Frankly, we’ve waited long enough now and I have September in my head as probably the earliest WDW and Universal may change their mask policies. Why? Well, by then everyone who wants a vaccine here and there will have had one, case numbers and deaths should be low due to that and for Disney, they will be about to start the 50th celebrations for Magic Kingdom and that has to be a big opportunity for them to claw back some of the cash the pandemic has cost them.

Conversely, they may be thinking that they definitely need to keep masks in place for a long time, as that may allow them to expand capacity and still be seen to be being careful with their guest’s health. I guess what they cannot do is welcome in “normal” capacity crowds for the 50th celebrations and abandon social distancing and masks at the same time.

My ability to argue with myself, on both sides of the debate is impressive.

Of course, all this is my very uneducated guess and I don’t trust myself enough to pick up the holiday and move it anywhere just yet. I can only do that once we know of course. So what happens if we get to a few weeks before our current dates and there is still no news on masks? I don’t know.

Assuming we are allowed to, without huge cost or penalty, our only option would be to move it to early 2022. The current Disney mask policy is that they will be required for all of 2021, so that would seem to be the only vaguely definite way to be sure. I’d say early March would be our dates of choice.

There are a lot of moving parts to all this and it is, as ever, a confusing mess. Basically, I have not one clue what to do or when to do it. But to quote the very wise Joey Tribbiani…

I Wanna Go GIFs | Tenor

See how quickly my blogging returns to holidays after months of ramming our house move down your necks? Like childbirth, it is now seemingly forgotten. It isn’t of course. We are still learning how to live in a new place. We had some guttering replaced yesterday at a moderate expense, and the list of repairs needed is a modestly long one, but don’t think we’re not glad we made the move. It’s lovely here.

We are still missing some curtains and our couch, both of which have worse lead times than our Sky installation and we’ll feel better once those are here. Sky you say? Well, after exchanging several shit-o-grams with them I eventually got a call from a nice Scottish lady from their “Shit-o-gram handling department”.

To cut that long story short I finished the call with about 75 apologies and some compensation for them cancelling my install on the day, leading to an almost three-week wait for a new date. That was only fair as had I done that, I would have been charged for doing so. The engineer is due this afternoon, so fingers crossed for no more cock-ups and the ability to watch football on something other than my laptop.

So with little or no respite from my “this house move is stressing me out” season, you have been plunged directly into the “this bloody holiday planning is stressing me out” season. With the vaccine now inside of me and about 25 million others in the UK then as D:ream once said, things can only get better, right?

I don’t know when we’ll get to go back to WDW but I know for sure that we are going to make the absolute best of it and never take another trip for granted ever again.

Till the next time…….

Getting Seckled

by mkingdon, posted in house move, Walt Disney World

A week can feel like a lifetime on occasion, and over the last week, it does feel that a lot has happened and a lot has been done. From the chaos of last Friday, every day has seen significant improvement and it has certainly been eventful.

We suffered an 8-hour power cut last Monday. It affected the whole surrounding area and we sat in the cold for a long time cursing the power that didn’t be stopping us from getting stuff done. We’ve also learnt a lot too. One of the main lessons was that as pleased as we were to discover that the previous resident has invested in top-notch kitchen gear, those fancy Neff induction hobs are no good to you unless you have the correct pans. We did not, and after a lot of frustration and swearing, Tom discovered via his brother, who also moved into a house with one of these, that we needed to invest in a new set of pans. Had we known before moving in, that would of course have put an end to the deal of buying the house in the first place!

It is true to say that the previous resident liked a gadget. It has been a week of figuring out remote controls (including one that does the kitchen lights…I kid you not) and swearing about why everything needs to be so complicated, but we’re getting there now.

I have constructed my office and despite it being the smallest room in the house it contains all the essentials for work, a 55″ TV, my PlayStation and an exercise bike so that I have somewhere to hang my clothes. it is also of course festooned with Disney knick-knacks and photos. I have, in the words of Louis Walsh, made it my own.

We have taken endless deliveries, both of big-ticket items like a new washer and dryer and new ridiculously large TV for the lounge as well as a cabinet thing to sit it on alongside multiple Amazon deliveries of bits and bobs we have discovered we now need.

We’ve already painted one room that was inexplicably orange and Emily is halfway through painting hers too. We only have about half a dozen boxes to unpack now, and all of this of course has been peppered with tip runs to discard the cardboard mountains we have created.

I went back to work on Wednesday. That long commute down the landing to my new office was glorious, but work was busy and stressful but needs must as the mortgage won’t pay itself.

On Wednesday we were due to have Sky installed. We’ve been waiting for a long time to ditch Virgin and this move was our chance. Well, frying pans and fire seem to be all the rage. Our install was booked weeks ago, for Wednesday between 1pm and 5pm. The chap rolled up at 4.20pm and told us he had only just been given the job, and he finishes at 5.30pm and he had a maternity appointment with his wife that evening. Having enjoyed his life story, I explained that we’d booked this weeks ago and we needed the install doing. He called his boss, who told him to survey the job to see how long it might take. It may amaze you to discover that he estimated it would take just long enough that he didn’t have time to do it.

I was not happy and told him as much. He assured me a new appointment would be arranged for the next few days. Long story short, the next installation slot isn’t available until the 21st of March and I am currently in a robust conversation with Sky’s complaints department. Alas, they are the only horse in town for us if we want TV up here so I cannot, as I wanted to, tell them to show their dish somewhere unpleasant. I yearn for companies who are competent. Sigh.

The dogs have settled in very well. They love the field at the back of the house and the fact that they now get to have the run of the place as the layout means we have no way to keep them downstairs at night. We have awoken during the night to Oli’s arse on multiple occasions.

All in all, we’re loving it. The idea that we were buying a house where nothing would need doing has been rubbished of course. In the ten minutes you wander around a place before deciding to buy it you are never going to spot that bit of dodgy guttering or a conservatory window that needs some attention, but nonetheless, it’s what we wanted and more.

I said I would share some photos. I’m being a bit lazy by just pinching some that Louise posted to Facebook earlier in the week, but here is one I took when I was out with the dogs earlier. By the way, the weather has been shocking since we moved in. We’ve had gales, hail and sideways rain non-stop. I was not aware that we had moved to a whole new climate. You can feel how cold it was on the field in this photo.

You can just see the top of our conservatory behind the goalposts. We are hunkered down into the hill.

Freddie’s playroom
Lounge
Kitchen
Kitchen again

We’re still missing some curtains here and there and our new couch has been delayed to the end of March but you get the idea. So enough not so humble bragging. With things settling down with the house and no longer having the constant looming cloud of the move on my mind, thoughts are turning to the holiday of course.

As it stands the dates in the government’s plans don’t change things soon enough for us but it all comes down to when the parks remove the need for masks for us. There is no way Freddie will or can wear one all day, so until that is lifted we are a bit scuppered.

Whilst thinking about alternative dates, and the time is fast approaching when I will make a change, I am hanging fire a little as the vaccines are being rolled out at an increasing pace, especially in the US so there is a small part of me that thinks/hopes this summer may see travel permitted and masks no longer needed in the parks. Then I catch myself and tell me not to be so stupid. I think I have been spectacularly wrong with every prediction so far! WDW are risk-averse and have already said that policy will remain for all of 2021 so I expect that to be the case.

Some day, we will return to WDW. Some day.

Before I leave you to your Sundays, let me wish a Happy Mother’s Day to my Mum and to all those who do “Mum” stuff. Let’s hope this is the last such day where we can’t all be together and do normal stuff.

Till the next time……

Take Me Down To Cardboard City….

by mkingdon, posted in house move

What am I doing here? I haven’t got time for this? People will often say “I have a million things to do” and currently, in my case, that seems literally correct.

The good news is that we did move house on Friday. How I have longed to type those words and have that horror behind us. For more months than I wish to count I have dreaded the day of moving. In fact, way, way back when we were deciding whether to extend or move, I was seriously contemplating months and months of building work just to avoid the experience of packing up and moving to a new place.

Seems silly? Well, you weren’t in my shoes on Friday when those fears were realised. It was not a pleasant day.

I’m not going to go into the multiple horrors in detail. To help my PTSD I need to move on and concentrate on the new beginnings and all that but I will give you some edited highlights.

I don’t know if I told you but we actually had two solicitors, one for the sale and one for the purchase. This was because our first one was relatively newly qualified and when she realised the complexity of our purchase, (due to it being old and with some rights of way issues) she passed that file over to a more experienced colleague. Throughout, that more experienced colleague has been a bit shit.

This held true right to the end. After a fairly easy morning, with the removal men making relatively short work of all the items I had stressed about moving for six months, we got the call before lunch that our sale had completed. We were now homeless for a bit and our selling solicitor had passed everything onto our buying solicitor to do her stuff.

So we actually sat down for a bit, had some lunch and waited for the next call to say we could go and get the keys. As the clock rolled around to 12pm, I was bored with waiting and I set off for the estate agents where the keys would be. This was a good half an hour away so I thought it better to be poised outside for when things happened.

So I arrived and waited. This went on for some time. I called my estate agents, and the seller’s and neither had heard anything. I was trying not to bother my solicitor as they would clearly be busy on a Friday throwing money around for everyone moving house. Ten minutes later and I could wait no longer.

Amazingly I got through and she genuinely seemed surprised to hear from me. I asked for an update. She told me she had sent the money “a while ago” but had not received confirmation from the seller’s solicitor that they had arrived. I explained that my household contents were in a van, I was outside an estate agents in Accrington and our buyer was en-route to my ex-house. These should not be things that need to be explained to a conveyancing solicitor.

“Perhaps you could give them a call?” I suggested, cheerily.

She did and two minutes later I was out of the car, sprinting (Dad jogging) to the estate agents. We had the keys. It was going on for 3pm but we had them.

Sigh.

The rest of the day could have gone better. Our removal men buggered us about by diverting off to another job as we had waited so long for the keys, and that meant we were still emptying our old house late into the afternoon with its new occupants smiling politely and telling me it wasn’t a problem that our fridge and several other items were sat in their new house as they were trying to move in.

Anyway, by about 6.30pm, we waved off the removal van and stared at our new house full of cardboard boxes. A take away happened and then an early night as I was broken both physically and mentally.

Things looked better the next morning. The house didn’t of course as we hadn’t unpacked anything but I took the dogs out on our field (ooohh, get me) and just took a minute to realise we were in, it was done and the worst was over.

I could go on, but honesty I have so much to do. Every room you walk into has a thousand tasks that need sorting, mainly in the shape of a box, so I will leave you to your Sundays.

I need to thank my Mum and Dad for looking after the dogs for the day when we moved. I don’t know what we would have done without their help on the day. The same goes for Rebecca, Tom and Emily’s boyfriend Mikey who have all helped in numerous ways and we are incredibly grateful.

In my immediate future are around 412 tip runs to rid the house of the cardboard mountain we have acquired, and today I am going to try and sort out my office/man cave as I have a desk, chair and other stuff coming early next week.

Overall though, right now it feels like we’ve gone away somewhere nice for the weekend, and it hasn’t quite sunk in that we live here yet, but I suppose that’s a good sign that we’ve done the right thing, despite all the tasks and teething troubles we are currently facing. That’s all natural I suppose when you start to learn to live in a new place after 8 years in another.

More news and photos probably next week when we are a bit more settled.

Till the next time…..