As predicted it’s been a busy old week, with work scaling new heights in ways to keep me occupied for more hours than it should. Battered, bruised and breathless I fell over the finishing line on Friday. My task now is to try and come down from the adrenaline and stress of work life so that I can actually relax and enjoy not working for a bit. Look, I know I’m not pulling babies from burning buildings but it has its moments.
As a parting gift, the UK graced us with 48 hours of continuous pouring rain, just to confirm that our decision to go somewhere else for a bit was correct. Also, how cold has it been? It’s ridiculous for late May.
Having eliminated the pouring water inside the house last week, this week it was (mainly) outside. The biggest challenge has been convincing the dogs to actually step foot outside to do their business. Hey and guess what? We have another leak. Whilst Emily was showering on Friday I could hear a dripping noise and yep water was coming down through the kitchen ceiling and probably has been for a while from time to time as there is a faint brown patch around that area. This house hates me. Well, that can wait till we get back and Emily can use our shower until then and the plumber can return, no doubt to cut more holes into this money pit.
Louise finished on Thursday and has been in prep mode since then. There will not be a shop unvisited before departure and somewhere in between all that and me doing two Pink gigs this weekend, we’ll leave the house at some point early on Tuesday with a couple of cases full of what we need, purely down to Louise getting us all packed on Saturday. The bank holiday Monday is well-timed.
Today I have to break my golden rule of never going to the tip at weekend as needs must so we do not leave Emily with a house full of rubbish that has somehow appeared asa result of holiday prep. No I don’t understand that either.
I should probably report in with you all on the weight loss front. It’s been a fairly strict and well-behaved four weeks and depending on what mood the scales are in of a morning it looks like I have shed something like 8 to 10 pounds. It sounds like a good effort but the injustice of that small number compared to the huge effort and time taken is heartbreaking. It also brings home how horrendous I must have looked at my heaviest as even in my new svelte form I will still be scaring folks on the beach.
Let’s see how the calorie sponge that is my body responds to ten days of holiday eating and you can all make your own bets as to whether all of that goes back on.
So we leave on Tuesday morning, so you can expect the usual “I’m at the airport” post on Facebook just to make you all feel happy for me. Right?
Anyway, we have a busy day ahead so I must leave you. As ever, feel free to follow the trip “live-ish” on the Mkingdon Facebook page and you can all look forward to another trip report about sitting in the sun most days followed by what we had for tea (dinner). You lucky, lucky folks.
I know you will have been on the edges of your collective seats after my leak cliffhanger last week. Well, what a palaver it turned out to be.
A non-criminal plumber turned up on Tuesday after much encouragement/badgering and spent a good amount of time scouring our house for the source of this bloody water.
He ended up in all our loft spaces and then cutting holes out of floors and walls to understand what may be happening. He could see some wetness on some stonework through one of the holes he cut but no telltale signs of any burst pipes.
After quite some time he left, giving me the number of a roofer he recommended as he strongly suspected it was coming from the roof above where we were seeing signs of water.
Frustrated, we sat down to dinner (tea) and after that, I thought I would go and try to dry out the wet stonework that had been spotted through the aforementioned hole. I spent a good ten minutes drying stuff out with Louise’s hairdryer (you may be shocked to learn I do not possess one) and then sticking my phone camera through our new hole and videoing what it could see. All of a sudden I spied some fresh-looking water and stretched my arm as far as it would go to video the evidence.
Yep, we had a leaky pipe.
The relief was palpable as I knew that any faffing up on the roof would take weeks and probably not definitively solve anything. I messaged the plumber who said he’d be back the next day to fix it by cutting yet another hole in another section of wall to get to it.
The quality of the camera work is dreadful but I was filming blind with my arm through a hole up to the shoulder, whilst lying on my side.
How a pipe suddenly starts leaking like that when nothing has been able to touch it since it was installed probably decades ago I had no idea, but I feel both incredibly unlucky that this happened to us, but at the same time so fortunate that we happened to cut a hole in a wall in just the right place to eventually allow me to see it.
The plumber did not make it back to us until Thursday, and after giving us another hole in another wall, he replaced the offending pipe. It had a tiny pinprick of a hole in it. He told me that lime in mortar will literally eat copper and the pipes should have been insulated/covered. He replaced it with plastic ones to avoid a repeat. No doubt this won’t be the last time a small prick causes untold carnage and expense.
Now, I just hope all the water damage internally will dry out alright and allow us to get it back to as it was, as well as having to repair all the bloody holes in our walls. This is the current state of play at our house…..
In more pleasant news, Wednesday saw Dougie turn 2. He was spoilt appropriately by everyone and we (me, Louise, Emily, my Mum, Tom, Rebecca, Freddie, Dougie and Tom’s Mum) went out for a meal on Wednesday night to celebrate.
We had a nice meal, the obligatory bad singing, and good cake in what looks like an abandoned restaurant, but there were other folks dining around us.
So now I enter my last week at work before a holiday. It’s always a difficult one, not least as it lasts for about three years, but also as I am desperately trying to prepare my colleagues for the gaping void my absence will no doubt leave, hoping they can somehow manage without me.
Then once that is done there is the chaos and carnage of getting stuff into cases, prepping the house for Emily and Mikey and making sure our zoo has all they need to be kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed. I’m always happy to be at the airport with all that done.
Here’s to a week without further house-based drama, smooth sailing on the holiday prep front and some kind of miraculous three-stone weight loss thrown in for good measure.
I was inundated with a comment recently asking if I still did the Mustard thing. That isn’t some deviant food-based kink, but instead, a band that I have played bass guitar in for almost a decade now. I do and we’ve also started a Pink tribute, so now I gig in both lineups.
For someone of my incredibly average musical abilities, I enjoy playing live and just about manage to keep up with the other members who are much more talented than I am.
Despite playing quite a few gigs each year, I rarely go to any. The reason for that is that most of my gigs are on the nights I would typically go to watch one, but also, it has to be a special gig to tempt me into the palaver of all the traffic, parking and expense involved now in seeing a “proper famous band” at a large venue. I’m not sure The Feeling qualifies as one of those, but the palaver was still decent. When you almost spend as much time getting out of the car park as you did at the gig something isn’t quite right.
I could at this point, spend a while asking how Disney can disperse tens of thousands of vehicles out of one exit seamlessly and yet a multi-story in Manchester is in gridlock from 10.30 till midnight. I won’t do that though.
Despite all those trepidations, Louise and I made the effort last night. We went to watch The Feeling at the Albert Halls in Manchester. I will include a humble brag at this point, that I too have played that venue with Mustard. Granted it was a Thursday night at some Architects awards bash and the audience was a little less interested in us, but still I’m claiming it. It is genuinely awesome to play venues like that as they have incredible gear and top professional sound guys who make you sound fantastic and take away all the stress.
Anyway, The Feeling is a band that both Louise and I really like. They are the perfect blend of catchy pop tunes, great musicianship and consistency. It was a great gig.
Away from Rock ‘n roll, I have continued to eat less than I would normally and have shed a pound or so more. If I keep this up over the next two weeks I should have bought enough runway to eat what I like on my hols so that I return only as fat as I was a few weeks ago, staring down the barrel of having to lose it all over again at some point.
I am cursed with a metabolism so slow it is a wonder I continue to exist and I only have to look at food on the internet and I put weight on. It is a constant struggle and if I were to ever meet a Genie and get three wishes, one of mine would be to be able to eat whatever I liked but remain at my ideal BMI, which I don’t think I have ever been in all my years on this planet.
Anyway, we’ll be going away whatever weight I am and the cases are out now and safely stowed in a spare room until the packing commences whenever Louise gets around to it. I shall be summoned to try on and select the stuff I want to take and we’ll both say we won’t take a lot of stuff but inevitably overpack and carry a load of clothes both ways over the Atlantic having not worn them.
I am of course ready for the break. I always say that and of course were we not lucky enough to be able to have this booked I am sure I would survive without it, but some time away from the stresses of daily life will be lovely.
The latest thing that I was over-anxious about was a leak in our house last week. Louise spotted a wall in the utility looking damp and after a lot of moving stuff around and swearing, it looked like the outside tap on the other side of the wall must be leaking within the cavity between the stonework and the internal wall.
There was no chance of me getting to it and of course there was no isolation switch fitted on that outside tap so we sat with the water off completely for most of Friday waiting for the plumber to come and attend to what was a quick job for anyone less incompetent. When you need someone to come out quickly, the quality of their work is often the sacrifice and whilst he did indeed disconnect the suspected pipe, charging me what he did for literally 30 seconds of work upset me both financially and from the point of view that was I even slightly competent, I could have done that myself. Anywho, he will never darken our door again.
On Saturday I noticed that the wall was still wet and indeed the issue was not resolved. I spent most of the morning trying to diagnose what the hell was happening, whilst messaging our regular plumber who has agreed to come out asap next week to have a look. The problem may be located in the ceiling above it. These things stress me out more than I can tell you, as my brain defaults to worst-case scenario mode and I have visions of re-plastering and endless damage as a result of any fix, not to mention the expense. These fears are always based on a complete lack of knowledge of these matters and at times like these I miss my Dad’s advice and personal black book of any tradesman you could ever require. He had golfed with every trade on the planet.
As you will know from my well-documented roof struggles a few months ago, nothing stresses me out more than water getting into the house where it shouldn’t be. By the way, in the end, I went up on the roof (I was terrified) and fixed the issue. Well, water is no longer coming in. How permanent that fix will be, who knows.
Hopefully, I will bring you a post about how silly I was to be worrying about it all next week.
I don’t know how your week went, but as mine ended, I had to endure the dentists. I’d been for my check-up a few weeks ago and was told that as I am old and closing in on death, my gums are giving up and all my teeth will imminently fall out.
OK, I may be exaggerating but whatever they said it resulted in me sitting in the chair whilst the hygenist did unspeakable things to my mouth. I wouldn’t say it was painful as such. In fact, I could endure pain more easily and for longer than the feeling of raw sensitivity that whatever they do delivers. Within seconds I had my eyes screwed tightly closed and a sweat on.
I had told her that due to a savage dentist in my formative years, I had an irrational fear of dentists. Still, her empathy was lower than my pain threshold and she raked, scraped and jet-washed stuff with a determination and gusto reserved for mossy block paving.
I escaped with less money than when I went in and the promise of two further sessions in June where she will really get into the nitty-gritty apparently, so much so that I will need a local anaesthetic. I did ask, but apparently, a general is not available. Well, I’ll look forward to that then. The price I pay for that Hollywood smile.
I had root canal work back in my forties and honestly, I do not know how I got through that.
Anyway, enough unpleasantness. Last week I declared the start of my pre-holiday diet and it has gone OK. I never trust our scales as I can be many pounds different from one day to another even when I’m not trying to lose weight, but it seems I may have lost about four pounds.
I’ll need to keep going though as I can put that back on at the airport.
The other thing I mentioned last week was Hollywood Studios and that I had thoughts on it and the current state of it but that would be a whole other post. With that park celebrating its 35th birthday this week, it looks like this is a good time for me to talk about it in my usually ill-informed way.
On our last two trips to WDW, post Genie+ and the pandemic, DHS has been a problem child and has presented the worst symptoms of the fallout of both in my view. Let’s start with the problem before I tell Bob Iger how to fix it.
In simple terms, the park suffers from a lack of crowd soakers. By that I mean, things that can occupy people. That ratio is off, with Galaxy’s Edge drawing large crowds, but there not being enough other stuff to keep them busy whilst they inevitably cannot get on stuff in GE.
If you look back in history, the park was, I believe, envisaged as a half-day park, hence its smaller size etc but I think that was abandoned as the additions of Galaxy’s Edge and Toy Story Land recently have shown. It can’t be a half-day park nowadays as it can take you that long to ride one ride if you’re in standby for Slinky.
Anyway, I digress. Years ago you had things like the Back Lot Tour that would scoop up hundreds of guests and occupy them for half an hour or so at least. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire was another crowd soaker up, alongside the Animation Tour and of course, the stunt show was a big crowd sponge. I’m old enough to remember the Hunchback of Notre Dame show that was there too, another one to have a large number of guests out of circulation for the other attractions.
Alongside those types of attractions, you also had a lot of street performers who would delay and distract guests from looking for the next ride.
In summary, I think the issue now is that there is very little like that so all guests seem to do is queue extensively for the handful of attractions on offer.
Having undertaken my usual ten seconds of research, attendance is not the issue. Visitor numbers, up to 2022 at least, are down on pre-Covid levels.
This supports my theory that the guest experience is worse than it used to be, due to the lack of attractions.
It’ll help to get the Little Mermaid back up and running as that will take a few hundred guests out of circulation for a while, but what we found on recent trips was that if you did not have Genie+ you had two choices.
Wait in line for upwards of 90 minutes for anything you want to do
Ride Star Tours and The Muppets all day with a couple of long pit stops at the Tap House, which is no fun for the kids.
We would literally sit refreshing the app in a depressed, stunned silence looking for anything that the kids could tolerate queuing for.
So what to do about it? As if I have a clue…..but there are some options I can dream up unencumbered by finances, reality and a great deal of the facts that I don’t possess.
The first is the one most deeply rooted in fantasy.
I have long wondered why WDW and all theme parks don’t just make all the queues virtual. Sure there will be technology challenges but they already exist for some rides. Why Disney and Universal want people to stand in lines for hours of their day I do not understand, as whilst they do, they cannot spend any money.
Do the parks literally not have the space to accommodate all the guests if nobody is waiting in line? It would make the guest experience better right? In DHS specifically, space may be an issue as it is one of the smaller parks, but WDW does not lack land to grow into.
I also think they should reinstate a lot of the “ad hoc” street entertainment to entertain folks as they wait to ride, who would be walking around instead of being contained in a queue but that would not be enough on its own, virtual queues or not. Those entertainers were also a large part of the magic of this park.
Adding stuff similar to long-since-gone, big-crowd attractions such as the ones I mentioned earlier would be ideal. I’m not saying on the scale of Fantasmic, but some attractions, like Indiana Jones, that can take thousands of guests out of circulation for a period of time. As a paying punter, I just want to feel that there is something to do for most of the day without queuing for over an hour and ideally without paying extra to avoid doing that.
Whether we will ever get virtual queues for all or most attractions aside, there is, in my view a fundamental issue at DHS and as it turns 35 it feels like it is having a mid-life crisis of sorts. It has lost its original reason for being as it is no longer a working studio, which was a huge part of its appeal and ethos and now only tips its hat to the film industry.
It may sound silly with the relatively recent additions of Galaxy’s Edge and Toy Story Land to say the park needs actual expansion, but the addition of those two lands alongside the removal of all the stuff I mentioned earlier is actually making the problem worse. Surely a constant wait time of over 90 minutes for Slinky Dog should be a clear sign that something in the park isn’t working as it should.
I don’t think our recent experiences have been unique but of course, we could have just been unlucky. Of all the parks in WDW, it is the one that I gird my loins most for in terms of actually getting much done, and that can’t be a good thing.
With an expansion recently announced at Magic Kingdom my hopes for another at DHS are low, but something needs to be done or it will get to the stage where people will vote with their feet and spend less time there which ironically would help to solve the issue at that park, but make it worse at the other three!
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