Tag: family

Return of The Crap

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon

Is this thing on? Testing, 1, 2…testing.

Hello again. Turns out I’ve had, and needed, a little break from the weekly blogging so apologies to anyone….anyone??? who missed these on the last few Sundays. It wasn’t really planned and just happened but it was very much required and unavoidable.

I return today unable to promise a weekly delivery but for now, mainly as I’m off work until the new year, we blog again.

Over the years I know I have regularly moaned about work being busy, but I was a young naïve fool, as only now do I feel justified in claiming that. In the late summer I was asked to take on some new responsibilities at work as well as my real job and it’s been carnage ever since. It’s involved some travel too with visits in recent weeks to London (a few times), Southampton, Birmingham, Leeds and of course our Manchester office which, with the commute as it, is qualifying as a trip all on its own.

I can’t say I am deliriously happy at work, but that’s not really related to the silly levels of busy, but more the over arching landscape since a new boss and some changes came around during this last year. Everything will pass I guess and when you’ve been there as long as I have, these Johnny come latelys don’t seem to stick around for the long haul so hopefully this is a temporary thing as I could do without having to find another job at my time of life.

So that work stuff meant that for the last few months I really haven’t had a minute to think about much else, and the prospect of sitting back at the laptop at the weekend to write this nonsense did not appeal. I’ve already been spending good chunks of evenings and weekends either working or travelling for work so I decided to not spend whatever free time I did have typing these posts for a bit.

How’s everyone doing? Well, Louise keeps on nursing despite not really wanting to, Emily still works with me and Rebecca, Tom and the boys are all good, with Rebecca now working part time in a local nursery.

Yesterday we went to see my Mum to commemorate what would have been her and my Dad’s 67th wedding anniversary had he still been with us. She’s doing well, is fit and healthy for someone in their mid 80s and she’ll be joining us for Christmas Day next week. Louise is once again working on the day itself and for a lot of the festive period, such is the life of a Community Nurse and she tends to volunteer to do/get stuck with Christmas Day as many of her colleagues still have young children and they want to be there for the big present unwrap.

Both of my readers may have been wondering if we have any holiday plans for 2026. Well, next year is a significant anniversary for Louise and I, as we will hit 30 years of marriage, so we are hoping to gift each other not one, but two holidays, if funds allow.

We have hopes of a return to Mexico and Secrets Akumal in April. We’ve paid a low deposit to secure our dates and have to decide by February if we’re going. It ain’t cheap so we’ll make a call then as to whether it is wise to once again blow all our available funds on overseas travel rather than more sensible uses. Our house continues to conspire against us financially so we’ll see what major bills hit between now and then before inevitable saying sod it we’re going anyway.

However, our main trip next year is a, perhaps surprisingly a Disney one.

In September we have booked to return to Florida, this time with Emily and her boyfriend. It’ll be an off-site affair in our usual villa, flying with Virgin and that’s about all we know at this point. Our boycott of the US was not an easy thing to lift, but after Emily went last year and found that inside the WDW bubble all was well, we decided we didn’t want the orange turd dictating our holiday plans for the next three years so we’re going despite our strong objections to current events over there.

So let’s see how long I can keep this blogging up, and I’d like to as I do like to look back on these things many years later, and to do that, I suppose I have to write them first!

Till the next time……

Woody Worries

by mkingdon, posted in mkingdon, Walt Disney World

Another four day week leaves me wondering why we splurge them all at this time of year. I suppose it gives us all a chance to enjoy the lovely weather, unless, like last week, we reverted to mid winter up in the frozen north anyway.

With four weeks to go until our holiday our minds have turned to preparing a bit, and at least thinking about what we need to take from a clothes perspective as our needs will be different to a Florida trip to some extent.

I already actually wrote down in words my trouser buying experience a few weeks ago, so believe me when I say I shall also detail other irrelevant and uninteresting details about my wardrobe.

I did a “try on” yesterday, digging out the summer stuff that hasn’t seen the light of day since our last trip. I have a lot of holiday clothes. That may not to be too surprising I suppose, but having managed to drop a few pounds in my usual pre-hols preparation I do have slightly more options than otherwise I might.

So thankfully my need to go out and do any actual shopping is limited to stuff I can buy online like some shoes, a new cap and some socks. Yes, I am actually spending time writing this stuff down on the internet.

Louise enjoys the madness of a real shop so her buying started this week with a couple of dresses and some shorts.

The rest of the week was of course dominated by work as it always is. However, there was a mild drama on Friday afternoon. I was, as ever, on a Teams call with the doors open as the temperatures had recovered to at least double figures and the dogs were pottering about in the garden. All of a sudden I heard Woody yelp in pain and he came running to the door feeling very sorry for himself. It took a few minutes for him to stop crying and I got him inside and up onto the couch in the conservatory where he literally flaked out.

He was worryingly limp and his eyes glazed over. For a few minutes I was genuinely worried about him. I comforted him for a bit until he started to come round and after half an hour or so he was up and about again.

He’s been fine since so whether he was stung or stood on something, we have no idea. There was no sign of any damage and he wasn’t paying particular attention to any part of his body so it was a mystery. He took himself upstairs to his proper bed for an hour or so and then seemed to be fully recovered. We went out for a decent walk yesterday and he was absolutely fine. It was all a bit strange.

He’s now gone over to Liverpool with Emily to spend the rest of the weekend there at Mikey’s where as you can see he struggles to settle!

Emily’s prep for her August WDW and Universal trip continues. They have booked Mickey’s Not So Scary and have what looks like an action packed and fun plan.

They are taking some first timers with them who of course are listening to almost all of Emily’s advice. However, she did share some shocking news this week. Apparently the newbie couple have bought new trainers for the trip but are refusing to wear them until they get there despite Emily’s advice and pleadings to wear them in. Is this the most rookie of rookie mistakes for a WDW newcomer? It’ll end in tears.

Till the next time……..

Wet, Wet, Wet.

by mkingdon, posted in Walt Disney World

There’s some cosmic irony to us all losing an hour’s sleep on Mother’s Day. As if it commemorates the plight of most mothers to never properly sleep ever again. Here’s wishing all mums a lovely day and we’ll be taking mine out for tea later as tradition dictates.

Don’t worry, I can’t do another post this week about the relatively simple decision and task of changing our holiday plans. All we have left to do now is wait, anticipate and turn up at the airport which is a pretty different experience to your typical Florida trip as we all know. Oh wait, there is an app I may need to download at some point that gives me vital information about the resort so I need to make plans to reserve several minutes to do that.

I am still getting drip-fed small crumbs of planning activity for Emily’s trip, though. They are doing the full Disney and Universal experience, so there’s a lot to think about. With a couple of first-timers tagging along, Emily feels the familiar pressure of being the planner, organiser, and expert for everyone.

We were never planning to do any parks had we stuck with Florida, so I had taken my eye off any park-related news since our last trip. It seems there will be a lot of stuff closed when she goes, which is less than ideal. Stuff like Big Thunder is down for lengthy refurb, It’s Tough To Be A Bug is no more, Buzz I think is going down for a massive upgrade, Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer’s Island are gone, Astro Orbiter is not back until “late summer”, Hall Of Presidents is down, (hopefully for at least another four years) Test Track is still down, and I even think the Walt Disney Railroad is closed. I’m sure there are more than I’ve mentioned, too.

One positive, certainly for Emily, is the re-opening of Voyage Of The Little Mermaid. It will be called The Little Mermaid – A Musical Adventure. That has been sorely missed.

Whilst it’s of course unavoidable, having so much unavailable at once is not ideal even for a regular visitor, but for first-timers who may or may not ever return, it’s a bit of a body blow. That’s without even thinking about the whole question of value for money for your now very expensive park ticket.

They will of course have a great time regardless but it seems WDW is in another massive period of change and regeneration which is good to see I suppose. Not all change in the parks turns out well (are you listening Stitch’s Great Escape?) but it is inevitable.

Speaking of change. Some things never do. I often document the constant parade of tradespeople wandering around our house fixing stuff. If you remember back far enough we had a leaky shower about a year ago that only got finally resolved about a month back when we had to rip the whole base out and fit a new one having exhausted all other options.

Shortly afterwards, the shower in our en suite started playing up, so our plumber, once he’d returned from his round-the-world cruise, which we had funded, popped back to sort that. We’d also spotted, due to us being freezing cold every night, that a couple of radiators downstairs were only getting warm across a three-inch slither at the top, and they needed replacing. So he came to do all that on the same day a couple of weeks ago.

All was well, we were warmer and they even looked nicer as we’d moved from the standard white things to the anthracite column ones to better suit the period of the house.

Anyway, yesterday I made a rare visit to our downstairs loo which is in a room we don’t use that often. As I opened the door and walked in there was an unusual and unwelcome squelch. I looked behind me to see perfect footprints in the carpet.

Panic set in as this was the same room which suffered badly from all our roofing woes a couple of years ago so I was initially desperately looking upwards for signs of water ingress. With nothing to see my attention turned to other sources of water and I soon discovered that the pipe leading into the new readiator was leaking pretty badly.

An hour of trying to vax up the water from the carpet and fruitlessly tinerking with a spanner and some connections on the radiator saw little difference and I resorted to piling towels near the source of the leak and trying to get hold of our plumber. Being 5pm on a Saturday I was not hopeful.

To his enormous credit, he was with us within the hour, made what turned out to be some simple adjustments, fixed the issue and left us dry again and with no charge for his services. I may gold plate him. Perhaps that was a perk of our titanium reward card recognising our levels of spend with him in recent times?

Anyway, today I shall be vaxxing furiously again, trying to turn the sponge on our floor back into a carpet.

Of course, you will know that upon discovering the issue, seeing the state of the carpet and becoming instantly furstrated at my inability to fix the problem, I was in a right strop threatening to either move or torch the house to the ground. Turns out that may have been another slight over reaction as ten minutes of a spanner in the right hands was all that was needed, aside from maybe a new carpet if it cannot be saved.

There’s a lesson there somewhere that I absolutely will not learn.

Till the next time……

The Getting Layed In Orlando Tour 2023 – Day Ten Wednesday 22nd November

by mkingdon, posted in The Getting Layed In Orlando Tour

It’s only when you write these trips up that you start to realise what dreadfully predictable creatures of habit we are. Trying to find an original way to say we woke up and went to breakfast just before ten is proving too much for my limited writing skills. Anyway. that’s what we did.

Having laid out a load of cash to stay a few extra days to enjoy some of the lovely weather we were denied on our first few days, we were a little perturbed to see the forecast predicting a little more shit weather today.

We went to the pool anyway, as if to defy the weather Gods and we Facetimed Rebecca and the boys. Today we watched a man cut some grass. Who says you need to go to the theme parks in Florida to enjoy yourself?

The weather turned around 1pm and we retreated to the covered area and had some chips and dips for a rare proper lunch.

There was no sign of the weather getting better so I drove to a Target on the 192 to collect that doll for Louise’s friend that I told you about some time ago. I finally worked out how to get the Target website to take a payment method registered in the UK but could only seem to do so if I collected. So I drove for over an hour to get a doll I knew nothing of before this trip for the child of someone I did not know.

The traffic was bobbins, matching the weather, with the rain tipping down for the whole journey. Still, apparently, I made some little girl’s Christmas so I’ll count this as my good deed for this lifetime.

Once back at the hotel, I watched more Two and a Half Men whilst Louise got ready. We made it out around 6.30 and got a Lyft to Disney Springs. It was a mercifully short journey, as when the driver set off from our hotel, she made the sign of the cross and kissed her crucifix, which was mildly concerning for a journey that would take about four minutes.

We arrived in one piece and made our way to the stage outside World of Disney, got a cocktail from one of the little drinks places nearby, and watched a band for a bit. It was now not raining.

It was no espresso Martini but it was OK.

We then made our way over to The Edison for our reservation.

The Spings were very busy tonight but we were seated immediately upstairs. There was a very cool retro three-piece band on the stage below us.

We of course ordered the bacon thing to start and in all the excitement it escaped a photo.

I ordered the Edison Burger.

Louise, the Soup and Grilled Cheese.

Louise had wine and I had of course….

We shared a Lemon meringue for dessert.

Overall, we were not blown away by The Edison. The theming is fantastic and the live music a real bonus, but the service was a little slow and whilst all the food was good, nothing blew our socks off enough to have us wanting to go back any time soon.

My mood may have been tainted by my health at this point. I was completely full of snot. I don’t know what the bill was, but I remember it of course being fairly pricey for what was nothing fancy. As we walked back to catch our Lyft home, I was feeling dreadful. I was short of breath, dizzy and really felt out of it.

Once home I went straight to sleep. I did wonder if that first cocktail we had as we watched the band had something in it that I had a reaction to. It was a very “fruity” cocktail and I may be way off the mark, but I can’t think what else it was, as I was right as rain the next morning.

On the plus side, had we not extended our stay we would have been flying home in the morning. Sadly, for you, that means a few more of these rinse-and-repeat blogs!!

Till the next time……