As our Disney World trip approaches, I find myself getting nervous. It’s not the massive packing that worries me. Honestly, B takes care of most of that. She’s much more organized with that than I am. Were it up to me, we’d likely arrive and find that I forgot to pack pants for the boys. (Ok, maybe I’m not *that* bad.)

What worries me is the flight. Specifically, the take off and the landing. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a fear of falling and of plane take offs/landings. They just get me nervous. I know that fatal crashes are rare. In the post I linked to, I had done some research and found 10 accidents with fatalities in the 5 years prior to 2008 (when the post was made). However, there were about 52 million commercial flights in the US during that same time. All things considered, 0.0000002% fatality risk is pretty good odds. Still, I’m nervous.

So my Aloha Friday question to you is: Do you get nervous on airplanes? If so, how do you handle it? If not, what do you have a fear of?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #23

On Wednesday, May 13^th, we had a dinner reservation at the Coral Reef restaurant in Epcot, so we decided to spend the entire day there. First, we stopped for breakfast at Pop Century’s restaurant. The boys loved devouring Mickey Mouse waffles. Then it was on the bus to head on over.

As we approached, the kids loved seeing the “giant ball” (aka Spaceship Earth). We entered the park and made our way over to Soarin’. We quickly “Fast Passed” this to come back to it and then went to “The Seas.” Here we saw (what else) “The Seas with Nemo and Friends.” This ride sees you through a condensed version of Finding Nemo (well, a new story, not a retelling of the movie). The gimmick is that the ocean life (except for the main characters) are real. You ride through a real (giant) aquarium with real fish. Projected “inside” these tanks are Dory, Marlin and others. The only downside is that it’s so dark, no photos of mine came out at all. Oh well.

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On Tuesday, May 12th, we decided to spend the day at the Magic Kingdom. Indeed, the day was quite magical. As we walked down Main Street in the morning, we saw a painting on the ground. Except it wasn’t done with paint. Apparently, when they wash everything, they spray water so that it makes a certain design. The one that I saw was Goofy with “Have A Magical Day” written underneath. Quite impressive.

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After our trip to Disney World last year, I started blogging a day by day account of the events. Then I just stopped. I meant to pick it up again, but things happened to distract me. Has it really been 7 months? With Disney Social Media Moms coming up (and thus a new source of Disney World blogging approaching), I decided I needed to finally knuckle down and finish this series up.

While I’m at it, I’m going to change the numbering. The Roman Numerals were cool to begin with, but I can see this is going to take *way* too many blog posts. I just can’t see posting “Our Week In Disney World – Part XXIV” instead of “Our Week In Disney World – Part 24.”

All that said, let’s see where we were last time Ah yes, we had enjoyed a Mother’s Day dinner with “Mom” at the 50′s Prime Time Diner, shopped at Downtown Disney and gone to sleep. This takes us to Monday, May 11th and the Animal Kingdom.

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Weight: 197.5 lbs (down 4 pounds)

Average Hours of Sleep: 6 hours

Total Workout Time: 80:36

Total Calories Burned: 531.9

This week I didn’t exercise as much as I wanted to. Various things (mostly my Disney World Photo Book) got in the way. Still, the 80 minutes and change that I did work out must have had an effect as I lost 4 pounds. My plateau is busted! This takes me to within half of a pound of my pre-Disney goal of 10 pounds and nearly 50% of the way to my ending goal (20 pounds).

Part of losing weight/getting healthy is recognizing when something isn’t working and changing it to maximize the effect. Last week, I pledged to work out half an hour per night. During the week, however, I only found time to work out 2 nights. Now, I could either keep the “half hour every night” pledge as-is and feel guilty about all of those missed workouts (thus perhaps making me want to skip them more so I don’t need to think about them). Or, I could recognise that it’s just not working and change it. Given that I don’t think that half hour per night goal is feasible, I’m going to modify it to 30 minutes per night, 3 nights per week. This should be easier to hit.

I still remain a night owl, staying up way past when I should. I know I need to work on this, but I seem to get a second wind at 9pm that lasts until midnight. It’s hard to go to bed when all the other things I have to do and want to do beckon. Perhaps I need to prioritize more.

After our last Disney World vacation, I had over 3,100 photos to go through. I could have just let them languish on my hard drive, but, almost immediately, I knew what I wanted to do with them: make a photo book. Obviously, I couldn’t fit all 3,100 in one book so I had to make some cuts. And by some, I mean about 2,800 photos. Still, the resulting photo album is a good representation of our trip.

As much as a photo book appealed to me, I would have been scared off by the price. It normally costs $19 for the first 20 pages and $0.50 for each additional page (up to 100 pages). So a 100 page photo book would cost nearly $60 (plus shipping). Luckily, WinkFlash.com had one of their flat rate photo book sales. Up until January 27th, additional pages are free. So my 100 page photo book will only cost $19. I could order three of them for the price of one.

So my Aloha Friday question to you is: Have you ever made a photo book of your trip? If not, how do you immortalize your vacation memories?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #23

I’ve talking about Sid The Science Kid before. I reviewed and hosted a giveaway for a Sid toy. I even mentioned a great episode about vaccines. So how could Sid get any better? How about like this:

Yes, that’s the complete Sid The Science Kid Vaccine episode able to be viewed online. And no, it’s not a pirated version, but a fully approved version. Don’t think it could get better than that? Well, if you go to Flu.gov, you can download this Sid episode for free.

As you may know, I’m a big fan of online video. I stream Netflix movies regularly on my Roku (especially another Henson production, Farscape). I’ve also considered cutting the cable cord more than once. (If we did, I’d be glad that PBS Kids, and thus Sid the Science Kid and Dinosaur Train would be available via over-the-air television.) Being able to watch a Sid episode on my computer via the Internet is great. (Note to PBS Kids: Please consider making a Roku channel to stream full episodes to people’s Roku boxes on demand. My kids would love this!)

Earlier today, I tried to send a coded message to B via Twitter. I wrote:

Would it be too geeky to tell @TheAngelForever “Number 25 as expressed in binary on one’s hand then translated into ASL”? Yes, yes it would.

Unfortunately, B was too tired to figure out a puzzle. I even sent a hint:

Hint for @TheAngelForever, use this site to find out how to express the number 25 as binary on your hand: http://bit.ly/4vLQf0

After this, she continued to resist spending time on my little game as she was busy doing my laundry. Fair enough, I figured. Still, I wanted her to get the message even if I had to spell it out in a blog post…. so I will.

Let’s start with a photo of my hand:

Now, my puzzle first specified that you must express a binary number on your hand. Binary numbers are Base 2. This means that the digits go from 1, 2, 4, 8, etc instead of the 1, 10, 100, 1000 that Base 10 uses. So let’s label my hand with the number each finger would represent

Now that that’s done, we need to count 25 on my hand. This is relatively easy now. 25 = 16 + 8 + 1. So we’ll raise those digits and leave the others down. Like so:

Finally, my puzzle said to translate this into ASL. ASL stands for American Sign Language. The photo above might be 25 in binary, but in American Sign Language it has another meaning. This next image is meant as a direct message to B when she reads this post

Like I said, very geeky. But that’s me!

Weight: 201.5 lbs (up half a pound)

Average Hours of Sleep: 6 hours

Total Workout Time: 45 minutes

I pretty much expected this to happen after my incredible first week. I’ve plateaued. Despite eating well the entire week, I actually gained a hhalf a pound. This isn’t going to discourage me, though. Going up and down is part of the whole weight loss process. You just need to make sure that the general direction is down. Given that I’m still 5 1/2 pounds lighter than when I started, I’d say I’m still ahead of the game.

I did work out one day with B using Leslie Sansone but then couldn’t get up the motivation to work out anymore. Finding time to work out after working for 8 hours, making dinner, cleaning up from dinner and getting the kids into bed is a challenge. I’m going to set a mini-goal for myself to work out for a half hour every night this week (perhaps exempting Friday night since Shabbat starts so quickly in January). After all, if I only reduce my caloric intake, my body will react by slowing down its metabolism. Exercising will help increase my metabolism. After all, Weight Gained Or Lost = Calories Eaten – Caloried Burned.

As far as sleep goes, I still can’t get the hang of early bedtimes. I suspect this is going to continue to be a concern. There are only so many hours in the day. NHL usually goes to sleep at around 7:30pm and JSL snuggles with B to go to sleep at around 8:30pm. Since I need to wake up at 6 – 6:30am, I should get to sleep by 10:30pm. So, once B takes JSL into bed, I only have 2 hours to clean up from dinner, do whatever I need to do on the computer, work out (and shower as I’m not going to head to bed all sweaty), and watch what few TV shows I follow. There never seems to be enough time to do it all. At the very least, I need to organize my time better.

As I mentioned before, we’ll be headed to the Disney Social Media Moms convention. We’re headed there early so we’ll have time to go on favorite rides from our trip last year and go on ones we missed. Some old favorites that we can’t wait to experience again:

• Toy Story Mania – This 3D ride/game is so fun we rode on it twice and NHL is still talking about it. One of his favorite video games now is Toy Story Mania for the Wii. He plays it over and over every chance he gets. One of NHL’s first thoughts when we told him we were going back to Disney World was riding Toy Story Mania again.
• Finding Nemo The Musical – This is a Broadway style, Broadway quality musical included in the price of your park admission. The entire story of Finding Nemo is told using handheld marionettes. Now the Pixar movie was terrific so they had a high hurdle to clear. They definitely cleared it. The songs, scenery…. well, everything is just so high quality that you might think you’ve been transported to an expensive Broadway production. This is not to be missed (though it might be hard to get in as it is very popular).
• Tie Dye Cheesecake – Ok, not an “attraction” per se, but the Pop Century’s multi-colored desert is just too good to pass up. Red velvet cake topped with cheesecake in various colored swirls. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it. Yes, I replicated it, but still a chance for the original will not be passed up.
• Monster’s Inc Laugh Floor – Mike Wazowski and company are keeping Monsteropolis powered not by screams but by laughter. To aid them, they pull humans (us) into their world and put on a comedy show. While you wait to go in, you can text some jokes which might be used. You might also be picked on to be the butt of some jokes. The show is hilarious and, thanks to improvisation, never the same twice. Plus, now that our phones have texting plans, we can send in some jokes of our own.

So my Aloha Friday question to you is: What is your favorite Disney attraction (be it ride, show or even eatery)? If you’ve never been to Disney before, what would you look forward to were you headed there?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #22