A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

We’re finally moving from the luxury apartments from hell, near Orlando proper, to a house a little farther out in Apopka. The only interesting thing of note I’ve seen in Apopka so far is this vintage shopping center sign on the outskirts. This was once the center of town but is now home to a bargain grocery, bargain auto parts store, and lame thrift store. I think the rest of the run-down neighborhood around it was bulldozed for the new surrounding highways.
I’ve mentioned Florida’s ubiquitous tiny lizards that are even more abundant out in the boonies, but we also have strange white frogs that climb the walls and think nothing of peeing on you from 20 feet up as they dive to the concrete if you disturb them. Plus, joy of joys, we found a shed snake skin in the front yard already.
Better yet, according to the Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology, 2 three-foot monkeys were spotted here in 2000, and monkeys have been captured in the state park across from our subdivision. But the best part is that Apopka and the Wekiwa Springs State Park have had numerous Skunk Ape sightings over the past 50 years– the wackiest and the only detailed one I can find is here. I can look forward to spending my evenings in a swamp with a camcorder waiting for Bigfoot– how awesome is that.
I spent a couple of late nights painting junior’s room with her favorite animals, manatees.

Every morning, when I ask what she dreamed about, she says “Manatees!” It’s probably not true, but she thinks it is, and I guess we’ve assured that they’ll haunt her dreams until long after the next repaint.

She didn’t really like that the “mommy” manatee is kind of mean looking, but it matched the model I had and the eye came out too nice to retouch. She likes the (more) cartoony baby manatee, of course.
I’m not even sure why or where her obsession started, just that it wasn’t long after moving down here. She’s seen them in captivity a few times, but not in the wild. And she only has one or two manatee toys. Her bigger obsession is probably puppies, actually, but big grey blobs are easier to paint, and if you see any flaws on it you can just say “That’s where a boat propeller hit the poor bastard; they’re endangered, you know.”

Feast your orbs on this tentacled horror, the kind of thing Lovecraft would’ve described only as “indescribably terrifying,” causing all who gazed upon it’s tendrils to pass into a catatonic unconsciousness from fright. And the less said about the flowers the better, thanks to Georgia O’Keefe. Yet there I was, seated at the winter meeting of some Floridian orchid society, brought in as a ringer to secure extra chances at door prizes and draw the ire of bitter old women away from family members who actually care about these things.

The irony was lost on the crowd that their club is dedicated to a flower that’s not even suitable for a table centerpiece; about the only thing, it seems to me, flowers are useful for. Their precious plants stood alone in a corner while furry pythons of green astroturf graced the tables as garland. Fears of spilling Swedish meatball-gravy on a sensitive air-root would have made them all too nervous to enjoy the potluck dinner, I suppose.

As these potluck things go, it was pretty typical– one woman brings a casserole big enough to feed the whole congregation, the next brings in a bag of store-brand cheesy puffs and throws it on the table. And everything in-between. There was also fried chicken, brought in from someones brother-in-law’s take out place. There’d been some controversy in the past where they switched to someone else’s cousin’s fried chicken for major events but an emergency referendum put things back in order.

Then there was the passing out of the orchids, which triggered more drooling than old Myrtle’s carrot cake. You could feel the tension as the (mostly) old folks waited for their turn, and I braced for a claw of artificial nails in the back when I went to grab mine and heard the murmured speculation over why I was entitled to a plant. I asked my wife, “What, are these things worth hundreds of dollars, or what?” But no, they go for $15 maybe, and all these people have hundreds of them at home. Living through the depression and rationing rubber during WWII makes people do strange things.

The big news of the meeting was that the society had a website now, which with this crowd did just about as much good as saying they’d put a greenhouse on the moon for them to visit. Bizarre cries of “Is that on computers now?” and “Don’t Google it! Don’t Google it!” went around the room. I’m sure the folks who do figure out how to access it will have a great time gathering more addresses for their forward-this-prayer and Obama-is-a-Muslim mass emailings, though.

There was a raffle at the end, and my ticket was called first so I passed it off to someone and thus ended my duties for the evening. No fisticuffs or even cane beatings ensued over the prize distribution so it was considered a successful meeting by all.

We were in Florida the Thursday before Christmas, walking barefoot on grass in 80*+ temperatures, and headed off on our holiday pilgrimage to Wisconsin only
to step out of the car 24 hours later into 12″+ of snow and
negative-degree weather by Saturday. We spent 1 entire hour in a mall
parking lot Saturday night in a minor storm, and I was only trying to
get to a restaurant on the far side of it. We ended up walking at
least a quarter mile from a parking spot we pulled into just to get
out of the gridlock.

The only pair of shoes I brought ("Who
needs the weather channel?” I often sneer), soaked from shoveling,
froze to crispy solidity in an enclosed entryway where we were staying overnight. My
eyebrows often freeze to my glasses during said shoveling.

Safety tip: The windshield-wiper fluid that they sell you down south,
while full of bug-guts-removing goodness, has no anti-freeze in it and
will ice up your entire windshield, wipers, tank, and hoses, and kill
you if you dare venture north of the last Waffle Hut you can see from
the interstate.

Instead of heading to Michigan for the second half of the trip on Christmas eve as we planned, we were frightened into heading back the night before by threats of more snowstorms. Reminding me again why all weathermen must die, it never did snow any more, and it warmed up nicely the next day. My overnight white-knuckle drive on black ice with a squealing front wheel was for naught. Big three networks, I’ll come back to the first one of you who does a TV show featuring TV and radio meteorologists being assassinated. It can be a drama, comedy, reality show, I don’t care. There’s got to be a large demographic eager to see it.

The noise from the front wheels didn’t get better (it wasn’t merely ice build-up around the tires, as I’d hoped) and turned out to be bad wheel bearings. Sure, buy American cars– parts are supposed to last 100,000 miles, but if they don’t, hey, you can pay about 10% of the remaining value of your degrading investment to fix any little thing. I’d be against bailing out US automakers, but at least they employ and produce things, unlike the pachinko-parlor attendants in New York we threw billions of dollars at. We need another 9/11 to thin their ranks out a little, to paraphrase Bart Simpson.

After getting soaked for parts and labor by a chain that ought to be reputable, I got a call claiming that my rear wheel bearings may be bad, and I “should get those changed too because the ABS light is on on the dashboard and it might be a bad sensor but there’s no way to change it without changing the bearing.” Which makes no sense. After refusing, I was told “Hey, it might just be gummed up or something and it’ll clear out with a little driving.” Which makes me wonder how it became “gummed up.” Sure enough, it blinked on a few times then stayed out. Jerks.

Anyway, Christmas was fun in both states, and the drive back uneventful. I got a day of rest, then set out for 3 days of Scrabble in Tampa…

One of the great injustices of being born in the mid 1960s, in my mind, is missing out on the whole McDonald’s playland experience. I didn’t even get to go inside a McDonald’s until I was in my teens; we’d have to sit in the car with full ashtrays where you’d have cupholders these days while my mom went in for the food we’d eat in the parking lot. I have no idea why, except that they might have thought of it as a drive in from an even earlier age. But we still had drive-ins around and went to them occasionally so who knows.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m grateful for my vague memories of the original six-limbed Grimace and the talking hamburger-headed public servants that have been replaced for today’s youth with a gay clown that eats raw apple slices. They fried apples into pies in my day. DEEP fried them. Probably in lard.

But when those brightly colored habitrails appeared in every high-traffic McDonald’s and I was far too old for them, I was more than a little ticked. A youth spent on ice-cold metal monkey bars and molten-hot metal slides seemed dismal compared to what was virtually a pre-pubescent wet dream of molded plastic tube-crawling joy. I couldn’t have imagined such a thing outside of a space station, and then, surely, no sooner then the impossibly far-off year 2000. And indoors, out of the elements! With deep-fried pies within sniffing distance!

As it turns out, the only thing that seemed farther off to young me than space stations was having a daughter, but unlike flying cars and cheap sub-orbital travel some things actually come to pass. And just like Walt Disney’s bourbon-fueled Epcot visions of the future taught us, you never really know what tomorrow will bring.

It brought me to a McDonald’s near the park we like to visit with a sunstroke-reducing awning over their equally mind-numbing play fortress with rubber coated parts and a recycled tire rubbery surface beneath it. If nothing else, McDonald’s is usually your bathroom away from home, just because they always keep the place clean and have all the amenities. You learn to appreciate this kind of thing even more with a baby, because a clean place to change a diaper is like striking gold.

I should say they usually keep the place in order, because this particular McDonald’s, even in a nice area with gated communities, a thriving shopping center, and the nicest park in town across the street, was pretty screwed up. The bathroom was disorderly, and worse didn’t have a changing table on the wall. So I headed back out with the wet squirrelly two-year-old, and noticed that there’s a “family” bathroom inside the biodome that encloses one of the biggest playlands I’ve ever seen (the supposed largest anywhere is in the touristy section of Orlando). So we trekked back in and around, but this one has a padlock on the door for some reason, so back out again.

By this point the 2-year-old has taken extreme interest in the giant series of tubes (not the Internet) and there’s no going to the park until she gets a shot at them. So after a blazing hot diaper change in the car, the nice air-conditioned McDonald’s sounded like a nice place to spend her exercise time and get something to eat.

The clues should have been adding up by now that this wasn’t the choicest franchise going. I noticed that one guy who’d been waiting for his food during our first quest for a bathroom was still waiting, along with a small throng at the lunchtime rush. There was no real line, but it took nearly 20 minutes to get our order with a near-frantic two-year-old urging me over to the playland area.

But finally it came, so we headed to a table in the playland. Another bad sign going in was the door propped open with a chair, which didn’t make sense, until I realized that the giant biodome was actually a greenhouse with 2000 square feet of southern-facing glass and no air conditioning. The open door was slight relief so we sat next to it. Or, rather, I sat, because the little one had no interest in food and beelined straight into the tubes and disappeared.

My kid is pretty fearless and will climb anything. She might ask for help getting down, but doesn’t flip out or cry and scream. And of course, a few minutes into the habitrail she started calling for help. A few other older kids were going in and out of the tubes, so I thought she’d follow one of them out, but no luck, so I had to go poke my head in. She was at the top of the first tube, a slight ramp with little rubber grips for steps, that seemed pretty tame, but she wouldn’t come down. I thought she might be claustrophobic or something, so with no real options I headed up the ramp to get her.

Of course I barely fit, and it’s about 120 degrees and smells like melted polyurethane inside these things. None of this would have bothered me when I was five, but now it’s pretty uncomfortable and hard on the knees. A little coaxing got the kid out, though, and I brought her back to the table to her fruit salad. She’s cured of all tube aspirations, for now, if not forever, I figured. But of course not; she bolted up the ramp again like it was the greatest thing ever. Well, she sees how to get down now, I thought, so resigned myself to eating my hamburger and waiting her out.

The next thing I heard was “Help, Daddy,” from above me, and I looked up to see her peering down from a plastic bubble 20 feet in the air. Oh, great. There’s no way I’m climbing all the way up there, so she’s going to have to figure it out. She disappeared from the bubble but the “help” cries moved all over the top level, not panicky or scared, just like “hey come and get me.”

The older kids went in and out some more, duly reporting to me which section of the tubing she was in and repeatedly letting me know she was stuck. Their parents or grandparents were wise to the fact that this side room was a sauna and ate in the actual restaurant, so I was the only adult in there. One grandmother did come in to get her grandson and noted that “she doesn’t seem very scared, at least.” Thanks grandma. None of the kids were willing to give her a hand getting down, so as soon as the room cleared out and I finished my food I realized that I had to climb up there.

I went past the little sign that said “Ages 3 and up” and “No shoes—socks only” (the 2-year-old was in sandals) so I figured we’d already broken a couple of rules and the lackadaisical management wouldn’t bother me even if they noticed. I was soaking from sweat a few feet into the middle level, and still had to twist around a few turns to get to the last bubble I saw her in. Thankfully, she came back to the top of the ladder on the second level so my trip wasn’t as long as it could’ve been. She just didn’t like coming down the ramps alone, so a little coaxing and a cramped u-turn and we were on our way out.

No shift manager was waiting outside the last tube for us so I packed up our stuff and held on to the kid as tightly as I could because she was gung ho to climb back up the thing again. A quick sneak out the side door and by the time I had her strapped in the car seat she’d forgotten about it, and was back on some crazy demand for Dora the Explorer fruit snacks that she rejected as soon as we got out of the grocery store.

Ah, fatherhood.

I’ve been stricken by a Floridian virus for the past week, so the posting slumped off. Florida has been in high gear with the weirdness lately, though, so here’s a rundown:

Fish walked through a suburban Florida neighborhood one morning last week, as seen on the news clip above. Note the part where they explain how the fish come up out of the drainage sewers after heavy rains, and then watch the lunkhead throwing the catfish into a cooler as fast as he can catch them for a big cookout over the weekend. It makes me yearn for the old days up north when the relatives would scan police frequencies for reports of dead deer on the highway and head out to pick up the carcass before highway crews could clean it up. Good times.

The whole country must be aware of the Florida 2-year-old who disappeared, and her mom didn’t report it for five weeks because she was “conducting her own investigation.” There are other equally off-their-nut relatives involved, and a string of implausable tales that don’t add up. The Ramsey’s might’ve gotten that tactic to work, but these yahoos don’t look to be able to pull it off. I haven’t kept up on any developments, but we can hope the kid turns up OK, as unlikely as it seems now.

This tasteful billboard popped up near the highway here, linking voting for a Democrat to blowing up the World Trade Center buildings. As much sense as that makes, billboards are a hotbed of 1st Amendment expression down here, with scores of message-type boards, mostly religious, dotting the area. My favorite, right up the street from me, is one of those all-black boards with a select quote from God himself.

“As my Apprentice, you’re never fired.”
–God

You’d think whoever your God is, he/she would be offended by that.

The southern part of the state is overrun with iguanas, according to this hard-hitting piece. I like the entire “commission” that put their brain power together to decide that dumping pets should be illegal, while they already have a breeding population of thousands. That’s some nice work there, Monroe County.

Also in the Keys, they had the annual Hemingway look-alike contest this weekend. My daughter took home the trophy two years ago: