Yesterday I went to Animal Kingdom with Christina and Greg and we had a perfect Disney day.

Elements of Disney perfection:

First, the weather has to be mostly nice, as in not sweltering, not chilly, not stormy. Yesterday was hot enough that I could get soaked on Kali River Rapids (and I did!) and still be perfectly comfortable wandering around the park in my soaked clothing, but it wasn’t so hot that there was ever a moment when I thought, “ugh, this is miserable.”

Second, the crowds have to be reasonable, and the lines, ditto. Yesterday was more than reasonable. We paid extra for the Lightning Lane pass for the Avatar ride, where you’re flying on a dragon over the Pandora landscape, but when we arrived we were about ten minutes too early for our time window. Meanwhile the stand-by line was only 30 minutes long, so we joined that line and wound up riding the Avatar ride — in Christina’s opinion, the best ride in all the theme parks — twice! (For context, back in 2018, when I took Rory and his girlfriend to Animal Kingdom, the line for Avatar was never less than 3 hours long and we didn’t get to go on it at all.) Yesterday, the line for the Safari ride was about twenty minutes, and the Everest roller coaster and Kali River Rapids were both close to walk-ons, ie you never really stop moving in the line. Not only was none of the lines long enough to get tedious, none of them even lasted long enough to start playing games.

Third, it helps a lot to be on the same wavelength as the people you’re with. Christina, Greg and I were like a well-oiled Disney machine, with exactly the same ideas about what we wanted to do and the appropriate order in which to do those things. We went Avatar, Avatar, Safari ride, snack (Dole whip ice cream for me), Everest, Kali River Rapids, ordered lunch, the Asia walk through exhibit with plenty of time in the aviary (the best part, IMO), a little souvenir shopping, picked up & ate lunch, then home. We were at the park from 9-2, approximately, which is about the perfect length of time in my opinion. Long enough to make it feel worthwhile, not long enough to feel exhausting.

Bonus points if the food is good, triple bonus points if the food is not just good, but excellent. My dole whip was delicious, but my lunch was amazing. We ate at the Satu’li Canteen quick service restaurant, aka the Disney version of fast food. I had a chimichurri beef and wood-grilled chicken rice bowl, with crunchy vegetable slaw, (the gluten-free version, of course) which was delicious, although helped a lot by the hot sauce Christina carries around with her, but for dessert I had this:

It’s chocolate mousse with raspberry on a tiny flourless chocolate cake and it was incredibly good. 10/10. Maybe 11/10. So good that the restaurant is my new favorite restaurant at Disney. Counter service! It cost $6.29! (Which I think is a really weird price, tbh, but I also think is an incredibly good price for a dessert that pretty and that tasty.)

More bonus points at Animal Kingdom, in particular, if you get to see some cool things. I posted a video of the baby elephant to Instagram so you can see it from the sidebar, but the lions, the anteater, the komodo dragon, and the birds in the aviary were also fun.

These two were hanging out right next to one another, belying the old “birds of a feather” cliche.

The Komodo dragon was, in fact, sticking his tongue out. It flicked it in and out just like snakes do.

The lion looked impressively comfortable on his rocky bed.

I worried, a little, before we went, whether Animal Kingdom was a park that held too much nostalgia for me. Last year, when I went to the Magic Kingdom, I wrote about how it was hard because of the time I’d spent there with Rory when he was little. Nostalgia isn’t grief, of course. It’s possible to remember the pleasant past without getting stuck in the pain of the present. But it can definitely trigger the pain. And Animal Kingdom is much more nostalgic than Magic Kingdom for me because Rory was so fascinated by animals, and once it opened, it quickly became our favorite park. Six-year-old Rory would have adored the Avatar ride. And I couldn’t pause by the anteater and the Komodo dragon without thinking about how thrilled he would have been to have such a great view of them. The anteater, especially.

But that was six-year-old Rory. And six-year-old Rory was already long gone when 25-year-old Rory decided to throw me away. Remembering that helped. And then I had a fun time remembering all the Rorys over the years. Two-year-old Rory was fantastic: solemn, earnest, curious, determined, with the absolute best laugh. Three-year-old Rory was a challenge. I read a lot of parenting books that year, as determination turned into obstinacy. Still a delight, but I had to learn a lot — and change a fair amount, too — to stop the endless power struggles.

Four and five year old Rory, I saw far too little of, IMO. During those years, I was working full-time, taking him down to Santa Cruz on weekends for visitation with his dad. Ugh. I remember the first week of kindergarten, when his teacher sent him home with homework. Worksheets. I looked at them and wanted to cry. Instead, I brought them back into school and told her, “No, we will not be doing these.” And then I mapped our schedule out for her: I got him to pre-care at the school by 7:45 so I could get to work by 9, I left work promptly at 5 — always! — so I could pick him up by 6, we made it home at 6:25, he watched Zoboomafoo for half an hour while I got dinner ready, we finished dinner at 7:15 or so, we did bedtime routine and bath and maybe played a little if there was time, and then I read him stories until he fell asleep. And then on weekends, I took him to his dad. The window in which we could do worksheets was so small, and was inevitably going to steal from the time in which we could actually enjoy our life. No. I was not going to do them, I was not going to make him do them. Fortunately, his teacher sympathized.

Ah, but six-year-old Rory! When he was six, we moved to Santa Cruz. I was still working full-time but remotely, commuting back up to Berkeley one or two days a week at most. He started first grade at the local public school and lasted approximately 8 days. Then I pulled him out. I wonder if I’ve ever written about that before? Talk about an agonizing decision. Talk about a decision that no one in my life remotely agreed with! It was insane. And those were some really hard years, to be honest, as I juggled home-schooling with a full-time job.

I remember them as full of sunshine, though. We had so much fun, we did projects and had adventures and read books and played & played, as I redefined “play” as education for the homeschool program. (It was educational, really!) And yeah, I was chronically exhausted, and always stressed, but he got to keep his sense of curiosity and wonder and… well, peacefulness. After two years, I did manage to get him into the alternative school, which was a much better fit for him.

And then, well… it’s pointless to look back over the years to try to see where they went bad. But it wasn’t awful yesterday to remember delightful two-year-old Rory and charming six-year-old Rory and highly entertaining twelve-year-old Rory and sixteen-year-old Rory who could make me laugh so hard I cried. I’m glad that boy existed in my life, I’m glad we had so many chances to admire the anteaters and the otters at Animal Kingdom. I hope someday he gets to go on the Avatar ride and appreciates it, if not the way he would have as a six-year-old, at least with an awareness of who that six-year-old was.

I did a deep dive into my archives this morning, though, looking for mentions of specific years, specific events, and stumbled upon this: “I’ve had enough practice with grief by now to know that the only way out is through. You don’t get to make the feelings go away by avoiding them. They only go away when you’re finished with them.” My own words from years ago, and what I’ve realized now is that you’re never actually finished. Never. But in the same way that nostalgia is bittersweet, you can miss someone deeply and intensely, and still have an absolutely perfect Disney day.

I woke up this morning in such a good mood. Cheerful, optimistic, ready to take charge of my day. Doing some stretching before I even got out of bed, grateful for the coziness of my space, charmed by my delightful dog. Just your basic happy morning mood.

In the spirit of my choosing happiness program, I knew that a few factors were influencing me.

1. I initially woke up at 5, decided it was too early, and successfully went back to sleep until just after 7. Two extra hours of sleep is a full extra sleep cycle — time enough to have some good REM sleep and maybe even some deep sleep — and that’s enough to make anyone feel good.
2. The weather has cooled down enough that I’m back on my Big Bowl of Possibilities breakfast meal plan (aka lots of sautéed vegetables), plus still sticking to my Salads+ summer menu, so the past few days have been rich with nutrition. Yesterday also included both chicken and hard-boiled eggs, so a lot of protein, too. I’ve also added sardines to my diet for the sake of the B12, which is an essential ingredient in the production of serotonin and dopamine, therefore a “feel-good” nutrient. (And one that many gluten-free eaters don’t get enough of.) The feel-good neurotransmitters are built with feel-good nutrients, and I’ve had plenty lately. It’s not surprising that I feel good.
3. Anticipation… I have so many nice things that I’m looking forward to right now. I’ve got the usual things going on, of course — writing time with friends, the farmer’s market on the weekend, hanging out on the patio of Celery City, spending time outside with Sophie in beautiful places. But my Disney pass is expiring in November and I’m not going to renew it (at least not right away), so I’m also planning a final set of theme park binging: Animal Kingdom next week, the Epcot Food & Wine Festival at the end of the month, maybe a solo short Magic Kingdom trip in between to say good-bye to Tom Sawyer’s Island. And the BBE is visiting next week, so I’m looking forward to that, too. I have found surprisingly little research-backed evidence for my deep belief that anticipation is a key ingredient in happiness, but my belief hasn’t wavered: expecting good things to happen and looking forward to them is part of being happy for me.

So in my happy mood, I get up, get dressed, and take Sophie for a walk. We are only a few houses down the street when Toby, the Australian Shepherd who lives on the corner, comes running out to greet us. I drop Sophie’s leash so she can play with Toby, which she happily does. Toby’s mom, Hannah, is putting her little one in the car, and calling Toby, who is not supposed to leave his yard, but Toby is ignoring her. So I walk over to Hannah’s car, Toby following me, and chat with Hannah.

Sophie pauses for a pee.

Alas, Sophie’s leash is not being held in my hand, as it should be, safely off the ground. Sophie’s leash is underneath her, and yes, she pees on it. Copiously. Ugh!

But it’s probably fine, right? It’s gonna be damp in the middle, but it’s not like I run the leash through my hands as we walk. As long as the loop on the end, where I hold it, is dry, what difference does it make?

The loop on the end is not dry. I am immediately faced with a dilemma. Do we go home so I can wash my hands right away and get one of Sophie’s other leashes? But Sophie is eager to go for her walk and I don’t want to get sidetracked and miss out on our early morning sunshine and cool temps, so I decide I will just finish the walk. Carefully. Not touching anything with my dog-pee hands.

We continue walking, around the corner, and down the sidewalk and between two trees and right into an enormous spider web. And I have the exact reaction that one would expect of a person who’s just walked into an ENORMOUS spider web — frantically wiping it off my hair and my face and my shirt and my arms, and OMG, yuck, yuck, and more YUCK.

I am simultaneously wiping off spider web and wiping on dog pee.

I am revolted and as I do my “get off me, get off me!” spider-web removal dance, I think, “This is not the day I was intending to have.”

Except… it still is. Sophie and I finished our walk. She got to say hi to Jack, a little gray terrier, while I chatted with his person, Armand. I got to say hi to Debbie, who didn’t have her dachshund, Ariel, with her today. We both got to say hi to Lisa and Lotara, a pittie mix puppy. We enjoyed the sunshine and the movement and the sense of freedom, and while I was quite aware that I could smell the dog pee on my skin, I also knew that I could get home and have an immediate shower with clean, hot running water in a bathroom with no bugs. (Campground bathrooms always have bugs, it’s just a fact of life in campgrounds.)

This past week, I went to the beach with Christina and a friend of hers, and somewhere along the way we got to talking about luck. I said that I didn’t really believe in luck, and I don’t, in the context of what we were talking about then. That conversation was about choices with bad outcomes. Yeah, that happens. A choice that seems okay can turn out to be really, really wrong. If I had chosen to go home and wash my hands and get a different leash, I might have missed that spider web entirely. Some other unlucky person might have walked through it before I made it back there. But if that had happened, we would have missed greeting all those people and dogs, too, and feeling like part of a community is one of the best happiness boosters there is. Maybe not quite as good as the WIN (Walk-In-Nature), but the WIN plus the community? A++. I mean I guess I could have had all the community and the WIN without the dog pee and the spider web, but I don’t feel unlucky. If anything, that spider web made me more aware of how much I am grateful for all the goodness in my life right now.

Other quick things I want to remember from the past, ouch, three weeks without blogging:

Live music, The Ordinary Boys, at a local bar on a Sunday afternoon, so much fun. In a really weird coincidence, while I was listening to the music and watching people dance, I was thinking about what it would take to make a dance floor feel like a safe space for me and whether it was even possible. At the end of that exact song, the lead singer took a minute to say that one of the things the band stood for was creating a safe space for everyone to have fun, no matter what you wore, your skin color, who you were going home with, their music was for everyone, and he loved that their audiences understood that, too. Such an odd coincidence! The dance floor was still too crowded for me, but maybe someday soon, I’ll dance. Maybe.

The All-The-Birthdays dinner at Space220. I think I’ll remember the circumstances, the magical “luck” of getting a perfect reservation at a restaurant fully booked for months in advance, but I’ll probably forget the food. It was fun, though.

An overnight dog-sitting for Riker. He and Sophie are so adorable together. So much chewing on one another’s faces! This photo, where they are curled up together, (the brown is Riker) was taken a split second before Sophie tried chewing on his ear. You can see why she couldn’t resist.

Going to the Fall Into Fantasy Book Fair from Spellbound Books, held at Tuffy’s, and running into two women from the Spellbound Writer’s Group. I really need to start promoting my writing more seriously again, because I should have had a table at the fair, not just been a guest, but I loved casually running into people I knew. And really, there are so many indie writers here.

And speaking of writing — I have notes, dictated while walking, that need to get transcribed today, plus some breakfast to eat, plus a Japanese lesson or three to do, and somehow my quick blog post, just to write about spider webs and dog pee, has taken me far more time than I intended. Time to get the rest of the day moving!

I read a book about the laws of magical thinking recently (The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane) and I obviously didn’t read it carefully enough, because I don’t know which of the laws is the one that applies when you think that the turn of the calendar from one month to the next is magically going to change the weather. It’s September, which means the air is getting brisk at night and the leaves are falling from the trees, right?

Not really, no. 

I am trying to get more motivated, however, despite the weather still calling out for sitting on a front porch in a rocking chair drinking mint juleps, or long slow beach days. Yesterday I was doing useful chores, including some reorganizing of towels — more useful than it sounds, I swear — and I was pleasantly reminded that we can always make new choices. Always. It’s easy to get into a routine and then have that routine turn into a rut, but all we need to do is pause, step back, take a look at that rut, and then decide whether we want to continue in it or not. Any pattern that we can recognize, we can change if we want to badly enough.

And okay, yes, this pattern was technically about not having found a place to comfortably store my towels  — my desk chair has been serving as a linen closet for the last two months — but it applies to anything that I want it to apply to. If I’m just spinning my wheels, I can choose to stop spinning & do something else. I can make new choices! Such an obvious thought, and yet also so radical, and so powerful.

Of course, I haven’t actually managed to make those new choices yet — with the exception of taking over a shelf in the bathroom for my towels — but at least I’m reminded that they’re mine to make if I want to.

Unrelated, I fell in love with an author this week and I’ve been gobbling down her books like potato chips. Trying to do some of my own work and my own writing between books, but reaching for my phone (and its Kindle app) in every spare minute. My Japanese lessons have been getting short shrift and my meals have been mostly bagged salads. Oh, well, bagged salads are pretty healthy, right?

Anyway, the author is Katherine Center. I’d read one book by her before, The Bodyguard, and I enjoyed it, but not so much that I started binging. But The Rom-Commers was on my library wait list for weeks from some recommendation I got somewhere, it finally showed up this weekend, and it just delighted me.

A quote:

They’re romances and they’re definitely not plausible or realistic, but they made me want to believe in love again, which was extremely unexpected, ha. Anyway, I’m not sure which one of her books is going to be my favorite, but since I could be reading one now, instead of writing this blog post, I think I will go do that. And then maybe I’ll open up the file for the romance I was writing that I haven’t touched since sometime in 2023, and see if those characters would like their story to continue. Maybe they would!

My new friend, Mocha. Okay, friend is possibly an exaggeration. But he did hiss at me yesterday instead of running away from me, so we’re making progress. (I’m cat sitting while my neighbors are away, so I’ve been showing up twice a day. Maybe by the time they’re home, he’ll decide I’m okay, but right now, he definitely thinks I’m an invader. One who comes bearing tuna, though.)

I’m having a lot of trouble believing in today’s date. Where did August go? How did it slip away from me so quickly?

Ans: August in Florida is hot and sticky and slow and profoundly un-motivating. I haven’t even been eating my stir-fried vegetables for breakfast, because by the time Sophie and I get home from our typical morning walk, the thought of standing over a hot stove is so unappealing.

That said, August in Florida might be un-motivating, but if you give in to the lazy (as I have), it’s also languorous and lovely. Sure, I’m moving in slow motion, but I’m appreciating my slow movement.

A few photos, attached to a few memories:

Sophie, saying, “Why try to write when we could be playing in the backyard instead?” I love the crossed paws, something about them makes me melt immediately.

Riker was away for most of the month, so first playdate on his return included some face licking. And a lot of running.

Birds overhead at sunrise on the Sanford Riverwalk. 

I love the sailboats at the marina. They feel like adventures-in-waiting.

A great beach day. The water was bathtub warm, but the waves were strong. I didn’t worry about sharks for more than a minute or two, because it just felt so good to be immersed in water.

Plenty of other pleasant things have happened this month. Lunch with family, ice cream with my friend J, some fun thrifting, and so much time spent in the backyard with Sophie. Lots of reading, lots of organizing of notes on happiness, lots of peaceful quiet time. Lots of sudden rain showers that make for cozy afternoons snuggling with my girl. Not much in the way of writing, but word-by-word, it happens.

One random other summer note that I’ve been wanting to write about for days: the cicadas are insanely loud. So loud sometimes that I’ve had to go inside because it’s like sitting in a giant static noise generator. So loud they’ve set off my noise safety alert on my phone. Not consistently! And I don’t understand why they’re crazy loud in the middle of the day some days and not other days. The reason I haven’t written about them is that I don’t have anything more to say about them than that, but I want to remember them — they have been the sound of this summer of 2024, and as it draws to a close (where did it go?!?), I want to remember that it was a good summer, despite — well, and maybe even because of — and the humidity and the heat and the bugs.

Last night, I woke up around four or so, needing to use the bathroom, and when I came back to my room, I had a text message from my brother, saying, “Got time to talk?”

Okay, it was 4AM, so yeah, I had time to talk. But could I? Did I want to? Really, I wanted to go back to sleep, but the Best Brother Ever wouldn’t text me in the middle of the night asking to talk unless it was important.

But if I called him, I’d have to talk in complete whispers or else I’d wake Jamie up. Our rooms are adjacent and it’s really easy to overhear conversations between them: I can basically ask him a question in a normal speaking tone and he’ll answer (during the daytime, obviously.)

Still, important, right? So I could go outside to talk to the BBE. But yesterday the side edges of Hurricane Debby were just skimming Sanford, so it had been rainy all day long. Also, of course, it would be completely dark and there’s no way Miss Sunshine would let me go outside without her. At nighttime, though, I put her on her leash, mostly to avoid wildlife interactions that might make both of us sad (aka skunks, rabid raccoons, coyotes). So I’d be juggling my phone, Sophie on her leash, in the rain and the dark… ugh, it sounded so unappealing.

And his message wasn’t, “Call me, please, it’s urgent,” so was it really so important that he would want me to be standing in the rain and dark to call?

But then it occurred to me — there’s a back room in the house that’s not currently being used. I don’t think of it as usable in the same way I think of the kitchen and living room as usable: it’s not shared space, it’s a bedroom waiting to be rented. But I could probably call from there without disturbing Jamie and obviously, I don’t think my landlord would mind if I used the spare bedroom to make a middle of the night phone call.

Perfect. Although I really would have preferred to go back to sleep, I would drag myself out of my comfortable bed and go call my brother.

And then I woke up.

The whole thing had been a dream, and I still needed to pee.

SO WEIRD! It took me a minute to convince myself that yes, I had just dreamed the bathroom visit, the text message, and the entire problem-solving thought process, but in fact, I had. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a dream that felt more realistic, and that had less of an aura of unreality about it when I woke up. I was literally dreaming that I was in bed, thinking. It felt like I’d slipped between multiverse worlds or something, that maybe in some parallel reality, the BBE actually had texted me to ask if I had time to talk.

I was honestly really tempted to call him. Or at least text him. But I didn’t, because it was 4:30 in the morning and I didn’t think he’d really want to talk to me right then either.

Instead, I went back to sleep and when I woke up, Sophie and I went for a beautiful walk down on the riverwalk. Some photographic proof:

I thought this bird looked so much like the night heron I posted last week that I was excited to discover that we had night herons here, too. But the Apple photos info says that it’s a limpkin. That is a word that you will have to fight with auto-correct to type. I type limpkin, auto-correct says pumpkin. Over and over again. Yeah, right, auto-correct, that bird sure looks like a pumpkin to me.

On the other hand, in an extremely cool piece of trivia, the limpkin call was used as the sound of the griffin in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and that is a fact I would never have learned if it had been a night heron. (Speaking of auto-correct, it also wants to say “heroin” every time I type “heron” and… what? I really think I’m a person more likely to write about herons, or even heroines, rather than heroin, but apparently I’m unusual enough in that for auto-correct’s default to be the hardcore drugs. Strange!)

Moving on, the construction project across the street is — oh, wait, have I mentioned that? If not, short version, they’ve taken the lovely green space and are turning it into a retention pond, which is exactly the kind of tragedy that turns people into NIMBYs. I understand the reasoning and approve in principle of proactively planning for more intense storms and potential flooding, but in practice… much sadness.

And more sadness because of the NOISE. Beep, beep, beep… please stop backing up your trucks. Just… stop. Don’t back up anymore! Go forward instead! Turn in circles!!

I strongly suspect that it’s only going to get worse, but I’m also mystified by the hours that they work. They show up, they do something, and then they disappear for two weeks. I’m not complaining, because I do think that I’m going to yearn for those disappearances long before they’re done ripping up the space and the surrounding roads, but I feel like it would be much easier to cope if I knew when they planned to work and could plan my own life accordingly. So far my coping strategy is loud music, which is good and bad, I guess, depending on the music. Not all music motivates me to work harder, but that’s what I need to find.

Speaking of which, I should get back to it. I’m jumping around all over the place in my course creation/book creation, with lots of processing of notes right now. I’ve got so much information, but it’s a struggle to keep from sounding like a term paper. I am entertaining myself with mixed metaphors, though.

In my latest section, I was writing about thinking of nutrition as basically a recipe for your body. If you want to bake chocolate chip cookies, you really can’t skip the chocolate chips. You’re not going to get chocolate chip cookies if you do. If you want to create a happy brain, you can’t skip the omega-3s and the olive oil: they are literally the ingredients that provide your brain with the building blocks to create neural connections and grow your hippocampus. No nutrients -> no connections -> shrinking hippocampus -> depression and dementia. If you want to be happy, you have to give your brain the ingredients it needs to thrive.

Here’s another one: iron is an ingredient for creating hemoglobin and hemoglobin carries oxygen throughout your bloodstream. Low iron = lower oxygen distribution = lower energy. You’ll never want to run around and have fun if your iron is low, because your body will be conserving its resources, and your conscious mind telling you to go out and get some exercise can’t win against a cautious body knowing that it doesn’t have the resources to do so.

Like I said, term paper. And probably a scientist would say that I’m oversimplifying. But simplifying to make information easier to digest and remember is where I’m at right now. (Oh, and my mixed metaphors are — is this ingredients, and a cooking metaphor? Or foundation plus building blocks, a construction metaphor? Or fuel and energy, an engine metaphor? Or maybe just all of the above, in their own places and times.)

But now I really am getting back to it!