Our house has a rather small back deck. Here’s what it looked like just before we bought it:
Today, Cary and I rented a powerwasher from Home Depot, and after 2 hours of work, our back deck now looks like this:
The bright sun makes the deck look slightly more new than it actually is, but it’s still a world of difference. Here’s an in-progress picture that really shows the difference:
The previous owners of our house, who lived there for two years, did very little yard work.
I’ve always found the phrase “tugging at your heartstrings” to be kind of odd. The phrase always makes me think of some kind of bizarre organic musical instrument — a Cardio Harp, with strings connected to a living heart. I don’t think the idiom is intended to evoke such a macabre image, but there you go.
If such an instrument did actually exist, however, it’s a sure bet that the artists at Pixar would be virtuosos. Their latest masterpiece, Up is a brilliant film. The first 15 minutes of the movie alone could be titled “Opus 15 for Cardio Harp”.
Cary and I arrived in Orlando yesterday at around 9:00am, picked up our rental car and drove to Universal Studios. One note about our rental car: it’s the first time I’ve ever been in a car this yellow (it’s even more yellow than most taxis). It’s a bit garrish, but one advantage is that it’s really easy to find in a parking lot.
Anyway, we managed to do most of the really good stuff at Universal Studios. The Simpson’s ride (formerly the Back to the Future ride) was pretty neat: a motion simulator ride through a CGI Springfield that even featured specific smells at at least one point in the ride.
We also hit the Men in Black ride, a small Woody Woodpecker roller coaster, the E.T. ride (which was shut down for part of the day, but was back in operation in the afternoon), The Disaster ride (formerly an attraction based on the movie Earthquake), the classic Jaws boat ride and a couple of kid themed rides based on Jimmy Neutron and Shrek. Wait times were generally pretty short since it’s the off-season.
We left Universal at around 4:30 and headed to the hotel for a quick nap, then it was off to Downtown Disney for dinner at the just-opened T-Rex restaurant. T-Rex is a theme restaurant very similar to the nearby Rainforest Cafe. It features a bunch of animatronic dinosaurs and an eating area called The Ice Cave. The Ice Cave is inside a fake glacier which glows blue most of the time. Every 25 minutes, though, the restaurant features a “meteor shower light show, in which the Ice Cave changes from blue to red and all of the animatronic dinosaurs start freaking out. It’s interesting, but I’m glad we didn’t eat in the Ice Cave. Having all of my food bathed in blue light would have been slightly disconcerting.
After dinner, we bought a souvenier at the gift shop and drove back to the hotel.
Today, we’re going to Sea World. More later.
