Bryce Moore's Blog, page 172

A Writing Update

It’s been a bit since I let you all know how the writing’s going, and seeing as how the main reason I started this blog way back when was to do that, I suppose I better get on it. There are a number of writing projects I have up in the air at the moment. Let me just run them down one by one.

UTOPIA, an as-yet unnamed science fiction book I’m working on, is going well. I should pass the 70,000 word mark today, and I’d imagine I have around 10,000 words left to go, give or take a few thousand. It will be the 15th book I’ve finished a complete draft of. It’s definitely been an interesting experience. For one thing, it’s my first science fiction book. For another, the voice is very unique. My main character isn’t exactly playing with a full deck of cards, and it’s written from his viewpoint. The best way I can describe it would be “YA Clockwork Orange.” Which doesn’t sound pretentious *at all*, does it? I had TRC read the first 40,000 words a while ago, and at first he came to me and asked if I’d messed up when I was writing it. I explained about the character and told him to stick with it and see if the voice still bugged him. He got hooked, and he keeps coming back to me now wondering if the book is finished. When I reread those 40,000 words, I found the same thing: the voice took a bit to hook you, but once you did, it felt very natural. I have no idea what my agents will think of it, though I did show one the first 5,000 words or so before I really dove in, and he was intrigued enough to let me continue. We’ll see.
MAGIC AT 30,000 FEET is still with my second agent. I hope to have feedback on that ready for me for when I’m done with UTOPIA. No idea if that will be extensive or not. I’d like to have this book submitted to editors by the fall, if possible. But that depends on getting a second greenlight on the manuscript.
OUR LADY went out on submission back in December. It was very well received, but not well received enough to get any takers just yet. We have yet to hear back from about a third of the people we sent it to, but I anticipate sending it out to more editors soon.
THE MEMORY THIEF is coming out in a little over 2 months. I should have some updates about it over the next while, so keep your eyes peeled for that. At this point, the writing is totally finished, so I just have to wait for it to hit the shelves.

What else do I have in the pipeline? After UTOPIA is finished, I’ll do the MAGIC AT 30,000 FEET edits. Ideally, I’ll start working on another book then before turning back to UTOPIA to give it a second draft before I send it to my agents for their input. (I know the book has some structural issues. I can feel it. So I want those taken care of before I get professional opinions. I don’t think it’ll be an extensive second draft. Mainly just tuning it up to get it where I want it.)

What will that new book be? Beats me. I’ll be having lunch with my agent in August. Perhaps something that comes up there will inspire me. Or maybe I’ll return to one of the books I set aside and never finished. Or maybe I’ll brainstorm up something new. It will feel good to have my current ideas down on paper and drafted, though. I’m excited to see what I come up with next. Never really worried about it, though. Ideas are cheap in my book. Sort of like going out for a walk on the beach and looking for something cool.

There’s always something to find . . .

Mormonism and Me

Forgive me in advance. This post might get a bit rambly. I’ve been having thoughts for the past few months (maybe even more than a year?) zooming around my head, and I’ve come close to writing them down now and then, but then they’d crumble apart when I tried to really bring them together, and so I never really bothered. Hopefully today will be different.

It’s a Mormon post (obviously), so feel free to ignore if that’s not your thing. I’ll be back to Pokemon updates and pop culture mania tomorrow.

We’ve been having the sister missionaries over to dinner every month or so for the past half year. Since Denisa and I are both returned missionaries ourselves, we like being able to connect to the missionaries and have them in our home. It’s a varied group, with some being more assertive and outgoing than others, but they all mean well, and I hope other members will do the same for our kids when they’re out on missions themselves.

But it’s not just to give them food, of course. Missionaries are focused on teaching other people about our religion, and with the influx of missionaries in the last few years (total LDS missionaries shot up from around 60,000 to the neighborhood of 90,000 in the space of a year, though it’s down to 75,000 now), there have been many more missionaries in our area. Our ward went from 2 missionaries to 4, and that seems to have happened in many other congregations around us (and the rest of the North East, judging by the few other wards I’ve visited here and there).

The church had a dramatic increase in the number of missionaries, and those missionaries had to be sent somewhere. I don’t have any specific data to back this statement up (it’s all anecdotal), but it stands to reason that the bulk of them didn’t go to exotic faraway places. They went to places where the church was already well-established, and where apartments and infrastructure could be easily found.

But this post isn’t about that. It’s about me. So let’s get back on track, shall we?

With the dramatic increase in missionaries has come a significant shift in the way the church approaches missionary work. We hear again and again that the role of the missionaries is primarily to teach people about the church. Finding people for them to teach is up to the members. We’re told that it’s most effective when members invite their friends to be taught by the missionaries in the members’ homes, and I don’t doubt that’s true. I’m sure there are statistics that show how many people get baptized through that path compared to the number of people baptized through other paths.

So the missionaries are here to teach, and our job as members is to “keep them busy.”

That’s all fine and good on the surface, but it glosses over a key assumption: while the number of missionaries in my area has doubled, the number of people living here has not. I hate to use the phrase, but I’m going to: back in my day, additional missionaries were sent to areas when those areas justified having additional missionaries. I’m not sad that additional missionaries are here. I enjoy having them in the area. But before the new ones arrived, it wasn’t exactly a booming, bustling place where missionary work was concerned. The Elders who were here weren’t working from morning to night, running from teaching appointment to teaching appointment.

In other words, if they weren’t “busy” when there was just two of them, the odds of four of them being busy aren’t too great, regardless of how many people the members find for them to teach.

When the missionary surge began, there was a great deal of excitement in the church. That many more missionaries had to be a great thing. And no doubt it is. But one thing it has not done is led to a corresponding boom in baptisms. Convert baptisms have remained steady, despite the dramatic increase in the number of missionaries.

So is that the members’ fault? Are we not holding up our part of the bargain? Is this “failure to convert” due to my hesitance to hand over my Facebook Friends list to the missionaries? (Tongue in cheek there a bit at the end, but also a bit not.)

And at last we come to part of the heart of the post: my relationship to missionary work. I don’t believe it’s changed much, even since the days I was out wandering the German city streets, looking for people to talk to about my religion. My goal at the time was straightforward: I wanted to tell people what I believed. I wanted to inform them about my religion and faith, and let them know how it’s helped me in my life, and how I hoped it could help them in theirs. At that point, once I’d been able to teach them about the Gospel, what they did with it was largely up to them. They could take it or leave it. If they wanted to take it, super! If they wanted to leave it, that was fine too. I really just wanted people to have an accurate understanding of what I believed.

That’s still the same today. One of the main reasons I write these long Mormon blog posts is because I still have a desire to have people understand where I’m coming from. There continues to be a lot of misunderstanding in the world about what Mormons believe, and if I can help clear some of that up, all the better. I will talk to anyone pretty much anytime about what I believe. I’ll happily answer sincere questions and clarify as needed. And when friends express interest in learning more, I’ll be the first in line to suggest they have the missionaries over to continue the conversation.

But I believe that choice is up to them.

It’s not my style to just go up to a friend out of the blue and say, “Want to have the missionaries over?” My style is to talk to them about what they believe. Offer advice when they seem to be looking for it. That advice is going to be heavily influenced by who I am and what I believe. My friends know and understand that. And over the years, I’ve invited some friends to hear more about the church. Some have accepted, and some haven’t, but they’re all still my friends. I imagine I’ll invite quite a few more over the years, but I don’t know when that will happen, and under what circumstances.

Here’s the thing: these days, my relation to the church would probably fall more under the “It’s Complicated” status on Facebook. I still believe in the church and its teachings, but I also recognize that many of those teachings are going to be problematic for many of my friends. For example, the approach the church has taken to gay members (and non-members) and their children has been very troubling for me. (Something I was very open with on the blog, as always.) What it boils down to is that I have no issue at all with the gospel. There are parts of it that I don’t understand, but even that makes sense: God knows more than I do, so it stands to reason He would do things that I don’t really get from time to time, just as I do things my kids don’t really get from time to time. (Try explaining income tax to a three year old, people.) I live my life as best as I can and trust that the gospel will iron things out eventually. (Sometimes, maybe the thing that gets ironed out is me. I’ve certainly got plenty of wrinkles.) It’s the day to day church membership and application of that gospel that can get pretty tricky.

I’m going to be blunt.

Some days, I come home from church and need a few hours before I’m able to calm down and not be one big bundle of frustration and irritation. Things people say, political opinions expressed, attitudes exhibited: they can all really rub me the wrong way. And I’m 100% certain things I’ve done and said in church (and on the blog) have caused other Mormons to want to pull their own hair out or yell at me or try to get me in trouble with a Bishop or three. I like to believe none of us does it on purpose. It’s just a side effect of having so many imperfect people from all walks of life interact with each other on a weekly basis. It’s what happens when many different, valid interpretations of how to live the gospel come crashing together week after week.

These days, my approach to helping others reflects my approach to sharing the gospel: I fall heavily on the side of personal responsibility. If people want to come to church, great. If they don’t, fine. I’m reluctant to be the one out there trying to drag them someplace they don’t want to go, whether they’ve been baptized or not. Our local congregation’s numbers have really shrunk, for a variety of reasons. Some people have moved away. Some people have left the church, Some people have just stopped coming. Is that on me? On the missionaries? I don’t think so. I think it’s on the individual. And yet sometimes it feels like if I don’t go to church, that’s my fault and I need to repent. And if my neighbor doesn’t go to church, it’s also my fault and I need to repent.

It all comes back to the same thing for me: live my life as best as I can. Try my best to be nice to other people and to be welcoming to others at church. Try to create an environment that is friendly and welcoming to all, and let people know it’s there and that we’d love to have them stop by. But once that’s done, then it’s up to the individual to decide what to do with it. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink, right? And if someone doesn’t want to do something, no amount of me wanting them to do something will make up for that.

So if the church causes me such frustration some weeks, why do I keep going?

Simple: I believe it’s true. Despite all the issues, I’ve prayed about it and received personal confirmation that there’s truth at the center of it all. Living by its precepts, I’ve been very happy on a macro level. I have guidance when I need it, and overarching goals to help me stay on a good path. I’ve personally witnessed miracles through living this religion. It’s helped me countless ways.

But I’ve also seen friends leave the church for a variety of reasons. I respect those decisions, even understand some of them. We all have different paths to walk through life, and my path might not be yours, whether you’re a member or not.

It’s at this point that a blog post this long (1,800 words and counting!) usually has come to some sort of enlightening conclusion. Something that ties everything together and makes you feel like you’ve really arrived. So perhaps it’s fitting that this post still lacks that final oomph. Because that’s kind of the point. How do you take all of this baggage, all these years of living life and living the gospel, and tell the missionary who’s just met you and is now asking you which of your friends you’re going to invite to be taught, the missionary who’s not even 20 and is smiling so chipperly in front of you . . . how do you sum that all up and help them understand? Understand . . . everything?

I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Though of course, if any of you out there would like to know more about this Gospel, I know of a couple of missionaries who would love nothing more than to talk to you about it. Just give me a heads up.

And that’s about all I have to say on this at the moment. Not all I think, but all I can mash down into words. Thanks for reading.

Pokemon Go for Parents

The weekend has come and gone, and I feel in a much better place today than Friday. Part of that has to do with Pokemon Go, believe it or not. I introduced my kids to the game Friday, and we had such a great time with it we even drove into town for a two hour walk so that we could have a better shot catching as many of the critters as we could. So I’m here today to give you a few pointers on the game, in case you’ve been hearing about it for the past few days and have wondered what’s up with it (and why you should be playing it.)

The Basics

Pokemon Go is an app for smartphones. Though it will run on iPads too, it needs GPS to work. You open the app (and keep it open) and it displays a Google Maps-like view of the world, along with your character in the middle. As you walk around in real life, your character moves around the world in the game. Every so often (more often in more heavily populated areas), you’ll come across a Pokemon, a little creature you can catch and own and use to battle other people. Different areas of the real world have different kinds of Pokemon, and different Pokemon come out at night. There are something like 250 in all to catch in the game, I believe.

In addition to Pokemon, you’ll also see PokeStops, real world places you can visit to obtain in-game items that help your character do the things you want to do, like catch more Pokemon.

Catching Pokemon raises your characters level, and once you hit level 5, you can go out and fight other people in Gyms. Again, they’re real world locations (public libraries, some stores, or particular landmarks in your area. You can see them on the in-game map.) You choose to belong to one of three teams (Red, Yellow, or Blue, though I think we can all agree that Yellow is the best team out there. Go Team Instinct!). Each team fights for control of each Gym. If your team controls it, your team members can go their to train their Pokemon and level up the gym, making it harder for other teams to take control. If your team doesn’t own it, you can visit it to fight those Pokemon and try to take ownership.

Long story short, this is a game where you walk around the real world to do things in the game.

Why It’s a Great Family Game

My kids caught onto this like wildfire. We first tried going for a walk around our house to find Pokemon, but there just weren’t any available. (It was fun watching TRC wander around the front yard, phone in hand, for about a half hour as he searched things out to be certain there were none hiding, however.) So we packed into the car and headed to town, two smartphones in hand. (The game is free, though you need to register to play, and you can buy in-game items to make things easier on your character, if you choose.)

Right away, things were different in town. For one thing, there were plenty of PokeStops and Pokemon to be found. For another, there were many more other people wandering around town playing as well. In the couple hours we were there, I’d guess we ran into 20-30 other players I could identify. (Probably filthy Team Valor (red) players, who had a monopoly on the gyms at that point.) People were all over the place, smartphones in hand.

As the parent in the team, my job was to catch the tricky Pokemon and to make sure my kids didn’t wander into traffic. (It’s easy to get too engrossed in the game, and I wouldn’t be comfortable sending out DC alone to play it. Not kidding.) Together, we walked 5km or so, I’d guess. (The game tracks how far you’ve walked, since one extra way to find Pokemon is to put eggs you come across into “incubators” that hatch the eggs after you’ve walked 2, 5 or 10km.

Even with just a single smartphone, my kids have had a great time sharing the phone, taking turns catching Pokemon. They wanted to go back out and catch more as soon as we got home.

What ages are appropriate? Pretty much any. My 3 year old loves being out with everyone else and looking at the screen now and then (though it takes too much hand eye coordination for her to actually catch any Pokemon), and considering I’m having fun playing the game myself, I don’t see an upper age limit. There were certainly plenty of older teens out and about playing the game Saturday.

Tips

There are a few things I’d recommend you be aware of, if you’re thinking about catching all the Pokemon. Here are my handy hints to getting the most out of the game, and I’d love to hear yours if you have any:

The app drains a battery. Fast. Next time I go out playing, I’ll be bringing my external battery pack, fully charged. We went from 100% down to about 20% in under two hours. You can minimize the battery drain a little by going to the in-game settings menu and enabling the Battery Save option. This will make it so that the game dims the screen when the phone isn’t being actively looked at. But the app doesn’t count your walking while it’s not actively on, and you can’t find Pokemon unless it’s running either. It doesn’t work in the background (something I hope they correct soon.) You can also turn down the brightness on your phone’s screen, of course, but then it becomes kind of hard to actually see what you’re doing in the game . . .
You can buy a device to catch Pokemon when you don’t have your smartphone out, called a Pokemon Go Plus. However, they’re sold out at the moment, and I’m not sure how they work exactly. (They’re also $35, which seems pretty steep to me.)
PokeStops reset every 5 minutes or so, so it’s not too difficult to hang out in an area and replenish your Pokeballs so you can have enough to fill your catching needs.
Gyms are a bit tricky to figure out at first. You challenge all the Pokemon in a gym at once, and you need to beat all of them in a certain time to gain control of the gym. You can use multiple Pokemon to do it. They’ll switch out automatically in order of power. Once you capture the gym, you need to put a Pokemon of your own in, but you can only place Pokemon that are at full health. Take a quick moment to heal your best Pokemon, and then stick it in there. Owning a gym is the only way I’ve seen to earn in-game currency for free (though you don’t earn much of it.)
Some Pokemon are trickier to catch than others. Flying ones seem to be a particular pain. (Cursed Zubats!) This is where it could help for you to step in to aid your kids before they burn through all their Pokeballs.
Eggs hatch some rare Pokemon, but also some normal Pokemon. It’s random. The eggs that take longer to hatch do come with extra candy when they hatch, however. You need candy to raise your Pokemon’s attack power.
You can get 1 candy per Pokemon if you transfer it. (An option down at the bottom of the screen when you’re looking at a particular Pokemon in your possession.) It’s 1 candy per Pokemon, regardless of the power level of that Pokemon.
As your character moves up in levels, the levels of the Pokemon you can catch move up as well. Motivation! But be aware that the higher level Pokemon are also harder to catch. (I almost had a Meowth this morning, but it got away. Sob!) You can buy or unlock better Pokeballs, supposedly, but I’m not that far into the game to know for sure yet.

Hopes for the Future

Clearly I love the game so far, but there are some areas I really hope they strengthen.

Add the ability to trade Pokemon. I would love to be able to meet other players and trade with them. As it is, catching extra Pokemon just helps you level up the ones you own. Trading is a central part to the main video game, so it really feels like a hole not to have it in this version.
Add the ability to fight other players without gyms. It would be great to be able to go up to a friend and have our Pokemon fight, just like in the game. It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard, since it’s all location based anyway . . .
Make Pokemon fights more interesting. As it is now, you just tap the screen as fast as you can to fight. (If you tap and hold, it uses your Pokemon’s special ability, so that’s something I guess.) This is so dumbed down from real Pokemon games, though I wonder if it would be possible for them to make it a feature. (It’s important to keep in mind this is a free version, after all . . .)

Because the World is Depressing, I’m Playing Pokemon Go

When you wake up to reports of snipers killing police officers in Dallas (as what? A retaliation for actions in Louisiana and Minnesota? How in the world does that even make sense?), it’s enough to ruin your Friday. And it’s really upsetting.

So I’ve been playing Pokemon Go instead of dealing with it. While I’m running around catching virtual critters and challenging people to virtual fights, other people are going through terrible times. Horrific experiences.

Sorry. I don’t have anything more in me to write today. I like the game? But in light of everything else that’s going on . . . I’m out of words. I feel guilty that I can be sitting here enjoying work and a silly internet game during my lunch break while elsewhere people have to go through such awful things. I know in theory that there are awful things happening at every minute of every day, and so I shouldn’t feel particularly guilty now as opposed to a different time.

But I do anyway.

Maybe I should just be grateful that today, awful things aren’t happening to me? That the sort of awful things happening to others will never happen to me or my family, because I happened to be born with the right color of skin and in the right socio-economic class and the right part of the country?

I can’t muster that feeling. I just feel sad.

Hoping things look brighter after the weekend.

Black Lives Matter and Police Need to Be Accountable

Before anyone tries to do it or say it, let me lead off with this: I don’t want to read any comments about how “all lives matter.” People making that statement are completely missing the point. It’s like someone telling you that they just got in a car crash that totaled their car, and you say, “Thank goodness my car wasn’t damaged today. All cars are expensive.” Or maybe “It’s not just your car. Lots of cars get in accidents everyday.” Tone deaf. It’s like telling someone dying from cancer “I sure am glad *I* don’t have cancer. Cancer is bad for everyone.” Or maybe, “Cancer kills all sorts of people. Not just you.”

There’s a time and a place for statistics or debate, but when someone’s actively hurting in front of you, that isn’t the time and that isn’t the place.

Yesterday had another one-two punch of police shootings where black men were killed. If you haven’t seen them, you should, despite how graphic they are. First, there was a man selling CDs outside a convenience store in Louisiana. There are two different videos of this shooting, and they both show the same thing: two police officers had the suspect on the ground. One of them yells out that the suspect has a gun. The other draws his gun, aims it pretty much point blank on the suspect, warns him not to move, and then shoots him multiple times.

In the second, the video starts right after the shooting. A man and his girlfriend had been pulled over for a busted taillight. From the report we get in the video, the driver was asked to produce his license. The driver started to let the officer know that he was carrying a licensed firearm, and the officer shot the driver four times.

In both instances, the victims are black men. The police are white. I’m at a loss for words and struggling to see how anyone could view these shootings as anything other than criminal. I suppose one might try to argue in the case of the second that we don’t actually see events as they happen, just the aftermath of them. (But even then, the officer involved seems trying to convince himself that he was justified. But maybe I’m reading too much into his voice.)

In the first, however? There’s no defense for that. Two trained officers practically sitting on top of a man, his arms pinned to the ground, and they were forced to shoot him?

“He shouldn’t have struggled,” someone might say. “He should have just done what the police officer told him to.”

Yeah. Well, that’s kind of the point. In the second video, we see what happens when a man tries to do what the officer tells him to. Shot if you do. Shot if you don’t.

I know police officers. I’m related to a few. They aren’t bad people and don’t deserve to be typecast. But there are most definitely bad people who are police officers. That badge doesn’t make them saints. And unfortunately, there are entire police departments that seem to have struggles with simple things like “treat the people you’re sworn to protect fairly.” And when egregious cases end up with the police officers being found not guilty?

Again. Words fail.

When you look at statistics and compare them to other countries, it’s so dismaying. In the US, police shot and killed more people in 24 days than England and Wales shot and killed in 24 years. Look at this site. The police have killed 561 people in this country this year. So far. And while the majority of people killed are white, proportionately speaking, most of them are people of color. You’re much more likely to be shot and killed by police if your skin is any color other than white.

This country has let violence get out of control. Violence breeds violence. I don’t believe this is all new. I believe our awareness of it is new, because so many people have video cameras with them at all times now. It was much easier to dismiss it when we didn’t have to see it all in full color, right before our eyes.

There are things we can do. We can demand change, Demand consequences. Support and comfort people who are upset and affected by this. You can support the police and still be appalled and shocked at the behavior of these officers. I’d like to think my police family and friends are just as disappointed and saddened by what’s happening as I am.

Raise awareness. Let people know this exists. Don’t sweep it under the rug until the next time it happens.

So sad.

In Search of a Good Used Violin

Thought I’d throw this out there to the interwebs. TRC is loving violin and still really into it, but the kid just keeps on growing. So we need to buy him a full-sized violin at last. There are some places I’ve gone to online to get one in the past (Shar Music is one), and that’s worked fine, but I thought one of you lovely people out there might have a full size kicking around that you aren’t using anymore. Or perhaps you know of someone who’s in that situation.

I’m not looking for a handout. Happy to pay for it. I just thought that it would make more sense to buy a used one than a new one. That said, we’d need a case for it as well. (Though do any instruments come without a case? How would you store the thing without one?)

I’ve blogged before about never really imagining being the father of a string musician. Woodwinds all the way, baby! But in the end, I’m just really happy TRC has so much fun playing the violin. It doesn’t take too much arm twisting to get him to practice some every day, and he’s to the point where he likes listening to violin music, and can appreciate the hard work and effort it took for those musicians to get where they are.

Anyway. I’m not on the hunt for anything too extravagant. If he ends up sticking with violin for life, he can buy that Stradivarius on his own dime. Just a solid workhorse instrument that he’ll be able to use and depend on for years to come. If any of you have a violin or know of someone who does, or know of a good place to buy a decent used one, pipe up!

Thanks in advance.

Tickets Bought

After no small amount of internet surfing and thinking and pondering and weighing the various options, I’ve finally come up with my latest Great Travel Scheme to Save Money.

For a while, that looked like it really was going to be renting a minivan and driving 22.5 hours (assuming no traffic. Yeah right.) to Orlando. I just couldn’t find anything that was reasonably priced at Thanksgiving, and no amount of creative airlining was getting me any closer. There were some fares that seemed okay at first, but nothing that really caught my eye. Paying $2000 for flights compared to paying $350 for a rental car and $300 for gas just seemed like the better deal.

But I’ll be honest. The thought of driving 24 hours with three kids down to Orlando, then turning around a week later and driving twenty four hours back was . . . less than ideal. I talked to multiple friends who have done it, and they all assured me how it wasn’t as awful as you’d imagine, but let’s face it: when the slogan of your planned trip is “Not as Awful as You’d Imagine,” maybe it’s time to rethink it all again.

What if we made it less awful? What if instead of driving straight through the night, we broke it up into two legs each way? We could take the kids out of school a day early, and then it would be 4 days of driving, 12 hours each day . . .

Still not exactly heavenly.

Audio books! And surprises! And maybe stay with family on the way back! Things to look forward to could make it more palatable, right? Right. And that’s what I convinced myself. I came up with some creative ways to make the trip fun, even though “4 days of 12 hour drives” just refused to really settle into the “fun” category for me or Denisa.

This past weekend, I took a long harsh look at the details. How much money was I really going to save by driving?

Rental car (because I didn’t want to drive all that way in a Honda Civic): $350
Extra driver fee (because there was no way I’d drive it all myself): $100
Gas: $350
Hotel on the way down: $150
Food and snacks for the trip: $200
Tolls: $100
Surprises: $100 (or so)
TOTAL: $1,350

Yes. I know I could make that cheaper. But I didn’t want to. Bare minimum, if I drove all night in my own car and ate bread and water, it would still be $450, but I’d arrive to Disney completely exhausted, and I know myself well enough to see a recipe for an awful vacation when it’s staring me in the face.

How much would plane tickets be again? Around $2,000. So I’d be driving to save $650, and that no longer seemed like such a grand idea.

So I continued searching for plane tickets that might cut things down even more, and I came up with a solution today. The answer? Canada. Not Montreal this time. I’d been looking at that airport all along, and the tickets were around $1,800 for a direct flight to Orlando. (They’d been cheaper earlier. Only $1550. But I waited, and I wasn’t sure those cheap tickets would return.) I’d checked Quebec and Toronto (for kicks), but today I decided to see if there were any other airports in Canada. Montreal had saved my bacon for our European vacation, and Canada doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, eh? So tickets might be cheaper than the $2400 out of Boston for terrible flights that I was currently contemplating.

Ottawa has an airport. I checked the flights. $1,315 for direct Ottawa to Orlando tickets at Thanksgiving. $1,315 total.

How long does it take to drive to Ottawa? 6 hours.

I talked it over with Denisa, and we hatched the plan. Leave the evening before. Drive part of the way and stay in a hotel. Have a leisurely morning, then head to the airport. Fly down (only a three hour flight!). Enjoy Disney. Fly back and stay in a hotel, and then drive home in the morning. Even with the costs of hotels, it’ll still come in around $1,600, and maybe we see a bit of Ottawa in the process.

Yes, folks. I realize it’s a fairly outlandish approach to flying. Drive 6 hours to fly 3 hours. But that’s still just 9 hours of travel time vs 24 hours of driving. And it’s only a bit more expensive. Sue me. I bought the tickets.

Anyone ever been to Ottawa before?

Watch Broadway Shows at Home

A week or two ago, I heard that they were going to stream a performance of a current Broadway musical live. The musical in question? She Loves Me, a revival of a production that’s based off the same play You’ve Got Mail and The Shop around the Corner were based on. It was one of the shows I’d been thinking about going to this summer, and I had been sad to hear it was closing July 10th, so I wouldn’t be able to see it.

Given the chance to stream it at home for $10? Yes, please. I wasn’t sure it would actually work, but considering going to the show in person would have set me back about $100/person, then it was definitely worth a shot. I marked the date on my calendar and investigated how best to view it.

It turns out that the service (BroadwayHD) has an app for the new AppleTV, which I just happen to own. So I downloaded it and subscribed for a month of the service ($15, non-recurring payment, it appears). I wasn’t sure if I’d have to pay an additional $10 on top of that fee to live stream the show, but again: bargain. (It turned out I didn’t need to, though from what I read, maybe that wasn’t supposed to be the case? Not sure.)

So last night, Denisa, DC, and I watched the whole show in our pajamas. (TRC showed up for the second half, primarily because I’d told the kids that anyone who stayed up to watch the show could stay up past their bedtime, and there was no way TRC was going to let DC stay up later than he could.)

We loved the experience. It was a little bumpy at first (I imagine because it was the first time they were trying to pull this off), as the video and the audio kept glitching, But after restarting the stream once or twice, it kicked in with no further difficulties. (We missed part of the first number, but that was it.) The picture and sound were fantastic, the camera work was great. I was really impressed they were pulling it all off live.

The musical itself was a delight from start to finish, with great music and acting and singing. All of us really enjoyed ourselves, and for $15 for that experience (plus a whole month of streaming other recordings on BroadwayHD), it really is a bargain. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, and I hope they were super successful with the experiment. Broadway is a long way for most of us to travel, and this would be a great way to see the shows.

Is it as good as seeing it in person? No. And I think that’s to the service’s advantage. I could imagine many people spending $10 on a live stream and then deciding they’d like to see that show in person when they get to Broadway. It must do wonders for the soundtrack as well (I’m always much more likely to want to own a soundtrack if I’ve seen the musical in question.)

In any case, if any of you are even remotely curious about this, I encourage you to check it out. I couldn’t recommend it more, and you can see the recorded version of the live stream this very instant (the actual show starts about 12:30 minutes in.)

A Few Star Wars Rebels Thoughts

Not sure how many of you people out there actually care about Star Wars Rebels, but I do. Not enough to keep up with the show live, I suppose. But certainly enough to be watching it after the fact. And I just finished the second season with DC and TRC yesterday, and so I wanted to go someplace to chat about it.

Why not my blog?

Rebels is a good reminder to me about how big a blunder the prequels really were. Lucas had a slew of fans all set and ready to love those three movies. It was practically T-ball. All he had to do was not completely miss the ball.

And he missed the ball.

It took later efforts to correct those mistakes. Clone Wars went a long way to repairing a lot of the damage, and Rebels has been some really solid television. For those of you who haven’t been watching, it’s an animated series set in the days after Revenge of the Sith but before A New Hope. Darth Vader pops in and out now and then, and Ahsoka Tano (Anakin Skywalker’s Jedi apprentice) appears as well.

No spoilers here, but as soon as you know Darth and Ahsoka both have roles in the series, you know there are some interesting plots that can develop. Between Clone Wars and the films, you never really see people who knew Anakin before and after Darth. To have Ahsoka come face to face with Vader . . . I found it pretty riveting. My kids agreed.

On a side note, DC is becoming a really big Star Wars fan. She wants to watch all the movies, and is really set on figuring out just what exactly happened to Anakin to make him become Darth Vader. She’s got big plans for a Star Wars marathon. Part of me really wants to make that a reality. But part of me also remembers Revenge of the Sith being particularly violent . . .

I wonder if the prequels will play any differently, now that I’ve watched so many animated episodes set with the same characters. Maybe familiarity will make me like the characters more in the live action version? I’m not sure. Ahsoka is a good example, though. She’s a character I didn’t really like at first in Clone Wars, but by the time she resurfaced in Rebels, I was a big fan of her. Interesting how that can develop over time, and a testament to Clone Wars pulling off some good story lines.

Anyway. The whole Rebels series isn’t a home run every time. There are some episodes where major plot points occur, only to have those advances forgotten about in later episodes, but on the whole it’s a fun show to watch, and really interesting to see the Star Wars universe unfold. (When you take into account the extra info that some of the characters from the animated series are now showing up in live action movies like Rogue One, it’s even cooler, in my opinion.)

If you haven’t checked out the series, you should give it a shot.

The Importance of a Weekend

Not that this is a real newsflash to any of you, but I’ve been surprised just how much working through my weekend has screwed up my sense of time this week. I was at the conference for Saturday and Sunday, and so my normal routine was totally off. Now that I’m back home, I’ve been having trouble remembering what day of the month we’re in, which month we’re in, and even how far into the year we are at the moment.

Does this happen to anyone else when they work through a weekend?

I think a large part of it for me is that I’m a real creature of habit. I have a routine, and as much as I like to complain about that routine from time to time, it’s a love/hate relationship. I depend on that routine to get everything done that I need to do. I know how much time I have to accomplish tasks, and I make sure they all get done on time.

Throw me out of a routine, and I flail around a fair bit, it seems.

Though this never happens to me when I take vacations, so what’s the difference? I think it’s that typically there are some “anchors” to my week, no matter what. There’s church, for one thing. Even on weeks I don’t go to church due to illness or whatever reason, many people around me attend, and so I can sense that church has happened. This week, no one was going to church at the conference. Denisa reported back to me on some of the things that had happened locally, but that was a small slice of my Sunday.

Being sick when I got back didn’t help much either.

Anyway. This is just to say that if you see me in the next bit and I seem bewildered as to the time of week, month, or year, you won’t think something’s seriously wrong with me.

Just dealing with PCCI (Post Conference Chronological Issues)

(And serious bonus points if you could identify the connection between this post and the pic I chose to lead it off with.)