Something Strange (pictures I like)

Angel (pictures I like)

...or maybe a dragon.

Siegfried (an opera review post)

Ah, Siegfried, if only you had not been so stupid...
Perhaps.
But, then, opera contains a lot of tragedy, so maybe this was all inevitable.

However, it wasn't the dragon (pictured above) that will do him in, nor will he be done in in this opera.

You know, normally, battling a dragon isn't a thing you're going to see in a stage production. Normally, someone writing for a stage production, knowing how difficult it would be, is going to circumvent any dragon fighting on stage. Not Wagner. It makes me wonder how he staged this the first time it was performed. Not enough to do the research on it, but it does make me wonder. Of course, he did have a special theater built just for the Ring Cycle, so maybe I shouldn't wonder too hard.

Siegfried is the culmination of all of Wotan's meddling and impregnating women, the son of the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde. Maybe that accounts for his... lack... in the intellect department. Daniel Brenna does a great job with Siegfried's rather vacuous mode of being, a mode of being always looking for a fight, seemingly for no other reason than to fight. Maybe to prove that he's the best, but it seems he just approaches every situation with a "hey, let's fight" attitude. It doesn't hurt, I suppose, that he has a magic sword.

The fight with the dragon, Fafner, is important. Fafner is one of the giants from Das Rheingold; the one who ended up not dead and with the Ring. He's a dragon through the magic of the Tarnhelm, a shape he's taken to protect the Ring and his hoard of gold. So, just to be clear, Fafner has a ring which could allow him to rule the world and, yet, he's hiding in a cave in the form a dragon instead.

To flash back: Alberich, who forged the Ring, rather than using it to control the world, was busy using it to find more and more gold and amass it into a hoard, the hoard that Fafner is now protecting. At this point, I'm a bit hazy on what exactly the Ring does other than give the owner an extreme lust for gold.

Because it certainly doesn't save Fafner anymore than it saved Alberich from having Wotan cut it from his hand. But more on that later...

The best scene in this opera, possibly the best scene from the Cycle, happens just after Siegfried has defeated Fafner. See, Siegfried only fights the dragon because he was put up to it. Put up to it by his adopted father Mime, Alberich's brother, who lusts after the Ring and thinks he can outwit Siegfried to get the Ring if only Siegfried will kill the dragon. Honestly, this shouldn't have been very difficult to do but for one thing: Siegfried gains the temporary ability to hear Mime's thoughts and kills him instead. But David Cangelosi, as Mime, is fantastic in this scene. Every time he says something that comes out in words that reveal his true thoughts, his reaction is fabulous. It made me sad to see the character go.

But Mime is just another example of a "father" in this opera, using his "child" as a tool to achieve some selfish end. He needed to go.

Siegfried ends with Siegfried "rescuing" Brunnhilde, the former Valkyrie, from her "eternal" sleep, eternal being relative to however long it took a man to come along who was brave enough to walk through the flames to wake her with a kiss, so in this case about 20 years. Depending on how old Siegfried is. Of course, waking Brunnhilde just moves her along to the next portion of her punishment, the part where she has to marry the man who wakes and do whatever he commands of her.

So let's look back a moment:
Brunnhilde is Wotan's daughter, a previous immortal.
Siegfried is the grandson of Wotan twice over, since both of his parents were Wotan's kids. I believe that makes Brunnhilde Siegfried's aunt and, maybe, his cousin. It's actually a little confusing. At any rate, it's just a little more incest to add to the mix.
Oh, and, evidently, Brunnhilde is a virgin. At least, she goes on about how she's never been touched before for quite a while before she finally goes off with Siegfried to do the deed. What's a little incest among gods, um, ex-gods, right?

Just to be clear here, I'm leaving a lot of the plot out, because you can always look up the plot if you want to. My focus is on the production, themes, and pivotal moments. What I know for sure is that the Ring Cycle is a complex piece of work and I walked out of it, all 16 hours of it, being willing to go through that again for another viewing. There was no point where I was bored or felt like I was wasting my time.

Flying (pictures I like)

Here, There Be Dragons (pictures I like)

Scroll down if you can't see it.

The Name of the Wind (a book review post)

I'm going to start out by saying, "I get it." I get why people rave over this book. It's epic fantasy, and it feels so big. Oh, the incredible world building! And it's told in first person! How can you get better than that? First person epic fantasy!

But it's all a trick. Smoke and mirrors. A lie. Whatever you want to call it. The world building, in actuality, is almost non-existent. What we have are constant views of the insides of wagons and inns. Beyond that, the only thing we have any experience of is the university, and we don't get much of that. Rothfuss fakes it all by telling us this other stuff exists, but we never see it.

Look at Tolkien: He never just tells us a place exists. We come across it, experience it, discover it then, maybe, he tells us about it. Even Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkin take us to and show us the places in his world. Rothfuss just mentions places and lets us assume that his world is big, but he never really even shows us the University. Thinking about it, now, I am realizing how little he gave us about this incredibly "important" part of the book. We know there's a big, box of a building with a bunch of sprawling stuff that was poorly planned. It's like Hogwarts with all the confusion except that Hogwarts has a reason for that to be. Rothfuss just wants to evoke the same kind of thing without having a reason for it.

And, speaking of Hogwarts, can we be through, now, with the young, brilliant student thing for a while? Seriously, how many times are we going to do that? And with, pretty much, the exact same formula: gifted student arrives at magic school, gifted student immediately makes an enemy out of one of the professors, gifted student immediately creates a nemesis in one of the students, gifted student is constantly getting in trouble but comes out the better for it each time, gifted student is generally gifted at everything.

But I think I'm getting ahead of myself, because I was tired of the book way before Kvothe ever got the University.

The book opens as a third person tale. I was good with that. Really good with that. In fact, I am very not good with the seeming overwhelming desire of everyone to write everything in first person these days. So we take this fine, third person story and, just as it's starting, we switch to first person reflection on the protagonists life. And it is so contrived! I could just feel the author thinking, "How can I get Kvothe to tell his own story?" So, you know, he has a guy show up who wants to make a book out of his story and convinces him -- Kvothe, who is supposed to be in hiding and doesn't want anyone to know who he is -- with almost not effort to do that. The whole situation felt completely out of character for Kote, the persona that Kvothe is playing, and it actually felt out of character for Kvothe, especially as we learn more about him, because he never displays any interest in having people know "the truth" and is perfectly fine with them making up whatever they want to further his reputation.

Then, it got worse. One of the first things Kvothe does is explain to us how to say his name. This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen done in a book and was completely the author, for lack of a better way of putting it, showing off. Think about it. The guy he's talking to knows how to say his name. Even if he hadn't known who Kvothe was, all Kvothe needed to do was to say, "I'm Kvothe." See, there, he heard it. Only us out here in reading land didn't hear it, and Rothfuss, for whatever reason, wanted to make sure we knew the "correct" pronunciation, so he has Kvothe explain it to us.

Now, you might be saying, "But he was explaining for future readers of the story!" Except, well, Kvothe is already a legendary figure -- yes, even in his own time -- so everyone already knows how to say his name, because there are stories about him floating around everywhere. Suggesting that people in the future wouldn't know how to pronounce his name would be like suggesting that we should need Julius Caesar to explain to us how to say his name. Or, maybe, Kanye explaining... um, wait... But, still, the argument stands. I almost just put the book down, right then, when he started explaining his name.

And, then, he stopped to explain how magic works. Really? Why do that? There's no need for anyone to know except that the author wanted to show off how clever he is by explaining his magic system and how it works to the audience. In a world where magic is feared, no one would have stopped to explain that. It was gratuitous. And completely not clever since all it amounted to is that his magic system relies on the laws of conservation of matter and energy.

Except that didn't seem to apply to food, because the food, even in the dead of winter in the snow, seemed to always magically stay warm.

Yeah, right, whatever.

The worst bit, though, other than the name thing which was also the worst bit (and that's me making fun of Rothfuss saying about two different things about a page apart "it was the most beautiful thing I'd seen in three years") was the part where Kvothe suddenly takes off to go investigate a Chandrian rumor. This may be the most contrived situation I've ever seen in a book. Sure, we know that Kvothe is interested in the Chandrian and that he has very passively been trying to find out about them. Very passively. So passively you can barely tell. Then, he hears this rumor about a Chandrian attack and he just drops everything and runs off to investigate it.

There are two things about this:
1. It is clear from the context of the book that the land Kvothe lives in is very rumor infested. Therefore, it is unreasonable to suppose that this is the first rumor of the Chandrian that Kvothe has heard in the past few years, but he takes off specifically to investigate this particular rumor. It would be more believable if Rothfuss had shown us an ongoing interest in Kvothe tracking down these rumors, but he doesn't do that. We're left to believe that Kvothe, at 15, suddenly has an irresistible urge to check this one out.
2. The other option is that this really is the first rumor about the Chandrian that Kvothe has heard since they killed his family. Then, we have to wonder why that is. It's a superstitious land full of superstitious people and rumors about all sorts of mystical things. That there wouldn't be other rumors like this is even harder to believe.

Of course, when he gets there, he finds Denna there in the middle of it. Of course, he does.

And he kills a dragon. Of course, he does.

Which brings us back to blue fire and why there hadn't been any Chandrian rumors due to the blue fire of the dragon.

I could go on...

Basically, this book contained nothing new. It was every fantasy cliche there is out there, including the orphaned boy living on the streets, shaken up and redistributed less skillfully than the sources they came from. Especially, the Kvothe Potter sections. There was nothing charming or interesting about any of it, just Kvothe being better than everyone always.

The end is the only thing that saves the book from being a complete waste of time, but that's just there to entice you on to the next one, and I am tempted, but I'm pretty sure that one will be more of the same, meaning barely more than a complete waste of time. At the moment, I plan not to be lured into going on. Maybe if Rothfuss ever finishes the third one and I hear that it is just extraordinary... Of course, that's what I heard about this one.

Maleficent (a movie review post)

Let's get one thing straight right here at the outset: This is not any kind of prequel. This is not the live action prequel to Disney's Sleeping Beauty. It doesn't pretend to be. This is not like Oz the Great and Powerful (which is a prequel but which I still haven't seen).

No, Maleficent is the story of Sleeping Beauty told from the perspective of the villain. Sort of. At any rate, it's told from a different perspective than the one that has been presented in popular culture for the last half century and more. I think they did an amazing job.

The movie is magnificent to look at. The tree men that serve as the border guards are astounding and the land serpent was... well, that was incredible. Not to mention the work they did on Flittle, Knotgrass, and Thistletwit. And the dragon! Well, I think it's enough to say that the movie looked amazing, but, then, there is also Angeline Jolie who was impeccable in her role. Not that there wasn't makeup to go with that, but I think she almost didn't need any help pulling off the fairy look. Except for the wings. I think it's safe to bet that she doesn't have her own wings.

The performances were excellent, especially Jolie. Elle Fanning pulled off exactly the persona of someone who is happy and beautiful all the time. Sharlto Copley was crazy scary... or, maybe, he was scary crazy. One of the two. The three fairies pulled off the same sort of bickering as the fairies in the animated Sleeping Beauty; they were wonderful and hilarious. And Sam Riley was great, too.

The only possible issue with the movie is the whole "true love" thing. Disney continues to try to undo its whole cliche around that theme, which is fine and good, but it hasn't even been a year since Frozen, so I hope this is not a new trend, taking the "true love" theme in some other direction every movie for the next... well, who could even guess how long that could go on. Anyway, it was fine for this movie and handled well, but 3/4 of my family reacted in the same way to it: "I hope this isn't going to be their new thing." I guess we'll just have to wait and see on that one.

Overall, this is a great movie. It has everything you could want, none of which I'll name, because that would mean spoilers, even if I did already mention the dragon. But, then, we all knew about the dragon, right? Wait, it doesn't have lightsabers, but I think that's okay. I'll just put it like this: My wife cried. It's almost a certain thing that a movie is good if my wife cries, so there you are. This one gets 5 tears.

The High Cost of Magic

I've mentioned before that I play Magic: The Gathering. Well, sort of. I mean, I sort of play. I used to really play, and if you want to read more about that, you can go here, but, these days, I only sort of play.

I just don't have the time or money to really compete, right now, but it is fun to go play a tournament every so often. However, in the short time I've been back into playing again, I've noticed a disturbing trend. Now, stay with me even those of you that have never heard of the game, because I have a point, so I will try to keep my technical talk as general as possible so that you can follow along.

Cards in Magic have a cost to put them into play. In general, that cost becomes higher the more powerful the card. So, for instance, a goblin,

which is weak, only costs 1 to put into play while a dragon,

which is quite a bit more powerful, costs 6. In the past, these costs were basically unaffected by the cards rarity. In the above example, the goblin is a common card (easy to get) while the dragon is a rare card (difficult to get). But this wolf

is a rare card and has the same casting cost of 1 as the goblin while this common wurm

has the same cost as the dragon.

What this did for Magic was allow people to play at whatever level they could afford. You didn't have to own tons of rare cards. The rare cards allowed slightly more flexibility and some advantage but not an overwhelming advantage. The same Terror card, a common and cheap to cast,

could kill a rare card as quickly as it could a common card. Basically, you could build a strong deck without having to have rares in it. In fact, I used to keep a deck built entirely of commons (with a few uncommons) around just to show people you didn't have to have the rares. People would bring their competition decks to test against my common deck (which always resulted in sales for the store I worked in when I would beat them).

This model of Magic was a good one. It allowed a broad base of players to play and to play on a fairly level playing field. You didn't have to own thousands of dollars worth of cards to be able to compete.

That model of Magic no longer exists.

Just within the last couple of years, Wizards of the Coast has switched to a model that lowers the cost to put rare cards into play. For example, this Loxodon Smiter

only costs 3 to put into play and he has some pretty fantastic special abilities. It's half the casting cost of the above dragon and wurm and nearly as powerful. This common card, not nearly as powerful as the Smiter,

costs 5 to put into play. To which you might say, "There's still the Terror card," but, no, they took that card out of the game, so there is no card that will destroy a creature that's that cheap to cast. What you have instead are things like

which costs 3 (as opposed to Terror's 2) and only works on flying creatures (but is, at least, common) or

which costs a whopping 6 and isn't even common; it's an uncommon. Perhaps the best example can be seen here. Lightning Bolt

was a common card that could deal damage to a creature at a cost of 1 but has been taken out like Terror has. The closest to it is

for double the cost, which may not seem like a big deal but, trust me, it is. And it's still not enough to take care of that Smiter from up above.

All of that to say that Wizards of the Coast has shifted the focus of the game from one that allows people of all financial means to play to one that favors the players with lots of money to spend gaining rare cards and the even harder to get, but even more powerful, mythic rare cards.

What this has caused is fewer players showing up to tournaments. I don't go more than once every couple of months, but even I have noticed it. And, after talking with some of the guys in the game shop that hosts the tournaments, player numbers are about half of what they were two years ago. What you end up with is fewer players spending money on packs and cards. Sure, those fewer are spending more money than they were before, and it may make up for the attrition rate of players for a while, but that can't last for forever. The end result is a strong but small player base where once you had a very large player base. In the end, it's bad for the game.

The cost of Magic, both in the game with the casting cost of the cards and outside the game on the wallets of the players, has become too high.

Of course, this kind of problem is not restricted to the guys at Wizards of the Coast.

When I was in high school, I was pretty big into the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony.

The series involved the use of puns. In the beginning, the puns were few, just added in as a bit of fun, but, by book four, Centaur Isle (get it?), the puns were becoming part of the story and, later, in such books as Isle of View (get that one?), the puns had eclipsed the story. The reason was a fan-based one. Fans of Xanth began sending in puns to Anthony, and he would work them into the story with acknowledgement to the sender at the end of the book. But he lost the story somewhere in doing this and lost readers like me that wanted that story thing to be involved. He was left with a loyal but small fan base and, although Xanth is still going on, there is no call for any other kind of writing work from Anthony because he has become just that one thing.

I think authors can easily be pulled into traps like this. Basically, they can focus in too much on writing just one kind of thing because that appears to be where the money is. They lock themselves into just writing fantasy or just writing romance or just writing... whatever because "that's what people want." Usually, by the time you've realized you've put yourself in a box, it's too late to get out. As Anthony says, publishers don't want anything else from him anymore.

David Eddings did the same thing after the success of his The Belgariad. Everything he wrote after that was just that same story over and over again for two decades because that's "what people wanted."

All of that to say (all of that because I wanted to talk about the whole Magic thing since it's something that I've noticed and am not happy with) that it's a dangerous thing to narrow your focus too much to only appeal to a particular audience. The more you narrow, the more people you will lose.

So, yeah, I like fantasy and stories with fantastic elements, but I don't want to be "just a fantasy author." I don't want to get locked in like that. I want to write good stories, all kinds of good stories, so I'll keep trying new things. Some of them may not work.

But some of them will.

Allegory of the Miniatures (part 3)

Which brings us to college...
And this is a much longer story, but I'm gonna cut to the part where I was working in a used book store in charge of the comic books. It was rather like a dream job at the time. Heck, it's still kind of a dream job. The owner of the place bought things, frequently, on whims, which was the state of things when I started working for him. For whatever reason, he had miniature sets kind of all over the place, but, mostly, he had Grenadier's Dragon of the Month kits.

During my freshman year at college, a bunch of us had started playing Battletech, so I had started painting again. And my boss had all of these dragons lying around. I started lusting after them. I couldn't afford them, though; however, all I really wanted to do was paint them.

Now, he'd had these sets lying around for, well, years, actually and never sold a single one, which is I why he gave me the job of being in charge of the comics and everything that went along with them, because, as evidenced, he was no good at deciding what to stock. But that's beside the point. Because he's had them lying around for years, I said, "Hey, why don't you let me paint a couple of these, and we'll put them on display and see if they sell." What the heck, right?

Just a note: I was still using oils, but oils had these great metallics that you couldn't get in acrylics at the time. Games Workshop rectified that sometime or other and, eventually, other companies followed with some excellent (acrylic) paints. [Just a personal note to any of you out there involved in this stuff: Games Workshop has what are probably the highest quality miniatures on the market if you're using them for gaming. They lack diversity, though, because their minis support their games. However, I don't much care for their paints. They tend to dry too glossy for my tastes.]

So here's how this worked:
These dragon kits sold for $10.00. They were lead, and they were heavy. He paid me $5.00 each to paint a few of them, and he put them up in display case (with the expensive comics) for $20.00 each. Remember, he'd been collecting these up for years and had never sold a single one (I think he had something like 3 dozen dragons. I know! He couldn't tell me why he'd kept buying them, either, but there it was). As soon as he started putting them in the case, people started buying them. I  literally could not paint them quickly enough. People started coming in just looking for the dragons. Even after he marked them up to $30.00. No, I didn't get a raise in how much I was being paid to paint them.

I still have one of them, though.

The only reason I have it is that my boss, the owner of the store, died, and it was the last one I had painted. That's not the original paint job. After he died, his son (or someone) boxed up a bunch of stuff that was mine (the dragon was mine because he didn't want it, I guess); he dropped it or something and broke it to pieces. Maybe that's why he gave it me. At any rate, that dragon had a hard life of having to be fixed over and over again. Eventually, I re-primed him and painted him with acrylics (you could never get a look like this with oils).

I do, now, have a large collection of (unpainted) dragons. Unpainted, because I've never had anywhere to display them if I did paint them, and they're easier to store in their disassembled states. One day, though...

In a lot of ways, this was like working for a publisher. I did the work, and he made the money. Sure, I got paid a decent amount for doing the painting, I suppose, and I got the enjoyment of doing the painting, but he made four times off of each figure what I did, and that was when he was selling them for $30.00, because there were certain of the dragons, like the Gold Dragon

and the Spectral Dragon,

that he would sell for $50.00. You could say that both of us got what we wanted out of it, and, in some respects, that would be true, but I was never happy with the disparity; there was just nothing I could do about it if I wanted to get to paint the dragons.

It's too bad miniatures cost so much these days, or I might consider going back into dragon painting. However, your general dragon miniature starts at around $25.00 these days, and the nice ones (the ones that are more along the scale of the Grenadier dragons) are much higher (like this one from Games Workshop that's more than $50.00).

So... I've kept it no secret about how I feel about traditional publishing and the way traditional publishers are just out to use authors for monetary gain, but, by my own experience, I can't say that there's not a time and a place for them. I would never enter into a deal, now, like the one I was in then, but at that time and in that place, it served my needs. I suppose what I would say about that in relation to traditional publishing, now, is that, if you're looking at traditional publishing, do make sure that it is actually going to serve your needs. Don't find out after the fact that you've been lead into a relationship that is only going to take advantage of you and give you nothing in return.

Next: how I spent years painting a Confederate army and how I came to hate the color grey.

Oh, and, just in case anyone is interested, that Green Dragon is still for sale. heh

The Happiest Place on Earth: Part 4

It's interesting how the Happiest Place on Earth can be accompanied by so much drama. There was a lot of drama. Mostly, it had to do with shopping. Or swimming. It was a lot more than we wanted while at an amusement park, though. Drama and whining are distinctly unamusing.

The hotel, the California Grand that I mentioned in part 2, had a big pool with a big twisty slide, and my daughter wanted to spend time at the pool. The boys didn't want to, and I'm not really a big swim fan, so I didn't want to, but it became apparent that my daughter just wasn't going to be happy if she didn't get to swim, so, initially, we decided to split up the group: the boys and I would stay at the park, and the girl and my wife would go to the pool. The grandparents would just go take a break, which, on Friday, involved a nap. I kind of envied the nap. Anyway, it became more apparent that she would be even less happy if we split the group up. Basically, we all needed to be on her page, which became the least painful option. But it all worked out. I used the pool time on Friday and Saturday to write (a story which should be available soon-ish), and, Saturday, we had lunch at the pool, all seven of us, and that was fun.

There was still the shopping drama, though. Oh My Gosh, the shopping drama! All the kids had money to spend that they'd saved up for the trip, plus they'd been promised some spending money from their grandmother. They didn't know how much or when it would happen, though, and that drove them crazy. And me. And my wife. Because they wanted to GO SPEND their money but also, especially my younger son, wanted to know what they (he) were getting from the grandparents so that they (he) could figure out what (Lego) to buy.

Yes, we went to Disneyland so that  he could spend money on Legos. Yes, Legos that he could buy anywhere. But they had this cool Lego store in the Disney Mall area with these huge Lego sculptures! And, oh!, how I wish I had pictures of these things, but it was after my camera went on vacation. There was a huge Lego dragon on top of the store breathing green fire down on a Lego knight just like in Sleeping Beauty. I think that was the sculpt that has over 1,000,000 bricks in it. And there was an Aladdin and Jasmine with Genie on a flying carpet hanging inside the store, and a life-size Sully and Mike (from Monsters, Inc) by the doorway outside, too. My sons loved that store, and we had to drag them out more than once. Even my daughter got into the whole Lego thing, and she's (mostly) uninterested in Legos.

At any rate, my younger son is always completely paranoid that anything he wants to buy will sell out before he gets to buy it, so he always wants to buy whatever it is NOW NOW NOW! But he didn't actually know what he was going to be able to buy, and the not knowing drove him (and us) crazy. Until Saturday, that is, when he finally got to do his shopping. To be fair, he did also construct his own lightsaber at Star Traders, and that is something he could only do at Disneyland.

And, then, there were the pins. In the end, everyone got into the pins. The pins are SO cool, and they have so many really neat ones. I wanted to buy ALL the Star Wars pins. The whole pin thing is its own saga, but (probably) I will never write that. However, here are some pictures of the pins we came home with.

Oh, on Star Tours, one rider each time gets pegged as the "rebel spy." I didn't know anything about this going onto the ride. Rather, I did, vaguely, because my oldest son (who had ridden it before) tried to tell me about it, but he's not always the best at that kind of thing, so I came away from that discussion with, actually, negative knowledge. Yes, he actually sucked information out of my head through all of that, but, then, I think my kids do that to me on a regular basis. At any rate, the fact that there is a rebel spy on your ship is the reason the Empire is chasing you, and, when we did Star Tours the first time, my oldest son was chosen as the spy, much to our surprise and his overzealous excitement. After being the spy, he felt the need to buy as many items related to being the spy as he could afford, so he bought a t-shirt and this pin (which is almost the same as the shirt except smaller):

And this is the pin that kind of actually catalyzed the whole pin craze (my father-in-law bought it for the younger son):

My daughter's favorite of hers:

There was this one theme at Star Traders that they had all kinds of items for. There was a mug, but it wasn't quite tall enough; if it had been, I would have bought it, because I need a back up mug, but, maybe, the shortness is appropriate. There was a t-shirt, an action figure, a bobble-head, and I don't remember what all else, and I had to have something with this on it, so, eventually, after cycling through all the options several times, I settled on the pin:

All of that to say that the pin collecting thing they have going is pretty fun, but it's fairly expensive, too, because there are just so many pins. They do have trading there, and you can get some really good pins if you know what you're doing, but you have to really know what you're doing. I did manage one fairly nice roundabout trade:

We each got a Fillmore pin (lower left corner) with our Disney package. It's a limited edition pin (a lot of the pins are limited edition, as most of them are only produced for one season), which is cool, but we had five them, so my younger son decided to trade his away. He actually made a bad trade with his pin from a collecting stand point, but he got one that he wanted, so I didn't say anything about it. However, I was later able to trade the pin he got in the poor trade (because I got him a duplicate of it in a set) for the Lightning McQueen (upper right corner) pin which is a highly sought after pin from Cars edition pins. The thing is, the employees have pins that they have to trade if they are a designated pin trader, so she had to trade it to me and actually commented on how good a trade it was.

But I've gone on for much longer than I intended about the pins, which I only meant to mention, but they actually became an important part of the trip, so I'm leaving all of this stuff in.

Other things that were really cool:

They have this light and water show at night which involves spraying sheets of water into the air and projecting film clips onto them. It was incredibly cool

We went to see the Aladdin musical, and that was incredible. I think it was better than the movie. The guy playing Genie was hilarious. The sets and props were magnificent. If you ever get down to Disneyland, you should definitely make time to go see it.

We also went to see the Muppets 3D show, and that was awesome! I suppose if you don't like the Muppets, it wouldn't be a big deal, but we love the Muppets, so it was great. It involved having the theater (yes, the one we were sitting in) get blown up around us. How can you go wrong when the Muppets blow up the theater you're sitting in?

The Haunted Mansion is amazing! We looked up some stuff about it later, and they do all of that with mirrors which just blew me away, because they have ghosts dancing around and stuff right through solid objects, and it was just WOW! I really want to go behind the stage and look at how that's done!

Pirates of the Caribbean was a lot of fun. It has a place where they do film projection onto a sheet of fog or water (I don't remember) which is like what they did at the light and water show. I know they've modified the ride since the movies have been out, so it made me wish I'd been on the original.

All of that aside, possibly the most interesting thing about the trip had nothing to do with any of this. As I've mentioned, we don't do a lot of eating out, and we don't (usually) do much sugar. However, this was an eating out trip. You don't really have an option. We did the equivalent of a couple of years worth of eating out in 5 days on the trip to Disneyland. But my daughter, well, my daughter is enamored with eating out. She always wants to do it and always wants store bought processed crap over the much healthy options that we make at home (especially when it comes to bread). Several times during the trip, my daughter ordered French toast for whatever meal we were having (yes, it's one of her favorite things), and, each time (and some of these were kind of expensive places to eat), she said "dad's is better." That was surprising and gratifying to hear, because stating a preference for anything I make at home over something we buy somewhere else almost never comes out of her mouth. The boys, yes, but never her. That, hearing that from her (more than once (or, even, twice)), may have been the best part of the trip for me. Yes, even better than Star Tours. Maybe.

As it goes with things like this, as we were leaving on Sunday morning and hanging out in the mall area and doing our last shopping and looking and all of that, the question came up, "What was better Trinity lake (see my Let's go on Vacation series) or Disneyland?" Even the kids had a hard time with that one. It's like comparing nectarines to apples. So the question became, "If you could pick just one to do again, which would it be." The kids did better at that one and immediately piped up with "Disneyland!" They like the apples, and, yes, Disneyland is the apple of amusement parks (Six Flags is only the pear). I do like apples, but I had to go with the nectarine, and here's why: when we got back from Trinity lake, I felt rested. It was a great, relaxing trip. When we got back from Disneyland, I felt like I needed a rest. At this stage in my life, as much as I enjoyed Disneyland (and I did), if I had to choose, I would pick the more peaceful and relaxing choice (especially since mornings at Trinity involved sitting on the deck with my mocha and writing). Still, if I want an apple, a nectarine is not a substitute; it's just that, more often, I want a nectarine.

We'll just have to wait and see what develops for next year.