The Great Experiment

Friday, July 7, 2000: My strategy of one-day-at-the-parks, one-day-down seems to have been working fairly well so far, so I decided to continue it.

Today's adventure: Grocery shopping.

My hotel room is decked out with a refrigerator/freezer, a small stove with two cooking surfaces, and a small microwave oven. (I'll take pictures of my hotel room for you one of these days, I promise.) I remember having passed a grocery store on one of my explorations (that is, when I got lost) the other day, so I headed there today.

The name of this grocery store was 'Gooding.' Floridians must have a fairly liberal definition of the term 'grocery store,' because it wasn't easy to find groceries in this one. There was some weird 'Pirates of the Carribean' decor thing going on, and right in the front center of the grocery store, beside the place to buy Disney tee shirts and stuffed animals, was a counter where you could buy tickets to theme parks.

There wasn't much of a selection foodwise, so I left and headed to another grocery store I had passed, this one named 'Kings.' This store was on the other end of the scale: small and a little seedy-looking, and the checkout lady was dressed in some weird Floridian Gothic getup (black, but not much of it). I filled my shopping cart with one of every microwaveable meal they had that didn't have broccoli in it, and got the heck out of there.

As I returned to my hotel, it started to rain. By the time I got inside, it was raining a lot. And thundering. And lightning.

Le deluge. The grey patch to the right of the road is a small stagnant pond to help preserve the mosquito population

I sat and watched the storm for a while, enjoying it (we don't have weather in California), smug in the knowledge that I was safely tucked away in my hotel room, and even if the power went out, I could run my portable off its batteries and work on these web pages while I ate my --

Whups. Being as I still hadn't actually eaten anything yet today, and the only food I had bought was microwaveable, I hurried to cook something, anything, lest the power suddenly go out. (It didn't. Not that I really expected it to, because I imagine Floridians have to deal with these kind of storms all the time, but the mere speculation that it might have was enough excuse for me to add another paragraph to my journal.)

Then I settled down to read the book I picked up the other day, The Art Of (Disney's) The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It's a great coffee table book, with lots of development information about the movie, and it had been marked down from $50 to $15. I mainly got it so I could study the artwork. (The pics below are photos from the book -- I can't draw that well yet!)

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