Friday, March 20, 2009

Spring Break

Our family is at the tail end of our combined spring break. Last Saturday, March 14, we arrived in sunny California for three days at Disneyland and a week in a beach house at Newport Beach. The whole family was here: Courtney and Robert (though they had to leave on Monday because Robert started school again on Tuesday), Brad, Melanie and Chloe, who left today to return to Missouri, Steven, Cathy, Maddie and Isabelle, who just walked in from riding the Balboa ferry, Jeff and Holli, Melinda, Leah and mom and dad. We've spent our days at Disneyland searching for hidden Mickeys, riding Space Mountain, Indiana Jones, Thunder Mountain, California Screamin', Maliboomer and all the other rides until we were sick, and shopping, adding more to Disney's empire. Courtney figured that they take in over $100,000 a day just in parking.

In getting ready for D-land, as the fam calls the Kingdom of the Mouse, we traded Disney trivia (well, mostly Steven provided it for us), but I discovered there are dozens, if not hundreds, of blogs and websites devoted to to Mouse-dom. That got me thinking about the Disneyland cult. Clearly old Walt was on to something nearly 60 years ago when he conceived of a theme park in the middle of a bunch of orange groves 65 miles from LA. It seems a no-brainer now, but back then I'll bet the bankers thought he was crazy. It also got me thinking that we baby-boomers are the first Mickey generation. We had the Mickey Mouse Show, Annette and all the Mousketeers. When Disneyland opened in 1955, our parents were the ones who took their kids and made it what it is today. Hooray for the old folks.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Square Root Day

Today is Square Root Day (3/3/09), where the month and the day are each the square root of the last two digits of the year. The last square root day was February 2, 2004 (2/2/04) and the next one will be April 16, 2016 (4/4/16). In the last nine years, we've had three (10/10/00, 1/1/01, 2/2/04 and now 3/3/09). Now they start to spread out. I know, this is very left brain, tending to geekiness. But it got me thinking of how many more square root days I might have left and that was kind of sad. I doubt I'll see 7/7/49, because I would be closing in on the century mark by then. I hope to make 6/6/36. Put this way, in three months, I could be gone. Anyway, enough doom and gloom. 6/6/36 is still a long ways off. Enjoy square root day.

My son mentioned to me that coming up is Pi day (3.14). Way to go Steven.