A Graying Matter and Why We Love Disney

On the list of things to do today there is one thing that is circled in red and underlined several, several times.

BUY HAIR COLOR!!!!

I have gray hairs popping up everywhere!!!! For the love of Pete what is this all about!!

I am only thirty!! Now really should this be happening?

I know, I know. It does. But it still very traumatic.

They have been slowy creeping into my life for sometime now and I have been ignoring them and plucking them in a show of resistance.

Last night I stood in front of the mirror for a good thirty minutes just examining my hair. In that time period I started counting the gray hairs.....I lost count at 25.

So hair color it is. Now I have always colored my hair but never for any purpose other than becuase I wanted to. I don't have time before I leave for Baltimore for my hairdresser to color it and my head will have stiches and be way to tender when I get back to tolerate hair coloring, so I must do it myself. Let's hope it turns out okay and not some weird or funky color.

Fantasies in our Recession

In our house we love all things Disney. It is quite an obsession and that's alright by me.

I found this great article and thougt I would share it .
This is taken directly from the Times & Transcript


WALT DISNEY WORLD, FLA. - The Magic Kingdom is awash with rain on a weekday in July. It liquidates the rockets of the Astro Orbiter and pours so much brine into Ariel's Grotto that even a mermaid could drown.

Still, the hordes press on. The crowds are so oppressive, despite the weather, that we have to park all the way out at Minnie Mouse, row 34, and wait for two long trams to pass before we can score four seats. I am with my wife, our four-year-old daughter, and my father-in-law, who has just flown to Main Street, U.S.A. from Moscow, Russia. It is hard to tell who is more excited, the pre-schooler or the 70-year-old.

Where is the Great Recession? I wonder. Not here, "Where Dreams Come True." The shops are crammed, the Pinocchio Village Haus restaurant is overflowing, the sidewalks are like Shanghai at spring festival. Minnows in a monsoon of humanity, we pay our $307 and swim toward Fantasyland.

The queue for the flying Dumbo ride is a python that encircles the tent, then doubles back and swallows itself. Undaunted, little Lizzie and I wait it out in our seven-dollar Mickey Mouse ponchos, spun from a penny's worth of plastic. To fly this flight is her sacred quest, the baby elephant with the big, floppy ears the most beloved icon of her young life. A little rain is not going to stop us now.

"Those boys made fun of Dumbo so his Mom got mad and hit them and the ringmaster put her in Time Out," she explains to the young family behind us, benighted souls who have never seen the film.

After nearly an hour, as we mount the final ramp, we hear thunder in the distance, not that it could come down any harder. Lizzie's mother and grandfather stand under cover at a picnic area and cry to me in two languages, "Allen! She's getting wet!"
"They'll close the ride if there's lightning," someone ahead of us says. But I have brought the Magic Feather with me -- it is invisible, but powerful -- and the storm stands back in awe.
We strap ourselves in and fly so high that only elephants can see us. When our flight ends, and we are dizzy with vertigo and joy, Lizzie climbs out and kisses Dumbo on the ear and bows to him with gratitude.

Wife Natasha and father-in-law Valery want to see everything, ride everything, buy everything, to drink Walt Disney's fictional, fabulous America like rainwater. There is nothing like Disney World in Russia, which is not, in my experience at least, "The Happiest Place on Earth," or even a close runner-up. But we have only this one day.
Abandoning outdoor adventures, I herd everyone into the Carousel of Progress. For this ancient attraction there is no line at all. It is a relic of my own childhood epiphany: the 1964 New York World's Fair. There, it was the General Electric corporate pavilion, long before short sellers were hammering the value of a share of GE down to a couple of bucks. Preserved intact for more than 40 years, first in California and here in Florida since 1975, it is a window on the history of the future that I was meant to live.
The show is set in American homes of 1904, 1927 and the 1940s -- these are unchanged from the World's Fair -- and was updated sometime in the 1990s to highlight virtual reality headsets and laser discs and other short-lived, now laughable marvels.

The theme is a song I haven't heard in decades, but it bursts back into my memory and I sing it as loud as I dare:
"There's a great big beautiful tomorrow
"Shining at the end of every day
"There's a great big beautiful tomorrow
"And tomorrow's just a dream away"

"I want to be fourteen again," I whimper, tearing up.
I am not the only one transported. My father-in-law, the former Communist Party member and Soviet diplomat, tells me how, when he was seven years old in post-war Moscow, he saw Snow White and other Disney fantasies on reels captured from the fleeing Germans.
"I remember the joy and kindness of Mickey Mouse," he says, "but I don't remember Lenin."

We leave the Carousel and slog our way back toward the Seven Seas Lagoon. "It's Cinderella's castle!" my daughter shouts, tugging me through the deluge. Even in the rain, even in recession, we trade our dollars for a firm faith in fairies, and the certainty that elephants can fly.

* Allen Abel is a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen who after more than 25 years of journalism in Canada moved to Washington, D.C. He has been a reporter, foreign correspondent, documentary film producer, columnist and author. His column appears here every Monday.

What a nice news article. That's something you don't see everyday!!