Amusement

Well, today did not start out as a disaster, but it sure did end as one.

I woke up around eight, feeling pretty refreshed. Missus watched Pig, a new Nic Cage movie, and I wound up staying up past midnight reading REAMDE, but since I had stopped drinking after we got home from our date at the amusement park, I wasn’t feeling hung over in the slightest. Still, I decided to give myself a break from the routine, so I didn’t workout or even bother meditating. I just boiled some tea and watched a Great Courses piano lecture about Mozart while I waited for the clock to strike nine. Then I started tending to my crypto positions.

So I pulled over nine hundred for the week. Pretty damn good. My actual positions were up several thousand dollars overall earlier this morning, but the market pulled back a bit later in the day so I’m down slightly. Enough about that for today. I was throwing potential BTC/ETH prices in my spreadsheets to daydream about my potential gains, but that’s probably a few more months off. For now, it looks like I’m going to need to liquidate my mSTABLE position, which should give me enough runway for another three months or more. That should buy me enough time.

So I woke Missus up at ten since she wanted to get brunch and I didn’t want to leave the kids at her sister’s for too long. I picked a local bistro that had a crab cake frittata that I wanted to try. It was raining, and the place was crowded, but we enjoyed time together and had a good time. The food wasn’t quite as good as I was expecting, and the place wasn’t quite as nice as I had hoped for our anniversary, but it wasn’t too bad. Missus and I were both acquainted with the owner as we had run in the same downtown scene a decade ago. She had opened a donut shop on the other side of the building and expanded to the bistro after the prior owners had shut down. It had character, all the coffee cups were mismatched, the salt and pepper shakers as well. The concrete floor was unfinished, but the place was decorated with all kinds of small potted plants and posters. Techno music was playing overhead. There were a few large groups sitting around us. One guy was wearing a Dadalorian t-shirt and wearing a N95 mask that he kept taking off in between bites of food. I thought it was foolish.

I might mention here that Missus and I have been fighting about COVID lately, mainly about whether to make the kids wear masks when we go out, or to wear them indoors. She works in a hospital, and I’ve obviously been exposed to too many libertarians on Twitter. We had a rather heated argument about it a few days ago, but I might need to save that discussion for another day. Let me just say that she didn’t wear her mask anywhere we went indoors this weekend. Delta be damned.

Brunch was great. The food was ok, but being able to spend time with my wife was tops. At one point in the conversation she noted how getting out was good for us and that we needed to do something similar for the kids to help raise their spirits. Then she came up with the plan. We both had season’s passes to the amusement park, and had almost half of our drink tickets left from the day before. They expired at the end of the week. We decided to pick the kids up, and tell them that we had a special surprise for them. They would need to help us clean the house, then we would take them to the amusement park and let them run around while we used the last of our tickets. It seemed like a genius plan, we would get to be great parents and have our drinks. It would have been a great idea if not for one very important fact.

Our kids are assholes.

The girls seemed in good spirits when we picked them up. They had gone to bed on time and gotten good sleep, but things deteriorated quickly once we got home. I’ll spare most of the details, but Elder made it less than two minutes after I announced that we were starting. She decided that she’d rather be a cat and pick up her silverware with her mouth instead of just carrying them to the dishwasher, and within minutes we were arguing. I should have just called off the whole thing from there, but Younger actually was trying really hard to help out. So then it got in to some crazy power struggle where I was prepared to take Younger but leave Elder with Missus at the house. And so on it went for three hours.

But we got the house clean. By then end of it Elder knew where we were going and was basically hyperventilating I want to go to … I want to go to … I should have just ended it there and reschedule for another day. Between the two of them and Missus and I, it was a bit of a mess. But we eventually decided that we could just pack them up, head to the park for a couple hours, drink our beer, and get home at a decent hour. Alas.

Things started pretty well. The park was pretty empty compared to the day before. Apparently Sunday evenings are the best times to go. We got our first round and took the kids to the childrens’ area where they played in a mini water park. I even took Younger on a small roller coaster, and we went twice in a row since there was no line. At some point Elder broke her plastic sandals. Thankfully it was just the front strap on one of them, so they stayed on her feet, but it caused Missus anxiety for the rest of the trip, as she felt compelled to duck into every shop the rest of the trip, trying to find new shoes for our daughter. The only pair she found cost nearly fifty dollars, and thankfully Elder didn’t like them. It would have been unbelievably ridiculous if she had bought them.

We must have spent too much time walking around, and, as a forewarning of what was to come later, Younger dipped out around a side stair that she wasn’t supposed to and was out of our sight for thirty seconds or so. I managed to catch and eye on her and we were on our way, but in hindsight it was an ill omen.

I think we spent too much time looking for shoes. The plan had been to let them go to the kids area, get them some lemonades and popcorn, drink our drinks, and then get the hell out of there. It took us way to long to get the popcorn. By the time we did, Missus was already out of patience and ready to go. We had promised Younger that we would take her on the sky gondola on our way out, but it wasn’t enough. Elder wanted to go to a second kids area, and Younger wanted to do the high-rise swing ride, but we took the gondola back toward the park entrance.

But Missus and I still had one beer ticket left, and there was a station right at the entrance to the gauntlet of shops that led up to the entrance. I had saved some popcorn just for the kids to enjoy while we had our last drink. I put our stuff down in an eating area off to the side and got our drink. Elder stood near the back, staring at us hatefully while I got my drink. Missus, thinking that the area was enclosed, said I left her back there. I turned back to look at her and didn’t see her, so I put my drink down and walked to the back, where there were some lockers. Near the back there was a small maintenance alleyway for staff which led back to the main thoroughfare, closer to the exit. No sign of Younger. I ran through it and back, put eyes on Missus. She ran off, I said. Go get her.

Easier said than done, since I wasn’t quite sure where she went. I ran back down the alley and started asking people if they’d seen her. I got staff’s attention, and a young lady went to go raise an alarm. I walked to the entrance to make sure she hadn’t gone out of the park, then back up the main thoroughfare until I ran into Missus coming back the other way. I cut back through the alley to our stuff and there she was, with her sister.

Missus was furious, and we started gathering our stuff. Me, not one to leave a brew behind, downed what was left of my six ounce cup and took Missus’s, which she had left and I knew was now to furious to drink. Elder was following Missus out the way we had come and I told her to go on, that I would catch up. I spent a few seconds packing the bag, then cut back through the maintenance alley to cut them off.

I caught them right there where I came out, near the small soda shop where I had gotten staff’s attention. Missus was arguing with Younger, who was calling her liar liar pants on fire for some reason or another. I was so caught up watching them that I was startled when a staff member called me. Yes, we had found her, but now I had two security officers standing around us, three staff members, and, I realized, Elder was nowhere to be found. I almost laughed. I backtracked a bit and found her standing in the middle of the square, staring around with no idea where she was. I got her attention, waved her in the direction of her mom, and downed the last drop of the last drop of sixty six dollars of theme park drinks.

Mission accomplished.

I swapped with Missus, backpack for Younger, and proceeded to carry her out of the park. Younger was crying, Missus was furious, and it had become apparent at some point during the trip that Elder’s behavior issues earlier in the day were likely due to the fact that she had come down with a cold. The trip back to the car was a bit of hell, but thankfully Younger fell asleep on the ride. Unthankfully she woke up as I was carrying her in and proceeded to resume her tantrum over the fact that I would not let her have a bath. This was in spite of the fact that I had, not five minutes earlier, given her a bath.

So it’s been quite the day, as you can see, and I want nothing more at this point to put myself to bed.