Monday, April 18. Morning/Early afternoon

Monday morning, I woke up briefly around 7 or so, to say goodbye to John before he went to work, then went back to sleep until ten.

This was the first day that I was supposed to see my relatives. My brother,his wife, their four kids, and my parents were all in town, by pure coincidence. (None of them live there, though my brother does have a timeshare in Orlando.)

Shortly after I made up my mind to get up, my father called. My relatives, not being from Orlando, actually spent time sleeping, same as me.

It turned out to be good that he called me then, because I couldn't find the piece of paper with his phone number on it. After some misadventures with the phone (First, the downstairs one ran out of battery power. Then I couldn't find the paper with the phone number to call back. Then my father called back but I couldn't get to the upstairs phone before the answering machine kicked in. Then my father got cut off on the second ring when he attempted again. Third try we finally got back in touch) I got directions to their resort.

The drive out was fun, although Orlando has annoying toll roads. In New York state, I remember only one toll road -- a major highway, I-5, maybe? There, you stop at a tollbooth when you get on the highway and get a ticket, and then you pay again when you get off. So you can go 200 miles and only hit toll booths twice. In Orlando, it seems like every highway is a toll road, and none of them issue tickets. They just stop you every four miles and make you pay another fifty cents or a dollar. Gah. Very annoying if you're going very far. The route I took to get to the resort involved two different highways but only one toll per highway, so at least that one wasn't too bad.

When I reached the turn-off for their resort, I was so proud of myself for not getting lost. It doesn't take much for me to be proud of myself when driving. As I pulled into the parking lot, though, I started to think "hmm, this doesn't look like registration". It wasn't -- the first building was sales. The actual rooms were way at the back, another mile or two down the access road. But I made it at last, more amused than anything else by the unusual gaffe in my father's directions. (My father typically gives great directions.)

Seeing everyone was a little strange. The last time I visited with my brother's kids, back in 2002, they were all startlingly enthusiastic about me, like I was the best aunt EVAR! It got almost wearying trying to give everyone a fair share of my attention. But this time, I got to their hotel room and everyone was rather listless about my presence. I'm betting on a combination of "more excited about Orlando and attractions than people" and "worn out from the Orlando attractions of the previous day".

Sunday had been my oldest niece's birthday, and she wanted to go to Dicovery Cove and swim with dolphins for her birthday. They had a videotape of the experience, which looked pretty cool. Entrance is by reservation only, as is the "swim with dolphins" part (you can go to Discovery Cove and just look at other stuff). If you do the dolphin-swim, each party gets their own dolphin and trainer for half an hour. The dolphin does tricks for the group, and each person gets a ride on the dolphin (which is apparently quite fast, as the dolphins will swim at a good clip while the passenger hangs on to a fins) and gets to kiss or hug the dolphin. They got a photo of my niece kissing the dolphin -- so cute! Had I told my parents earlier that I'd be coming, I could've joined them. But I'm not sorry to have had a quieter Sunday with my friends. :)

My relatives all planned to go to Sea World, except for my mother. Since I'd arrived around noon, my brother suggested that we se what time Sea World offered discount tickets for late arrivals. He called the hotel concierge and was told that admission prices were halved at 2PM. So we decided to go out for lunch and then head over to Sea World.

Lunch was at a Bennigan's near the hotel. When the waiter took our drink orders, most of the group ordered root beer floats, including my mother.

When it came, my mother told me, "It always drives your father crazy when I do this. Have ice cream -- which is a dessert -- before my meal."

My father grinned and admitted, "This is true, but it doesn't take much to drive me crazy." My father has these peculiarly fixed notions about food, like not eating dessert unless you've eaten ALL of your dinner, and what foods are "good" and what foods are "bad". It's all based on 'the rules' when he was growing up, I think, and though he knows they're not very rational and although he is, himself, usually quite rational, he's never really shaken them. But he's quite good-humored about it, which makes the whole thing amusing.

I told them Lut's line on the subject: "Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first." Until I met Lut, I'd never heard that line before, and never heard it spoken by anyone else until the game on Saturday, when moonwolf used it. Guess it must come from somewhere--darned if I know where.

After lunch, my father took my mother back to the hotel to nap, while my brother drove me and the rest of his family over to Sea World

Monday, April 18. Afternoon/Evening

In the car on the way over to Sea World, we talked about sibling rivalry. My brother's kids all get along pretty well, but they have occassional spats. The two oldest used to be very odd to watch, as my niece would deliberately needle my nephew, and he wasn't able to stop himself from getting annoyed by her -- which only encouraged this hobby in her. Happily, they seem to have outgrown this phase and are getting along better now.

My sister-in-law was talking about when I was kid. My brother is still friends, some twenty-plus years later, with Richard, his best friend from high school. Richard is kind of the the fifth child in my family. He's my brother's age, four years older than me, and he's been to every wedding in our family save one -- which only a blizzard stopped him from attending.

My s-i-l was saying that when my name comes up in conversation, Richard still cringes. Imitating him, she put her hand over her eyes and quoted, "I can't believe how horrible I was to her! And she was always so nice to us! She'd make us cookies and brownies all the time."

This perspective is simultaneously amusing and peculiar to me. (Richard has actually apologized to me, directly, for the way he treated me when we were growing up.) I remember being, as a child, very annoying. I was the annoying, whiny, tagalong younger sister. I had almost no friends of my own from when I was twelve until fifteen or so, and I hung out all the time with my siblings and their friends, trying to worm my way into their social circle because I couldn't get one of my own. I was too young and not adept at the things they wanted to do, so their reactions ranged from tolerance to abuse aimed at driving me away. (Incidentally, the brother I was visiting now was always the nicest person in my family, and quite tolerant).

And, in retrospect, I always thought of this as not unreasonable. I was annoying and wouldn't leave them alone, so they would be mean to try to drive me off. Sure, they could've been nicer to me -- but I also could've left them alone instead of trying to involve myself in everything they did, whether I was any good at it or not. Fair trade, right?

It never occured to me that Richard owed me an apology. (He was, as a rule, worse to me than any of my siblings were). It's strange to think that he'd still feel guilty about it, twenty years later.

I wonder if these childhood episodes, that sense of being a nuisance to the people I'm trying to be friendly with, is behind some of my lingering insecurities about friendships today.

I did bake a lot of cookies and brownies for them, though.

Anyway, we got to Sea World and sauntered to the gate from the parking lot. There, I went to get a ticket in. The others all had passes as part of the Discovery Cove package. I told the ticket agent, "I'd like a ticket for one."

The ticket agent said, "$64.36!"

"I thought there was a discount after two -- "

"64.36!"

"But I was -- "

"64.36!"

I wandered back to the rest and explained that either (a) there was no discount or (b) the ticket agent was unaware that there was a discount. My brother grumbled about the concierge. I told them that I wasn't all that keen about going to Sea World anyway, and $64.36 seemed kinda steep since I'd only be there three hours.

"Only three hours?" my eldest niece exclaimed. "Why?"

"I want to get back to see my friends, once they get off work."

"Why?"

"Because I came here to visit them. Don't you like to spend time with your friends?" Earlier, her mother had been telling me that five of my niece's friends had called her to sing 'Happy Birthday' to her. My niece is gorgeous, perky, gregarious, and, so far as I know, very popular.

"Yes," she said, "but not that I'd miss all this -- " she gestured around at Orlando in general and Sea World in particular " -- for. Why do you want to leave?"

And I thought about Sea World, and I thought about all the friends I'd come to Orlando to see, and thought that this really wasn't a hard choice at all. "My father will be here in a minute or two; I'll just ask him to drop me back at the hotel. I can see my mother for a bit and then go back to John's house."

And that's what I did.