Jolly Holidays!

I hope everyone had a merry Christmahaunnakwaanzakaa!

Cory and I had a nice, relaxing, stress-free Christmas with Zoe... we went to a movie (The Day the Earth Stood Still. Don't bother.), ate Chinese food (an O'Dizzle tradition), opened presents (Thanks for all the good stuff!), talked to family on the phone, and that pretty much covers it. Nice and uneventful. We both worked the next day, so we went to bed early.

On Friday after work, we headed to Orlando. Cory had a pair of Universal Studios passes that had to be used by the end of the year, so we spent my birthday at Universal and Islands of Adventure.

I had a very child-like birthday, really. We went to IKEA in the morning, and had breakfast while we were there. I had a gigantic slice of "Chocolate Overload" cake for breakfast. After I got all hopped-up on sugar and chocolate, we spent the day at the amusement park.

We've been to Universal a few other times, but never during peak season. Once was on a weekday in January, the other time was a weekend in July when it was about 95 degrees out. This time, the park was packed. Lines for most of the rides (or the good ones, at least) were in the 90-minute range.

So we found other ways to have fun...

We'd been in the park for about fifteen minutes and were trying to figure out when the next showing of the "Terminator" attraction was going to be. All of a sudden, the Simpsons rolled up in a big, yellow, cartoony RV. It took some arm-twisting to get Cory to get in a picture with them, but I think he secretly wanted to do it. It doesn't look like anyone's forcing him to smile. Plus, Homer gave him the thumbs-up.

I could not, however, get Cory to pose with the Cat in the Hat.
I tried.
When I walked up to the Cat in the Hat, he gently grabbed my face and planted a smooch on me. The person in the cat suit even made a little kissing sound when he did it. I got another kiss when Cory took the picture.

We took plenty of other photos with our cell phone cameras, but those are my two favorites.

All in all, it was a pretty fun day. The weather was beatiful, we managed to get onto a few rides, and best of all, we didn't have to pay park admission, so that made it even better (Thanks, Fox-4!).