Footle and Grok

I’m trying to run/walk 1,000 miles in 2020.

Right now, I’m at 876, and I’m getting impatient. My original plan was to reach 900 on my birthday (10/19) and hit 1,000 on Thanksgiving. I think I can get it done quicker.

My new goal is to reach 900 miles this Thursday. I can easily do it; I just have to convince my brain that I should go out even if it’s raining. Running truly is 90% mental. If I weren’t doing a Leap Year streak, I’d never have reached 876 miles because I’m a master at talking myself out of running.

So, to ensure my success, I’m telling you what I am doing. Do you have a project that could be finished if you gave it a push? Feel free to share it here. Remember, it’s not a goal if it doesn’t have a deadline.

Done is a wonderful feeling. I look forward to completing 1,000 miles. I ran/walked 300 miles in July; I can easily do 124 more. I hope you feel the joy of success also.

I watched the first episode of National Geographic’s Magic of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and it’s wonderful. Disney’s Animal Kingdom is one of my favorite parks at Walt Disney World, and a chance to go behind the scenes is magical.

You can view it on Disney+ right now, and I highly recommend it. I plan to watch the next episodes this weekend. I’d love to know what you think.

Did you know that all of the Magic Kingdom could fit in just one attraction at Disney’s Animal Kingdom? Below are more fun facts that you can share with your family as you watch the show.

I won’t be visiting the parks until 2022 at the earliest, so it is nice to get a taste while staying home. 

Big Facts about Disney’s Animal Kingdom

• The Tree of Life has 102,583 transparent leaves in five shades of green
• Expedition Everest (my favorite attraction at Walt Disney World) is the most expensive roller coaster ever made at $100,000,000
• All of the Magic Kingdom (107 acres) could fit inside the Kilimanjaro Safari savannah (110 acres)
• Disney’s Animal Kingdom is 580 acres. Six Disneyland’s could fit inside it

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I didn’t know what to write about today, so I figured I find some fun trivia.

As everyone knows from my July posts, I don’t take trivia lists at face value because many contain mistakes. So when an item caught my eye, I did some research. It turns out it’s true, and I’m glad because it’s just the sort of crazy fact we need in this crazy time.

The highest court in the land, The Supreme Court, is on the United States Supreme Court Building’s fourth floor. An even higher court, a basketball court, is on the fifth floor of the same building.

Yep. There is a basketball court in the Supreme Court Building. This spare room was converted into a workout area in the 1940s for the employees who work in the building. Later on, a small basketball court as added.

This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard. Since it is on top of the Supreme Court, I wondered if the justices could hear a game being played. The answer to that is yes, and that is why it’s forbidden to use the higher court when high court is in session.

A few justices like Byron White (who served from 1962-1993) and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist (who served from 1972-2005) have used the basketball court. Other justices have used the adjacent weight room.

If supreme court justices created a basketball team, they could be the Washington D.C. Robes. Yeah? Yeah?

A visit to a farm and a walk through a corn maze is an autumn tradition for many families. I’ve only been to two and neither was very good. Usually, I’m more impressed with the aerial view than the walkthrough.

This is a shame because I love hedge mazes found in English gardens (or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.) I have tried to escape many of those and enjoyed the challenge.

I’ve finally found a corn maze that I’d love to explore. Unfortunately, it’s in Illinois. Richardson Farm claims to have the world’s largest corn maze with ten miles of paths wandering through four interlocking mazes. You can try to do all four (that’s what I would do) or explore as little as you want.

Check out their website to see this year’s maze. It looks like a corny adventure!

I love punny jokes (especially the memes with the husky.)

Okay, so that one wasn’t Halloween themed, but it makes me laugh every time. The following jokes from Good Housekeeping are spooky as well as punny. Share them like treats with no calories.

• What do mummies listen to on Halloween? Wrap music.
• How do you make a skeleton laugh? You tickle his funny bone!
• Why did the Cyclops give up teaching? He only had one pupil!
• Where does Dracula keep his money? In a blood bank.
• Why are ghosts terrible liars? You can see right through them!
• Why don’t mummies take vacations? They’re afraid to unwind.
• Where do fashionable ghosts shop? Bootiques!
• What do skeletons order at restaurants? Spare ribs.
• What does a panda ghost eat? Bam-BOO!
• What’s a vampire’s least favorite meal? A steak!

Happy Mad Hatter Day!!

October 6 is Mad Hatter Day because the crazy character from Alice in Wonderland has a measurement tag on his hat that reads 10/6. Fun.

I enjoy wearing hats and would love to see them come back as normal attire. I’ve been watching the Perry Mason movies from the 1950s, and all the women who sit in the witness box wear fancy hats. Some of them are better than others, but I love seeing the different styles.

Thinking about hats led me to wonder how many types of hats exist. After some research, I’ve decided that this number is unknown. Hat styles come and go, and any list I found was not complete.

I’d love for everyone to wear a hat today in celebration of a history of covering our heads. Luckily, women no longer decorate their hats with stuffed birds or extravagant feathers, and men aren’t destroying beaver populations and exposing hat makers to mercury just to have a fashionable top hat. However, a nice cloche hat or a fedora adds a bit of panache to anyone’s outfit.

I finally watched Knives Out.

I like mystery movies, but the preview for this movie was awful. I didn’t think I could handle listening to Daniel Craig (who I adore as James Bond) butchering a southern accent for over two hours.

However, I heard good things about this movie from people I trusted, so I checked it out from the library. Hubby also thought it would be horrible, but was willing to give it a chance. 

It’s a good thing we did.

Knives Out is clever, twisty, and fun. After a while, Daniel Craig’s horrible accent didn’t bother me, and since he is teased about it by other characters, I rather enjoyed it.

The cast (Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, and others) did a great job playing an obnoxious over-the-top family. However, Chris Evans stole the show. He must have loved playing a loud-mouth, cursing, trust baby. I admire him as clean-cut Captain America but relished him playing a very different role. 

There is a character who pukes whenever she tells a lie (the preview made a big deal of this point.) I hate watching people throw up in movies, so worried that this would be a deal breaker. Luckily, it wasn’t a problem. She doesn’t do it often, and most of the time, she is discreet. 

If you like mystery films, watch Knives Out. You will spend most of the time wondering what’s going on and whether or not Daniel Craig’s character is a complete idiot, but the ending is very satisfying.

I give this 4.5 out of 5 stars and look forward to seeing it again. I will probably enjoy it even more the second time since I won’t be wondering what the heck the writers were thinking. And I can watch Chris Evans cuss out his greedy family. It was a great scene, and he obviously enjoyed doing it.

Sometimes I research something that I think I understand and discover that I’ve been completely wrong all my life. This happened with the above caterpillar that I found on my driveway yesterday.

The woolly bear caterpillar is also known as the woolly worm or fuzzy worm. Lore says that it can predict whether winter will be mild or severe.

Let me explain how I was wrong. I call these furry caterpillars “woolly buggers.” According to the internet, I’m the only one who does so. A woolly bugger is a fly used in fishing. However, I’ve been calling them woolly buggers my entire life. I don’t know who taught me, or if I made it up all by myself.

My other error was how I thought it predicted the weather. According to the internet, if the brown stripes are wider, it will be a mild winter. However, if the black stripes are wider, it will be severe. That’s news to me.

I always believed that winter’s intensity was determined by how fuzzy (fat) the caterpillar was. If it were super fuzzy, winter would be cold, and if it were thinner, it would be mild. Of course, I lived in southern California, and all our winters were always mild.

How did I learn this all wrong? Probably because it makes no sense. How would I know if the stripes were different if I didn’t have a previous one to compare. It’s much easier to decide if they are fat or thin.

But, I concede that I have been incorrect. I don’t plan on changing my own woolly bugger measurements, but I will tell other people the agreed-on method.

If you want to learn more about woolly bear caterpillars and why they became weather-predicting animals, check out this website. This is a well-studied creature. 

In conclusion, I may not be able to tell from the above woolly bugger whether its red stripes or black stripes are wider, but I can tell that it looks a little fat. Therefore, I think we’re going to have a slightly severe winter (which is normal for the northwest.)

The Season of Spooky has arrived.

I love going to Disneyland or Walt Disney World during the Halloween season (for Disney, that used to start in August.) The decorations are awesome, the food is unique, and the costumes on the characters are wonderful.

Of course, 2020 has changed everything. Disneyland isn’t open, Walt Disney World has limited or canceled many of its Halloween events, and many people who normally visit the parks this time of year aren’t able too.

But all is not lost. Disney has brought Halloween to fans around the world with the help of the internet. The Disney Parks Blog has fun stuff year-round, but now they have videos and contests that have never been seen outside of the parks.

If you want to bring some Disney treats into your Halloween tricks, check out the Disney Parks Blog. I look forward to watching the fireworks that were only shown at Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party (another event that has been canceled this year.) There is enough in the blog to fill all of October, just how Halloween should be celebrated.

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my Pinterest post. I now have a lot of good tips to try.

October is here! It’s my favorite month of the year. The cooler weather. The changing colors. My birthday. Halloween. What’s not to like?

I decorated my house last Saturday, and for the first time since living here, I had to change my displays. Normally, I arrange my decorations in my family room, but the cats have turned all the surfaces in that room into a racecourse, so I can’t set anything out there anymore.

Instead, I focused on the dining room. To my surprise, my spooky items look great in there. Who knew?

So far, the cats have only knocked over the trick-or-treat bears on my dining room table and ignored everything else, so I think this new arrangement will work. Plus, I smile every time I walk past the dining room.

Do you decorate for Halloween? Have you ever tried putting things in different places? I wouldn’t have thought to if my cats hadn’t forced the issue, but I’m glad I did. I recommend trying even if you don’t have cats that are into NASCAR (or NASCAT as we call it in my house.)