As promised, for parents and grandparents, here’s Kate on It’s a Small World. We pick up halfway through the (best for people Kate’s age) ride, after Joel has shot some photos with my phone. (I’ll post those to Flickr or something soonish.)
(The second video is taking a while to process by the site. If you can’t see it, come back later.)
Strange-but-true: My mother (who was born and lived much of her life in Memphis), was born on the day that Elvis Presley would later die. My mother-in-law was born on the day Elvis was born.
No idea what the significance is of that, but it’s my mom’s birthday today.
You were born on a Friday
under the astrological sign Leo.
Your birthday falls into the Chinese year beginning 2/2/1946 and ending 1/21/1947.
You were born in the Chinese year of the Dog.
Celebrities who share your birthday:
Vanessa Carlton (1980)
Emily Robison (1972)
Timothy Hutton (1960)
Angela Bassett (1958)
Madonna (1958)
James Cameron (1954)
Kathie Lee Gifford (1953)
Lesley Ann Warren (1946)
Eydie Gorme (1932)
Robert Culp (1930)
Frank Gifford (1930)
Ann Blyth (1928)
Fess Parker (1925)
Charles Bukowski (1920)
Menachem Begin (1913)
Your age is the equivalent of a dog that is 8.57729941291585 years old. (You old hound dog, you!)
OK, I’m in the process of setting up my computer, again, right now, and I’ve gotten my phone hooked back up. So here, as promised to Joel, is the video of his daughter Kate on the teacups at Disneyland, as shot by my Treo 650.
I don’t imagine these videos will be of a lot of interest to anyone but Kate’s parents and grandparents, but this one is kind of neat to watch because of the shadows. (The two-part It’s a Small World extravaganza will only be for the really serious home movie audience to watch.)
So, my brother and his wife and their baby Kate are in town and went with us to Disneyland yesterday. I confess to being skeptical ahead of time: How much could a one-year-old get out of Disneyland?
Quite a bit, it turns out. Proving that she is, indeed, a Yarbrough, she clapped and squealed with joy both times she went on Pirates of the Caribbean (the revamped ride is pretty slick, and the Captain Jack Sparrow animatronics are eerily accurate in their sculpts), enjoyed the teacups and wanted to climb out of the boat and play in the waterfall on the Jungle Cruise.
But the evil genius of Walt Disney was most apparent when we rode It’s a Small World. Yes, it’s a somewhat (OK, not “somewhat”) obnoxious ride for adults, but Disney’s “Imagineers” knew what they were doing. Kate was entranced and at the end of the ride, tried to leap over Joel’s shoulder to crawl back into the ride on her own.
I shot photos and videos of the entire day — including her deciding that Eeyore was scary, not sweet, something that will have to be rectified with lots of Pooh stories, I think — and will be posting them once my computer is back in the land of the living. (It’s in the shop for yet another day, in what I’m increasingly convinced is some sort of intervention.) True, the videos of Kate on It’s a Small World might be only of interest to grandparents, but what the heck.
I grew up overseas for much of my formative years — five years of middle school and high school, returning for 11th and 12th grade in the foreign country of America — and it’s rare that I encounter anyone who seems to understand the life.
This week, NPR is doing a series by a former Foreign Service wife talking in detail about what it means to be in the diplomatic corps. While her experience doesn’t directly mirror my family’s — she and her subjects tended to be in more Third World locations than we were — it’s otherwise very much in synch with my memories:
