favorite shots

Over Christmas vacation I spent five days in Florida, generously hosted by Sean, who also played host for summer vacation last year. We spent a day at Epcot Center in Disneyworld, spent a day flea marketing and comic shopping, rode a water taxi around Ft. Lauderdale, saw some movies, went to the mall, and basically just relaxed. I took over 200 pictures, and wanted to share a few of my favorites. Click on any of them to see a larger size.

1) Sean's Christmas mash-up:



Sean's apartment decor is a little eclectic:



if you're willing to take the opinion of someone like me, whose apartment has bookcases with action figures all over them in the living room. Rather than remove anything for Christmas, Sean just puts his Christmas stuff among the other decorations, so you end up with things like the mash-up picture, which apparently tells the story of how Malificent cursed the baby Jesus to fall into an enchanted slumber after pricking his finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel on his sixteenth birthday.

I love it because the same thing would happen if I put up a nativity in my apartment, except that the three wise men would be replaced by Bizarro, Supergirl, and Iron Fist.

2) The Distant Past:



This was taken on the "Spaceship Earth" ride, the ride inside the globe at Epcot:



Disney, probably deliberately, makes it kind of hard to take good pictures inside their rides. The flash washes out colors, the cars jerk and turn right at the moment when you click the shutter, the cars move too fast for a low light section and everything turns out blurry, but I think the blurriness works here. This is supposed to be a glimpse into the past of a caveman tribal shaman, and the blurriness gives it an impression of the powerful magician emerging for a moment from a blur of smoke and fog. It's kind of the way you imagine frightened tribesmen glimpsing him as they tremble in fear withing his shadowy cave.

3) Light and Paintings:



There's not a special story or anything that goes with this one. It's from the "Gran Fiesta Tour" ride, which is inside the pyramid in the Mexico pavillion:



It's a shot of the lights that lead up to the dock at the very end of the ride, but I really like the angles sharp angles of the light and the way they play against the curves of the painting on the wall.

4) Wooden Trees and People:



This was a window display in Downtown Disney, the shopping area that you don't have to pay to get into. I realize the whole thing probably came in a box and someone probably just followed instructions on how to put it together, but it looks cute. The little wooden people really look like they're decorating their wooden trees, and it made me smile when I sat down by it for a minute while Sean stopped by the restroom.

5) Drawbridge 1 and Drawbridge 2:





I saw the drawbridge go up while we were riding the water taxi:



around Ft. Lauderdale. I was fascinated with the machinery and the huge gears, especially when the water taxi went right under it and you could see everything up close. I was so busy studying the mechanics when we went under it that I forgot to take a picture, so those two are as close as I got. There's something inherently intriguing about large machinery to me, be it giant strip mining machines, drawbridges, rockets, or whatever else.

Some of it is that I have no real aptitude for machines (I finished 2 out of 4 projects in our mandatory 8th grade Technology class, because it took me the entire semester just to complete those two and to make them actually work; my tiny motor worked long enough for the teacher to evaluate it, and when I tried to turn it on again afterward it was dead. I destroyed it with a sledgehammer later that afternoon.), some of it is that I try to take them apart in my head to figure out how they work, and some of it is the inherent danger and possibility for disaster that large scale engineering represents.

6) Me:



I don't often like pictures of myself, but Sean did a good job on this one.

7) Ft. Lauderdale Sunset:



The colors are gorgeous. That's why people move to Florida: palm trees, water, sun, and beautiful scenery.