tim and lisa cocking

My parents went to Disney World with two other couples a few days ago (so they’re all kids at heart). One of the other couples was separated from the group on a ride at the Magic Kingdom, and it took about 10 minutes afterward for them all to meet up again. In this 10 minute period right after getting off the ride, this other couple was approached by a Disney Cast Member and told, “You’ve won a night at Cinderella’s Castle for yourself and five friends!” You just read that correctly: my parents’ friends won the “Year of a Million Dreams” daily grand prize! But get this: THEY TURNED IT DOWN. Once again, you’ve read that correctly: my parents’ friends said no to a night in Cinderella’s castle.

I guess they’ve been getting a lot of calls from resorts and time shares with the typical “You’ve won a free night at our resort, but you have to sit through 18 hours of sales pitches” type of calls and thought this was the same kind of thing. How they hadn’t heard about this promotion in the huge media blitz that’s gone on for the past year I don’t know, but somehow they’d missed it. And so they missed out on something that any other person in the park that day would probably have given their right arm to be able to do.

The Cast Member was stunned. No one had ever turned them down before.

By the time the group reunited, it was too late. A release form had been signed and it was all over with. All except the relentless teasing they had to put up with all day from their friends, especially my dad.

This is an online story that makes me think of my kids. A lot. Even though it’s a kid thing, it always cracks me up! I wish it were available in print form.

“The Grumpy Bug”

Make sure to put your cursor over the bugs and play with them!

Grumpy sounds an awful lot like a couple of little girls I know (who shall remain nameless but live in my house) when they’re angry–or want someone to play with them.

So I caught the Golden Globe nominations a couple of days ago. I don’t know if it’s sad or if I’m a bit proud of the fact that I have never seen even a single episode of any nominated program. Not only that but I’ve not seen any of the nominated movies.

Since I’m in the film industry I should probably see more movies. I have seen my share of movies this year that are a year or two old. It’s just cheaper that way!

Tim has always been partial to taking slides rather than print pictures. Sure, they have great color and resolution, but looking at slides is a pain. And as a scrapbooker, I find them pretty useless, except for the fact that we have some great images on slides.

There are companies that offer slide-to-digital transfer services, but they can get expensive when you’re talking about converting hundreds of slides to digital images. Our scanner is kaput, and even when it worked, it didn’t do slides well at all. So we came up with another way of digitizing our slides using our digital camera. If you’d like to see how we did it, click here.

The digitized images need help, though. I’m partial to Picasa for simple fixes and enhancements, and I’m learning my way around GIMP for more complex stuff. I used GIMP to create the banner images that are at the top of our blog and website, as well as tweaking most of the photos on our web site. They’re both great programs, and both are free. Picasa is from Google (what isn’t these days), and does a great job with minor fixes. GIMP is basically an open-source version of Photoshop. And did I mention that they’re both free? If you like playing with images, you should check them out.