Chaos Attraction

The Polar Express

2017-12-18, 5:29 a.m.


Today I went out and saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I'd review it, but mostly I came out of it saying "Huh? Who's dead and who's not dead? What just happened?" I had to go ask my cousin-in-law afterwards about this stuff to get it clarified.

The Jedi stuff came off best. The rest of it was okay. It needed more Carrie Fisher (sigh).* But mostly I was just confused as to who can survive what a lot of the time. Also, I continue to find it not compelling when your main villain smashes shit all the time like a 2-year-old. Actually, that's demeaning to 2-year-olds because the one I hung out with today was still more mature than that.

* I wore the sweater but nobody at the theater noticed it, for the record.


Way off topic: my mom sent me a photo of herself on Santa's lap and she appears to be uh...her hand is in a delicate spot.... which her boyfriend pointed out to her. I saw Mommy groping Santa Claus....

Oh, 2017.


The other big activity for the day was getting together with my relatives to go on the Polar Express train, a kid's ride thing in Sacramento that is incredibly hard to get tickets for unless you are a railroad museum membership person like my cousin in. My other cousins without kids bailed, so we got to go.

It was pretty cute, actually, Kids showed up in pajamas. Adults showed up in adult onesies, which at first I thought was because of all the drunks wandering the streets of Sacramento in them last night (some towns do SantaCon, I guess Sac does OnesieCon?). Aidan (the 4-year-old) was in BB8 ones and Dylan (2-year-old) was in R2D2. I asked how many SW movies they had seen and apparently just episode 1, but they are read to about Star Wars very frequently for 4 and 2 year olds.

There was a, no joke, "train sword" on sale that looks like a light saber. Because I don't know about you, but I have always needed a sword every time I get on Amtrak to fight with the other passengers in the aisles.

They give you hot chocolate, a souvenir mug, a cookie and a bell. They have a hot chocolate song playing "Here we only have one rule / Never ever let it cool!" and they had the stewards doing a dance with trays of coffee cups in the aisle. They read the book aloud on the train and pass out a copy for each table to read along if you did not bring your own. At the end of the line, you drive by a Santa area where you see Santa and elves waving. One elf balanced a gift on her head and then disappeared down the chimney.

There was also a random hobo* wandering around and at some point he put on a dirty Santa suit. Santa got on the train, chewed him out for it and gave him coal, saying "I hope that's coal with you!" This freaked out little Dylan quite a bit.

* note: Thanks to this, I found out that my aunt apparently used to hang out with hobos at the railroad tracks. Her mother was unthrilled.

At one point the elves were walking through on their knees and I heard one saying, "Why are we still on our knees?" "I don't know!"

So, that was pretty cute. After that, Mom wanted to go eat at her boyfriend and his son's favorite restaurant in town, so we did that, followed by Mom didn't want to go home so we were in Target for way too effing long. Oy!


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