Winter Cleaning, Part 2... A rubber duck. That is a cat.

You know, I think this cat-duck may become the mascot for my blog. I can put him on ascots. Yes I just did. 

I can still remember exactly where I got this duck. He's from Great Wolf Lodge. In case you don't know where that is... (I don't know if it having a stock necessarily makes it well-known) It's a wolf-themed hotel and waterpark. You may wonder how they fit wolf themes into a waterpark if you've never been. If you have been and you're a fun person, and especially if you have a short attention span, you might be thinking something along the lines of what I'm thinking, which is "I have no idea just how they did it, but they did, and oh is it awesome!" It just works, okay? Like oreos. You don't know just exactly how they stick the icing to the cookie so firmly, yet sometimes you break that darn cookie before you can even separate it from the icing!

Besides the waterpark, they also have a spa - for parents and children, no less - called something I can't remember, a training/workout room, gift shop (of course), along with a cafe and Dunkin' Donuts, and something that is now a bowling alley and was once a computer room. The last thing, and I think the last thing we found, was a tiny arcade, visible when you went to the bottom floor via the elevator. It was lit with blacklights, but was surprisingly well-lit anyway. There were tons of games and unsurprisingly way-overpriced token games with near-impossible to get prizes. Instead of all that, my brother and I found a fantastic game that was surprisingly fun and gave instant gratification. It was like a crane game, but not quite, and was filled with all sorts of tiny prizes... and ducks. You know, the rubber ducks you may have taken in the bathtub as a child. But these were different. They were wild colors, strange paint patterns and dressed as very strange things. Like a rooster or a cat, for example. Some were painted purple with green dots, for another example. We got these almost every time. We came home with probably about five or six ducks, and maybe three dinosaurs and two bendy men each. We had so much fun trying to nab what we saw as unarguably best prize in the machine. Hours, I imagine, were spent in front of that, smiles and giggles on our faces as we watched the thing stop spinning, hoping it would be a duck that popped out. I still have the cat one, I admit, and every time I see it, it reminds me, tangentially I presume, how much I really do love my brother. It's hard to hate someone when you remember spending goodness-knows-how-much-money on to get plastic ducks while laughing hysterically and groaning in horror.