HAPPY FUN WEEKEND TIMEZ!!! XD

...not that I did much this week. I got pulled to do requals the entire week! Hooray for requals!! XD (When we change something in the OG, we have to bring each CM in, one by one, and explain the changes to them. It rocks.) I pretty much kicked back in the training room and took turns with the other trainers going out to bump people out of rotation. And I got trainer pay for it. WIN.

I also helped teach an evacuation class this week. HAH, we ROCKED it. First, our new batch of CPs kicked some ass and did really well. Second, we trainers planned out our ideal class and executed nicely. Third... you can't go wrong when you get to play the totally loony guest in the log. XD ("My log has PIXIE DUST ON IT!" "The mean voice told me to keep my feet inside the log! I was just trying to be like that frog!") Or when you show the trainees how to trackwalk after an evac by marching them through the mountain singing Christmas carols. And the Rocky theme as you run up the 99 stairs up C-lift. XDDD ...or "hand-check!" CMs on ride-through. HEE! (Sadly, that's the only time I've ever been the one evac'ed off any ride... and it was all planned!)

In Guest!Win this week... the one that puked off the chicken bridge onto a log filled with guests below. You made my day, in such a sick-but-hilarious way. XD

And god help me, the music from "Celebrate a Dream Come True" is growing on me. It's catchy. Anyone got a rehearsal CD? XDDDD (...what's even more sad is that I've already picked up half the routine for a couple of units, including the show stop :P) I also really need to go to MK and see "Move It! Shake It! Celebrate It!" in person, because I watched it on YouTube and it looks like everything that the new day parade SHOULD have been. And 'cause I wanna get my ass out in the street and shake my tailfeather. XD (sana_chan... MUST DO IT. XDDD)
(PS... how do I learn stiltwalking? Because that looks WAY too fun.)
(PPS... anyone got a rehearsal CD for that one? ;))

But YAY for trainer outings! (the first in like 2 years, apparently) Yay for getting paid for a day of playing next week! I'm psyched. They haven't told us where we're going yet (they want it to be a surprise) but they did say we're allowed to dress casually (tank tops, jeans, sandals even!).

So I'm considering auditioning for the Encore Cast Choir show this summer. However, since I haven't done any form of singing audition since middle school (runner up for the solo... GRRR!) I'm a bit intimidated and lost by the process. :P Still not even really sure how to pick a good audition song or 16-bar segment.

I also saw Coraline with ariellen last week! It was really good, but I think if I'd been a little kid I would have been scared shitless. It was much creepier than Nightmare Before Christmas or Corpse Bride.

The roomies and I watched ESB last night... and found a Hidden Mickey on Cloud City. "NEEERD!" (And what looks like an Ugnaught orally pleasuring Han Solo. Just sayin'.)

Aaaaand books! ( February 2008 books! )

Merry Christmas!!

Work is done, presents are opened, and now it's time to kick back!

The parks have, of course, been insane. I had log wash yesterday morning, thus was out of rotation from 6:45 to 9:45... went into rotation until 10:45, when I got my parade bump out. Yay for only one hour in rotation! Yaaaay for double day parades! I then nearly lost my voice doing parade, screaming "stay to your right!" And eventually, "...hold up this hand! It makes an 'L'! That's your left! Hold up the other hand! It doesn't make an 'L'! That's your right! Stay to your right!!" ...and of course, because people still didn't listen, there was such a bad traffic jam at the crosswalk that we had to start turning people back mid-crossing, practically shoving them off the street as the parade started.

Also, there are 37 elves in the Once Upon a Christmastime Parade. Just sayin'.

Today was crazy... we had about a 100 minute wait at Splash. But for all the waiting, few people were cranky about it. Most were very cheery, and I had some great conversations with guests who'd already been in line over an hour.

Oh, and for lulz, Sunday morning while picking logs, we found an empty 99 Oranges mini-bottle in a log. Party on Splash Mountain, yo! ;) We had it proudly on display in the break room until a coordinator got cranky about it and threw it out. :p

And through it all, nature gave me a cold for Christmas. I've blown my nose so much that I got a bloody nose. Yippee!

And of course, the Christmas presents today! This year's haul so far:
-4 GB Compact Flash card
-Spare camera battery
-1.4x tele-extender for my 400mm lens (methinks next week I should go out to Merritt Island to play with it...)
-"The Beauty of the Beasts" by Ralph Helfer
-"Steve and Me" by Terri Irwin
-"Alex and Me" by Irene Pepperberg
-Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass, for DS
-Super Smash Brothers Brawl, for Wii
-"How to Draw Disney-Pixar Characters" (those books, while simplistic, have some AWESOME reference info)
-"The Book of Animal Ignorance" by John Mitchinson and John Lloyd
-Mad About You season 2 DVDs
-Lenox Mickey Mouse ears ornament
-Mickey Mouse ornament
-Polar fleece pullover

Still got a bit more to come, too! :D

Other than that, I'm just relaxing. Slowly moving stuff over to my new apartment, which now is getting some furniture thanks to my new roomie's awesome mom! Also trying to draw a bit - did this one the day. Also feeling the need to do some Enchanted sketches. And I'm totally hooked on this year's Tokyo Disneyland Christmas parade music, "Mickey's Jolly Christmas Snowtime." Seriously, everything they write is so freakin' catchy! Got my last two Candelight shows tomorrow night, too!

Everyone have a happy holiday!

Christmas parade taping was today! OMG, it was NUTS. Miley Cyrus was performing, so the place was packed with fangirls. :P I didn't see her, though, 'cause Splash is too far from the castle. And of course, in the middle of that craziness, Splash went down. And in the middle of trying to evac and reset, Big Thunder went down. Can has no Frontierland attractions for over an hour?

TSI/Country Bears training starts tomorrow! YAY! I'm really excited. I'm sooo burned out on Splash.

Cutest kids EVAR while I was doing a rare night PAC for Spectro shift this week. We started playing catch, and then like 20 kids joined and it got too chaotic. So I got them all to sit in a big circle in the middle of the street (hey, once PACtivities start, they take priority over people trying to walk down the street. So says the Management) and spread our legs to the sides to make a "leg wall" to keep the ball from rolling away as we rolled it back and forth. They were SO into it. XD And all of a sudden, all my managers are standing around laughing at the totally random game I started. XD One kid in particular cracked me up. He couldn't have been more than 6... thick southern accent...

(talking about football)
Him: Who do you go for?
Me: I don't really have a favorite college team, but I'm a big Seahawks fan in pro football.
Him: Auburn or Alabama.
Me: Hmm?
Him: Which one: Auburn or Alabama? *flail* AUBURN OR ALABAMA?!??!
Me: *dies*

(three guesses where he was from)

(and on a side note I'm watching the Alabama/Florida game now... GOOD game... GO GATORS!)

And as a football note... LULZ... Issaquah High and Skyline High played each other in the WA State 4A championship. Issaquah schools party in the championship, anyone? (Skyline won, sadly, in a close game)

Not much else going on! Trying to draw a lot and catch up on art I owe people and such. Also working on the cross-stitch, which is coming along great.

Aaaaand, it's time for book reviews for November! Not as much reading time, but I got a few read... ( November 2008 book reviews )

Yaaaaaay weekend! :D Had a busy week last week, have a busy week this week.

Tuesday - Went to SeaWorld with ariellen! OMG, so much fun! I haven't been there in forever. I loved Blue Horizons. It was like Cirque-meets-dolphins. Gorgeous music. It totally breaks my "I hate dolphin shows without education" rule, but it was just too pretty. And since when can you not even go poolside to pet the dolphins without fish? I understand why you can only have fish in that one area (so they can monitor feeding) but why can't you just go wait poolside and hope a dolphin swims by anymore? Ugh. I loved that there were no lines, though! We waited like 20 minutes for Journey to Atlantis (which still kicks San Diego's all over the place) and only had to wait for Kraken when we wanted front row, otherwise it was a walk-on. I got an annual pass and added Busch Gardens onto it as well. So now I have an excuse to go there! Photos for the day are here!

Wednesday - Cast preview of the Halloween parade! I had to kill time until midnight, so I went to Downtown Disney and saw The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. It was pretty entertaining, but it really felt like they just reused all the plot points from the first two movies. And I kept getting distracted by the fact that Rachel Weisz was not Evy. It felt wrong. No offense to Maria Bello, she wasn't horrible, she just wasn't Rachel Weisz. Loved Brendan Fraser, though, as always. Then onto the cast preview! It was NUTS. OMG, there were so many people there, and they were practically all CPs, LOL. Ihe parade was awesome, though. It's changed a lot since 2002. OMG, they had the hyenas from The Lion King! And I got lots of candy of course. And then it took 25 minutes to get the bus back to WestClock because so many people were trying to get back there. :P Took a few photos. They're pretty crappy, but they're here.

Thursday - So I signed in at work and got a message to go have a meeting with a manager. I wondered what I was getting in trouble for, but there were like three other people going. So we get back there, and they take us all by pargo to the back of Main Street, and start walking us through the tunnel to the base of the castle. The trip? A surprise visit to tour the Cinderella Castle suite! OMG, that place is gorgeous. It's smaller than it looks in videos and pictures. LOVE the TV that's a mirror until you turn it on. Magic Mirror FTW! And the bathroom ROCKS. The tub is a jacuzzi, and in the ceiling above you there's lights that look like stars. The whole suite is so ornate, it's mind-blowing! I got pictures on my cell phone, but alas I can't get them onto my computer. Here's the GIS for it

Had a lot of day parade this week! I am in LOVE with playing with bubbles for my PACtivity. It's so simple, and the kids adore it. Seriously. Most popular game I've found yet. Just start blowing the bubbles and within minutes you'll have a whole herd of kids chasing you around and popping bubbles. Sooo much fun. I've also been getting a lot of 7:15 (trackwalker/tower opener) shifts on Sundays, which rocks. I'm pretty comfortable opening tower now, even when I have days like yesterday when I had to call maintenance 4 times just to get the mountain open because everything kept breaking down. :P The parks have been DEAD, too, which rocks. I <3 offseason. On Friday, the longest wait we had all day was 10 minutes. Most of the time, you could walk right on. We never even opened FastPass. <3.

Candlelight Processional rehearsals start this week! Yay! I picked up my music last week, and now I just gotta figure out how to get to the rehearsal location.

We have movie night at work next week. Woo! They're holding it out on Tom Sawyer Island, which should be really cool. They have like 8 different movies to vote on, but all of them sound good, so I can't decide. :P (Ratatouille, National Treasure 1 or 2, Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 2, or 3, Fantastic Four, and Cars)

Seahawks lost on opening day yesterday. D: My Fantasy Football team, however, won, so that rocks. And if I'm pointing and laughing at Tom Brady, does that make me a bad person? Saw the end of the Chargers-Panthers game, too. OUCH. Two Monday Night Football games tonight, yaaay!

Today's Update of Random is brought to you by too much Coke and too little sleep.

The move is complete! I went and cleaned and turned in my keys yesterday morning. Huzzah! Now I just have to deal with all the address changes everywhere. :P

My jug of milk leaked on the way home from the grocery store, and now my car REEKS.

Apparently Michael Phelps paraded down Main Street yesterday morning. I would've gone but had to wait for the cable guy. Grr.

I finished the newest Stargate novel, "Mirror Mirror" already. OMG LOVE. I would kill to see that as an episode. And when Elizabeth gets in on the action (literally) I'm always pumped. There's a couple of parts that would give Sparky shippers the squealies. ;)

I worked a closing shift Thursday night. That felt weird, I haven't done that in months. But my closing duty was ride-through, so that rocked my socks. Nothing like 12 minutes of pay for just going on the ride!

And parade was back today! Yay! And I even got pulled to it! It was... entertaining. We were down until the last minute due to lightning... then had just a few minutes notice to roll out. And of course, all the ropes were messed up because they'd been knotted and messed with and switched around and replaced in the last two weeks. So we were only halfway done when the parade started. We booked it and rocked it. Then it started pouring halfway through the parade and the last two floats didn't go out... we stood there waiting and waiting before they finally told us, so we had to chase down the Peter Pan unit and catch up. Good times. The new bridge is nice and flat and smells like new wood. And it's kinda green.

But YAY, Halloween parade cast preview this week! *dances* Definitely sticking around for that. It'll be a late night, but oh well.

Had my Fantasy Football draft last night! Got a pretty decent team this year! It's a bit of an older team, so I'll have to balance "experienced" and "past their prime." ( 2008 Fantasy Football team! )

I bought MarioKart DS today. Oh, man, I'd forgotten how addicting that game is. Toad is <3.

And to everyone in Gustav's path - stay safe!

ariellen arrived this week! WOO! She and her mom crashed here for a couple of days before her CP arrival date, and put up with my furniture-less apartment. :P Woo! The Disney geek factor in Orlando just skyrocketed! XD Watching Enchanted together was lulz... because we both totally said the words along with the movie. XD

We had fun at work earlier in the week, though... during a lightning storm we got a power surge that reset the ride... and when we went out to do the reset, we found that the flume pumps hadn't come back on and half the logs (still full of guests, BTW) were suddenly sitting on the bottom of the dry flume. Doh! :P Prease to evac? Turns out that Magic Kingdom (which had most of the major attractions go 101) got off easy - Epcot and Studios lost power completely. :P

I had a manager approach me yesterday and tell me he wanted me to talk to the coordinator of training about becoming a Splash trainer. We're WAY short on trainers right now, and he said even though I've only been here 3.5 months, he thought I'd be REALLY good at it and thought our area manager might be able to pull strings to get me a spot even though I'm not really eligible. I think it'd be awesome, not to mention the extra pay while doing trainer shifts... but at the same time I keep wondering if I really know enough to be able to do it. I have no problem at all with handling and explaining the basics of the attraction... but there's so much I don't know or have never actually encountered before that I think it'd be tough to really do a good job. Hrm.

(...I have, however, already racked up 8 Great Service Fanatic cards. /bragging moment)

Day parade almost got rained out today. We had to stop rolling out the ropes just as we started because of lightning (when Splash goes 101 for weather, so does parade). So at like 2:55 they go "It's back on! Roll out! Rainy Day Cavalcade is going out!" So we roll out like maniacs and get ready for Cavalcade... only to turn around and find the entire regular parade lined up, minus only the princess float. Thanks for the heads-up, guys. :P

Was gonna do Epcot today after work, but the rainstorm made me decide to come home instead. Was also gonna do a drawing for Lilo and Stitch's 6th birthday today, but was too lazy and went to bed at 7 pm last night instead. XD And now I sit here sketching and watching Newsies. This movie doesn't get NEARLY enough love.

Splash is special this week. Yeeeah. Wednesday we opened 1.5 hours late, were down for an hour after a mid-day e-stop evac, and then went down for another half hour in the afternoon. Today we opened two hours late. *pats Splash on the head patronizingly* I think Frieda (the computer) hates us. :P Oh, well. :P Tomorrow and Sunday I'm in at 7:15. I haven't come in that early since training. I hope there's training groups, 'cause I don't know that I remember how to open tower or trackwalk. :P

I've done a lot of PAC this week, too. Day and night parade yesterday, day parade today, and I'll have day parade for the rest of the weekend. Yaaaay parade! I tried to play beach ball with kids yesterday afternoon, but there was a storm coming in (parade stepped off ten minutes early) and the wind kept blowing the ball away. :P I made up for it at night parade, though. We had an AWESOME beach ball game with a bunch of teenagers before the 11pm parade. :P

Oh, and DDCT today? Thanks for the epic pre-parade fail. You should probably start the music BEFORE the grand marshal performers are 50-100 yards down the parade route, so that we can, you know, know it's coming and get out of the way? Just a thought. :P

I was a good girl and finished my Indy drawing! I think I really biffed up his face, but I LOVED shading the horse. Uploaded to DA here!

I've got a Legend of Mythica one in mind next, because that show amazes me. (Video on YouTube starts here with the intro, check the "Related Videos" for the rest of the parts) Tokyo DisneySea, how are you so awesome?

And dammit, I got hooked on Ikariam now! I blame it joesmom92 and droops. So now I immediately check that in the morning, as well as my two Travian servers. :P

Oh, and I totally blame ariellen for spurring on my favorite new crack!pairing: Jack Sparrow/Giselle. Because it just brings the lulz. :P

And on the Wii front...
LEGO Star Wars Complete Saga: 85%
LEGO Indiana Jones Original Adventures: 72%

Happy hurricane season!

(Central Florida, BTW, you're doomed, as natural disasters seem to follow me.)

My sore throat never got better this week. In fact, it got worse. I could barely talk on Tuesday at work. (Trying to group at Splash using only hand gestures? LOLarity!) I didn't eat for about 72 hours because it hurt too much to swallow. Then whatever I had in my throat moved to my ear for a few days, and I battled vertigo. (which got REALLY bad whenever I was watching the logs go by. You know, like I have to do ALL DAMN DAY.) FINALLY I'm feeling better. A bit of dizziness now and then, but nothing unmanageable.

I think this is where I insert the famous "Hallelujah" chorus. Why? OMFG I ONLY HAVE FIVE DAYS NEXT WEEK. I CAN HAVE A LIFE AGAIN.

Wednesday night I might go to the Pirate and Princess Party, since it's the last one for the summer and I'm finally off. I need an excuse to wear my Giselle costume to MK! XD I just gotta run to Company D and get a ticket.

Did day PAC the last couple of days... I rolled for the first time ever today! For those who know the Disney parade routine, that's the person who walks behind the parade with the Big Ass Heavy Harness and actually physically rolls up the ropes along the street. I didn't lose my roll, and for that I am eternally grateful. :P (When you lose the roll, it's panic time for the managers, who them have to finish that entire section rolling it up on their arm and then sort it all out later. Plus it's really embarrassing.)

I finally get my yellow ID this week! Woo! Then I can stop feeling like a n00b! (Albeit one who was around when MK wasn't a CastZooming location and when Property Control was just a tent, but whatever!) And, you know, get health insurance and stuff. Bid information came out this week... they've hired so many new people lately that, on the full-time Frontierland Ops seniority list, I'm already #42 out of 88. Woo! Not even out of my 90 days yet, and I'm in the top 50%! ;)

King King got demolished in a fire this morning... that makes me sad, that's like a classic bit of Universal Studios right there.

And speaking of fire, on my way home last night, as I was going down 535 there was a HUGE plume of smoke (I could see it all the way from MK). Turns out there was a big brush fire in Hunter's Creek. It only made it to about 50 acres before it was contained, but the smoke was still hanging around this morning. While I was out setting up our FastPass area, the smell of smoke was REALLY thick. It more or less blew out by late morning but... ick.

I'm trying to get myself drawing more, so I've made a new "draw every day" rule. Too many ideas, too little time! (That Indiana Jones sketch is sitting next to me, half-colored...)

Lego Indiana Jones in TWO DAYS!