And what have I done? (Yes, that was corny. Shush and keep reading.) Well, we should really go back to Tuesday first. I was woken up at 9 by a call from my manager, asking me to come in for our assignor. Okay, 11 hour shift on about 5 hours of sleep. It actually went very smoothly. I was rather proud of myself. And - OHMYGODPUPPIES! Sorry. Christmas Day Parade. There are puppies on TV.
Wednesday I pretty much did nothing all day. I did go to EPCOT that night, though, to meet up with a family friend in possession of my shiny Christmas gift from my family. Yay!
Christmas Eve I worked 12-7 as a seater. Honestly, it was WEIRD. We were expecting to be bombarded with people all day like we were for Thanksgiving, but we took a ton of walk-ins at lunch, and dinner didn't get bad until time for me to leave, so I didn't really have to deal with it. I covered greeter for a while, and it kinda shocked me that I could've done a stupid dance in the middle of the promenade and not disturbed any traffic at all. But, as Sam (I think) had pointed out, EPCOT is a last resort park for a lot of people, when they realize how incredibly nuts Magic Kingdom is. So we had a pretty good day. Then I came home and had nothing to do. Jen was having a potluck, but that was all the way over at Patterson, and I had nothing to bring. Plus I'd taken chicken thighs out to thaw, so I had to cook those. As I started making those, Keiko was making sushi to bring to a friend's place, but she did cut up a roll for my Norwegian roommate (Marian? I'm not sure how to spell it because I've never seen her nametag, but that's how it's pronounced) and I to share. While my curry was in the oven, after Keiko had left, Marian decided she wanted pizza. So she put in an order to Domino's, and we had a bit of chicken curry as an appetizer. I turned the TV on, but there were surprisingly fewer Christmas specials on than I thought there would be. However, it WAS Thursday, which is Supernatural night, and they were airing the Christmas episode from season 3, so we watched that. We're both big fans. Then there wasn't much else on, so it was Phineas & Ferb and Hannah Montana for us. Eventually I went to bed, after clicking around online, upgrading to Windows 7 (YAY! Though I mourn the loss of my stock market desktop gadget), and opening one of my Christmas presents.
This morning I dragged my butt out of bed, put on my present from Ros (Yes, I wore it; no, I don't have pictures), and got out the stuff I'd been shipped so that I could skype with my family and open my presents. Thanks, everyone! After video calling my family, I turned on the TV to watch the DisneyParks Christmas Day Parade (SO wasn't missing that). And that's where I am now. Yay Celine Dion!
(The rest of this was written on the Feast of Fools. For those of you who don't speak Hunchback of Notre Dame, that's January 6th.)
Okay, so after the parade I finally got into the shower and grabbed my cookies to take to the contest at work. Yeah, we were having a cookie contest. I made white cake mix-based cookies with crushed candy cane and red and green m&ms. I won for taste! Yay me! Mel and Ali won for presentation, because Mel was crazy enough to make sugar cookies in the shape of ornaments, decorate them, and then stick them on a small tree. Like, actually. I rode to work in the back of Ali's car, holding the tree steady so that it didn't fall over on me. After that, Mel and I went to her place to cook Christmas dinner. She already had the turkey stuffed and in the oven, so we made a game plan for cook times and then stuck on Love Actually for a while. Then it was time to start the potatoes, which was a mildly grueling ordeal because those things just did not want to peel! Eventually we got them, though (okay, Mel got them and I was put on jell-o duty because I fail just that epically, but whatever), and we put them on the stove to boil. We got the Pilsbury biscuits ready to bake, took out the non-turkey-stuffed turkey (made without chicken stock so that our vegetarians could eat it!), and started the veggies (microwavable bags - surprisingly very good). We also put on the cranberry sauce that Craig had donated to Mel's cause (which he'd had around since Thanksgiving when nobody ate it). By this time, people had started to show up, but since dinner wasn't going to be ready for a little bit, Mel had set up a cookie decorating station on the coffee table for them. She still had a few undecorated cookies from her massive sugar cookie bake, and some icing, so they had fun with that. Eventually the bird was done and we transferred it creatively to the cutting boards on the counter so that we could start on the gravy (my specialty!). I taught her to make gravy, and then she got down to carving the turkey, Commons style. Which means we totally didn't have a long serrated knife at all so it was mostly done with a fork and table knife. She did an amazing job, though. All in all, it was a great turnout, great food, and good drinks (unless you were Craig, in which case you were drinking eggnog instead of sparkling grape juice). Cookies were for dessert, as well as little pumpkin tarts that Desiree had brought, and ice cream! Unfortunately (or just humourously, depending on how you look at it) the ice cream also had to be consumed Commons style. See, we'd used almost all the bowls and spoons earlier for serving dinner. So ice cream was served in cups, and you had your choice of measuring spoon sizes to eat with. Allison claimed the smallest one, so she got to eat hers with a 1/8 tsp. We sang a few Christmas songs - like, the pop ones. Not the traditional ones. Mariah Carey, which was followed by NSync, and then somehow morphed into Sister Act (not quite sure how the transition happened there). I helped clean up as people began to disperse, pulling the rest of the meat off the turkey and removing the wish bone for Mel, which was much easier said than done (speaking of, I should ask her what happened with that...). We sent a couple people out the door with garbage bags, began a load of dish towels, and then kinda collapsed. Eventually Ali and I, the last ones there, decided we should probably go home. About ten or fifteen minutes later we actually made it up off the couch.
Saturday and Sunday were nothing particularly fascinating. I was seater, the parks were nuts, we move on. Monday and Tuesday (I'd been asked to come in again) I was assignor, and still nothing particularly fascinating happened. I missed Celine Dion using our break trailer washroom twice, and Toby Keith decided not to grace us with his party of 16 because the only time we could fit them in was too close to his dinner reservations at Italy. Thank god. I've managed to avoid assigning for major celebrities so far, and I'd like to keep it that way. Too much craziness to deal with.
Wednesday was fun because earlier in the week (Sunday?) I'd found out that Mel's French roommate had left, and there was a bed free in her apartment. I'd applied, and on Wednesday the lady called me to ask how soon I could move. Thanks to being called in on Tuesday, I now had Saturday off, so I told her so and everything was approved. Yay!!!! Only afterwards did I realize that phone calls would become a lot more confusing now, especially when one of us picked up the phone ("Is this Mel?" "...Well, it's one of them.") or if people were talking to us while we were both in the living room (this was bad enough on Christmas). That night, Selina and I went to see Avatar, which was SO awesome! Such a great movie! I mean, okay, the plot was like some strange hybrid child of Pocahontas and Dinotopia, but in away that made it even more entertaining. In other news, Sigourney Weaver is totally looking her age. She also kinda looks like Carrie Fisher. Whatever.
Thursday was kinda sorta Hell on Earth. My family may recall me mentioning over and over how much I'd love to be here at Walt Disney World for Christmas and New Years. I would like to amend that now, particularly with regards to the 31st. On New Years, I would like to be at the geographical furthest possible point from Walt Disney World. It is SO many levels of insane! The people! It's just madness! Originally I was scheduled to open popcorn that day, but Kari wanted to trade shifts to have the evening off, so I jumped at the chance to be PM greeter. I mean, New Years kinda stopped being a big deal to me after I started staying up til midnight regularly. Plus it meant that my shift didn't start at 9:30 in the morning. I got up to remote podium to start my shift and just kinda stared at the freaky sea of people. Surprisingly, though, I don't think I turned away any more people than usual (which is still a lot, really). I think people must've figured we were crazy-booked. Which we were. Just before midnight we all got to run up to the promenade to watch the special New Years fireworks, which was BEYOND awesome. After the normal IllumiNations run, the voiceover comes up and talks about how different countries are in different time zones, so they rang in the new year at different times. They start with when Japan and China celebrated it, and then fireworks started going off right above the Japan pavilion, when those were done, China started. And so on and so forth, until just before midnight, when Canada, the US, and Mexico "all celebrate the New Year" (despite the fact that we have how many time zones over here?), when the ten second countdown began. So there's 88,000 people plus cast members gathered around World Showcase all shouting numbers together, and then everything goes nuts. Fireworks are EVERYWHERE. It was crazy. Gorgeous, but still something I'd like to avoid in the future.
Friday I was really tired, but I dragged my butt to work anyway for a popcorn floater shift. In the cold and rain. Yippee. I probably should have started packing that night, but I didn't. I left it all for Saturday, after I'd gone to housing at 9 in the morning to pick up my new key. Having been driven here rather than flying, I didn't have rolling suitcases I could load up a few times and cart back and forth. No, I had to load all my hoarded stuff (I really should consider being less of a packrat) into a few travel bags I'd picked up at throwouts (Thanks Chantal and Greg) and my boxes, and walk back and forth for a really long time. Between noon and 1, Mel got back from horseback riding at Fort Wilderness, so we borrowed Ali's car to make life easier. It still took two trips. After all I'd already carried. We're SO gonna need the van to bring me home. I'll miss all of my housemates there, because they were fantastic, but I like having a smaller apartment with less people. Plus my bathroom in this apartment is gargantuan. After about three times of me saying, "Okay, that's it. ...No, wait! I forgot!" we finally got me all moved in and I could start UNpacking. Which took a lot of the rest of the day. What I was really uber-happy about, though, was that I could finally hook my system up to the TV and play video games. Yay Final Fantasy! ...No, seriously. It'd been almost four months. I was going through withdrawal.
Since then I've pretty much just been working and chilling out at my cozy new place (and I love that this bed doesn't creak so loud I wake up every time my foot twitches). Sunday's movie night had a population total of four (me, Dan, Jeremy, and Heather), so the boys had ordered pizzas and we sat and watched a couple episodes of the British 'The Office.' Monday night's game was The Simpsons Scene It. Craig is officially the equivalent of Heather and I with the Disney version. Tuesday was Heather's (attractions Heather, with the musicals, not aforementioned Heather) last day off before her last day of work today, so she wanted to go see the Welcome show at the Magic Kingdom one last time. I love Heather dearly, plus I'd never seen the Welcome show (ever, actually, that I can recall), so this was a great idea! Key word: was. I didn't think it was so great when I was trying to take pictures and couldn't because my finger was too cold to put enough pressure on the button! We had an absolute blast, though. Heather and I bought tiaras from the glass and crystal place, and all the cast members called us princesses all day. Mother, stop rolling your eyes at me. I can hear your "Oh Lord" from here. We also managed to get into VIP seating for the 3 o'clock parade, which was awesome because all the characters face us the whole time (since we're on one side of a bridge and there's no one on the other side), and I was bowed to and kissed by so many characters! Heather and I were like five-year-olds. Eventually it was time to go, especially since Heather was practically hacking up a lung by this point.
Today was another day in Magic Kingdom with Jess, one of the newest arrivals. I'd trained her on greeter. She's fantastic. Anyway, other than briefly with her arrival group, she'd never been here before, so once again I got to play tour guide. And I'd made reservations at Tony's again. Have I mentioned that I love that place? Sadly, mint cheesecake was gone, but the new flavour was chocolate raspberry, which was also pretty good. Jess and I had so much fun! Lines were surprisingly long, though, considering these are supposed to be our deadest weeks. So we fastpassed some stuff, waited in line for the stuff that wasn't that bad, walked onto yet other rides. And we finished the day off with Wishes. I love Wishes. And yes, I had my tiara back on. Don't judge. It's sparkly.
So now I'm sitting here, kinda freezing in my pjs. I think I'm gonna go get my flannel blanket.
(The rest of this was written on the Feast of Fools. For those of you who don't speak Hunchback of Notre Dame, that's January 6th.)
Okay, so after the parade I finally got into the shower and grabbed my cookies to take to the contest at work. Yeah, we were having a cookie contest. I made white cake mix-based cookies with crushed candy cane and red and green m&ms. I won for taste! Yay me! Mel and Ali won for presentation, because Mel was crazy enough to make sugar cookies in the shape of ornaments, decorate them, and then stick them on a small tree. Like, actually. I rode to work in the back of Ali's car, holding the tree steady so that it didn't fall over on me. After that, Mel and I went to her place to cook Christmas dinner. She already had the turkey stuffed and in the oven, so we made a game plan for cook times and then stuck on Love Actually for a while. Then it was time to start the potatoes, which was a mildly grueling ordeal because those things just did not want to peel! Eventually we got them, though (okay, Mel got them and I was put on jell-o duty because I fail just that epically, but whatever), and we put them on the stove to boil. We got the Pilsbury biscuits ready to bake, took out the non-turkey-stuffed turkey (made without chicken stock so that our vegetarians could eat it!), and started the veggies (microwavable bags - surprisingly very good). We also put on the cranberry sauce that Craig had donated to Mel's cause (which he'd had around since Thanksgiving when nobody ate it). By this time, people had started to show up, but since dinner wasn't going to be ready for a little bit, Mel had set up a cookie decorating station on the coffee table for them. She still had a few undecorated cookies from her massive sugar cookie bake, and some icing, so they had fun with that. Eventually the bird was done and we transferred it creatively to the cutting boards on the counter so that we could start on the gravy (my specialty!). I taught her to make gravy, and then she got down to carving the turkey, Commons style. Which means we totally didn't have a long serrated knife at all so it was mostly done with a fork and table knife. She did an amazing job, though. All in all, it was a great turnout, great food, and good drinks (unless you were Craig, in which case you were drinking eggnog instead of sparkling grape juice). Cookies were for dessert, as well as little pumpkin tarts that Desiree had brought, and ice cream! Unfortunately (or just humourously, depending on how you look at it) the ice cream also had to be consumed Commons style. See, we'd used almost all the bowls and spoons earlier for serving dinner. So ice cream was served in cups, and you had your choice of measuring spoon sizes to eat with. Allison claimed the smallest one, so she got to eat hers with a 1/8 tsp. We sang a few Christmas songs - like, the pop ones. Not the traditional ones. Mariah Carey, which was followed by NSync, and then somehow morphed into Sister Act (not quite sure how the transition happened there). I helped clean up as people began to disperse, pulling the rest of the meat off the turkey and removing the wish bone for Mel, which was much easier said than done (speaking of, I should ask her what happened with that...). We sent a couple people out the door with garbage bags, began a load of dish towels, and then kinda collapsed. Eventually Ali and I, the last ones there, decided we should probably go home. About ten or fifteen minutes later we actually made it up off the couch.
Saturday and Sunday were nothing particularly fascinating. I was seater, the parks were nuts, we move on. Monday and Tuesday (I'd been asked to come in again) I was assignor, and still nothing particularly fascinating happened. I missed Celine Dion using our break trailer washroom twice, and Toby Keith decided not to grace us with his party of 16 because the only time we could fit them in was too close to his dinner reservations at Italy. Thank god. I've managed to avoid assigning for major celebrities so far, and I'd like to keep it that way. Too much craziness to deal with.
Wednesday was fun because earlier in the week (Sunday?) I'd found out that Mel's French roommate had left, and there was a bed free in her apartment. I'd applied, and on Wednesday the lady called me to ask how soon I could move. Thanks to being called in on Tuesday, I now had Saturday off, so I told her so and everything was approved. Yay!!!! Only afterwards did I realize that phone calls would become a lot more confusing now, especially when one of us picked up the phone ("Is this Mel?" "...Well, it's one of them.") or if people were talking to us while we were both in the living room (this was bad enough on Christmas). That night, Selina and I went to see Avatar, which was SO awesome! Such a great movie! I mean, okay, the plot was like some strange hybrid child of Pocahontas and Dinotopia, but in away that made it even more entertaining. In other news, Sigourney Weaver is totally looking her age. She also kinda looks like Carrie Fisher. Whatever.
Thursday was kinda sorta Hell on Earth. My family may recall me mentioning over and over how much I'd love to be here at Walt Disney World for Christmas and New Years. I would like to amend that now, particularly with regards to the 31st. On New Years, I would like to be at the geographical furthest possible point from Walt Disney World. It is SO many levels of insane! The people! It's just madness! Originally I was scheduled to open popcorn that day, but Kari wanted to trade shifts to have the evening off, so I jumped at the chance to be PM greeter. I mean, New Years kinda stopped being a big deal to me after I started staying up til midnight regularly. Plus it meant that my shift didn't start at 9:30 in the morning. I got up to remote podium to start my shift and just kinda stared at the freaky sea of people. Surprisingly, though, I don't think I turned away any more people than usual (which is still a lot, really). I think people must've figured we were crazy-booked. Which we were. Just before midnight we all got to run up to the promenade to watch the special New Years fireworks, which was BEYOND awesome. After the normal IllumiNations run, the voiceover comes up and talks about how different countries are in different time zones, so they rang in the new year at different times. They start with when Japan and China celebrated it, and then fireworks started going off right above the Japan pavilion, when those were done, China started. And so on and so forth, until just before midnight, when Canada, the US, and Mexico "all celebrate the New Year" (despite the fact that we have how many time zones over here?), when the ten second countdown began. So there's 88,000 people plus cast members gathered around World Showcase all shouting numbers together, and then everything goes nuts. Fireworks are EVERYWHERE. It was crazy. Gorgeous, but still something I'd like to avoid in the future.
Friday I was really tired, but I dragged my butt to work anyway for a popcorn floater shift. In the cold and rain. Yippee. I probably should have started packing that night, but I didn't. I left it all for Saturday, after I'd gone to housing at 9 in the morning to pick up my new key. Having been driven here rather than flying, I didn't have rolling suitcases I could load up a few times and cart back and forth. No, I had to load all my hoarded stuff (I really should consider being less of a packrat) into a few travel bags I'd picked up at throwouts (Thanks Chantal and Greg) and my boxes, and walk back and forth for a really long time. Between noon and 1, Mel got back from horseback riding at Fort Wilderness, so we borrowed Ali's car to make life easier. It still took two trips. After all I'd already carried. We're SO gonna need the van to bring me home. I'll miss all of my housemates there, because they were fantastic, but I like having a smaller apartment with less people. Plus my bathroom in this apartment is gargantuan. After about three times of me saying, "Okay, that's it. ...No, wait! I forgot!" we finally got me all moved in and I could start UNpacking. Which took a lot of the rest of the day. What I was really uber-happy about, though, was that I could finally hook my system up to the TV and play video games. Yay Final Fantasy! ...No, seriously. It'd been almost four months. I was going through withdrawal.
Since then I've pretty much just been working and chilling out at my cozy new place (and I love that this bed doesn't creak so loud I wake up every time my foot twitches). Sunday's movie night had a population total of four (me, Dan, Jeremy, and Heather), so the boys had ordered pizzas and we sat and watched a couple episodes of the British 'The Office.' Monday night's game was The Simpsons Scene It. Craig is officially the equivalent of Heather and I with the Disney version. Tuesday was Heather's (attractions Heather, with the musicals, not aforementioned Heather) last day off before her last day of work today, so she wanted to go see the Welcome show at the Magic Kingdom one last time. I love Heather dearly, plus I'd never seen the Welcome show (ever, actually, that I can recall), so this was a great idea! Key word: was. I didn't think it was so great when I was trying to take pictures and couldn't because my finger was too cold to put enough pressure on the button! We had an absolute blast, though. Heather and I bought tiaras from the glass and crystal place, and all the cast members called us princesses all day. Mother, stop rolling your eyes at me. I can hear your "Oh Lord" from here. We also managed to get into VIP seating for the 3 o'clock parade, which was awesome because all the characters face us the whole time (since we're on one side of a bridge and there's no one on the other side), and I was bowed to and kissed by so many characters! Heather and I were like five-year-olds. Eventually it was time to go, especially since Heather was practically hacking up a lung by this point.
Today was another day in Magic Kingdom with Jess, one of the newest arrivals. I'd trained her on greeter. She's fantastic. Anyway, other than briefly with her arrival group, she'd never been here before, so once again I got to play tour guide. And I'd made reservations at Tony's again. Have I mentioned that I love that place? Sadly, mint cheesecake was gone, but the new flavour was chocolate raspberry, which was also pretty good. Jess and I had so much fun! Lines were surprisingly long, though, considering these are supposed to be our deadest weeks. So we fastpassed some stuff, waited in line for the stuff that wasn't that bad, walked onto yet other rides. And we finished the day off with Wishes. I love Wishes. And yes, I had my tiara back on. Don't judge. It's sparkly.
So now I'm sitting here, kinda freezing in my pjs. I think I'm gonna go get my flannel blanket.
No comments:
Post a Comment