Merry Christmas!

This has been the best Christmas, probably in years.

It all started last night when my roommate and I baked gingerbread cookies.  And they came out perfectly.  All soft and chewy and all gingerbread-y.  So delicious!  Then we each opened a present.  My roommate bought me a little radio control Safari truck.  It's a little smaller than I'm used to driving, but will do nicely.

Excuse this picture, I literally just took it, since I decided I needed to put more pictures with my posts.

I was really excited for her to open hers.  I recruited my other roommate to go in with me and get her a nice tiara from Adventureland.  One of the really nice, legit looking ones.  I'm pretty sure she almost fell asleep with it on!  Hers was the present I was most excited to give! 

Then I had to be at work bright and early this morning.  As I opened the front door, one of my friends had left a wrapped present for me just outside on our doorstep.  A small stuffed Piglet, my favorite character!  So incredibly "thotful!"

When I got to work I got Departure 2, which is my favorite land to have.  I loaded people on the trucks all morning.  I was hilarious because it was so slow nobody was going anywhere I asked them to.  "Party of three?  Row eight please."  Pause... watch them walk... "Orrrr, you could have two of you go to row five and one in row six.  That works too..." So funny.

Then, my first truck of the day I had the best family in the front row.  There are some safaris where you just seem to click with the guests.  They all love me, and I just love them.  I love safaris like that!  They are always so much fun, and what a great way to start off Christmas day!  And the family in the front row just made the whole safari that much more fun.

We had a pot luck at my location so on my break I got to pig out on the best green bean casserole I've ever had.  Also, someone made some incredible mac and cheese, and we had lots of turkey.  My friend also made a Jewish dish called "noodle pudding."  It was good, for a change (*wink wink* Dad).  I'm glad that I tried it!

I got off at the same time as my friend, Allie.  On our way home we made plans to go to Downtown Disney (DTD).  She actually wanted to brave MK, but I talked her out of it.  We went to Earl of Sandwich and got their Thanksgiving Sandwich which is stuffing, turkey, cranberry sauce, gravy, and such on a sandwich.  Best sandwich ever!  And only five bucks!

Even though DTD is less than ten minutes away, it took over thirty to get home for the traffic.  Ten minutes was spent at the same stoplight waiting for it to change three times before we could get through.  Cuh-razy!

I opened the rest of my presents and they were so awesome, plus all the Christmas cards and such from friends.

What made this Christmas better than any other I've had in recent years, is that today I'm reminded of the amazing friends that I have, and how much I am loved.  And with knowledge like that, not much else is needed in life.  I'm grateful for loving family, lots of friends who think about me, incredible co-workers, a fun job, strong beliefs, plans for my future, a safe place to live, a good education, and a working body and mind.  I love my life.  I love December.  I love Christmas.  I LOVE it!  Not much could make me happier.

Oh wait.  Christmas music.  Yep, that just made me happier!  I didn't think that was possible...

This has truly been one of the most Merry of all Merry Christmases I've had in recent years!  Thanks to all who made it great, and to all, a good night!

Christmas Day Photos!

They gave us these rice crispy snowmen at the bus stop. They tasted horrible, but they look cute and hey, it showed they appreciate us lowly CPs just a little!



I woke up reeeeeaaally early before work to go to my friends apartment to open presents! This is their Charlie Brown Christmas tree with all their present under it. Our tree was bigger, but we had about one quarter of the gifts.



We went around in a circle opening our gifts one at a time. Jenna and I were the first to run out, but it was fun watching everyone get their presents!

This is Cami getting her pirate presents!



Jenna and her super cute footy pajamas. (Okay, so they didn't actually have footies, but I have no other word for these! LOVE them! lol)



Katelin and her car ride certificates... she wanted a car so a coupon for a ride when she gets back home is at least a little close.



Emily and her princess hat.



Kelly and her bling-a-licious purse!



And the only picture I have of me is after opening the book that Cami gave me. Thanks Cami! (But also thanks to Mom who also gave me some Christmas gifts! THANK YOU! And sorry I don't have photos of me opening them!)



Less than a year til NEXT Christmas!!!

Thanksgiving Day!

We have new Park Greeter costumes that took place on Tuesday. Tonight will be my first greeter shift wearing the new costume. I like the new costumes way better. Not because they look any better, but because they fit better and the nametag spot is better. I love how Disney is literally always improving and becoming better. Pictures soon!

Oh, and I didn't forget! HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!! I'm sure your Thanksgiving is going better than mine. Not that mine is bad... it's just not very Holiday-ee. I slept in because I didn't get home until midnight last night and then I had to stay up and watch "I Shouldn't Be Alive" because a new episode came out last night. So I didn't wake up until noon! All my roommates had already gone to work for the day by then. So I woke up, watched a bit of TV, talked to my mom, cleaned the kitchen, cleaned my room, took out the trash (okay, well it's bagged and sitting on the floor ready for me to take out as soon as I'm willing to show myself to the world), and, most importantly...



Put up the Christmas tree!!!!

I have to work at 7:45 tonight (until 2:15am yuck!). This means I'm closing greeter. Most of the people I work with hate greeter but I'm actually okay with it. I mean, I kind of prefer PAC, but greeter is a good change. I'm just gonna laze around for the rest of today and maybe go to work early to start shopping for Christmas presents! Our 50% kicked in yesterday!

Flag Retreat

And did I mention I LOVE my job?







More to come later about this little ball of holiday goodness...

Last Week of Disney

These are pretty random because it's hard to put pics up on blogger. But all of these pictures were taken pretty much from Christmas Eve on. Fun times!

Driving home from church one day the traffic was totally unbelievable. Around Christmas in Orlando it's ridiculous. So after we were stopped on the road for a few minutes I thought, "Hey, as long as I'm in park and no one's moving... why not save a memory?"



I held an alligator. Not this one. But one exactly like it named Popeye. I never put the story up here... but it was freakin' AWESOME!!!



It's awesome at night after all the guests are gone, but the water show goes on always. So I get to stand there in the solitude watching the show and hearing the music blast! It's so cool! Well, I mean not total solitude, but it's pretty close!



Our cute little tree with our stockings. No chimney. But I'd say we decorated pretty darn well! The stockings were hung a little weird cuz my friends were freaked out we'd get in trouble if we poked holes in the walls. So they only used pre-existing holes. So funny!



I memorized every single country's flag!



As I left work that night (New Years morning... around 2am) I went to catch the bus home.



Check out this line!!! Here you see busses one and two. I was on the fourth one. It was insane! You can see the hats they gave us and we also got free food! It was a fantastic last night!





Kelly and I in the Land. We took a picture of ourselves...



And then we realized we were both wearing the same shirt! Dang, great minds think alike!



Me, Jean and Alyssa. Our.. well... at least my... final night at Image!



Me, Jean, Alyssa, and Marina. As we were walking across the park Jean was really into taking photos and for some we used my camera. I think it's so cute how Jean got Alyssa to do the peace sign. I think she thinks we think (follow that?) that's super cool or something. So funny! All the Asian kids do that in their photos. Jeans doing it in the previous one.



Me, Jean and Alyssa. In case you're wondering why Marina kept getting left out it's because she was one of the new kids who we still didn't know very well. We hadn't really bonded with her (although I think she's awesome! The more I got to know her the more I liked her) and she just offered to take the pictures. I felt bad so I made her be in the one before this one.



I drew this pic of Donald Duck!! I did!!! Really! And I was really excited about it too, until I looked at the 8 year old girl sitting next to me who totally showed me up. Lame....



Ahhh EPCOT. How I love you!!



The Living Seas. One of my three places in my location. Actually, I guess it's "The Seas with Nemo and Friends" now. This is the entrance to the ride. I only worked in the shop.



Kelly and I took pictures in the aquarium. It is so beautiful. I love it!






The Land. Another of my locations.



We put these signs up. People would come up to us, "Are you really out of tickets? What about us. We really wanted to go on this ride! It'll totally ruin our whole vacation if we don't get fastpasses." Yeah, sorry. You can still go on the ride. But in this case it was a three hours wait. Yeah, popular.



Figment. My main area of expertise. If you could call it that.



I found him.



My 3D glasses in Honey I Shrunk the Audience.





Kelly at work in HS with her light saber. You SELL that thing girl!!



Spectacle of the Dancing lights in Hollywood Studios Christmas Eve. This show is awesome. And you can wear 3D glasses that are supposed to make it better (we didn't really see a huge difference but... ya know...)



Kelly and Lis



My room. Day of packing, packing and more packing. Glad my roommate was gone.



My friend thought it would be cool to get a shot of me throwing my hat up in front of the castle. Except it was night. And this was the best shot we ended up with. When we got it, we had already been trying for so long we just said, "Eh, good enough." and gave up. Still, it works okay. You can kind o f see the hat barely in the frame on top.



On the plane ride back to Idaho I figured this little thing out. Here's how it's supposed to start (getting it into start position is hard enough!)



And pretty much two steps later you're here and ready for the final step.



Yep. Only three steps pretty much to solve. Lame right? It's actually really fun to play with though!

Merry Christmas

It's very wet outside. I woke up at 7am to drive my roommate to the airport. She's going home today. Something I'm extremely jealous of.

She got directions to the airport avoiding all toll roads. There were several turns and small roads and stuff and it was all foreign to me. Oh, and it was raining ridiculously hard. I don't know if I've ever skidded so much in my life (don't read that part, dad) But, we didn't have to deal with the tolls.

On the way home I gave it up and just took the toll road. I didn't want to be trying to figure out the paper directions while driving through ridiculous rain and fortunately I live right beside a popular tourist attraction so really all I had to do was follow the signs to Disney World. One of the toll ladies (apparently you have to pay every couple miles on a toll road... yuck!) even let me go by for free. "Merry Christmas" she told me. :) It took me about 45 minutes to get to the airport and around 15 to get back. Toll roads are pretty nice!

I got home expecting to go back to bed but instead I'm not as tired as I thought I'd be. I have the apartment to myself so I'm just relaxing, watching tv, and being sad that this is my first Christmas morning in my whole life that I'm not happily opening presents with my family. No family. No friends. No gingerbread houses with mom. No snow. (It's actually almost warm outside) No presents. No tree. No stockings (well, the tree and stockings are downstairs). No joy.

Okay so actually there is joy. I have great friends here. I've gotten to listen to all the Christmas music I want to. I know my family is only a phone call away. Oh, and I'm the luckiest kid in the world in that happiest place on earth. Teehee! :)

So just so this isn't a totally depressing post I'll add some happy stuff! I've had the last two days off and I don't work until 7:45 tonight. Last night I went to Hollywood and saw the Osbourne dancing lights show. Pretty cool. They were handing Christmas cookies out at the bus stop last night! We also watched the movie "The Santa Claus" last night. Good movie. Possibly my favorite Christmas movie.

Anyway, only a week left. Wow. I can't even believe it. We were looking at pictures of our program last night and I just couldn't believe how wonderful this semester has been. I love it here and I know I'm gonna miss it like crazy when I leave. But also for now I'm excited to go back to college.

Merry Christmas!!

Picture Overload

Here's those photos I promised... These are from random days in the parks. Near the end they're all from the Christmas party, but other than that it's mostly random. Enjoy!

Apparently I missed the memo to be making that hand sign. Ah well....



We went to go to the Crystal Palace a while ago. But we got there really early for our reservation. So we decided to go on Thunder Mountain Railroad. Right before we got on the ride, Janessa grabbed my camera. I asked her what she was going to do with it and she just said, "You'll see." She held it in the air the whole entire ride! It's a good thing I trust her. She got some awesome photos!
















Heather and I and Pooh.



Heather likes Eeyore. Actually, she just likes everything.




I just like Piglet!



Sorcerer Mickey awesome. To be honest Im' not really into character meet and greets but if I'm living at Disney World I have to put a few in.



And then Mickey made me kiss him. Do you see the red in my face? Ugh.



It's a joke at Disney World that everyone learns from the trams how to say "Please stand clear of the doors" in Spanish. Wanna learn? It's right here!



This is at Hollywood Studios. They have this kid thing where kids actually get to fight Darth Vader. It's adorable to watch! I just had to blog about it!



For Halloween I dressed up as a twenty year old college student. See, I'm really only nineteen. It was funny cuz as we stood in line for candy moms of little monsters and princesses would look at us and say, "Oh, this is the candy line! You can go around us if you want. We're just waiting for the candy." We just responded with, "We're waiting for candy too." Teehee, I like candy! (Actually the majority of it was candy I don't like and I ended up giving almost all of it away)



I just really really like this picture.



End (or at least close to the end) of Illuminations: Reflections of Earth.



I think Heather's been wanting to do this for a while, but as we were driving on to property one day we decided to stop and get pictures in front of the sign.






On the metro on the way into Magic Kingdom for the Christmas Party. Except the monorail stopped and s at idle on the tracks for like ten minutes. Ugh, we got bored. But we took pictures!







My first decent view of the l it up castle. What a freakin' awesome sight! (Be prepared, many more castle pics will be down farther below!)



The awesome castle and my awesomER Santa hat!



Unfortunately, shortly after we got there, it started raining. LAME! So we went to seek shelter. Where else is better than a place that gives us free cookies and hot chocolate!?

I try to get a good picture of Heather and I and just look at what she does!



I love me some hot chocolate!



The rain only got worse though. A bunch of character spots w ere canceled as well as some shows. Sad! So we went to a dance party at Ariel's Grotto. The stepmother and stepsisters from Cinderella were there.

The stepmother came over to me and actually freaked me out a bit so I went to take a step back and basically stepped on Heather. The stepmother saw me and came right over to me and said, "You are not dancing. I was to see some moves." in her "stepmother" way. I chuckled and started dancing. Later we did this song "A Pizza Hut, a Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut, McDonald's, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut" and you have to do the moves with the restaurant and it gets faster and faster. The stepmother came over to me again as that song was playing and I was attempting to keep up with the music. As she approached me I told her, "Hey! See? I'm dancing! Happy?" She came up to me and said, "Ohh, so you know this song do you. All right then, let's see it!" I tried to dance, obviously failing since I've only heard the song like twice in my life. She watched me for a few seconds as I laughed and "danced" and then said, "I do not approve," And walked off with her nose in the air. Shoot, good thing I don't have a stepmother.




It was funny though because when the "Cha Cha Slide" was playing there's a part in the song where it tells you to go down to the floor. As everyone went down, the stepmother remained standing and directed everyone else to stay down pushing her hands down at us and stuff. Sooo funny!



Pretty castle!



Just a little taste of how crowded the Cosmic Rays dance party was. Probably because it was raining.



The fireworks show was awesome. All kinds of Christmas songs and the fireworks were literally all around us and the castle kept changing colors and it was just awesome!








































This was my attempt at getting a shot of the finale of the fireworks show. 'Nuff said. :)



After the fireworks we hung around for a bit because we were hoping the show would start right after (actually, it was scheduled to start ten minutes after).



During that entire ten minutes this crew of tons of people came out and started squeegying (sp?) the stage area off. They worked fast and did a magnificent job. We even applauded.



We got bored of staring at them though so we took a few picture of ourselves. Then the sad announcement came on...



Sorry, no show. It was canceled just like the other one earlier due to rain. "But get your cameras out for this 'unique' photographic experience! All the characters from the show came out with a sign...



They shot some fireworks...



And then left... Can you spell "depressing?" Ah well.




After our attempt at watching the show in front of the castle we went down Main Street to watch the parade. I didn't really get a picture of it, but it was snowing! On Main Street! In Florida!! LOVED it.


I just love Heather's excitement at this stuff. She's the only one of us who had seen the parade already but was possibly more excited than both of us for it to come. So funny!




Mickey and Minnie started off the parade beautifully. But they moved around so much it was hard to get a decent picture. Actually, everyone moved around too much to get a decent picture. At least... that's my excuse!



I love Winnie the Pooh!










Chip and Dale are just so stinkin' amazing!



Who else but Santa Claus is going to end the Christmas Parade?




I just can't get enough pictures of the castle lit up at night.




Right after the parade we looked down Main Street and saw that the show had started up again, so we quickly ran down the street to see the end of it. We actually caught a decent sized chunk of it! It was cute, but I still wish we'd have seen the whole entire thing from our old spots!










As we were leaving the park we just had to say goodbye to Piglet and Tigger!