Professional Internships

Last Wednesday I received an email from Recruiting asking to set up an interview for a PI.  I set up the interview which took place Thursday.  I learned more about that job, and hung up the phone feeling nervous despite the phone conversation going just fine.

Friday I received another email from Recruiting asking me to fill out background check info.  I told them all about my previous life as a convicted felon and all the laws I've ever broken.  After reading and obsessing over others who have been accepted/denied, I knew this email meant they were getting ready to give me an offer.  Or, in very rare cases, change their mind and turn me down.

But this email came Friday.  Which meant I had all weekend to obsess over what was going to happen. 

Monday came and I missed a call from Disney because I was at work.  I proceeded to play telephone tag all day, obsessing even more.  My manager told me he had received a phone call from recruiting about me and that he put in a good word.  I was delighted, but could hardly even show how happy I was.  I think I was more in a state of bewilderment.  Plus, it's hard to talk with a stomach in your throat.

Monday night my roommate and I were watching a movie and my phone started ringing.  It was that magical phone call!  The one where they offered me a Professional Internship!  But... not the one that I had the second phone interview for...  Well, she informed me I was still in the running for that one.  But I was officially accepted to this one, and I had to accept within 48 hours online.

I went online Tuesday (yesterday) and accepted.  The pay is higher, the job is fun, and I'll get to work at Disney World!

Today, I was just getting over that excitement and continuing to look for apartments (mainly friends to get an apartment with) when my phone rang again.  This time, again, from Disney.  (I'm learning that anytime a "restricted" number calls my phone it's going to be awesomely amazing!)  The lady on the other end offered me the other Internship!

"I see here that you've already been accepted to this other one, but at this point you are allowed to change your mind and choose between them if you'd like.  I want you to know though, that this is extremely rare.  We only offer maybe ten interns two PIs each season, if that.  This is a very high honor that you're allowed to choose between two."  As she told me this I nearly started crying.

Even though she offered me a day to think about it, I went ahead and told her I would rather stay with the first.  For one thing, I'm not really into answering angry guest emails all day.  I'm kind of sick of working with guests, and will enjoy working more with cast.  For another, the Workforce internship pays more per hour.  And also, the apartment I'm looking at living in is closer to the Workforce internship office, whereas it's more like ten of fifteen from where the GC internship would have been.  Also, Workforce will take me more in the direction I want to go long term.  So it wasn't a really hard decision to make.

But really.  Oh my gosh!  I'm still reeling... I can't even believe it.  I am seriously.  So. Freaking.  LUCKY!

Words can't even describe my joy right now!

Maybe I'll get Ghirardelli tonight to celebrate!  Just as a test to see if chocolate can even make the happiest people in the world even happier!

Baby Sables!

I heard stories from the people I work with about when we got the addax a while back.  They said they just came to work and suddenly there were fact cards and the leaders basically just said, "Here's a new animal.  Memorize it and look for it."  Done.

Well, a few days ago they mentioned our "baby Sable Antelope" were coming out on show.  I didn't even know we had baby Sables.  I'd only ever seen the adult.. male I think.  Usually they put him over with the zebras, but once in a long while I'd spot him somewhere on West Savannah (out with the giraffes and Ankole cattle and such).

So yesterday was the magical day.  Their first day on show.  They put burlap all around the reserve to help protect them, just in case they got a little "lost."  And we got the little cards that had random Sable facts on them.  More Sable facts than the ones we had already memorized.

The only problem?  They didn't happen to warn us that baby Sable Antelope look absolutely nothing like adults. I mean, seriously.  Look:

So I was driving around and looked out, looking for a small group of Sables and instead saw two adults and several little reddish looking things.  I wanted to say, "What in the heck is that!?"  But of course, it's easy to figure out in that situation, since I knew every animal on the reserve except that one.  I'm just glad I didn't misidentify a squirrel or something as a baby sable.  The main thing I was worried about was that I didn't know how big the babies were, so I was scared I'd hit one.  But there were trucks parked all around the reserve both keeping an eye on the sables and keeping an eye on us drivers.  It all went well.

And I'm really excited for our newest addition! They really are adorable.

And in closing, something stupid I said on the safari yesterday (this could seriously be a daily thing here, stupid things I say).  This comment made my whole entire truck burst out laughing.  Soooo embarrassing: "The male lions of the pride are generally all females."

Meant to say, "The female lions of the pride are generally all sisters.(or at least closely related)"

Fourth of July

It was a fun weekend. But I'm too lazy to fully write about it. Basically, Disney World pretty much ruined all other fireworks for me. :) But the IF fireworks were still somewhat impressive I guess. I got a lot of homework done. It was nice having the apartment to myself!

I've been getting progressively more and more excited for school to end. Seriously, I don't even know what I'm gonna do Senior year if I'm already this psyched for school to be over. Not that I dislike school. I love friends and parties and weddings (oh my gosh, the weddings! ugh!) and learning and stuff, but really I have way more exciting things to look forward to.

First off school ends exactly two weeks from today. That in and of itself will be great! Two-ish days after that I'll be on my way home. We're driving. In a car. Across the country! 32 hours in a car. This is gonna be so much fun!

After that I'll get to be home for a few weeks! I can tell right now I'll be bored out of my mind, but my mom usually has a pretty long list of work for me to do. Plus I'll get to see the people in my home ward again!

Then we'll drive down to Florida. 12ish more hours in a car. Depending on how fast I drive. Heehee! I'll get to see my Grandma... maybe both my Grandmas. I haven't seen them in a while. Plus I'll get to see the new place my one grandma is living in. She's lived in the same house for like sixty years, so it's kind of a big deal that she moved.

Then I'll go down to Orlando. I'll get to see Kimmy who I haven't seen in a while (we may even be able to be roommates again! Long story....).

Then Heather and I will go on a five day cruise! That'll pretty much be the coolest thing ever. Especially since I've never really been on a cruise. At lease, not a real one!

Then Heather will leave and my other friend Laura will come. On the 18th Laura and I will check in to work at Disney World! I'll be in Main Entrance Ops and she'll be in Merch.

Now, if I can't be ridiculously excited about that, what can I be excited for?

LOVE It!!!!

You know that feeling when you're just so happy and excited you can't possibly wipe the smile off you face?

I freakin' LOVE that feeling!

What Have I Accomplished Today?

3 Things That I TOTALLY LOVE About My Computer Screen Looking Like This:

1. My totally favorite movie of all time in Spanish so not only is the movie amazing with awesome music, I can pretend I'm learning at the same time!!

2. Check out the top right corner. Note the temperature. AND THIS IS IDAHO! How freakin' great is that!? Spring begins Saturday!

3. This game... Not only am I about to win but it's leading up tooooooo.....



This screen:



Need a better look at the box? Here:



And then I sit back and think about the things I could have been doing. You know, like writing that 5-7 page paper due Tuesday. Or the 10 page paper due Thursday. Or the art project for Humanities. Or my brochure for Visual Media. Or my paper for my practicum class.

Yeah. That.

But hey, 100 wins at 100% perfectness! At least I'm good at something, right?

FHE Fire!

We had an awesome activity for FHE tonight. Kudos to whoever's idea it was. It was one of our sisters in another apartment.

Anyway, you start with several copies of The Scroll (school newspaper). And a few cigarette lighters. Catch the scroll on fire. Eat a mouthful of powdered sugar....



And then blow as hard as you can directly at the fire. It looks awesome in real life.



It's super hard to capture good pictures. I didn't take any, these were all taken by our FHE bros and I just stole them off of facebook.



Unfortunately, they didn't get a very good one of me. I did it three times. You have to blow quickly before your saliva and spit make the sugar too wet. I think I kind of spat it one of the times. Lame. This time actually looked cool, but they caught the picture just after the "explosion."



We even had people looking out their windows from other apartments to watch us. So cool. This is definitely something I'm gonna keep in mind for fun ways to hurt myself in the future!

Guitars Unplugged

I really wasn't planning on going tonight. Well I was, sort of.

Guitars Unplugged is a yearly/semesterly (not sure which) event. Basically, they get all the students in the school who are stinkin' awesome at playing guitar or have a band and said bands get to play on stage.

You have to pay to go see it. I had an FHE brother who was in it one year. He was inCREdible at guitar. No seriously, he could have been the best one up there. Tonight, I saw a kid from one of my classes who played. He was super duper amazing too. Sometimes it amazes me how talented some of the people at our school are.



Well, I've been to Guitars Unplugged before. I wasn't really planning on going tonight either. I didn't have friends who were going. I just went to hand out bracelets for our Student Safety Committee. People actually collect those silly rubbery bracelets people hand out all the time. I had people coming up to me asking for them and more for their friends. Funny...

Because I handed out bracelets they stamped my hand. So I got in for free. Something I was totally not expecting. So I stayed. For a little while. One of the guys got up to introduce his band.

"Hey there! We were going to dedicate this song to a special someone tonight.... but decided that might be too risky! So instead I'm dedicating it to all you people out there screaming!" And he began to play.

Guitars Unplugged is pretty cool with their effects. They had the lights and the smoke and the lasers. Partway through the song these white lights started going off all around the gym. "That's a cool effect. I didn't know we had that in our gym!"

Then I heard a noise. Sounded sort of like a buzzer, right in time with the music. "Wow, the buzzer and the lights go off together nicely. With the music. Nice! I didn't know they had such awesome effects."

And then I heard this woman in a formal looking outfit come through saying something about fire alarms in a panicked voice.

"Oh. Crap."

It took like two minutes for people to realize it was the fire alarms. All the lights and stereo equipment up front suddenly shut off. People were screaming, "KEEP PLAYING! SCREW THE ALARMS! KEEP PLAYING!!!!"

And then the loudspeaker system came on. "The fire alarms have gone off. We need to calmly evacuate the building. If everyone could calmly make their way to the nearest exit and--" Yeah, I didn't even hear the rest of that statement. When there's five thousand people in already energetic moods in one gigantic room with fire alarms going off, the word "calm" isn't even an option.

People weren't really freaking out or anything. No running or anything. We just all walked slowly out of the building saying to each other, "Well that sucks! Ruined a perfectly good song." But it was loud. Opposite of calm.

I have to say, I myself thought it may have been that "special someone" that the boys decided not to risk dedicating their song to tonight who pulled the alarm.

But it wasn't. Too much smoke got caught in some pipe. Five minutes later we were all back in our seats, excited as ever to continue the show. And the show went on.

And all was well with the world. The End.

The Tiniest Bit of Excitement on a Potentially Boring Day

Last night around ten I was chilling on my computer as my roommate went to bed (yeah, she goes to bed early, my roommates here are just way too mature). As I was listening to music on my computer I could hear a light tapping noise coming from our bedroom wall. I thought someone was tapping on the wall. As I took out my headphones I could hear that there were actually two tapping noises. And one sounded a lot like water was dripping.

I ignored it at first. I'm really good at tuning noises out when I don't want to hear them (pretty bad during class when the professor is discussing something important though). I got into PJs and did all my nightly routine stuff. As I went back into our room just about to climb up into my bunkbed, I heard the tapping noise again. It had been going on the whole time, but it just entered into my head again.

I was really curious what the noise was. I heard water. I knew our old apartment used to sound like water was running through the walls all the time. So I wasn't really worried about there being a problem, I was more just curious where this noise was coming from. First I asked my roommate. She said she heard the noise too and it had been going on for a while, but didn't know where it was coming from.

Finally I went into the hall. Just on the other side of our closet wall is our utilities closet. I opened the door and immediately knew where the water was coming from. The floor was covered in water, and more water was dripping from like five different places. I didn't even know where it was beginning. It was like every pipe in the whole closet was leaking.

I called my roommate and told her I was pretty sure it was raining inside our apartment. We both looked at it for a second, trying to figure out what to do. I mentioned getting a bowl, but as she pointed out, what good would that do? There was so much water on the floor already and it was dripping from so many places we'd need a lot of bowls.

We pulled the vacuum, mop, and other stuff out and then decided to go to our neighbors upstairs to see what was going on. We knocked on their door and explained what happened in our apartment and went to their utilities closet to figure it out. And of course you could hear the problem walking down the hall. As we opened the door we saw the cause. It was as if someone had turned a faucet on full blast from one of their pipes. Hard to explain, but it was a LOT of water.

We went to get the managers. It was about 10:30 at this point. The manger came and spent about three minutes in there fixing it, draining off water into a jug and doing other random stuff. I think they said it was the hot water heater... and something about freezing from the cold. I don't really know. The manager didn't really know either. But apparently the same thing had happened in another apartment. He said he'd have our maintenance guy come over first thing in the morning.

We went back downstairs.

Fortunately, our utilities closet has a drain in the floor so the water didn't spread much further.

Unfortunately, my side of the closet is the one that shares a wall with the utilities closet and so there was water all over the floor of my closet.

Fortunately, it was only my already dirty clothes that got wet.

We made sure the water had stopped leaking, *texted our other roommates, and then went to bed wide awake. Pretty fun final twenty minutes of the night.

*I think it's totally hilarious that my computer doesn't know the word "texting" or "texted" and is telling me I'm spelling it wrong. Just thought I'd throw that in there. :)

Anxiously Waiting

I have to admit, this is not nearly as exciting as it was last year.

I applied for the Disney College Program on Feb. 1st. The letter should be here any day starting today pretty much. The excitement is building. And yet, there's no way it could even begin to compare to last year's excitement.

I have to say though I'm pretty bummed that the mail here never comes until 4pm. I'll be checking it as soon as I get out of class this afternoon.

I sure hope the letter comes today, because I want to buy pizza to celebrate/cry and Pizza Hut has the $10 Tuesdays deal where you can get any large pizza any way you want it for just $10! (no, I was not paid for that sentence... but it'd be nice if I was)

Anyway, on a completely different subject, we shot a film on Monday. Well, I shot the film. The other three were actually in it. If I ever learn how to put videos up on my blog I'll show you it. Well, parts of it. We have quite a bit of editing. But I have a blooper that's pretty entertaining. More on that later... maybe. :)

Boggles My Mind

I have this slideshow on my computer that filters through my photos... or the few photos I've chosen to put on this new computer. And I just can't help but be amazed at how ridiculously lucky I am.

It never ceases to amaze me, the wonderful works that we humans can do.






























God's creations amaze me even more. If I had all of my pictures this would be better, but we all know what's in this world.








































And it boggles my mind even more that I get to be a part of it!