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Monorail Haiku

Yesterday I was collecting wheelchairs on express load as usual. When I do, I remove the yellow nametag from the back pouch and use the paper to fold up little origami flapping birds. It’s the only thing I know how to make. I made a few of them and as I finished, I put each one up on the fire box near greeter. Kids usually pick them up and play with them.

One was blown off by a gust of wind in front of a little girl and she picked it up off the floor. She walked along, showing it to her parents, and then threw it away in the trash can up near car 2. Nice, huh? I said to Glen, “There’s a poem in there somewhere.”

A few minutes later, he supplies this gem: (Glen, correct me if I got it wrong)

fallen to the floor
a girl picks me up—with hope
and throws me away

It’s funny just how appropriate that is.

I told him about when I worked at Speedway, how I would stand out at Bridge and write haiku. (There wasn’t much to do out there unless something broke down… and we had paper and pen for doing car counts). He fired off a few more. Hopefully he’ll post them as comments, I can’t remember them all. Here’s mine:

“stand clear of the doors”
it closes on their stroller
why are they surprised?

If I can find any of the old Speedway Haiku, I’ll post them here. They were originally put on ProteinSpill years ago but that database seems to have been lost in one of the moves.

Registered Users

Those of you who registered previously should be able to log in to this site now. Please give it a try and update your profile so I can verify that my mad coding skillz are still good.

It was actually pretty easy to map the fields over. Fortunately, both systems depend on MySQL to encrypt the passwords so I just copied the hash over. The annoying part is that WordPress doesn’t permit any of the fields to be NULL, so I had to insert spaces for columns like your AIM screenname. Makes more sense to me that if the field isn’t always going to hold real data, it should be NULL right?

So much for going to sleep

I stayed up a bit and got the site looking more the way I think I want it. I’ve been hacking stylesheets and templates as well as editing and categorizing old entries. Those of you who registered on the old site hang on. I’m gonna see if I can import your id and passwords. Later, like after I sleep a little.

Converting to WordPress

I’ve finally decided to dump Geeklog for this. It’s fast approaching 4am so I’m going to give up for now but at least I got all my stories posted. It’s going to be rather ugly here until I tweak the template a bit and re-migrate the photo gallery.

Candlelight

I finally got a chance *cough*cough* to go and see Candlelight at Epcot tonight. It was magical. John Stamos was there and he spoke to me.

It was fun going backstage before the show and hanging out with Maribeth. She got a bag lunch and we waited for check-in together. After she got her robe and whatnot, we saw Doug and Sharon and talked for a bit. An announcement was made for the cast choir to line up and I took off to get in line for the show.

The line was incredibly long… like all the way back to Italy. I waited in it anyway and they cut off the line when there were about 15 people ahead of me. Nuts! The show began and they were squeezing in people for the 6:45 but I decided to wait for the 8:15.

I got a fairly decent seat for a walk-in. I was as close as you can get and towards the center of the theater. Holding the camera still in the dark, without a flash or a tripod, with cold hands is a bit tricky. That’s why John Stamos’ pic is a bit blurry.

I’m far from religious but I enjoyed the show. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it in it’s entirety. Afterwards, we met up again, got coffee, and watched Illuminations with the Holiday Tag. That’s a pretty serious finale, even for Disney.

It was EMH that night so we took our time leaving. She priced a book at the American Adventure then we headed out. We slipped in to El Rio de Tiempo at Mexico and got our own boat. We left after that and I took her back to her car.

The traffic on The 4 and all Disney roads leading to it was awful. I had to drive the length of Buena Vista Drive and went home via Sherberth and Old Lake Wilson.

Slower Traffic Keep Right

That’s not really that hard of a concept to understand, is it? If you are moving at the same velocity as the cars around you and you are not in the right lane MOVE OVER. It doesn’t matter what the speed limit is.

That being said, on my way up to Switzerland I made good time. Coming back I did ok too, despite being boxed in by two motorcoaches and a floatilla of idiot car drivers on 95. I was finally able to punch through the crowd and get back up to speed just north of Daytona. Jerks.

Tekey had never ridden in this car before so she spent an hour and a half walking around, eating old french fries from under my seat, and making a smell map. Then she finally laid down.

When we got off of I-95 and turned west, sun broke through the clouds. Chihuahuas, you may know, will lay in a spot of sunshine the size of a quarter. She moved to the backseat. We turned into my mom’s neighborhood and Tekey came back up front to smell where we were. She always sniffs the air vents to navigate.

I pulled into my mom’s driveway and she ran out, smiling and crying, to greet me. She had no idea I was coming. Unfortunately it was the only gift I could give her. Some other family came over, I stayed for dinner, and headed back. Two hours up, two hours and twenty minutes back. Not bad.

I stopped by work on the way back to share a cupcake with MB and hang out a bit. Probably one of the better Christmas days I’ve had in a while.

Yay, it’s Christmas

So what. Heh. I’m not a big fan of the holidays lately. I’m more of a giver than a receiver (nobody can really afford what I want and working where I do I’m not able to do very much any more. Somehow I managed to get the day off so Tekey and I areheading out to surprise my mom with a visit.

I tried baking a loaf of bread to bring up but it came out… wet and dense. Yuck. I think I didn’t give the yeast a chance to warm up to room temp and maybe I should’ve put another spoonful of flour in there or something. I should watch it more closely in the first phase. Oh well.

Last night was a pretty serious exit. Fortunately we had The Caster Guy on the platform with us. We were slamming trains full of people and out of the station in about a minute. It went on for hours but it was a good time. We had drivers stuck in the train so long we started to give bathroom breaks. hehe

It smells like head!

I started off working at TTC tonight but managed to orchestrate a swap to get over to the kingdom for the last Very Merry. I’m going to miss going into the park for the fireworks and parade.

On my first break, I caught up with MB and gave her her gift. It was in a small box, a little bigger than a ring holder. I wrapped it in red paper with a red bow. Mary G. gave me the idea to drop to one knee as if I were about to propose. You should’ve seen the look on her face! Bwahaha!

Over at the kingdom I worked at audience control mostly. MB and I were horsing around down there and she snatched off my hat and put it on. She announces to me and several passing guests that “It smells like head.” MB then collapsed in a fit of laughter. “I hope you’re not gonna put that in your blog!” she says. Shyeah, right.

Holiday Wishes were the best tonight. We kept walking into the park to find a good spot and settled in the middle of Main St. near Center St. The wind blew bits of paper and cardboard fireworks fallout on and around us. Later on we went back into the park to watch the parade, then worked the exit.

I love nights where I don’t drive at all! I didn’t even do a complete lap around the system… I rode an express train to the MK, then rode a resort train back to base.

I gave Bonnie a ride home and we talked about school and stuff. Her gig at USF sounds really promising! I’m glad we became such good friends. I’m going to miss her when she goes home in a couple of weeks.

No news on Tracie yet. I’m supposed to meet up with her boyfriend Raul to pass him some mail and determine what I should be doing next. She has a car payment coming due soon and no known income.

I got another email from WAY BACK. Alex P. We were good friends 22 years ago in Center Moriches, NY. I remember doing crazy stuff with him… jumping makeshift ramps with our bikes, fishing, playing Atari games (I still have my Atari 2600!), setting a fire in the back of a Tonka truck in the woods from which we launched bottle rockets. Hard to believe I only knew him for two years.

It’s not an obstacle course

Maribeth and I were actually scheduled the same lunch last night so we didn’t have to lie, cheat or steal to go to the cafeteria together. That was nice. When we returned, we watched a couple climb over the security fence that divides the monorail exit from the express load ramp at the Magic Kingdom.

“Hey!” Maribeth yells, “I see ya runnin’!” They stopped on the ramp and looked at us. I waved for them to come down as we continue walking towards them. They turn, start back down the ramp and MB directs them over to me at the gate.

“Don’t be rude,” the guy says to Maribeth. “She’s rude,” he repeats to me. I ask them where they want to go and direct them up the resort ramp.

This guy climbs over our fence into a secured area (yeah I know that term is laughable, concerning MK security but still) and runs up express and we’re rude? I ignored him and remained polite as kind of a “good cop, bad cop” routine but I think he should’ve kept is friggin’ mouth shut. I wouldn’t climb over the fence at his home to take a shortcut.

I can’t believe Firefox just crashed!

I wrote out this lengthy blog entry, clicked Preview, and my browser crashed. Ugh! I wish geeklog automatically saved the crap you are working on like gmail. Anyway…

So like I said, I’ve run out of holiday cards. I’m thinking that if I can get my printer fixed in time I may just run off some corporate-style proteinspill.com cards for you extra folks. And who better to help me with the design than emily. She’s made a bunch of Santa-hat icons for folks on LiveJournal so I asked her to do one for me. Be sure and click on my name and tell me your mailing address if you want a holiday card!

Today happened to be the day of our department’s holiday meal. It was similar to the offering on Thanksgiving: turkey, ham, corn, mashed potatoes, a veggie pasta dish and a few desserts. Good stuff. I managed to make two passes at the buffet. On my second run, I sat with Maribeth in the cafeteria. She hadn’t started work yet.

whimmel manually saves a draft and then continues writing…

“I bid Magic Kingdom and you’re at BASE?!” She pounds on the table. I laughed. I bid over the phone and Shawn was less than helpful in finding shifts for me to choose at the time. Not his fault, just that it’s difficult to follow when you’re on speaker and everyone is talking about EXP06 vs. EXP07 and nobody really knows where the shift ends up or what the hours are exactly.

I waited in the hall for her but gave up and discovered she had already gone back to the kingdom. She called me trying to engineer a trade to join me at base. It didn’t work out. She kept bugging me to bump into a train so I could try her Rockstar Energy Drink.

If something tastes awful, and you describe it as such, why do you think anyone would want to taste it? Like, “Hey, I think the milk is sour–TASTE IT.” Uh, no thanks. heh.

My mom’s Christmas package arrived today. I was expecting the usual couple of giftcards and some treats for my dog. Inside were four wrapped packages for me, one for Tekey, two Christmas cards (one funny, one mushy. nice cards, but both empty. hehe) and an empty plastic bag. *shrug* I’m debating whether or not to wait to open this stuff. I could really use some new socks.