Oliver Twist Would Be Jealous

Food, Glorious Food

I have a confession to make.

Last week's post came Saturday evening, in which I elaborated on my love of food and gratuitous appetite. I told the story of all the delicious food I ate at the Whispering Canyon Cafe, from the cholesterol-soaked meat to the sugar-loaded milkshakes. But that was only the beginning.

Writing about all of that made me realize just how piggish I seemed, and it got me feeling pretty self-conscious. I decided to withhold the information that, on the morning of the day I published my last post, I had another sinfully large meal at a Disney restaurant. Francisco's friend from Texas, Lingo, was in town last weekend, so we celebrated with brunch at The Wave, a restaurant located in Disney's beautiful Contemporary Resort. They have a breakfast buffet there. A really, really big breakfast buffet.

It had all your basics: bacon, eggs, sausage, mixed fruit, croissants, muffins, and other assorted pastries. But it also had some less common and especially delicious foods, like biscuits and gravy, sweet potato pancakes, Mickey waffles, ham and cheese omelets, and - drum role please - bread pudding! I ate a little bit of half the foods, and a lot of the rest.

So yes, I decided to space out my stories of stuffing my face over two blog posts so that it wouldn't seem as bad. Sometimes you have to do petty things like that to make yourself feel better.

After brunch, we walked right over to the Magic Kingdom and spent all afternoon on attractions! It was a very rainy day, so the lines were pretty short. I think our longest wait was 20 minutes for Pirates, and that was only because it broke down for ten minutes right before we got on. I tried a few new attractions that I'd never seen before, like Country Bears, Hall of Presidents, and Swiss Family Treehouse.

We also stopped and met Cinderella, Aurora, Tinker Bell, and Rosetta. Unfortunately we all looked pretty bad in the pictures due to the rainy weather, but at least I can check them off my list! I'm slowly working my way through meeting every Disney princess... Hopefully I'll be able to finish by August!

Best of all, I rode Splash for the first time as a guest. That meant sitting in the front, throwing my arms in the air, and screaming shamelessly as we plunged down the mountain. (Meanwhile, Francisco and Lingo hid in the back row.) It was good to be back on that ride! Though if I'm being perfectly honest, Disneyland's Splash Mountain is more fun, and you get much wetter on it. Actually, it's hard to say exactly how wet I got because of the ride... The rain hit us pretty bad as we drifted through the open-air parts of the ride. But the way I saw it, a rainy day just meant we had nothing to lose by going on the ride!

Then, since last Saturday was Jongui's birthday but he was with family all weekend, Francisco and I took him out to another enormous buffet brunch just earlier this morning. This time we ate at Trail's End, which is a little place next to Bay Lake in Fort Wilderness. This one was even better (and cheaper) than the last, and it had all sorts of more unique foods, including biscuits topped with pulled pork and a poached egg, breakfast pizza, a mixture of guava and orange juice they call moonshine, and - even bigger drum roll than before, please - French toast bread pudding!

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

That last picture is the French toast bread pudding. I'm ashamed to admit that no, that was not my own plate full of bread pudding (I hope you're not too disappointed in me, Nathan!). I ate my third plate of food, with the bread pudding on it, before I remembered to photograph it; the picture I took is of the skillet at the buffet itself.

A Wild Walk

Well the winter walking league at ESPN that Atom and I participate in ended the Wednesday before last, so this week Atom took me to a different location this week so that we could still get in a few miles. Turns out there's a very quiet, picturesque biking/jogging trail that wraps from Wilderness Lodge to Fort Wilderness, passing through the more woodsy parts of the Disney World property. It was a beautiful walk, and we actually saw a bunch of wildlife, including a couple squirrels and six deer!

Maybe that type of thing is more common around here, but it was a big deal to me, since I come from the dessert. Most of the interesting wildlife in Arizona is too dangerous to admire from close-up, be it rattlesnakes or coyotes. So I stopped and took a couple pictures, though it's kinda hard to pick out the deer since they're in the shade.

On a related note, I'm going to the doctor this coming Wednesday to get my knees looked at. Remember how I mentioned at the beginning of my internship that they've been hurting whenever I run or do leg exercise? Well despite the fact that I haven't done any running, cycling, or leg workouts in almost three months, they haven't gotten better. In fact, they've gotten worse.

I'm looking forward to getting them looked at; hopefully it's nothing too serious, because I'd really like to be able to go on runs around here while the weather is still somewhat nice. It's getting awfully muggy awfully quick!

The Perks of Being a Cast Member

Let's be honest, I could devote an entire blog to this subject instead of merely one section of one post. This past Wednesday night my roommates and I got selected to participate in MyMagic+ testing for Splash Mountain; they needed a couple hundred cast members to volunteer their time from 10:30 pm to 1:30 am to ride the attraction over and over using magic bands so that they could be sure the pictures from the ride would sync properly to guests' magic bands.

You know me - a selfless saint who always gives what he can to the community through volunteer work. This opportunity was no exception: I volunteered to sacrifice myself at great personal cost for the benefit of Disney's MyMagic+ service, enduring four straight rounds of Splash Mountain on a temperate spring evening.

We showed up in the Hall of Presidents auditorium for a debriefing on how the testing would work. I was hoping they'd program the animatronic President Obama to give us the rundown, but instead it was just another cast member. He told us that the park would close at 11, and that after that we'd be led around the Electrical Light Parade to the entrance of Splash, where we could enter the attraction and begin testing.

The bad news was that we only actually had the attraction for testing from 11:30 to 12:30, and after each ride we had to exit and walk all the way back through the queue to enter again. Still, like I said, I got to ride it four times with literally no wait, and it was a ton of fun. I even took a video of myself on the big drop! Unfortunately, it refused to upload to the blog. So just imagine a young man joyfully screaming as his hair flies back and water splashes his face.

Then, on Friday, Rug messaged me at work to let me know that another intern in Engineering Services had set up a tour of the Monsters Inc. attraction that morning at 8:30. He invited me along, and after procuring Rawlings's permission, I headed up to the Monsters Laugh Floor to take a look at the how the show worked from backstage. It's more software/electrical stuff than mechanical, but I still found it very interesting.

Best of all, we got to meet some of the cast members who operate the show and do the voices of the interactive characters; we even got to watch them do a live show from the studio! It's pretty impressive the way the performers think on their feet and roll with whatever the audience gives them. We then finished up with one more live show, this time from the guests' perspective in the audience. I got chosen to participate in part of the interactivity of the show, so that was fun!

So by now I've seen close to half of the park's attractions from backstage. I feel extremely privileged to have glimpsed so much of the magic from such a unique perspective. This internship has been so much more than just a great engineering experience. These are memories I'll cherish for the rest of my life!

That being said, I got some more great engineering experience this week, too. Monday night, Rawlings and I did some ride testing (actual engineering tests, this time, not just riding the attraction) for some minor changes being made to Goofy's Barnstormer. We haven't done anything like it so far, so that was pretty interesting! And the design project I've been working on is also coming closer to being finished; I've made the engineering drawings for my design, so over the next couple weeks, Rawlings will check them and make suggestions or point out mistakes to be fixed. More really great learning experiences.

So yeah! It's been a good week. I'm looking forward to the climactic end of March Madness this weekend, as well as the Masters next weekend. I sure wish we got FSAZ out here in Florida so that I could watch the Dbacks' games, but maybe it's for the best that I can't watch them play: as of last night, they're 1-6 to start the season. The good news is, they can't get much worse! Unless they swap franchises with the Angels, of course.

Oh, and guess what came in the mail early last week? The magic bands that Hannah and I were supposed to have by the time she visited back in mid February! Turns out they'd arrived at the apartment's clubhouse just like they were supposed to, but the package had been shoved to the back of the pile, so every time I came to check if it had arrived, they told me they had no package for me. Kinda frustrating, but I since I thought they'd lost it entirely, I had Disney send us free replacements.

So, if anyone wants a magic band with my name on it, give me a call. It'll probably be worth a lot of money some day.