Ok, first off I’m going to say the past 24-48 hours have been craaaaazy. That’s why I’m blogging. I feel the need to explain what happened from when I went to bed Tuesday night until right now, sitting on the couch Thursday evening.
What is One More Day of Disney you may ask? Let me explain. See, every four years there’s this cool thing that happens called a Leap Year where February gets an extra day. Instead of 28 days, there were 29. “But Alaina, what does this have to do with Disney?” Hold up, I’m getting there. Disney feels the need to celebrate the awesomeness of this oddity and every Leap Year Minnie and Mickey wear their pajamas. Awesome. But this year, that wasn’t good enough, oh no! For the year 2012 it was determined by the powers that be that the Magic Kingdom would be open for a FULL 24 HOURS!! And it shall be called (Insert welling Disney music, fireworks, pixie dust, etc.) ONE MORE DAY OF DISNEY! Sweet, right?? Oh yeah! “Hold on a second,” you say. “Alaina, don’t you work in the Magic Kingdom?” On a normal day my answer would be “HECK YES I DO!” On the day I found out I was scheduled to work from midnight to six thirty A.M. my answer was more accurately something along the lines of emotional sobbing and nail biting. Honestly though, I didn’t react that badly. I’m just a bit sleep deprived right now, hence the extensive use of capital letters and internal dialogue with an imaginary person. However, I wasn’t terribly excited by the idea. Now we’re getting to the good part. What happened Tuesday night?
Well, Tuesday night came around and all of us ladies in the apartment kicked into high gear. We had our apartment inspection in the morning and we had heard all sorts of crazy things about it, not the least of which was that if you failed the inspection each person in the apartment would be charged $50 so a maid could come in to clean the place. Pretty good motivation for college kids, right? It worked. We didn’t know when the inspection was going to happen the next day, we just knew that apparently you would fail if you slept through the inspection (something like they can’t check a room if someone is sleeping and if they can’t check the room they automatically have to fail it) so we were all a little on edge. I decided to sleep as late as I could because of my crazy shift later on and if the inspection people showed up and knocked on the door to my room I would just roll out of bed and stand to the side while they checked. The inspectors didn’t actually end up showing up until around noon as I was headed to Ihop to meet up with some work friends for brunch, so I stuck around for a few minutes while they did the inspection and it turns out our efforts were rewarded! We were awarded the White Glove, for being extra clean and such. The really exciting part is that they give you a case of Ferrero Rocher chocolates for the apartment, so we were pretty excited. After that I went to Ihop where we had a lovely brunch and then a couple of the ladies who had to work later invited me to go to the parks with them to do some character hunting for pictures and autographs. I said sure, why not. So I headed back to the apartment to pick up my costume so I could put it in my work locker for later when I needed to clock in.
We got to the park around 2pm and it wasn’t really too crazy. I met Tigger and Pooh, and Minnie and Mickey. I have to admit I was actually more excited when I got to meet Peter Pan a little later, he was pretty cool. We wandered around the parks, went on Splash Mountain and the Haunted Mansion and generally people watched. It was pretty fun. Later when the ladies I was with had to go to work I ended up meeting up with Christa, one of my room mates who was in the park with a couple of her work friends. We rode Splash Mountain again then we went to wait in line so we could meet (wait for it) CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW. That’s right guys, I met Captain Jack Sparrow! Ok, so I was excited but there was this group of crazy (like, legit crazy) girls behind us who screamed and almost started passing out when he came outside. See, it was actually kind of a big deal because Captain Jack only does meet and greets a couple times a year for special occasions but still, not worth borderline crying over. It was really fun to get to meet him and get the autograph/picture thing done. After that, we were on a mission. A while back Magic Kingdom randomly decided that Flynn Rider wasn’t going to come out with Rapunzel for meet and greets anymore, but for the special One More Disney Day they were bringing back (before he comes back permanently on March 7th). We waited in line for 2 hours and when they came out it was crazy. The same group of girls who had been behind us when we met Captain Jack were there and were even closer to dying when Flynn came out. Then, he did the smolder. Look out world, I’m honestly surprised they didn’t have to call ambulances for these girls. You know the whole thing where girls would pass out at Elvis concerts and stuff like that? We were pretty close. Anyway, I was on a bit of a time crunch. By the time they came out it was 10:30 and I had to clock in at midnight so I only really had 45 minutes to wait in line before I had to leave to go change and walk to work. We got so close, so close! I was probably ten minutes away from meeting Flynn and Rapunzel when I had to go. Not my favorite way to start my work night, but Christa did get to meet them and they are her absolute favorites so I was really happy for her 🙂
When I clocked in at midnight things were starting to get a little crazy. At that point all the other parks had closed so all the College Program kids who work at the other parks started coming in. And some of them had been drinking. A lot. Honestly, the shift I had this morning is probably the fastest I’ve ever had until 4am when the mountain went down for routine maintenance. After that we had to stand out on the bridges in front of the attraction to let people know we weren’t running anymore. Then we just stood there until 6:30 and watched the sun start to rise over Cinderella’s Castle. I wish. We didn’t actually get to see the sun rise because it was so misty. When we got to the transfer spot for the bus it was packed, tons of people were just getting off work and a lot of people were just leaving the parks. Thankfully, a girl that I met at the very beginning of the program recognized me and said, “You live in Chatham, don’t you?” When I said that I did she offered me a ride home. Made. My. Night. Er, day. Maybe night. I don’t even know. Anyway, it was great that she did because then I got home around 7:30 instead of 9 like I would have if I had to wait for the bus. So I showered when I got home and just fell into bed and slept until noon. Then I got up, went to my Human Resource Management class (wooooo) and then came back to the apartment. I had a bit of homework to do so I went to the pool to read for a while and then I came back here. Now you’re all caught up.
There’s a lot more that happened, some interesting stories and just a lot of fun details that would take forever to describe. So, as always, if you want to hear more just let me know and I’ll tell you alllllllll about it 🙂
PS Drunk proposal count is up to 2! 
(For those of you who can’t read backwards the t-shirt says “I took the leap and didn’t sleep! I pulled an all nighter at the Magic Kingdom)
Your Daly Dose 