Christmas Eve

Last night was Christmas Eve and I had dinner at Rothy's apartment, where she and her boyfriend made apple avocado salad, chili, and latkes and AM shucked a plate of oysters and seven of us polished off six bottles of wine in descending price order.

youth in brooklyn

On Saturday night on my way to a gathering in Williamsburg I listened to two girls gossip on the L train about which friends one of their alleged man friends had slept with and who hated whom. I got off the train and as I was walking to the bar I listened to a couple walking behind me where the girl was confronting the guy about his drinking problem and inability to know when to stop. Once I arrived at my destination, the hostess told me I was actually looking for the bar next door. I went in and bought a drink and after talking to the bartender he told me I was actually looking for the bar next door. I swallowed the drink in a single gulp and went back to the first bar and found my school friends on my own this time, and then stayed there gallivanting until 3:30am or so before taxiing back to Bushwick. 

good night world

< 3

sleep in a wigwam

I just discovered the existence of the WigWam Motel, a chain of motels built in the US in the 1930s and 40s. They're clearly the inspiration for the Cozy Cone Motel in Carsland in DCA. There are still two locations in Arizona and California and I'm adding sleeping in a wigwam to my to-do list.

i woke up at 4 am in a panic about my life and lied awake for at least an hour completely manic

taylor splitter

on my last day of work for the season i set up an hdmi splitter for the first time so i can play taylor on two screens a once in the workshop

driving flying driving relocation

Yesterday I packed up all my things yet again and moved to Windermere, where I'll be living in a bachelor pad with two dudes come January. I moved to Florida with one suitcase and one carry-on and somehow my possessions were fruitful and multiplied into a carload of crap.

As a person who is fairly resistant to change, it feels strange and somewhat mournful to think about how I've moved ten times since graduating from undergrad in 2010:
08/2010 Pudong / Shanghai
11/2010 Normandie Ave / Los Angeles
09/2011 Bach Way / Cerritos
02/2012 South Point View / Los Angeles
04/2012 West View Street / Los Angeles
09/2012 Butler Street / Brooklyn
10/2012 Thames Street / Brooklyn
09/2013 Willoughby Avenue / Brooklyn
08/2014 Cropping Street / Winter Garden
12/2014 Overstreet Road / Windermere

In the afternoon I looked at the Christmas trees and gingerbread houses on display in different hotels around the resort and then hopped on a flight to New York for the holidays. Upon landing, New York was almost instantly more interesting than Florida. My taxi driver from JFK told me about how he came from Dubai when he was young for school, but ended up dropping out and drove taxis. He told his father that he was in America getting his PhD and used a combination of the money he'd made along with the money his father was giving him for tuition and bought two taxi medallions. After years of working he ended up going home to Dubai where his 53-person family lives in one house. Now he's back in New York for just two months, spent $5,000 to rent an apartment in Flushing, so he can sell the two taxi medallions for a huge profit and then go back to Dubai. He said also that he speaks 5 languages, has been to 49 countries, and has a house in San Diego. He dropped me off at my apartment at midnight and I abandoned my suitcase and walked two blocks to Rothy's 27th birthday party at Tandem. Now I'm on my couch, nursing my waning hangover.

Fall 2014

Tonight we ended the internship season with emotional goodbyes.

Bowie

My mentor's beloved cat-child has gone missing and last night we drove through the neighborhood from 11pm to 1am looking for him. The car played an audio loop of my mentor's wife calling the cat's name and shaking his favorite bag of treats. In the dark we saw a raccoon, opossum, bunnies, someone else's cat, and even a gator - my first wild gator - peeking its head out of the water in one of our thousands of ponds and glinting its eye under the beam of our flashlight. We saw all the animals but the one we wanted to find most.

Gather near to us

Tonight Mofitz and I were invited up by the piano player at the Rose and Crown at the UK in Epcot to sing Christmas carols in front of the entire bar. We sang The Christmas Song and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. I'm no Judy G but I really enjoyed crooning to my captive audience.

Babbys

This morning I was up at 6 and at magic kingdom at 7am to attend the Christmas parade filming, but hilariously apparently the portion being filmed today was not the part with the parade or Neil Patrick Harris or even the Ariana Grande performance, it was the opening number with 300 little girls dancing around in a circle in front of the castle and everyone was supremely pissed to have gotten up so early for it.

Speaking of little humans, in the afternoon I went to Animal Kingdom and visited the gorilla exhibit, where there was a near-stampede to see the mama and her baby gorilla. Everyone was pushing and shoving and I thought it was quite funny how we were all fighting while surrounded by an endless number of human babies who all look basically the same as the baby gorilla. By the way, that was my last task on the intern challenge so as of today I have ridden all the rides and seen all the shows in Disney World.

orion

i was up at 4am this morning so i could leave the house at 430am so francus could drive evilbetty and me to cape canaveral so we could all watch the orion launch at 7:05am. there were tons and tons of people out pulled over by the side of the road, armed with their big fancy cameras and ready for a big rumbling space show. we stood deep in wild grasses by the shore and were surrounded by spiders and the droppings of an animal unknown and we waited and waited but the launch was delayed for wind issues and then delayed for mechanical issues and delayed for almost three hours until the flight window officially closed and everyone felt dejected and got back into their cars. while we were stuck in heavy traffic heading back inland i noticed a number of ospreys in the air and remembered the animal report i did on them in elementary school. they're going to try to launch again tomorrow morning but i don't think i can get up that early again because all day my eyes and head have felt swollen from lack of rest.  

Leaving the falcon nest

Back in my bed in winter garden, dreaming feverishly of not sharing a room ever again after the end of next week

Red-eyed baby

I'm in the Orlando airport, fresh off of one of the worst flights in recent history. It was a four-hour red-eye that landed at 5:20am, which feels actually like 2:30am when you've been staying on the west coast, from which I would have to go straight to work, and a baby cried blood-curdling screams the entire way. For my only for hours I had blurry visions of violence in my head and could not imagine what kind of person would bring a baby on a red-eye.

tornado evac

After much dedication and walking, as of yesterday i have completed all 45 of the shows and attractions in magic kingdom and have 6 things left to do in the rest of the parks. i was going to go to the indiana jones stunt show to finish hollywood studios today but cotton and i were foiled by the all-day rain. In fact, today was my first tornado evacuation. in the morning we all had to leave the office and go downstairs and sit in the auditorium on the first floor until we were deemed safe to go back upstairs. i kind of wanted something dramatic to happen but it never did.

right now it's raining so hard it sounds like fake rain and it's a little disconcerting. it sounds like when the storm hits at the end of the enchanted tiki room show. i'm in my co-intern yzma's home because she is taking me to the airport in the morning so i can catch my 6:30am flight out to la for thanksgiving yay yay. tonight i had dinner with her family; her ma is a physics professor at a big college here and her pa is a funny man who watches frozen almost every night and knows all of the words. their family is iraqi and we ate a really beautiful mound of vegetables (grape leaves, cabbages, onions) stuffed with rice. maybe this says something about florida but i feel very comfortable in their home because it somehow feels very immigrant. Best of all, tonight, and for the next four nights, I won't be sharing a room with anybody! It's going to be so wonderful.

Also, my cousin called my this evening and asked me to be one of her bridesmaids in Texas next august. I really looked up to her when I was younger but we haven't spent much time together as grown ups so I am very honored to have been selected and despite having felt a lot of bitterness recently about the swarm of engagements and weddings kind of can't wait take this role. 

useless child

i think this is proof that i'm not a grown-up yet

miss manners

my newest tirade is against the way everyone is on their goddamn cell phones all the time. i feel like i can't have a conversation with anyone here who isn't simultaneously texting. the texting, dear god, the texting is ruthless. i try to coach my cohorts on the merits of living in the here and now but i feel like i'm truly standing on the wrong side of a generational divide whose line of demarcation isn't necessarily dictated by age but by some bewildering mismatch of social graces. i'm standing in lines with people who would rather talk to people who aren't there. i'm at dinner with faceless bodies. i'm conversing with myself and statues with motorized fingers who don't even register that i'm squawking noises. everybody's face is glowing with their own boredom with the world. of late, all i want to do is snatch everyone's phones and hurl them into the ocean, including my own. i feel like the lone conscious witness to something horrible that's happening.  

lazybones

is it too late for me to learn how to do a cartwheel?

Iaapa

IAAPA is the convention where anyone who makes anything for theme parks or entertainment locations comes to sell their wares, from snacks to roller coasters to water fountains to arcade games. Cotton and I went to the convention center this afternoon and walked around for 4 hours. We saw prize manufacturers and map artists and fur wholesalers and selfie booths and ropes courses. I picked a good expo partner because we were both shameless junk food eaters and stuffed ourselves with pizza, icees, multiple servings of dippin' dots, mini donuts, churros, cookies, french fries, hot dogs with tropical fruit sauces, cheesecake in a cone, cheddar popcorn, caramel popcorn, and I'm sure there was more. There were two haunted houses and I really wanted to go in them but at 26 I'm still too scared. I was about to walk into one but then I could see behind the curtained entrance a shadowed figure sitting at a table and my knees got weak and my entire constitution buckled.

The great gilly hopkins

A million things happened today. 

I visited Creative Costuming and saw where new costume ideas are fabricated in a big room full of partially-dressed mannequins in big froofy dresses and bows. I saw a Form 1 printer, a kind of stereolithographic 3d printer, for the first time. It was in hard at work on a desktop shooting a laser into a pool of liquid resin. A tiara-like headpiece was slowly rising out of the resin like a beautiful swamp thing's crown. 

After work I played haunted house-themed mini golf at Citiwalk with some very notable men in the show control business - they're all in town for IAAPA's (International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions) yearly expo, which I'm going to tomorrow. 

My mentor announced that he's moving to California and the entire office became quiet as we suddenly became aware of how lost we will be without him. In only a few months I've come to look up to him very much and it was the saddest news in the world.

Oh and according to Facebook my cousin just got engaged.

fantastical work places

I've seen a lot of crazy things in the past work week.

Wednesday I took a tour of the FoF parade floats and got to see all the floats return back to their warehouse after their parade and get parked and recharged for the next show. I touched them and saw where their drivers sit and how they're monitored along their routes. They're huge. That night I stayed late at work to finish a prototype with a tight deadline and while the Makerbot was running I was able to run out and see the The Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights on New York Street in Hollywood Studios with my mentor and the man who designed the entire show. It was a dazzling, blinding affar (over five million lights) that Disney once acquired when a family's zany enormous Christmas light display in Arkansas was shut down by the Supreme Court. The story is so good: "In 1986, Breezy asked her father if they could decorate their home in lights. Osborne complied, stringing 1000 lights around their home. "Each year after that, it got bigger and bigger," Osborne would later recall. Eventually Osborne purchased the two properties adjacent to his own and expanded the display into them.

By 1993, the display had over three million lights. The lights were extremely popular in both in Arkansas and around the world, as news crews often visited to film the display. Since their house was located on one of the busiest streets in Little Rock, it eventually caused severe traffic issues, and lots of complaints.

The display grew bigger every year, and by 1993, was lit for 35 days during the Christmas season, from sunset to about midnight every day. Six neighbors filed a lawsuit, saying traffic congestion made trips to the corner store take two hours, and they feared emergency vehicles could not get down the street. Osborne responded by adding three million more lights." I love those crazy Osbornes and am very happy that their insane display lives on in Florida.

Thursday I went to Gnireenigami's office for the first time behind Epcot to do some 3D scanning and saw their incredible workspace with a Peter Pan ship hanging from the ceiling and the kookiest, darlingest cubicles. I was invited to their Thanksgiving lunch which was an outdoor catered affair in hot Floridian November sun with tents turkey and ham and all the grand feast accoutrement and listened to a man talk about the process of making believable animatronics.

Friday I went to the Character Head Shop, where alll of the character heads are made for all the parks and I saw heads being sprayed in enormous spray booths, different molds, 3D-printed props, facial features being painted, fur being glued, huge rolls of foam, rows of character shoes, and so many things cast in resin, which I adore. Yesterday I went to the animatronics lab and saw all sorts of figures partially skinned, like Body Worlds with tubes and cables for vessels. The entire time I kept thinking about the countless people in the world who would love to be standing where I was at that very moment.

Broken Spanish

In Magic Kingdom today I had a long conversation with a small butch woman from Spain. We had been sitting on the train next to each other and when we both got off at Main Street station she asked me a question in Spanish and I attempted to respond and she told me about how she had just come from a trip to Miami and was going to be at Disney World for two days. She showed me her map of the park and asked for recommendations. I haven't spoken Spanish since 2010. At some point I realized I was definitely accidentally mixing in some Russian. I circled the good rides and attempted to describe them to her. Haunted Mansion... "Una casa con los muertos." Small World... "Agua...todos los paises...munecas." Journey of the Little Mermaid ... "la mujer...pez." Buzz Light year... "Autos... Puede jugar bang bang." She asked for food recommendations and I just circled something random because none of the food in Magic Kingdom is good. She told me about her restaurant in southern Spain near Portugal. In retrospect, I wonder if she was really telling me about her restaurant or if I came away with a completely different story because i didn't understand her both because of my incompetency and her regional Spanish accent. She asked about beer and I told her there's no beer in Magic Kingdom and she asked if it's because all the parents would get drunk and lose their children.

new york again

I went to New York; I visited my apartment and it made my heart ache to see it and smell it again and know that I haven't lived there for a long time. I met my subletter, who has somehow rearranged my belongings to make my room look cuter than I ever did. The weather was so cold, 37 degrees at night, and looking for my coats (which I never found and will absolutely have to find in December) I realized that I own so many things. How did I get so many things? I can't believe I have lived in New York for two years and that I came by so many objects that became my possessions, which I now have to take care of and be guardian to in addition to all my other things who live in California and Florida. I pulled sweater after sweater over my head, about five layers and then one of Weaver's scarves as a woolly cherry on top. On Friday I met a former Florida intern for lunch and then commenced drinking from 3pm to 3am, which started with office hours with Rios, then a romantic Bushwick pizza dinner with Rothy, gross cocktails at the Johnson's, and then dancing until I was falling asleep like a horse standing on the Tandem dance floor. I was all brunch and hang over Saturday until I went out again that night. 

the cutest elsa in the land

lives in san diego, ca

Work

Sunday I went in to work and worked by myself in an empty office until 8:45pm, which was fun until I started to imagine that there could be ghosts in the building. Monday Graham and I worked feverishly until 8pm to assemble a prototype for demo in the morning. I was so tired that I kept making dumb decisions and  dropping things on the floor. Naturally we didn't finish so the next morning I arrived back at work at 7:45am and discovered that the models I had printed overnight didn't fit together, probably because I was delirious and dumb when I made them, so I took a Dremel to them until they fit, then drove everything to the big meeting across property at 9:30am. This morning I rolled into big meeting day 2 at 8am and literally didn't stop meeting until 5pm, at which point I went and had a beer by myself at the bar at the contemporary and then walked around magic kingdom by myself for a few hours and watched a parade that annoyed me so much that I put in my ear plugs.

Last night I had another fish dream, where I was at Neil's house for a fancy children's birthday party which was being held on the patio and it was beach themed but also flooded like the shallows of a beach shore and there were dead or dying fish everywhere. The first one I saw was stiff as a board and I blew on it to see if it had any life left in it but it was dead. Then I tried to save a bubble-eyed goldfish but the moment I threw it into a body of green water I knew it would probably die in there.

growing pangs

this makes me want to give my parents big hugs

red fraggle

Red Fraggle is one of the five main Fraggles in Fraggle Rock. She is yellow and her hair is red with yellow and orange highlights which is always in big pigtails. She usually wears a red sweater and has the most hair of any Fraggle.

Red is athletic and energetic. She likes to think of herself as the fastest and strongest Fraggle in the Rock. She is highly competitive with her friends, which sometimes causes extreme interpersonal problems, especially with Gobo Fraggle (though, as revealed in a recent SFX interview, despite their constant competition, she secretly admires him).

Red also has her share of insecurities; she especially hates to admit her mistakes.

birds

in florida there are lakes everywhere. they serve as obstacles to triple the driving distance between any two points and blockade the zealous development of tightly packed track housing. anyone can have a house because they come as cheap as eighty thousand dollars. the lakes, however, are amenable housing for the birds. big cartoon birds stand knee-deep in every body of water. i once saw a heron in the night staring into the darkness of a lake. suddenly it plopped into the water and came up with a fish in its mouth, which it swallowed and then the fish stuck out horizontally in its throat, still moving. in the morning on my commute to work cormorants stand on the shore and hold their arms out wide to dry in the sun. the dry birds are big black vultures as big as dogs, always swooping around my apartment complex, and wild turkeys who stand in herds around by the golf courses and baffle me with their existence. the not-birds are the armadillos that root around in the bushes by where i park my car and the 8-foot gator my boss says he saw on property walking around near the contemporary resort a few days ago.

Goodnight world

1:30 am and I fall back into my freshly laundered sheets

starve a vampire

This morning I donated blood for the first time in 2 years and for the first time in a truck. I was pleased to find that my resting heart rate is 63 bpm despite my sedentary Floridian lifestyle. They (OneBlood) had a curious device that rocked the bag of blood back and forth as it fattened and was mixed with anticoagulant, like a baby rocking in a cradle. I was lying  next to a woman who was donating for her 57th time! And then I got this horrendous shirt. All afternoon I could feel my heart working harder than usual. представьте себе - up to three people walking around with my blood in their bodies.

Where should i be in December?

My extraordinary ability to agonize over a calendar should be added to my list of extra-special talents. 

Chens take Orlando

I'm in my parents' hotel room at the all stars music resort. It's nice to be in a bed that is bigger than a matchbox and feel like it's filled with one million slinkies. It's nice to probably not be woken up by a roommate wandering around the room in the dead of morning, opening all the doors and drawers. Ma and pa and me had a delightful fancy Africanish dinner at the Animal Kingdom Lodge and tomorrow we're spending the day at the food and wine festival, which will be my parents' first trip back to Epcot in 24 years.

WWWD40D?

I'm such a light sleeper that it isn't exactly altruism, but I bought a can of WD40 at Target and lubricated every squeaky damned hinge in this apartment, from my roommate's walk-in-closet doors from hell to our shared bathroom's rolling door and even to our roommates' regular swinging bathroom door and no one seems to notice or voice appreciation (except for Sinay, bless her). It reminds me of all the little things my dad did silently and thanklessly around the house all our lives to make us comfortable, like changed the air filters and pulled long girl hair out of the drains, like the time that I was in the garage about to leave for my hourly job at Disneyland and he watched me expectantly as I put on my work shoes and voiced his sadness that I hadn't noticed that he'd shined them for me.

It's alive

Though I may have intensely burned my finger with a soldering iron and the skin turned gray, I replaced a fan, thermocouple, and motherboard and got the Makerbot working today for the first time in almost two months.

surprise

almond milk is the fucking worst

todayland

Last night I bumped into my 2006 parade trainer in Epcot again and this time he was with a guy with whom I also used to work at that time, back when I was at Buzz and he was in a blue jumpsuit across the way at Star Tours. Epcot, the great unifier, across years and coasts. 

cliff and char

this baby is starting to look suspiciously like a grown-up

reboot

i wrote my first cron job this morning to run a python script on a raspberry pi.

Fire dreams

Last week I dreamt that I spilled acetone everywhere and my hands were on fire. Last night I dreamt that I had to cremate my own body. I only had a small fire and I was worried about the smell. Last week I bought concert tickets to see CHVRCHES on Tuesday and Lykke Li on Thursday and tonight I went to see CHVRCHES and on my way out was given four free tickets to see Lykke Li on Thursday?

after all

A treatise On how coincidences on coincidences build on coincidences

I was supposed to go to Typhoon Lagoon, one of the water parks, today, but I was feeling kind of sick again and spent most of the day drinking a frappuccino in the sun at Starbucks and then sitting on the floor of my living room watching Millionaire Matchmaker and Kendra on Top. My roommate, Sinay, was at Clearwater Beach most of the day and while today Mrs. Tuckersman was telling me about how it is fall turning winter over in New York, here in Florida my roommate came home sunburned and looking like a cooked lobster.

In the evening we spontaneously decided that we really needed dessert and, more specifically, chocolate. We decided to go to Epcot in search of chocolate and we wandered the World Showcase (Jefferson Starship was playing again, 'We Built This City') until we settled on Italy and Sinay would have a gelato cookie sandwich and I would have tiramisu. Our decisions had been made and we were getting in line when I decided that I wanted to find a bathroom, but the closest was over at the American Pavilion. Once we were there, Italy felt much too far away and carrot cake at the American Pavilion became an acceptable option. We got in line and at the register the cashier girl looked at my roommate said, 'You go to Miami!' and apparently Sinay had been an RA in her college housing back in Ohio. We took our carrot cakes to some nearby picnic tables and I looked at a table of people sitting and realized that one of them was Patrick, my parade trainer in Tomorrowland in 2006. I had literally found out via our dominant social network yesterday that he is now living in Orlando and here I'd spotted him sitting at a picnic table in the dark, over 2,500 miles away from where I'd last seen him. I was explaining to his friends that 8 years ago Patrick had taught an 18-year-old me how to work on the parade route at Disneyland when I realized that one of his friends was an Imagineer I'd had lunch with a few weeks prior, whom I'd sat next to and had pizza with as part of a work function, with whom midway through our conversation we had realized that I actually know his younger brother because we both worked in Shanghai at the Expo in 2010 together. I hate to say it but it is a small world _____ ___.   

friday funday

First thing in the morning yesterday EvilBetty and I tried to ride Toy Story Mania before starting work. We were almost at the front of the line when it was announced that the ride was down and everyone was funneled out. I spent the day working on rewiring and programming e ink displays with a raspberry pi, took a lunch break to go eat pizza at Flippers with our team, and then went back to nudging small electronic text around. Then EvilBetty, Yzma, and I got to go poke around at Fantasmic and see the control booth and watch the crew getting ready to put on the show. Went back to the office, started running a 15-hour print on the 3d printer, and then ended the work day by leaving for the Food and Wine Festival at Epcot.

There I rode Mission: Space for the first time, which is a notoriously intense ride that is a centrifugal motion simulator thrill ride simulation of a trip to Mars. "The attraction exposes riders to forces up to 2.5G, more than twice the force of gravity at the Earth's surface (effectively multiplying a rider's weight by 2.5). A few months after the ride's opening, motion sickness bags were added within easy reach of riders." The ride blasts you with g-force that really does start to take your cheeks off your face and compresses your chest until you think you might pop a little, and all the while you are in trapped under a chest harness in a very very small face (less than a foot of space between you and the wall of your enclosure). I started to panic during the ride because I feared that I would die and had to start doing slow breathing to keep my wits about me. And now I know why most people don't like Mission: Space.

After that we wandered around in a sea of tourists, heard the 80s band Jefferson Starship, the night's live performance, play 'Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now,' and occasionally snacked and drank expensive things. I had my usual blood orange margarita from the Mexico Pavilion's tequila bar. We rode Maelstrom, my absolute favorite ride at Epcot, which is tragically closing at the end of this weekend to make way for a new Frozen ride. At the end of the night Francus and I had delicious tequila flights by Mexico, I tried the sweet corn cheesecake and it was amazing, and we all watched the weird Epcot fireworks show, IllumiNations, before going home.      

my desktop

this week i acquired some high-end electronic candles to try out and, thanks to the raspberry pi, i also got yet another screen this week and now my cube is really running amok

elsa magic

The last time I saw Char, she wasn't able to say very many words, but she definitely knew 'Ana,' 'Elsa,' and 'snowman' and was able to sing along to 'Let It Go' in the car. She also had a Frozen t-shirt that was washed every night so she could wear it every day. Here she is demonstrating her Elsa magic this week looking very grown up in the dress that I bought for her and mailed to California.  

Uncertain life

Some friends are landing jobs and becoming drastically richer, others are breaking up, others are moving away. I'm living alone in a swamp and don't even know where or what I'll be in a few months' time. I can't help but wonder, what's going to happen to us? It's times like these that I go to sleep.

38

Camping at falcon

I hate my creaky spring-filled bed so much that tonight I'm trying sleeping on the floor next to my bed. Also, when I was packing to come here Mrs tuckersman told me I was bringing too many clothes and she was right because tomorrow will be the Tuesday of my 6th week of work as well as my first day of repeating a work outfit. Well done, self.

the whitney

Last night I had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Windermere with WTG, a friend from my dorm in Copenhagen. I hadn't seen her since 2009. I remember that I didn't like her when we first met but we ended up very close friends by the end of the semester. We traveled to Istanbul, Berlin, Amsterdam, and road-tripped through Ireland together. Reunited in Orlando five years later and I'm working in new technology and she's getting a degree in computer science. We talked for three hours until I was hoarse about the total hole of an area that I live in, things that are sort of 'cool' in Orlando, how there's an excessive amount of Jesus here, and the moss that hangs from the trees.

Some old snaps of us romping Europe:

chapter closed

I'm finally released from this transplant case and for good reason.

Crazy world.

Goodnight

Nothing beats turning off all your morning alarms right before bed on a Friday night. It's been a long week.

*a next-day update on this post: the joys of shutting off all your alarms are greatly diminished if not altogether annihilated if the girl with whom you share your room neglects to disengage her wake-up alarms. i fucking hate sharing a room. 

dapper day

I fully expected to get some work done at home tonight but instead I ended up doing a hair run-through on myself for Saturday, which is Dapper Day at Hollywood Studios, which is a bi-coastal event in reference to back when Disneyland opened in in the mid-1950s and people would get dressed in their Sunday best to go to the park. On Dapper Day, modern-day guests pay homage to that time by dressing up as stereotypes of people from the 50s and take pictures of themselves.

you can't stay in vegas forever

Rockin' morning

It turns out that how good my mood at work is is directly correlated to how much sleep I had the night before. Shocking. Putting myself to bed earlyish tonight so I can get up at 6:30a and go ride roller coaster.

My bed is so uncomfortable (I ache every morning) that I've been thinking about sleeping on the floor instead.

Carrie

I was told tonight that of the Sex and the City characters, I'm 'Carrie.' I decided that I'll take that, since the role of 'neurotic main character' seems to be vastly improved over 'prissy one,' 'take-charge lesbian,' and 'old nympho.'

nine fine irishmen

my whole fambly is in vegas at one of my favorite pubs. i'm in the outskirts of orlando watching tlc on my couch.

work photos

new sweater

beams

Three nights ago driving home at night I used my high beams for the first time in 11 years of driving, because I live in the heart of swamp darkness. 

structure me

two different me scans made using a structure sensor on an ipad

Danielle Goldilocks

Last night I met my actual room roommate's previous roommate, Danielle. I found this to be interesting because the girl who had my room prior to me in my dorm in Copenhagen was also named Danielle. I must have a penchant for taking over the beds of Danielles.

y2k

It's 10:20pm and I'm basically trying to teach myself how to become a computer engineer. Can I be done in the next two hours before I roll over and pass out? 

What is your emergency

Today at work I accidentally called 911 while trying to dial into a meeting.

Kickin and screamin

Things are definitely not be perfect but I don't think I've ever been so reluctant to sleep seeing as I'm having such a fun time living

all-star parents

My parents surprised me by announcing that they are going to visit me in October. I'd asked them when I saw them in LA whether they would come and they said no. However, their way of visiting me appears to be by going on a 7-day cruise to the Caribbean and Bahamas and then staying one night in Orlando and then flying back to LA. Ha but I am excited to see them and show them the swamp.

I just booked them into this ridiculous-looking place:

Serendipity

Something very strange that happened today was that we had lunch with two imagineers and as i was talking with the one sitting to my right I discovered that I know his brother because we worked together in shanghai in 2010.

yao ming

Yao Ming aims to save Africa's elephants by persuading China to give up ivory

The 7-foot-6 Yao, 33, said in a recent interview that he had connected with Africa particularly because “many animals there are bigger than me.”

solidworks null

when i got out of bed at 7:30am this morning all my roommates had already left the house for work. i'm clearly the slacker of my apartment.

over the past 5 days or so during my few spare hours at home i've been following a tutorial on how to build all the parts for and assemble a toy car in solidworks, only to discover today that i'm not really going to be doing any 3d modeling for my ongoing projects anymore and will now be doing mostly hardware instead. oh well look at this cool car