Time Really Does Fly

So Luke and I have been caught up int some serious end-of-August doldrums the last couple of weeks. The sort of no energy, just sit on the couch and eat popsicles and snow cones sort of mood that's pretty much inevitable at that point where you're sick of summer and pretty sure it's never going to end. Good times.

In fact, I've been so caught up in the "blah" mood that somehow I completely missed that Sunday marked five years since I arrived in Florida. Which is kind of sad because that one decision, which seemed fairly insignificant at the time completely changed my life - and in more than just the obvious ways. :-) You people are always telling me I'm funny (gotta admit, I can't always see it) so it seems like I should tell more crazy Disney stories. I was REALLY burnt out when we left, but with a little time and distance the sweet memories are crowding out the bitter . . . and great merciful crap I have some cuh-razy stories!

With Team Jayla riding out their first hurricane out in North Carolina I've been remembering my hurricanes. And Shay and I have been trading war stories, as it were, lol.

Anyway. I got initiated into the whole hurricane thing pretty quickly - Hurricane Almosto . . . I mean Ernesto hit before I'd been there a month. It actually down to just a tropical storm by the time it got to Orlando, but you'd never have known that from my mom's reaction. She called every couple of hours almost like clockwork, which got really awkward while I was at work because if I didn't answer she'd call or text non-stop until I did, so I'd get my break and have a gazillion increasingly frantic messages. Which, you know is totally understandable at first for a west coast family with zero hurricane experience. But like I said, it wasn't even a hurricane by the time it got to me . . . but when I told her I'd been more scared of storms at both grandparents' houses (hurricanes are heavy on wind and rain, but short on thunder and lightning) it seemed to freak her out more. Kinda made no sense. Especially when she was telling me to conserve my phone battery in case the power went out, which totally makes sense, but it's a little oxymoronic to have someone call you to tell you that, no? :-) I spent a couple of vaguely unpleasant days at work listening to people ask why it's raining, to which even then I could only think: seriously? I was too much of a newbie and too intimidated at the time, but by the time I left I would have totally given them a lesson in meteorology. And enjoyed watching how long I could string it out before they either got fed up or caught to what a touron they were. And then I had a couple of days off and spent them in the parks marveling at the fact that apparently the one thing that can make Peter Pan drop below a two hour wait is a hurricane. (of course, it was still a half hour wait while Space Mountain was a walk on . . . I will NEVER understand how that works.)

Then there was Hurricane Fay two years later. That one was just miserable - and I still resent that got named after me. I don't think it was actually a hurricane for more than a few hours at a time. It parked itself right on top of Orlando and stayed there for, like, three years. Okay, it was actually about three weeks, but three weeks of absolute non-stop rain feels like three decades. Or maybe three centuries. Seriously, it was awful. I worked at 3 different attractions, and all of them depended on the weather for whether they actually ran or not. So basically the entire end of the park was shut down for almost a month. Oh, you better believe people were damning us to hell left and right for daring to call up a hurricane during their vacation . . . never mind the fact that they scheduled said vacation smack in the dead center of hurricane season. And I had to stand there with utterly soggy feet (they basically didn't dry out once until about a week after the storm finally moved on) and smile and say "I'm so sorry about your utterly ruined vacation in which you've been prevented from seeing one whole show and riding one whole ride, but if you'll just head up to the front of the park that's where the people who are paid to listen to you complain and pretend to care and pretend to fix it are stationed."

You know, if I could have phrased it that way I'd have much happier memories of that entire month. :-)

The kicker was this chick who I have yet to figure out how she functions on a daily basis. All wide-eyed and looking heartbroken and going on about how she just couldn't understand what was going on, there are all these people here and it's been raining so much and it's just been so awful and why are things going like this?!?! So I roll my eyes and pseudo-calmly explain that she chose to take her family on vacation during the summer, which means they are here both during the rainy season, which means it rains at least a little bit everyday, and also during the time of the year when everyone else and their dogs choose to visit so it's going to be crowded. And then she wanders off saying again that she just doesn't understand how we could let it be so crowded and rainy when her family is here and - seriously? The ego-centrism of some people will never cease to amaze me. Forget the fact that most tourons are convinced that CMs are audio-animatronic and there's an invisible dome over the whole place and we completely control the weather . . . do these people actually expect us to clear out the park of everyone else just for them? Do they expect restaurants to be empty when they go out to eat? Is everyone else supposed to just go home if they want to go shopping? Or do they just have to go to a different store in the mall?

I know it sounds a little crazy, but at the moment I would actually kind of welcome a hurricane. Not a big one - just another one of those little ones I got a taste of a few years ago. Rain . . . temperatures lower than a million degrees . . . nice, high speed breezes . . . yeah, I could go for one of those right now. Where's that teleportation device when you need it? :-)


P. ost S. cript
Like tourons, the supply of stupid reporters seems to be pretty bottomless.