a little thought

I'll take whatever the world gives me. cause ultimately it is also what God choose to give me according to His plan which i would want to follow.

defining contentment,
"contentment is the realisation that God has provided everything that i need for my present happiness"

Yes, God may have denied me of may things that i want, but thinking it through, i do have everything i need. I can be happy with the way i am or how things are now. if only i stop comparing myself to others, or how things could have been better. its hard, but it would take some getting used to.

after all, it is better to be content with little, than to gain much just to satisfy your desire.

Shroud of Breeze

It all started with a rain in the night. that doesnt happen very often. it hardly even rained at all. at least 5 times less than singapore. i dont know if that is the cause or not, but the next morning, it finally felt like autumn in america.

in a very sudden change of climate, the air temperature dropped from a usual 27ish degrees to about 20 in the morning. a huge drop in temperature already. but still nice, like aircon. then at night, it dropped from a usual 24ish to 12 degrees! i would usually go outside to the balcony to warm up if the aircon gets cold. but this time i go outside only to be met with a blast of cold air many times colder!

its like some spell has been cast upon Orlando that suddenly turned it from summer to winter overnight... even as i speak, i feel the chill seeping through the closed windows and chilling the room. today's temperature is estimated to be 9 degrees... my goodness.

last night we went out for supper at ihop, we had to walk to take the bus and walk somemore from there. and though we were in jackets, it was still freezing. especially with continuous wind. going up the warm bus, we could feel ourselves defrosting... and after eating, we felt like just camping over at the restaurant so to not have to make the trip back in the coldness.

surely it is the sudden wind that brought this shroud of frost to this temperate land. i dont know which direction though... probably the east wind from the atlantic. winds are sure getting stronger. perhaps soon i would experience gales, and maybe even hurricanes! florida is known for its hurricanes. i think it would be cool if i could experience one firsthand!


Oversleeping has really got the better of me this time. And this time its even more dumb... forgetting to set the timer. With a class from 8am to 11 and a social security collection from 8 to 10 which i intended to do and be late for class, i woke up at freaking 10.20! it’s like i just missed everything! Plus the class today was very important as there was to be a 5% test to be done in class, and an important topic taught. Im so screwed this time. Oversleeping totally sucks!

Interesting facts & events cont'd

Finally, my full collection of state quarters is complete! for more than a week that elusive Maine coin has been avoiding me and leaving my collection incomplete.
then last night, i bought something from the dispenser machine. i got back 5 cents change. i realised i had 2 dimes in my wallet, so i combined them all into a quarter. then trying to get a coin for my 2nd collection, i exchanged that quarter several times. after so many futile tries, i decided to just take the next coin and go.
So i did, and lo and behold, the coin was.. Maine.


2 days ago, one of my colleagues got terminated from the program because he accumulated 3 property offences... the last one was because he signed in another colleague as visitor to his apartment, but she failed to leave by 1am. both of them gets an offence.
termination is like such a serious and big deal. all of us colleagues were so concerned for him and threw a farewell party for him which i didnt go. (actually its more like a termination party cause he aint leaving.). immediately after being terminated, all his IDs are being confiscated so that he cannot take any disney bus, enter any park or even his apartment except to pack up and leave. he cant stay over at any of the disney apartments either.

now he is looking for a place to stay nearby, like rent an apartment or sth. his good friend roommate is also going to move out of the disney apartment and join him there, but continue to work in disney until the end of the program. he has a car so its possible. such is the great convenience. but being faced with such a big sum to fork out at once, several of us colleagues actually donated money to help them out. Only now did i realise that my group of colleagues is such a tight knit community.

even during the operating day, the restaurant faces very fluctuating demand... during the lunch hour all the counters are opened, and even then there are long queues at each. tables are packed and they overspill to the next restaurant's seats. then it quickly begins to die down and by 4pm it is down to 3 counters with a few guests in line. funny that the kitchen window also has fluctuations... in that small space where the food orders from the kitchen is dished out for the fillers to collect and serve to guests at the counter, it could get totally filled up with trays of food in the busy periods, and even with like 4 fillers frantically serving orders, the food keeps piling. but then at one point, suddenly the window clears and becomes empty... and then another wave of food comes shortly after. i dont understand whats happening, cause the kitchen staff prepare the orders in a regular motion too.

on one incident, a kitchen staff put the tray too far in the window, a little too far to reach. so the chef gave the tray a push; it slid all the way across the greasy metal window surface and came tumbling onto the floor on this side! the worse thing is, it was witnessed by many guests in line. some were shocked, but the counter staff including me were laughing. and of course that chef got a good scolding.

i am starting to get increased work hours a week. more money but more stress. as i stay longer, the number of hours are expected to increase.

bag tear, dragon lockered out

Interesting facts & events

Unbelievable. I just experienced hibernation. Last night i slept at 1.30am after a day of work. I set the timer to wake me up at 8.30. 7 hours of sleep would be enough to last well through a day. So the timer rang, i woke up, but apparently 7 hours wasnt anywhere enough for my body. i instantly fell back to sleep, just as was for the other incidents of oversleeping. i woke up again and knew i had slept long. so i was expecting it to be about 11am. (since long oversleeping period is about 2 hours). and then i checked my clock and to my horror, it was already 2.10pm! I had slept 12.5 hours!! Now that is my best record in my whole life! and i never expected it to happen here on my program, when time is short. Luckily my work today is at 6pm till late. gonna miss the dragon swing party. such a waste.
So i learn, the body does demand sleep to cover for what is lacked the day before.... cause yesterday i only slept 2 hours.

Talking about oversleeping, it has already caused me 3 latenesses. once for class, twice for work. and i was almost late for my orientation, my first day of work, which would have been disastrous. fortunately and almost miraculously, while i was going to take the long walk out to the main road, a taxi drove past on that secluded road i was at, honked at me and asked me if i needed a taxi! wow, it was like God-given. But it did cost me dearly in money. i saw the taxi fare meter jump by 25 cents every few seconds, it couldnt bear the agony to watch it. The fare came to US$30+! just to get from patterson to magic kingdom... ouch.

I had 3 christian books with me brought along to florida, given by Collin, Lifang and Diana. I have been mostly reading 'Serenity' from Lifang until one day i brought it along for my class, but discovering my class was actually 3 hours later. i decided to visit the magic kingdom but i didnt wanna bring the book along cause i had no bag. So i left it in the middle of some bushes outside Disney university. it was a really nice spot where people normally would not go.. but it seemed really apt to find serenity in the middle of those tall bushes!
I went off to have some fun, came back to retrieve my book, but discovered it was gone! some crazy person actually crept through the tiny path between the bushes, found my book and took it! i suspect its the gardener. he must have been really surprised and intrigued to have found such a book there, nicely placed.
What i hope now is that he didnt throw it away, but took it back to read, hopefully be inspired and transformed. I wouldnt know. But God could be working on it.

I have been taking up the hobby of coin collection here in US. not for the different types of coins, but for the design on different Quarters. apparently it was a very recent thing that the US minted quarters bearing designs for each of the 50 states. they were only produced for about 10 weeks and production has now stopped. So for the past few weeks i have been getting and trading coins and collected all 50 states except just one more very elusive Maine, the northeasternmost state. well, i still have 4 months to get that stupid coin to complete my collection.

i totally shouldnt have gone to work and even miss the dragon swing for it... now i got a bad record in my disney record card just because of a bad mix of factors which mostly i couldnt help... when usually 3 people close a topping bar (its really lots of work), last night they only assigned 2 - me and some girl who has never done topping bar closing before. so i was busy doing my stuff and she went to throw away the leftover food, and then later i discovered she missed out lots more food in the coolers and by then the spoilage sheet was already done, reusable food kept and the food waste taken away.
and i made a bad move unknowingly by alerting the manager for advice instead of the coordinators. so he got to see the situation and got really mad just because i brought the food in late, because my assistant missed it out, because she doesnt know how to close topping bar, and because they only put me with 1 other person. and i have to take all the blame just because i have done closing before, only a few times, and it was aways someone else who did the spoilage. the manager really got mad for nothing without finding out the full story and knowing its actually their fault too. things could have been so much better if i called in and went for the dragon swing instead...

Halloween revisited!

Last night i went for the halloween party at the magic kingdom again, this time with my whole company of coursemates, and this time everyone was dressed in costumes! My costume was of course... harry potter! we bought our costumes at some costume shop nearby the place where my classes are held. we get 10% cast member discount so its not bad. but still rather expensive. we had all sorts of different costumes... peter pan, clown, cat woman, circus performer, sailor girl, playmate, magcian, ninja, mafia, egyptian pharoah, some i dont even know what they are. but the most outstanding one was surely Yasu's star wars soldier outfit.. all with the full battle suit and helmet! of course they were not made of metal but of rubber and plastic.

it was oh so picturesque, and as we walked along the street and around the place in one big costumed mob of about 20 of us. People along the way stared and marvelled, some of them asked to take pictures with us. at the magic kingdom, other groups of people in costumes came to mix with us and took an even bigger group photo. but they went their own way after that. most of the people at the halloween party was costumed, so we just seemed like normal once we were inside. a really interesting eye opener... halloween is such a big scale thing comapred to in singapore where its hardly existent. we gathered at the cinderella castle to watch the magnificent fireworks like i did the previous time. but this time we managed to find a place much nearer to the castle. it was nicer for us to see that way, but for the camera it looks better when i am a little further away.

this is a family of enthusiasts who we met at the party. indiana jones, maleficent and little luke skywalker. they started talking to us and i managed to take a picture just with them, and talked to them for a while. then today, they actually came to Pecos Bills to look for me! they identified me as 'a guy from singapore who dressed as harry potter last night'. they didnt know my name. Too bad i wasnt working yet when they came, so my colleague told me later. what a waste.

it was hard to do what we wanted when going as a big group. a lot of time spent wasted in waiting for others, taking pictures, being indecisive. moreover we went late. and i dont know why, but they all chose to spend the time taking rides... which could all be done the same any other day in the magic kingdom... it so wasted the stuff that only happens in the halloween party, like the trick a treat stations and the characters that we can queue up to take pictures with. time passed so fast and before i knew it the party time was up. everything closed down at midnight and we had to go back. argh, still so many things we could have done but didnt.

overall, i think it could have been much better. too much time wasted, not much interesting things we did, not as fun as expected based on my previous recce of the party. but it was still fun, a really memorable experience, like once in a lifetime. upcoming is the mickey's very merry christmas party, also in the magic kingdom! i would sure think that would be better... staying hopeful!