Dan@Disney

So I think we can all agree that I have been terrible at posting since August. My excuse is that I have been working very hard! I am just going to give the highlights and hopefully in the next few weeks I will be able to finally post a bit more.

September was spent mostly training. There were only 2 trainers left on podium so we both trained 6 days a week for the whole month – which was fun to start with but to be honest by the end I just wanted to come in to work and do my own thing without having to think about other people all the time. I love training but you can do it a bit too much. The end of September brought the arrival of Halloween to Orlando – I went to both Not So Scary at Magic Kingdom and Halloween Horror Nights at Universal. Both were great fun in very different ways – running through the walking dead house with Emily Porter and Dan Underdown laughing their heads off behind me will be one of the things I will never forget about the whole experience.

October was defined by the Food and Wine festival which made the pavilion much busier than it had been for months. The restaurant has stayed pretty steady but Chippy, Beer Cart and the Pub have been crazy on Fridays and Saturdays. I was given the role of Bar Back on those days, helping them with stocking and discounts. It has been a really great opportunity to do something different and it is nice to be really busy, it make the days go very quickly.

I also made a big decision during Food and Wine after seeing some good friends finish their program and thinking a bit about the future. I decided to finally take my pre-service test, 5 months late. After a few days of revision I took my test and passed. I was originally told I would not be able to go in to the kitchen until January but that was then changed to the end of the November – just in time for Candlelight, the busiest time of the year in the restaurant, to begin. I am looking forward to a new challenge and training in that kind of environment is certainly going to be difficult but I am ready to give it a try. I have got to the point where Podium is not fun anymore and I am working so much that I don’t have time to spend with my friends – hopefully going in to service will help solve that problem a little bit.

This week was also full of big news. The first was new costumes for the pavilion  you can see them in the picture at the top of this post, they are still working out a few kinks but overall I think they are nice. It is weird to think that we are the first Cast Members in the history of the Rose & Crown to not wear the yellow and blue. The other big news was that I received a Quarterly Award, I was really proud to have been nominated and it makes working so hard for the last few months feel worth it. I get to go to a reception on the 29th with some of the senior Disney managers which I am really looking forward to.

That is the basic highlights of the last couple of months. I have been working 50+ hours most weeks but hopefully that should drop off a bit in the next few weeks and I am hoping that the regular posting schedule can resume.