In which I am terrible at updating (and almost die by white rhino)

     Can you blame me, though? For me it's just the same job, day in and out. Working at Disney has lost most of the glamor (although I still really love my job, it doesn't seem noteworthy anymore so I forget to write about it). Of course, plenty of exciting things still happen; no surprise, considering the animals I work with.
        We have a baby white rhino that's a few months old that's been on show for about a month now, and the mother is very, very protective of her baby, and safari drivers are under strict instructions to not get between mother and the calf. So today I am driving normally past two other white rhinos, when mom and baby suddenly come barreling out of the bushes on one side of the path. I stop immediately, not only because they're obviously in the way, but images of being gored to death by this white rhino flash into my head and mother rhino is staring me down like a hawk. They actually have really terrible eyesight, but I momentarily forgot this, considering I was too busy being terrified. After a few moments (during which the guests were completely enraptured with baby rhino and were chattering nonstop and I tried to pretend like I hadn't just almost peed my pants. Our trucks can withstand a rhino ramming it, but I'd rather not test that), the pair moved calmly off the path and I was able to continue on my way.
          So, yes, I guess exciting things are happening (did I tell you about the time I accidentally rammed the unloading dock? Yeah. Let's not talk about it. Before you ask, the truck wasn't even damaged. The unloading dock....minimally so), but that sort of thing happens to everyone on Kilimanjaro, so people are always topping each other's stories and you forget that it's not a normal occurrence for everyone else. Although, I have to admit I feel a tiny bit smug when my roommates come home and their biggest complaint is that the condiment machine stopped working. I get to watch baby elephants play in the rain and giraffes chase antelope...the bad moments tend to get overshadowed by all the awesome things I am fortunate enough to see.
     For example, I got off my lunch break today and bumped someone off a truck to do a few rounds. I do one safari, and as we're nearing the end it starts sprinkling a little bit. Not a big deal; it looked like it would clear up in a few minutes. Not so; literally about a minute after I dropped off my first round of guests, rain started pouring down. And I mean like pre-hurricane level rain....rain so hard you actually couldn't see clearly. It was absolutely nuts. We have certain parts along the path where we go through water, but nearly every part of that path that wasn't on a downward slope was flooded. Luckily for us (safari drivers, anyway), we have clear plastic windows that roll down and protect our radio/audio equipment and keep us dry, but guests have no such luck: it's a completely open-air truck, minus a canvas canopy overhead. For the most part, the animals don't mind normal rain (unless it's a steady, rain-all-day type thing; then they hate it), especially after it's been hot during the day (which it has), but I don't think anyone expected the amount of rain we got. The elephants usually love it though, and they were playing in the water for quite a bit.
    My days off are still primarily spent at the parks; last week (two weeks ago? I don't even know anymore) I went to the two water parks for the very first time with Jordan, my friend Andrew, and his friend Marcie. We first went to Blizzard Beach, which is known for the Summit Plummet, one of those pretty much vertical slides that shoots you down and give you a major wedgie now matter how minor  the drop. Well, the drop on Summit is hardly minor; I'm pretty sure it's the tallest slide of its kind at 120 feet. I counted how long the entire ride took at one point...it's about 10 seconds, but I swear it almost feels much longer. You slide down so fast I almost lost one of my contacts at one point! It's the tallest point in the park, obviously, and as you climb the stairs to the top you can actually look out and see all the landmarks in all the other parks (Expedition Everest and the Tree of Life in AK; Tower of Terror and the Sorcerer's Hat in HS; Spaceship Earth in Epcot, and you can just  barely see Space Mountain and the castle out in Magic Kingdom) what makes it even freakier is that from your perspective it looks like the slide is actually taller than all of these (it's definitely not, I know at least Everest is 199 feet).
        Blizzard Beach is definitely the place to go for slides, but Typhoon Lagoon has a cool atmosphere as well. They have a little saltwater pool where you can snorkel among sharks, and their wave pool is terrifying. You can tell when a wave is coming because it makes a giant, roaring WHOOMPF noise and everybody around you will start screaming. The water parks closed at five, and we had gone right at the park's opening, so we were pretty exhausted by this point and Jordan had left before we went to Typhoon to get ready for a party the housing committee was throwing. So the three of us decided to go to the Polynesian resort to have some Dole whip (the Polynesian is really awesome because they have a beach right by their little man-made lagoon with hammocks and beach chairs and it's just really nice) and lie out on the hammocks. At this point we were all kind of dead and the weather was really nice so we ended up staying on the beach for a few hours just napping, and it was pretty fantastic.

    I took a solo trip to Magic Kingdom the next day, which wasn't nearly as fun as I had planned, but I was able to get some birthday/Christmas shopping done. Halloween's already started up in full swing at the Magic Kingdom, so the roommates and I are planning to go to Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party around the end of September (when tickets are cheaper, ha). Two of the girls and I had planned on being the ballroom dancers from the Haunted Mansion, but Kelsea and I, on our quest to find Goodwill dresses, ended up empty handed. So we fell back on our second options, which was awesome female detectives; Kelsea's going as Nancy Drew and I'm going to be Velma from Scooby Doo once again. We've all been talking about going to Islands of Adventure at some point to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but that'll probably happen in October.
   Not much going on beyond that, but I'm thinking about doing a video soon focusing on a day in the life of a Kilimanjaro driver ;P
Until then,
Kwa herini!