Here are the drum boys at half-time.
Not a bad view, if you ask me.
Purdue won and everyone rushed the field!! AWESOME!
YAY!
This is why I love being home - we use John Deere lawn mowers as lawn chairs. LOVE IT, MISS IT!
Yeah - I dunno!
At dinner at Mama Della's. This is where I met Mohammed....oh, how I miss him! (NOT! He was a waiter there that seemed to enjoy my company! My goodness, he could talk my ear off!)
One minute until the shuttle take off!! I think you can see my cavities!
Dan, Lyle and I (who were working at three different locations the week we went live in Orlando), just happened to all be wearing pink on the same day! We would usually be able to rotate our pink outfits, purely through coincidence... Not this time!! HAHA! 
THAT'S RIGHT!! Four computers going at the same time! That's how we do it, around here!
I got to see this just about every day... There were water taxis in between the City Walk, and the other two hotels. So - when dinner was at someone else's "house" - we'd take a water taxi past Universal to meet up with them.
I almost died a few times while in Orlando. This horrible rash showed up about a week before I left. It itched like crazy!! But - a nice security guy would come and put ointment on it every morning for me. He was pretty cute, so I was okay with that! I had a doctor's appointment yesterday, and my doctor determined that it was poison oak. Hmm...interesting.
This is about three days after I cut my leg shaving (yes, embarrassing). I cut it so badly that it didn't stop bleeding for about two days. My co-workers told me that slitting my ankles is a slow way to die! Haha.
I had a friend (Jeff) come visit me in Orlando. He's another installer, so he knew everyone there. We had a great time - but they managed to get me a little bit intoxicated. Seems he always gets me drunk....
Here is the Loews Universal Orlando team (minus one person). We had such a great time, but we were sad to see my training room turned into the "War Room". It was actually pretty cool - they turned it into a jungle and had army "stuff" all over the room! This room was the central location for our cutover process to take them from the old system to the new system.
This is everybody (plus our favorite interface technician), the night before we all left. Oh, how I miss them all already!
One of the many beautiful passage-ways at the Royal Pacific Resort. I was a little sad to leave.
The Hulk ride at Islands of Adventure. My hair was HUGE when I got off this thing!!
My hotel had the best fountain-thingy. The elephants became my best friends. I loved hanging out with them at night.
My parting gift from the hotel. They gave me a plaque-type thing with a picture of all three hotels and their key cards. Most of the employees there signed a piece of paper saying farewell (more like telling me to stay away from green skittles), and they also sent me a chocolate cake. It was SO GREAT!!She's a little tired in this video, but it's the only one I got where she's paying attention to something for more than 30 seconds!
I had to share this one, because I think it's hilarious. Notice the way she eats her grapes!
The Space Shuttle Discovery was supposed to launch on Tuesday of last week at about 2am. Two of our guys made it down there (it's about an hour drive from where we are) and they post-poned the launch 10 minutes prior to the launch. They re-scheduled it for Wednesday evening, I think. That one didn't go either.
SO - they re-scheduled the launch for Friday night at 11:59 and we decided to go. If it went - we wanted to be there. We got there about 45 minutes prior to the launch and there was lightning right above the launch pad. Well, it looked like there was lightning right above it. But - it could've been further out, I guess. We were sure they were going to post-pone it again. Next thing we knew, we were ten minutes in....five minutes in....then we were counting down.
I still get goose-bumps (sp?) when I talk about it. It was such an amazing sight. The video is a little long, as I was afraid to miss anything. I'm going to grab some pictures from the others and share those too......
Here's the video!! Enjoy!!
Here are four of us hanging out with Shaggy and Scooby-Do before dinner!
There is so much to cover, and I'm going to do it in several different posts...and in no specific order. We rotate who takes the camera on our little adventures, so I'll need to pilfer some good shots from the others probably.
First of all, here are some pictures from the different hotels.... None of them are very good. I'll work on getting some better ones. You'll find the link to each of the hotels below the title. These places ARE FANTASTIC, and if you go to Orlando...I would HIGHLY recommend them.HARD ROCK HOTEL
http://www.hardrockhotelorlando.com/
The group Molly Hatchett performed in the lobby of the Hard Rock Hotel for their Velvet Sessions on Thursday night. VIP Access.....it was still really loud!!
PORTOFINO BAY HOTEL
http://www.loewshotels.com/en/Hotels/Portofino-Bay-Hotel/Overview.aspx
ROYAL PACIFIC RESORT
http://www.loewshotels.com/en/Hotels/Royal-Pacific-Resort/Overview.aspx
One night the self-parking was full and I had to park in the back of the hotel (before I had even walked around the property and knew where everything was...but I had already heard stories about alligators attacking people). I had to walk for what seemed like 2 miles through the dark fearing a deadly attack from a gator. I turned a corner and these three guys scared the CRAP out of me! I think I even YELPED! I went out the next morning and had to take a picture!!
What a great amenity!! I also got cookies and a big glass of really cold milk. I LOVE REALLY COLD MILK!! This was the best gift ever.... Someone in my training class sent it to me, thanking me for a great week of training. Made me get misty-eyed.
Okay - moving on. I did actually have a pretty intense situation in my first week of training. I think it was the first Thursday of the training classes. For snacks in the training room, they have a number of things...but the best is the HUGE bags of skittles. I love skittles. I was standing in the back of my classroom while some of the folks in my class were discussing a few things. I decided I had time to pop a skittle in my mouth. FAIL.
I chewed a little, then tried to swallow......tried to swallow....kept trying to swallow.....start walking toward the front door of my classroom that led out into a cafeteria.....keep trying to swallow.........try to breath....find out that I CAN'T BREATHE (I was actually making really crazy *gasping for air* noises at this point)....keep walking toward the door....open the door....keep trying to breathe and can't....decide that it's just a DAMN skittle and that I should be able to handle this....with every effort I had left, I pretty much hacked the thing up....I see the green skittle piece go flying out of my mouth.....I gasp for air and have never appreciated oxygen more in my life.
Of course, once I made the crazy hacking noise while hanging outside the door of my own classroom, they got a little quiet! I came back in the room, put my hands on my knees and caught my breath! My throat was so soar, from all of that sour acidic-type stuff in my throat! It was NOT pleasant, and it freaked me out. One of the ladies in my class lectured me for the last 15 minutes of class for going off by myself. She's right - I could've died....on a friggin' skittle. How embarrassing!
It was pretty funny though (since I didn't actually die), and every person in my next class knew about it by the time they got through my door! On the last day of class this week (It's already been over a week since the choking incident took place, and a whole new group of people...), one of my students left this on the table for me!! HA!!
The next post was going to be in this one.... but it's too important to mesh together with this one. READ THE NEXT POST....and watch the video. It's breath-taking! More later, gators!
