When I’ve been to Disney World before, the trips have never been quite long enough, and I’ve wondered how long it would take for me to get tired of all of it. It turns out the answer is two and a half weeks.

Entering week three here, I can say that this is the most surreal business trip I’ve ever been on. Last week I took off a couple of hours in the middle of the day to get my hair cut. That involved taking a monorail and boat ride to the Magic Kingdom, going to the barber shop on Main Street to find a long line of little girls waiting to get their hair done up like princesses, riding Pirates of the Caribbean until the crowds died down, then having two children stare directly at me the entire time I had my own hair cut. (I opted out of the princess glitter or colored hair gel).

Today as I was eating lunch, a fife and drum corps marched through the restaurant. Most days during my lunch break I stroll around to see lute players or taiko drummers or belly dancers. Breakfast meetings are interrupted by Minnie Mouse or Goofy coming out of nowhere and patting you on the shoulder. I’ve picked up a bad cookie-sandwich-a-day ice cream habit, and I’ve got the gut to show for it.

Yesterday I got off work a little early to come back to the hotel and do laundry. On the way in, I saw the hotel’s waterslide, which I’ve seen for years but never had the guts to try (I’m not that strong a swimmer — I wasn’t afraid of drowning, just of looking like a total idiot flaling around in a kiddie pool). So I went and tried it, and it was a blast. And I fell asleep as soon as I got back to the room, then ended up having to stay up until 2 AM to get all my laundry done. (With temperatures and humidity in the high 90s, I’m going through laundry really quickly).

I get the feeling the entire remainder of the trip is going to be like that — struggling to get the most mundane tasks done, being pulled in opposite directions by my innate impulse to always get my life into the most boring routine possible versus my brain’s built-in short-circuit that keeps freaking out that I’m in a theme park and not riding more stuff. The end result is that all the people on vacation are the normal ones, and I’m some alien floating through them trapped halfway in some dimensional rift.

Hurricane Ernesto is supposed to come through tomorrow, and try as I might I can’t seem to work it into a metaphor. I’m homesick and desperately want to sleep in my own bed and see my friends and eat some non-theme-park-or-fast-food, but that doesn’t quite count as “depression.” And I am wondering exactly what I’m going to do when this project finishes in a couple of weeks, but I can’t say that’s “a storm brewing” or anything that dramatic. I guess my mood is hitting central Florida and fizzling out into general surliness.

I put up pictures from the second half of the game, that’s pretty much it except for the finale and prologue. Be forewarned that if you were planning on coming to Disney World and playing the game, you shouldn’t look at the pictures, because they give away the whole thing.

Last week, a former coworker from LucasArts came down with his girlfriend to visit the other programmer on this project, and they all invited me to tag along to stuff after work. It was a lot of fun; it makes all the difference going to the parks with people who just seem to get why Disney is cool. You can read about their trip and see a lot of great pictures of the Polynesian Resort on her blog.

And although I’m definitely on the tail end of this trip, there’s still some stuff here I want to try. I haven’t been to either of the water parks yet, and I’m hoping to get some time in before I go. My kiddie pool water slide experience has given me false courage to go to a water park without fear of looking like a total spaz. Plus, I’ve got a savage farmer’s tan going on, and I really want to even it out.

And someday further out, I want to save up enough money to come back and stay at the Polynesian. I’d dropped by before but never appreciated it; now I see that it’s as if they took Disneyland’s Tiki Room and built a huge hotel out of it. It’s still got just enough of the early-70s vibe around it, too, with the Atari 2600-esque colored stripes around the wooden roof. Also, the pool has a volcano water slide. The place ain’t cheap, but ever since I started going to Disney World 35 years ago, I would look at the Contemporary or the Polynesian and say, “someday we’re going to have enough money to stay there.”

It looks like it’s finally safe to talk about what I’ve been working on for the past year. (With the reminder that this is a personal blog and neither I nor this website is a representative of the Disney company. I don’t speak for them, they don’t speak for me, etc.)

It’s a playtest for an adventure game in Epcot’s World Showcase based on the Kim Possible series, using wireless devices to give you the next clue to solve your mission. This Disney fan site has a description of the game with pictures (and yes, the creepy guy standing in front of the Kim Possible logo is yours truly). I’ve taken my own pictures of the first half of the game; the next half will come whenever I get a chance to play through it as a guest again.

As a fan of the Disney parks (and, yes, of the Kim Possible show), I think it’s just a brilliant idea, and I was sold as soon as I first heard the concept. The playtest is going on for the next two and a half weeks, and the results are still being analyzed by all the different divisions of the company. But on a personal note, I think it turned out pretty cool, the work that the guys at Imagineering R&D put into it is amazing, and it’s one of the two projects I’m proudest to have worked on.

The coolest is seeing kids around the park playing it and getting excited about it. And the family who was leaving the finale, and the dad came back upstairs to give the whole team the thumbs-up sign. Working in “normal” videogames, you never get that kind of instant feedback, and wherever the project goes after the playtest ends, it’s just cool seeing something in the park and working and seeing people enjoy it.

Today was the first day I’ve had off in a couple of weeks. I spent the bulk of it napping, interspersed with rides on the Tower of Terror.

After being awakened (awoken?) by fireworks, I headed to Downtown Disney to the Adventurers Club. Full disclosure: this was my second night in a row there, and I went alone, and I did get a little tipsy. Still, I can be smug and sanctimonious enough to point out the people there who were messed up.

I’ve never been consistent enough in my bar-going to spot the regulars, but I know they’re out there. They have their routine, and their regular drinks, and their awkward conversations with the barstaff, and in the most uncomfortable of situations, they prey on younger bar-goers. Combine the sadness of the barfly with the loneliness of the Disney “That Guy,” and you end up with the Disney Drunk, a sight so melancholy it’s like the saddest song played on the black keys of the world’s most depressing piano.

The Adventurers Club, in case you don’t know, is on Pleasure Island at Downtown Disney, and is actually an extremely cool concept. It’s kind of a dinner theater thing without the dinner, set in an adventurer’s club in the 1930s. The cast of characters roams throughout interacting with the drunk guests, and there’s lots of stuff on the walls that talks. Disney plus improv comedians means some of the corniest innuendo you’d ever want to hear, but somehow it all ends up working. Tonight during one of the bits the guys launched into a rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from Young Frankenstein that was pretty hilarious.

The place has its own slogans and in-jokes and cheers and such, so you get a lot of repeat guests. In addition to the hairy guy wearing the tropical shirt (me, who was referred to as “mustache man” for much of the night), there was:

• A good-looking and very well-dressed man in a suit with Adventurers’ Club pins in his lapel. He did all the cheers and would go from group to group, chatting with anyone who made eye contact.
• An older gentleman in a black T-shirt and shorts, who went from room to room just before the show would start, like clockwork, and occasionally chatted with
• A young woman dressed in black, wearing make-up much like a woman who learned to wear make-up when she was in her Goth phase in high school and outgrew that but never had anything to fall back on.

The latter two told me to avoid sitting in a corner seat I’d picked out, because I’d be hit when the door of a cabinet flew open during the show. (I did, and I almost was). They chatted amongst themselves about which actor was playing which part this evening, calling both by name and referring to the club’s different shows in some kind of code (e.g. “Bob’s doing Hathaway tonight in the 11:50 Mask Room.”) In other words, they’re insiders.

It was all fascinating, and became even more fascinating the more I drank. It was like its own little ecosystem in the middle of the gigantic entertainment megalopolis of Walt Disney World. The only barfly I’ve encountered at Disneyland — the “Velvet Misery” — was a lot more depressing, because it seemed more personal. Everything at Disney World is on a much grander scale, which makes it all seem like a giant social studies experiment. Including the absolutely shitfaced young woman who kept telling the cast that it was her boyfriend’s birthday, and how they ended up with several members of the cast giving him a spanking with a tennis racket while onlookers laughed somewhat nervously, and how we all knew that they deal with this kind of thing every night and that there’s probably some Operations Manual written down somewhere telling them that spanking a young drunk man with a tennis racket is acceptable behavior and where exactly that line is drawn.

Also, I overheard one of the cast talking to a group of people about the project I’m working on. That was cool.

Okay, yeah, this kind of sucks. Somehow “you get to spend over a month at Disney World” didn’t register with me as “you get to work from around noon to 4am or later every day sitting in an abandoned store staring at a computer screen, occasionally going out into the heat to have mediocre food while fireworks are exploding all around you, and dealing with a bureaucracy that’s 20 layers deep at its shallowest.”

Maybe once install is finished, things will be different. For now, I’m concerned that this month is going to ruin Disney World for me, when it took at least 2 and a half years for me to start hating LucasArts.

And if I hear “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” one more time I’m going to go all Manchurian Candidate on somebody.

Today I moved into what’s going to be my new home for the next month. It’s one of Disney’s timeshares, with a nice tree-obstructed view of Spaceship Earth at Epcot and fireworks visible from my balcony. Even though I didn’t get to sleep last night until around 2, I suddenly woke up at 7am — even if it’s for work and not vacation, I’m hard-wired to wake up early the morning of a Disney trip.

When I got off at the airport, my bag came out almost immediately. At the rental car place, I managed to snag a Volkswagen Beetle convertible that someone had just returned; driving around Disney World in the sunshine in a convertible bug is like the world’s biggest autopia. Tonight I had a chili dog and a hot fudge sundae for dinner.

I’m not going to lie; it’s pretty sweet. If I were here with Kim Deal and had flown in on the Millenium Falcon, I could’ve taken care of about 98% of my lifelong fantasies all in one go.

But since it’s in my nature to find the dark side of everything, there are some downsides:

1. Damn is it ever hot. Who’d've thunkit, Florida in August and it’s hot and humid. I wasn’t even outside all that much today, all things considered, and still by the time I got back to the hotel I was ripe. Luckily, the hotel has a laundromat.

2. And while we’re on the subject of heat and my personal hygiene, I’ll tell you right now that the beard’s not going to survive to the end of the month. And I was hoping to hit one of the water parks on this long trip, but I’m concerned I’ll set off a panic and frighten the children, making them think the Yeti escaped from Expedition Everest.

3. It hasn’t been a full day yet and I’m already wanting to strangle Stacy (pictured). She’s the chirpy hellbeast who hosts the “Top 7 Things To See at Walt Disney World” that runs on an infinite loop on the hotel TVs. She was abrasive the first time I came on vacation and she was there yammering on about the Rock’n'Roller Coaster in their faux Travel Channel advertising, but that was like 4 visits ago. Now I want her dead. There’s not much else on the TV, unless you like 45 variants of ABC, the Disney Channel, ESPN, and advertising for Disney’s Vacation Club.

4. I’m starting to realize that a 35-year-old man, especially one with a history of digestive problems, shouldn’t be having chili dogs and ice cream sundaes for dinner at 10pm. I’m not that interested in becoming the next Morgan Spurlock, so I’m going to have to find some way to go the next 30 days with something other than theme park food.

5. I could take advantage of the current lull for me and just goof off, but there’s this dark cloud of insanely busy crunch mode just a day or two away hanging over everything, sapping the fun out of it. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to goof off at every available opportunity, I just have to schedule it so that I work some Protestant guilt in there.) Plus it’s tough to get into the spirit of Disney Magic when I know the rest of my family’s pretty miserable at the moment.

There, that’s a pretty good block of negativity. Things already feel like they’re getting back to normal. Fact is, though, that this is just a really really cool opportunity to be at a place I love for a good long while, to see stuff I’ve never seen even after 35 years of coming here, and to get a look at what goes on behind the scenes. And to add something to it that I think is going to be pretty cool.

Whether or not it’s crazy busy, or things go bad, or people hate it, it’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. And I’m excited as hell about it.