This is Halloween, This is Halloween...in Orlando

I dressed as a flapper for the Trick or Meet Up and may or
may not have attacked this walking Turkey Leg.  

I have LOTS of fun Halloween blogs coming, it's just a matter of finding the time to post them. I have three Halloween blogs on SmithBites this month, a great guest post here from Heather about how it feels to be a Halloween snob, and plenty more. But this is what I've been up to so far...

In the past, I've posted:

Wreck the Halls!

Halloween: Five Ways to Avoid the Gore and Enjoy the Holiday

and waaaaaaay back in the day 20 Halloween Flicks, Made for TV Movies and Cartoons

I haven't been blogging much this fall because I've been busy working on Orlando Attractions Magazine: The Show which takes pretty much all day, every day. (Don't cry for me Argentina, it's like living one long Halloween blog post. It's amazing.) 

But I did give myself the afternoon last Sunday to put up my fall garlands and orange and purple LED's, my pumpkins, and cider-candles. Also, my work on The Show has already taken us to Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party, Universal's Halloween Horror Nights, Busch Garden's Howl-O-Scream, and tomorrow we're off to Sea World's Spooktacular. Later this month the Tampa Zoo Boo! It's been non-stop Halloween and I'm completely in love with it. 

Usually I blog about the Haunted Mansion a lot this time of year, but this year I've already been IN the Haunted Mansion. We covered something called the Walt Disney World Trick or Meet Up. (Or Trick or Treat Up, I've heard it called both.) It was an after-hours event where we were allowed into the Haunted Mansion for private rides. And once again, my husband and I found ourselves completely alone on The Haunted Mansion, nothing but empty doombuggies all around.

This also happened in 2008 at the Doombuggies.com "Swinging Wake". For someone like me who is so obsessed with the Haunted Mansion that it actually took up a large chunk of my graduate thesis... inhabiting the Mansion alone for any period of time is literally a dream come true. 

If it hadn't been for a phone call from my boss telling me about the event, I would've missed it completely. That's what my boss calls me about! Hello there, dream job. I'm usually too grumpy or tired to have a good perspective on things, but in Tina Fey's Bossypants, she also speaks of this exhaustion-based mood disorder that overtakes her when she works on 30 ROCK. Again, I am certainly no Tina Fey. Not even close. But it sure is neat to share an entertainment-based ailment with a hero. At least, that's what I'm choosing to call it. I guess I could learn to lighten up too...but it's more convenient if I pretend it's a communicable comedy-writing disease. 

In the mansion, after hours.
(And totally looking snooty about it!)

And anyway, it's pretty weird to be surrounded by people who are fans of the same things on a daily basis now. For so long, I was the super weird girl obsessed with the Haunted Mansion and theme parks and now I find myself frozen and shy around my new peers. I feel like a freshman in high school all over again. I know what they're all talking about, I just can't make myself jump in. I can talk Hatbox Ghost (Again, wrote a short story all about the Hatbox Ghost during grad school) and collector's items and fan-created characters and Cory Doctorow...but for the first time in my life, I'm just kind of at a loss for words on a regular basis.

It's great to find home, but then...how do you find your place at home? My identity was in being the lone weirdo...now I'm in a whole herd of weirdos. 

Too much ennui for a Halloween blog! Bah! 

Anyway, how are you wrecking the halls? And what will your costume be? I'm still trying to put my Han Solo costume together, I have the holster, the shirt, and the blood stripes, but I need the vest, the gun, the boots, and the pants. No  WAY am I going to have the money for those, so it looks like another Halloween costume dream unfulfilled for me. (It's why I had to be the ubiquitous flapper costume from Target at the Treat-Up.) 

Greetings from Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party, I am the tiny red-shirted spec on the gound holding a camera.
(Photo courtesy Matt Roseboom...said awesome boss.)