Living a Facebook Life °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

Did you know that we have a Facebook page that is dedicated to this blog and to the smaller details that relate to Living a Disney Life-the blog (as well as living a Disney life)?

1. Do you already live in the Central Florida area and are interested in quality friends?
2. Do you dream of relocating to the area in order to be near Disney?
3. Are you just an über-Disney fan that loves to talk Disney even though you don't have plans to relocate?
4. Are you a GLBT Disney fan (or GLBT friendly), and also fit into category 1, 2 or 3?

Then we wanna be friends with you!

Please come over to Facebook and "like" our page. We want to built a community of like-minded friends. The link is below:

http://www.facebook.com/LivingADisneyLife


Hugs to all of our MouseketeerFriends,


MouseketeerKen and MouseketeerMark

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

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Disney Summit Meeting, Spring 2013 °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

We are at a period along the relocation timeline where we find it is time for serious discussion now about putting plans into action. This weekend Mark and I sat down to discuss options for how we will make this move, logistically.

One of the scenarios and the one that I happen to like best is that Mark graduates on June 30^th, and within a week or two, we relocate him to Orlando.  I can take a few days off of work, and the both of us will fly out and spend 4 or 5 days looking for a residence and setting him up with everything he needs to settle in. If we are able to schedule a few interviews during this time period, we will at least have a rental car for the week to get him to the interview.  We bide our time until he gets a job offer, and once that comes in, the house in Phoenix goes up for sale.  When the house sells, and it’s time to pack up the dog and the furniture, Mark will fly back to Phoenix so that he can help me load a U-Haul truck and make the drive across country to Florida. Done.

The second scenario is identical to the first, except that Mark does not relocate to Orlando UNTIL he secures a job. Once that happens, we move him there, and the house goes on the market, it sells, and then we coordinate the moving truck and the cross country drive.

I like option one because it means that Mark will be able to establish residency right away, and he will be more likely to interview well in a face-to-face meeting.  From some web research I have done, I have learned that many employers will not even consider you for a position unless you are already a resident and have a local address. Mark will also be working in the culinary field, which is an industry that has high turnover.  Considering Orlando is already on the record as having the most hotels in the country after Las Vegas, we have a good feeling that Mark can land a job within a couple of months, if not sooner.

This gives us the following time line:

June 30^th – Mark graduates

July 15^th (or sooner) - Mark moves to Orlando

September 1^st (or sooner) – Mark is employed

September 2^nd (or sooner) – Phoenix home goes on the market

*** unknown factor: the house sell date (current average is 69 days, depending on what website you are reading), which means I could be moving by mid-November.

Another adjustment to the scenario is that we put the house up for sale upon Mark’s graduation and before he receives a job offer.  Considering the time it takes for a home to actually sell, we may want to take advantage of the summer time when most homes sell, so that we would have a potential move date of mid-August to mid-September.

So many factors to consider and worry about! Forget Space Mountain, THIS is the real roller coaster ride!

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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Focus and Balance °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

This blog has been on my mind almost daily since I put it on a fall hiatus. I discovered that I was writing too long before the move to keep the subject of my postings related to relocation, and too many entries were veering off into other subjects.  They were all Disney related, but they did not serve the core reason for the blog.  Once Mark and I have settled into our “Florida Compound” and have started to get to know the area, I plan on changing the direction of the blog, but before the move, I want to keep the focus with fewer off shoots into other subjects.  I think we are now at a point in the timeline that I can start up again, but don’t worry if I still occasionally veer off into other directions just for the fun of it (alright, I’ll admit that Mark and I have a few non-relocation blog postings already in mind). Among other things that are simmering on the burners are these thoughts:

·       Boy, I can’t wait to get my hands on some of the home-improvement and furniture refinishing jobs that I have planned.  I have started some of them, and I’m itching to dive back in again so that we can make the house as re-sellable as possible. 

·         I am also an artist, and now that the overtime at work has ended, it is a personal requirement to get back to my art.  All of this is about balance, and not tipping the scales with any one project so that it becomes a detriment to other tasks that also need attention.  My first project is a pen and ink Mickey head silhouette that will be embellished with a swirly design and mounted in 3D, in a shadow box. I’m planning on a series of them.

·         Oh yes, the damned rummage sale…  This thing really needs to be a priority. I have 13 years in the house we live in now, and it feels like I never threw anything away in that 13 years. I have completed a sifting of the first layer and it’s enough to fill the back porch, and about 15 bins. We’ve been going out to work on pricing everything for a few hours each weekend, but I keep finding more to drag out. Sometimes I look at it all and I just don’t know where to start. Where the hell did I get that accordion?!?!

·         I’m also focusing more attention on my on-line bookstore through Amazon.com.  Last week, I mentioned that we spent a few hours digging through Goodwill bins for games to sell and we made a great haul. I’ve made the first sale from that batch of games today; The Game Of Preferences for $38.99, plus shipping. I see that as $39 bucks more towards the Move to Disney fund!  Oh, and as an aside, that $39 dollars covers the entire cost of last week's Goodwill haul, gas included; all other game sales from that haul are pure profit.

Please help keep up the blog-o-sphere morale by commenting every now and then, even on old posts; knowing that people are out there reading (or even FOLLOWING the blog-hint hint) is really a great confidence boost!

 

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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Making Money to Move to Disney World °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

We are still socking away money for the move to Disney. To make additional money on the side, I sell books, games and puzzles on Amazon.com. Last weekend was a 50% off day at Goodwill, so Mark and I made a trip to 7 different stores and came back with the 21 items you see pictured here.

The great part about our haul is that we were able to scan all of the UPS numbers with our smart phones to check the value on Amazon.com, so that we could pass on items that were not worth spending the money on.  Some items here were for sale for $100 or more!

After 3 days of sorting, part-counting, cleaning and listing, all of them are available for sale and the grand total for all 21 gems is $950!  Even if I sold only one quarter of the haul, I would still have profited by more than $200!  I currently have 700 books and 50 games/puzzles/toys for sale, for which all profit goes right into savings for the Disney Move. Everything not sold by the time we move will be donated back to Goodwill, unless we find the room in the moving truck to keep a few things. Those books are heavy!

Go ahead, take a guess: (click on the photo to see it larger) Which game out of the ones you see here do you think is the most valuable? Comment below!

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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We are still on track

Hello Mouseketeers,

Have no fears, none of our plans have changed. You may have noticed a lack of postings lately, and it is because we started to notice that our own blog postings were becoming less and less about the relocation plans, and more about things unrelated.

Our vision for the blog is to document our journey every step of the way. Occasionally, we thought we would include some fun postings (Disney pictures, Hidden Mickey finds, Disney cooking), but it became clear that since we are still more than a year away from the actual move, we didn't have enough happening to sustain the blog in these early months.

So, we are still here, still making plans, and still saving money.  But we will not be posting again until we can contribute on a regular basis on the subject that was planned.

I'm hoping that what we HAVE written will still attract readers, so if you have just found us, please drop us a line. We are hoping to make many friends local to the central Florida area, as well as Disney fans in all parts of the world.

I am hoping that we will return in just a few short months.

Ken 

Photo blog - Hidden Mickeys °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

Oh yes, the most popular of secondary Disney activities; hunting for Hidden Mickeys.

These photos are from my own collection.  Feel free to send yours to me, I'd love to feature a post with all of your great finds!

Here are the first five:

This one was the hardest to capture.. it's found on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and the coaster goes by the hidden Mickey very quickly. You need to know where it is to get the photo.

This one is in the queue of the Matterhorn. I was directed to this by the cast member when I asked him if there were any hidden Mickeys on the mountain.

And this last Hidden Mickey, was staged for the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival. Photo credit: http://www.myhiddenmickey.com/ blot.  Thanks, My Hidden Mickey dot com!!!

Send your Hidden Mickey photos in, and I'll give you a shout out.  You deserve it!

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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Where Are We Going to Get the Money For This? °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

It will come from sacrifice, pure and simple. When the decision was made that we would be moving to Florida, we immediately imposed a freeze (or at least a chill) on movies, eating out on a Friday or Saturday night and internet shopping (that was a hard one). Of course, freezing your frivolous spending doesn’t really earmark the savings, so we put a more formal plan into action as well.

Just around the time that we started dreaming about the move, and wondering how we would ever afford it, I was reviewing a history of book sales that I had made in the past year on Amazon.com. I have been selling books for several years now, and I have been able to afford some things that I otherwise may not have been, including trips to Disneyland in California. I was looking at the numbers and wondered to myself how much money I had earned in one full year. I added up the  and found the amount was just slightly over $1400!

This boggled my mind. Had I stashed that money away into a savings account and not spent it on things that are unaccounted for today, I would have that money right now. Suddenly, I had a savings-account epiphany – what if I saved my earning for the upcoming year? How much would I have at the end of the year? If sales maintained at the level that it has been, then I could easily have the same amount by the end of 12 months, without any more effort than I was used to.

Then, another thought popped into my head. What if I wanted $2000 by the end of one year instead of just $1400? I did some quick math and divided the $2000 dream total by 24 (the number of paydays in one year). I would need to earn $83.50 every two weeks.

When I first think about socking away $83.50 every pay period on my current salary, my excitement kind of evaporates.  However, with the kind of sacrifices that I have been making recently, I might be able to supplement the balance of my book sales, UP TO the $83.50 goal. So for example, if I have a slow book sale week, in which I earn only $40, from my following work paycheck, I would transfer the difference ($43.50 in this case); a prospect much easier to swallow.

On good sales weeks, I might even go over the goal amount, in which case I would not need to supplement any deficit. Of course at the end of the day that translates to earning MORE than my goal amount.

The first thing I did was to adjust my half.com payments account that that all deposits were made straight into my savings account, instead of checking. This way, I save myself the added effort of doing it, and I’m not tempted to hold any amount back when things are tight. I made a plan, and I need to do everything I can to stick to it.

The year was already two months in by this time, so I had missed three or four deposits and I wanted to make them up.

Since book sales had been decent, mostly approaching the goal, I didn’t need to supplement much more than 10-20 dollars, but there were those first few weeks in January and February that I needed to make up. It took some belt tightening, but I was able to double up on savings transfers and I matched the half.com deposit, to the penny for the weeks that I was missing.

Of course, second-hand books don’t list themselves, and they also don’t shop for themselves to be sold in my store.  As they say, your success is dependent upon the effort you put forth, so I started increasing my efforts. I had rummage sales to visit, and thrift store bins to dig through. Church and School fund-raisers were priority because they are usually on a much larger scale than a garage sale, and there is usually no shortage of books they are trying to unload and the church or school staff don’t mind taking lower price offers when I come up with a huge box of books and a five or ten dollar bill in hand. Rock bottom discounts are usually more frequently accepted as it gets later in the afternoon; no one likes to pack up heavy book boxes at the end of the day.

The rest of my afternoon is spent inspecting my booty, getting them listed for sale, then stored in the garage, awaiting their new owners. I like to think of myself as a book-broker; someone who goes out and finds an unwanted or abandoned baby, cleans it up, and gets it into the hands of its rightful owner; someone who will appreciate the beauty of the thing… at least until they have finished reading it and the cycle starts again; hey, kind of like Buzz and Woody and the toys of Toy Story 3, eh?

 

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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Cooking Our Way to the Magic Kingdom (Meatloaf) °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

Mark and I decided that since it’s Mark's dream to work for Disney in the culinary arts, we would build a portfolio of culinary experiences.

Until we have more blog-news making experiences in the area of our relocation, this will be an ongoing feature (as budget permits), where we will choose a recipe that looks good, cook it up, take some pictures for you, and then include our review of the finished product.


We thought that a fun way to share these adventures (and to relate them to our theme-blog) would be to look to the Disney catalog of recipes, namely “Cooking With Mickey” volumes 1 and 2, and “Delicious Disney”, which collectively contain hundreds of park favorites.

This week we made an easy, comfortable choice; meatloaf! The comfort food of comfort foods. This relatively easy recipe was featured in Orlando at the Disney Village Market place in Chef Mickey’s Village Restaurant.

Unfortunately, Ken is STRONGLY anti-onion... and mushrooms, celery, bell peppers, and most seafood (and as Mark says, "basically, the fundementals of all cooking-the mirepoix"), so we will be cooking slightly altered versions of the Disney recipe, but we plan to stay as close as possible to the original.

The recipe was for a family of six so since there are only two of us, we decided to cut it in half. The full recipe is at the bottom of the post.

Photo credit: WDWnews.com


Sadly, we do not have photos to share.  The day after baking this dish, we had a computer crash, and lost everything from the last 24 hours.  We were lucky-we didn't lose much, and we were able to recreate everything EXCEPT the meatloaf pictures. Thanks, WDW News!

This photo is courtesy of me.  Since the back cover lines up with the front to make one great Disney scene, I thought you would like to see it laid out.

RESULT: We had very good results for our first meatloaf.  The half recipe was the perfect size for a meal for two, and then left overs for lunch the next day.  The texture was surprisingly smooth, and the herbs and spices were just great. 

We cooked our loaf for one hour as called for, and it looked perfect, but we like a more crispy outer shell, so we gave it another 15 minutes.  That gave us a perfect, juicy inside with a crunchy outside.  I would suspect that if you were making the full recipe, you will probably need to bake for more than one hour in order to cook all the way through.

THE RECIPE:

Meatloaf

Chef Mickey’s Village Restaurant

Disney Village Marketplace

Yield: 6 servings

2 pounds ground beef

1 pound ground pork

1 ½ cups onion, diced

1/8 teaspoon garlic, granulated

2 cups bread crumbs, fresh

2/3 cup cold water

1/8 teaspoon thyme

¼ cup parsley, chopped

1 whole egg

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

1/8 teaspoon salt

Soak break crumbs in cold water and set aside.  Sauté diced onion until tender.  Set aside and allow to cool.

Preheat oven to 350 degree.

In a large bowl, combine ground beef, ground pork, onions, granulated garlic, and bread crumbs mixed with water.  Mix well and add remaining ingredients. Mix well and mold into loaves.  Form in either loaf pans or in a meat pan with sides high enough to hold juices.

Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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We highly recommend this recipe!  8 Mickey Heads out of 10!

Disney Haiku - Installment Two

(Haiku: an unrhymed verse form of Japanese origin having three lines containing usually five, seven, and five syllables respectively.)
And now a little indulgence in language manipulation; Haiku, volume 2...


This week I was watching the Disney Channel and a really nice commercial came on the screen. It was a two minute, fifteen second ode to poetry aimed to opening children's eyes to all things iambic!  Perfectly fitting when I have a Haiki post upcoming.  You could even say serendipitous!

Please to enjoy.

A cool mist sprays out-

Mickey’s imagination

On a summer night

The Main Street Parade;

Magnetic musical sounds

and sparkling lights

Disguised in grass skirts

a bear and man-cub dance for

Bare Necessities

Looking for villains

My favorite trading pins

to fill my lanyard

Scat Cat and a rat

Foil Edgar’s evil plan,

to change Madame’s will

 

And one more written just for this blog.  As sweet as a spoonful of sugar....

Poppins is her name

Very sweet and witty

Rosy cheeks, no warts!

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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Scouting Orlando – The Arrival °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

In planning for our relocation to Central Florida, Mark and I felt that we needed to budget in a trip to the area for scouting and research to make sure this was the right thing for us to do.  We visited the Orlando area March 23^rd to the 31^st of 2012... 

Our flight to Orlando was scheduled to leave at 11pm. We were due to arrive in Orlando at 4am Friday morning. We figured that with even an early check-in we would not get a room before 11am, so we planned on taking our time picking up our luggage, checking in with Hertz for the rental car and maybe getting a bit of breakfast in our future home.

The flight over to Florida was about 3 ½ hours, but I didn’t sleep for one minute which was hard considering I fall asleep at 10:00pm on the dot when I have to get up for work the next morning.  It was a packed flight, full of Spring Breakers heading to Orlando for the theme parks. They weren’t a rowdy bunch, thank goodness, but it did mean a lot of people to maneuver around and wait for loading and unloading.

Mark and I anticipated the extra charge to check our luggage, so we planned to share our larger suitcase so that we would only have to check one bag. Everything else we were able to carry on (lap top, and a carry-on bag each). Still, $50 bucks each way is not chump change!

Four hours later, we were searching for the luggage carousel that would spit out our green suitcase. This is a big airport compared to ones I’ve been to, and we didn’t find the signage very user friendly. After a few wrong turns, and what felt like a mile of hiking, we had baggage in hand and started the trek to the rental car counters.  Of course, Hertz was the furthest one down, but was thankfully empty of people.  The rental agent was nice enough, tried to upsell the vehicle without mentioning an extra charge (she made it sound like she had a nicer vehicle on hand, and was going to upgrade as a courtesy).  We declined, and found that we were happy with what we got.

Walking through the outside of the airport at 4:30 in the morning, excited to be in the city that we will be moving to eventually, all of our senses were alert.  We noticed a light fog around the area, something you rarely see in Phoenix.  That temperature at that hour was on the cool side of lukewarm, but the humidity was noticeable.  We didn’t know if the humidity that morning was high, or low, but we were both surprised that it was humid at all considering the cool temperature. 

During the 20 minute drive from the airport to the Radisson Hotel Orlando we soaked in the view of the environment, lots of grass, lots of small bodies of water, certainly more tree-life that in our desert home. 

I was pleased to discover that Orlando did not have a strange smell when we got off the plane.  Sometimes, you may find that a strange city has a scent (Phoenix smells like dust sometimes, and when it rains, it’s a distinctive dirt smell).  Certain parts of the valley has a lot of horse property, so in the morning hours, you will smell manure for miles.

(The crystal chandelier from the lobby of the Carlton)

We arrived at the hotel by 7am after a quick breakfast at a nearby Waffle House.  We were pleasantly surprised that the staff was able to put us into a room right away.  We were very happy with the room; a nice size, clean and with nice décor.  I have to admit that both of us were drop-dead tired, so after a quick wash up, we both dropped onto the bed and slept until late afternoon.

The first day of our Scouting Orlando trip had begun with a nap!

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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Why Florida & Not California? °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

When I made my announcement to my friends and family a couple of months ago, one of my friends asked me “Why Florida and not California?”.  A fair question, because we did think about that.

Mark and I have been to Disneyland in California several times together. We both have countless visits to the West coast parks logged in before we even met, but we have only been to Florida a couple of times each, and never together (until recently on our Scouting Orlando trip). 

When the idea started to gel that we wanted to move to another state, and then the idea to live near Disney started to percolate, Florida was the first place that popped into my mind.  We both dearly love Disneyland because of the intimacy of the park, as well as the history and nostalgia of the original, but there were a lot of factors to weigh in against.

My first concern about relocating to California was about the cost of living. From what I have read, and what friends have told me, it costs a LOT to live there.  I realize that income may be commensurate to the cost of living there, but I would rather make a lateral move than to try to win an uphill battle.  In addition to that, we want to own our home.  With the cost of real estate anywhere in the state of California, it would be totally prohibitive.

We had to ask ourselves where were we likely to find more available jobs as well?  With Florida’s unemployment rate as low as it is right now, I have been keeping tabs on a regular basis, and I have been seeing recent signs of improvement.  It’s staying even with Arizona’s rate, which are both slightly better than California’s.  The cost of living index is very similar to ours here in Phoenix. This doesn’t guarantee either of us a job of course, but I think both Mark and I are more competitive with our job skills in Florida, then we would be in California.

By size comparison, our “intimate” park is approximately 1 square mile in total.  That includes both parks (Disneyland and California Adventure) and downtown Disney.  Disney World is 47 square miles!  One of the questions friends ask is “Don’t you think you’ll get tired of Disneyland”?  Well, in truth, we might. With as much as Disney World has to offer, however, we can move from park to park to park.  Add in two water parks, Downtown Disney, DisneyQuest, the upcoming Pleasure Island as well as all of the other parks in the vicinity, and beaches on either coast (don’t forget the Florida Keys and Miami) I don’t think we’re going to be bored!

Now let’s talk weather.  I guess no one would choose scorching heat and dripping humidity over the breezy, mild climate of Southern California. But when you consider where we are coming from, we are trading hot-as-hell for hot-as-hell (if you will pardon the phrase).  In Phoenix, you spend your summer months indoors as much as possible, and you run from air conditioning to air conditioning as quickly as you can.  I imagine it will be the same when we get to the tropical heat of central Florida, but the difference is that we will be living less than 30 minutes away from Disney World (and we will have a pool in the back yard)!

It wasn’t a quick and easy decision. We wanted to make an informed one, so we have done a lot of research, and have discussed endless scenarios. I think we both have fallen in love with the idea of living in a state that is so much different from the one we live in. 

Besides, Mark is scared of earthquakes.

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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Scouting Orlando - Budget °o° *•._.•* ‘ *•._.•* °o°

In planning for our relocation to Central Florida, Mark and I felt that we needed to budget in a trip to the area for scouting and research to make sure this was the right thing for us to do.  We visited the Orlando area March 23^rd to the 31^st of 2012... 

Mark and I have known for a while that it might not be a smart move to just up and move our lives to Florida without ever having visited the area. So, when we first made the decision to move, I set up a budget so that we would know how much this was going to cost.  Part of that budget included a “Scouting Orlando” section. 

Among the costs we budgeted for the Scouting Orlando trip looked like this:

flight	$400.00	4 days/3 nights
hotel	$300.00	($100/night)
Rental call	$154.00	Standard Car-$116-$154
Food	$150.00
DW tix (1 Day)	$175.00	$87.30 x 2
gas	$100.00
TOTAL	$1279.00

$1,279 bucks.  Economical, right?   Well, the reality ended up being something different:

Flight	incl.
Hotel	incl.	8 days/7 nights
rental car	$2,050.00
Food	$200.00
DW tix	$630.00	for 6 days (each)
Gas	$100.00
TOTAL	$2,980.00

So Priceline.com allowed us to bundle the flight, hotel stay and rental car.  Since we decided to extend the visit from just 3 days/4 nights, to twice that at 8 days/7 nights, I think we stayed within budget. I’m not sure how each cost broke out for the bundled flight/hotel/car, but having upgraded the hotel a bit so that we would be comfortable for such a long stay it works out to $120 a night for hotel, $200 each for flight, and $89 a day for the car.  The rental car was the most surprising cost.  Even taking the most basic insurance coverage they offered, we were shocked at the additional fees and charges that weren’t explained on the Priceline itinerary.  That and the extra hundred bucks that U.S. Airways charges to check your suitcase provided some wallet shock!

You’ll notice that we bought 6-day park hopper tickets for the Disney Parks.  I had originally decided that we would only go ONE day out of the 4 that we were going to be in Florida.  We were waiting for a price deal to crop up before buying the ticket, knowing that if we didn’t find one, we would just buy tickets at the gate.  It wasn’t until just days before the trip that Priceline send an email with a discount offer, in which the best deal was 2 days free if you buy 6 days.  We decided that if we went with that deal, at roughly $50 a day, we could still tour the city, and then just drop in on the park for a few hours here and there for a parade, fireworks and a few rides, then head back to the hotel.

I think we ended up spending about $3500 in full. It took some sacrifice to save it up, but by now, we have resigned ourselves to the need to reduce our spending for the next year and half so that we can have as much money as possible in our hands before it’s time to make the big move.

This Scouting Orlando trip was a necessary evil in terms of spending our hard earned savings.  It opened our eyes to some of the challenges that we will be facing when we arrive in Orlando, and begin the second, most-important half of our journey.

This posting marks the first in a series on the subject of “Scouting Orlando”. 

Comments are welcome. Positive feedback encouraged!

Mouseketeer Ken

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