like a kid on christmas eve

Couldn't sleep last night. I kept waking up with a start, thinking I'd slept through my alarm -- which was set for 2am, 3am and 4am, because today is registration day for the next MouseAdventure!

MouseAdventure is a twice-yearly event put together by the Disneyland fans at mouseplanet.com. It's sort of a scavenger hunt, but it's puzzle-based and trivia-based, and the quests are cleverly designed so that each puzzle has many layers of complexity (at each of which you may go veering off in a wrong direction!). My friends Maria, Mike and Peter join me on these day-long, somewhat grueling yet incredibly fun events (this will be our third one, but I think it is the fifteenth MouseAdventure overall). The event started out small but it has grown dramatically -- our pre- and post-game meetings max out the largest ballroom in one of the Disney hotels with a total of 650 players plus a couple dozen staff. (In the massive group photo above, taken at the Spring 2007 MA, if you look at the very center there are two people in wheelchairs, and then to the left of them is a guy in a grey sweatshirt, and then there's Maria in a pink shirt, Peter in a black shirt, and I'm the tall girl standing behind them wearing a red scarf. Thank goodness we stood in the front or we'd never have managed to spot ourselves. Mike had to stay home with an injured dog that time.)

MouseAdventure is HIGHLY addictive. My heart would break if we were to miss out on registering, but Team Bibbidy Bobbidy Bleep is in! I sealed the deal at 2:45am, hooray! So between now and the next MouseAdventure, we'll scout the park to review commemorative plaques, peruse the window displays, refresh our memories about shortcuts between Lands and notice the stuff that you normally don't notice, like floor tiles and doorknobs and weather vanes and wrought iron. Oh yes. Last time there was a quest in which we were given photos of fifteen different New Orleans Square wrought iron balconies, and we had to spot them, find the address of the store or restaurant below it, associate each 2-digit number with the correct list of letters, and use those letters to decode a lengthy clue -- THEN we had to understand what the heck the clue was talking about, and know where to find the answer! And then manage to phrase the answer correctly in the right spot on the answer sheet. There are a hundred ways to get it wrong and only one way to get it right. (We got it right!)

Being gluttons for punishment, we compete in the Advanced division although relative newbies really belong in the Basic division. In our first MA we only placed 41st out of 60+ Advanced teams (we had tons of time management issues as well as a general bafflement at the whole spectacle of it), but in our second MA we improved to 21st place so we are hopeful to continue our upward trend. I'll be "in training" at Disneyland on numerous Sunday mornings leading up to April 13. Obsessed? Not quite. Just very, very competitive...