Blog update coming within the next couple days. I did update the photo link with photos from last cruise and also want to mention that next week's photos (week 13) are fun because I went to the Vancouver Aquarium at Stanley Park on the 15th. So, be looking for those next update!!! :)
T
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Friday, August 10, 2007
Week 11 of 14: August 1 - 8, 2007
Wednesday August 1st: Vancouver, B.C.
This is my second full day of isolation and the rest has been very much needed. I have slept a good portion of each day and still fall asleep by 1 am each night - late for me I know but after sleeping a good 8 hours of the day or more as well that’s sorta early.
I ordered room service for lunch today, the kind dining steward wakes me each morning to inquire if I would like breakfast but today I was too tired and slept until 10:30 am. Around 11:30 am I called them back and ordered a grilled tuna melt with tomatoes and fresh fruit. I haven’t had a huge appetite, but I haven’t completely lacked one either so that’s good.
I read part of a book that my roommate recommended for me and watched TNT for a few hours (Law and Order re-runs is the staple for that network I think) and then fell back to sleep until dinner around 6:30.
I have to say on a side note that the stewards have all been so nice when they bring my food and I call on the phone. It’s great attending the Sunday night fellowship with a bunch of them because word spreads and they are all taking really good care of me. When I call the caller ID tells them it’s my room and they greet me each time by name and then kindly ask what I’m in the mood for and then if I don’t call around the next meal time they call me back and inquire if I’m in the mood for the next meal. That has been really fabulous. :)
I also had the distinct privilege today of updating my blog in the morning as I didn’t have to work. I really needed this rest and am really thankful to have gotten it.
Thursday August 2nd: First Day at Sea
I went to the medical office this morning to be cleared for work, even though my stomach is still rumbling I definitely do NOT have Norwalk - that would have been constant symptoms for 24 - 48 or more hours. So I’m going to feign total health and go back to work. I do have sinus issues going on - that comes from living with a smoker (I’ve been sick all summer because of the heavy perfumes she sprays to cover up her odor) but otherwise I’m peachy and ready to work.
My kids didn’t know me because I missed the first night of activities and some really gave me a cold reception - wow. I was told that certain ones were super sweet and cute and suprising enough those are the ones giving me the problems. Hopefully they simply don’t trust the “new girl” and they’ll warm up after awhile.
The ship was rocking a little bit today and the kids were slightly seasick, but thankfully no incidents in the room. I can tell sea wise that we are slowly transitioning into fall weather in Alaska because the sea is gradually becoming rougher on the first, last sea days and Glacier Bay evening when we are in exposed water rather than the protected Inside Passage. I will say though that compared to last summer it’s so much better and much much more beautiful on this run from Vancouver. If any of you desire to sea Alaska by cruise ship I highly recommend Holland America (very traditional and not a party ship compared to the other lines) and also would highly recommend the Inside Passage cruise from Vancouver. It is well worth the hassle of flying or driving into Canada as the port of origin.
Tonight we had our photo scavenger hunt and the kids were SO WELL BEHAVED. I was really amazed at how wonderful they did. They really worked well together, got along really well and had great teamwork/ sportsmanship. That really makes my job fun when I have such a conscientious group of kids.
After work I played Spider Solitaire on my computer. My friend Kim emailed while I was in isolation and asked if I was playing that again like I did last year when I was isolated because of my roommate. It actually hadn’t occurred to me this summer to play that game in my spare time until I was reminded. Way to go Kim, now I’m addicted to it again! :) I have also rekindled my passion for reading, another something I don’t think of doing when I have the internet and TV so readily at my disposal at home. I have TV here but not much of anything to watch and the internet is way too expensive to use it for entertainment purposes, so reading it is. It’s free and educational!
Friday August 3rd: Tracy Arm / Juneau, AK
It is so gorgeous today in Tracy Arm. The glacial ice is so aqua I kick myself for always forgetting to bring my camera to Club Hal on this day. Maybe next week I’ll remember. Tracy Arm is a very narrow passageway carved by a glacier that our ship must slowly navigate and make very sharp turns super carefully. A few weeks back we canceled Tracy Arm because we couldn’t see well enough to navigate it safely and not hit any of the icebergs. Not wanting to be a modern day Titanic we skipped it and sailed straight on to Juneau instead. Today though it was gorgeous.
In Juneau I wasn’t able to get off the ship until late because we had a meeting for all members of the Passenger Notification Team at 4 pm. So I took my camera and went to the Governor's Mansion and the Capitol building.
Tonight’s theme was supposed to be Brave the Night, but I had one boy (Henry) show up. He started out the week quite shy and withdrawn but tonight we had a great time together. He is very courteous and respectful and helps to pick up without being asked. He looks for ways to help out. I love that in a kid. Well, I asked him what he wanted to do and he didn’t care he said I could pick and he’d be fine with it. Wow! Well I insisted that we do what he was interested in, so we finally picked out a game to play and towards the end of the night one other boy finally showed up that was Henry’s age. John and Henry really hit it off that night and became fast friends. The boy’s ended up playing foosball for about 30 minutes using John’s tokens and then they helped me clean up the room and reset it for the next day.
Saturday August 4th: Skagway, AK
Today I walked around in Skagway once again but my journey also took me on some beautiful new trails. If the weather cooperates this next cruise I plan to pack a picnic lunch and spend the day at this new location because it is so relaxing and makes me feel like I’m either at my grandparent’s old cabin in northern MN or back at Camp Forest Springs in northern WI. The climb is 500 ft almost at a 10:00 type angle until you get to the top and then it levels out to a beautiful wooded trail and mountain lake. It is called Lower Dewey Lake. Moira, if you read this you need to go there when you get back on board before the Z leaves Alaska because thought the climb is steep it is so worth the effort when you get up there. There is a picnic table and some beautiful trails and it is so quiet and serene it’s completely amazing. And yet I didn’t worry about bears because even though I hiked independently there were lots of other people coming and going the whole time so I was never technically “alone”. Look at my album this week to see a brief snippet of the beauty of Lower Dewey Lake.
Tonight our Country Carnival was a huge success. The kids had fun and were very well behaved. The night started out really slowly, but by the time we got to the carnival games they were very animated and eager to play for prizes and win tickets. All in all a fun evening with fun kids. It’s really cute watching the older ones help the younger ones and they did it willingly.
Sunday August 5th: Glacier Bay National Park
It was warm and sunny today in Glacier bay - at least 65 degrees with the sun heating the air to maybe the lower 70’s when it came out right at Marjorie Glacier. This week we didn’t see quite the magnificent calving that we saw last week, but just enough small chunks to keep the kids waiting for more until it was time to go in for lunch.
This afternoon the weather was still amazing and the Park Ranger and guest singers came up for their activities. Afterwards I sent the kids out on a scavenger hunt and then we ate ice cream. How great is that! I love the kids this week - they are so super sweet. I’ve been so fortunate to have had 3-4 groups in a row of good kids. This trend can’t possibly last can it?
Movie night was good and there was no late night baby sitting so I was able to make it to the fellowship meeting. I had prepared sufficiently to lead the message portion, per a request from two weeks ago when I ended up with late night baby sitting, and was thankful that my stomach was hanging in there because the sea is quite rocky tonight. The meeting went very well, I feel so blessed after going and know that in that group are true friends that care about me in a right way. After the meeting we sat around and sang praise songs until about 1:30 or 2:00 am (thankfully for ME tomorrow is Ketchikan and I don’t work until the pm, but unfortunately the others still have to get up in a few hours and go back to work).
Monday August 6th: Ketchikan, AK
Today I slept in for a bit and got off the ship around 11 am. I went over to the local internet cafe and purchased 5 hours of time for $20.00 (not quite half price as the ship but almost) and finally filled out my FAFSA form for student aid and signed up for one class. I now have to wait until Juneau to see if it was approved and then fill out the request for loans from UWM and US Bank. Hopefully I can get it all to go through rather quickly as I only have a month until classes start. I already know though that I’ll receive a rejection notice in the mail because of a notice on my credit regarding a misplaced wallet from 3 years ago. Now all online credit approvals are rejected and I have to call an 800-number to approve the application being filed in my name. This is fine by me, but the timing had to be worked out so that when I apply for aid on Friday it will have 2 weeks to come in the mail as rejected and then I’ll have to call and take care of it right when I get home and then hopefully I’ll have approval and disbursement before the 3rd week of classes when payment is due. It wouldn’t matter if I’d done it earlier because I wasn’t home to receive the rejection notice. So anyways, I finally got that all taken care of using high speed internet. That’s one thing I’m really looking forward to having again when I get home, but I have been so thankful to have internet in my cabin this summer I am not complaining about the slow speed (I don’t know anyone else that can get it in their cabin, I just happen to live right across the hall from the hotspot).
After going to the internet cafe I then walked to City Park and sat on a bench and called friends. It was overcast, but not raining and so it was really peaceful and pretty. I enjoyed the tranquility. I love the fact that I can safely find places to be alone and have such gorgeous surroundings.
Tonight’s theme was more scavenger hunts. My kids are so great working together in teams that I let them pick their own and they did 2 scavenger hunts for prizes. I even broke out the good prizes because they are such great kids.
Tuesday August 7th: Final Sea Day
Today we hung out in the Loft and played UNO and then went to Playstation and the cooking class. This afternoon they did another scavenger hunt and had an ice cream eating contest.
For the farewell party I brought back the Brave the Night theme night for most of the games because we didn’t do that earlier in the week and I thought they might enjoy it. So with a few of those games combined with t-shirt decorating and some other stuff we had a very fun final night together. I’m going to truly miss these kids. :)
I hope that your week was a fabulous one like mine and I look forward to hearing from you! :)
T
This is my second full day of isolation and the rest has been very much needed. I have slept a good portion of each day and still fall asleep by 1 am each night - late for me I know but after sleeping a good 8 hours of the day or more as well that’s sorta early.
I ordered room service for lunch today, the kind dining steward wakes me each morning to inquire if I would like breakfast but today I was too tired and slept until 10:30 am. Around 11:30 am I called them back and ordered a grilled tuna melt with tomatoes and fresh fruit. I haven’t had a huge appetite, but I haven’t completely lacked one either so that’s good.
I read part of a book that my roommate recommended for me and watched TNT for a few hours (Law and Order re-runs is the staple for that network I think) and then fell back to sleep until dinner around 6:30.
I have to say on a side note that the stewards have all been so nice when they bring my food and I call on the phone. It’s great attending the Sunday night fellowship with a bunch of them because word spreads and they are all taking really good care of me. When I call the caller ID tells them it’s my room and they greet me each time by name and then kindly ask what I’m in the mood for and then if I don’t call around the next meal time they call me back and inquire if I’m in the mood for the next meal. That has been really fabulous. :)
I also had the distinct privilege today of updating my blog in the morning as I didn’t have to work. I really needed this rest and am really thankful to have gotten it.
Thursday August 2nd: First Day at Sea
I went to the medical office this morning to be cleared for work, even though my stomach is still rumbling I definitely do NOT have Norwalk - that would have been constant symptoms for 24 - 48 or more hours. So I’m going to feign total health and go back to work. I do have sinus issues going on - that comes from living with a smoker (I’ve been sick all summer because of the heavy perfumes she sprays to cover up her odor) but otherwise I’m peachy and ready to work.
My kids didn’t know me because I missed the first night of activities and some really gave me a cold reception - wow. I was told that certain ones were super sweet and cute and suprising enough those are the ones giving me the problems. Hopefully they simply don’t trust the “new girl” and they’ll warm up after awhile.
The ship was rocking a little bit today and the kids were slightly seasick, but thankfully no incidents in the room. I can tell sea wise that we are slowly transitioning into fall weather in Alaska because the sea is gradually becoming rougher on the first, last sea days and Glacier Bay evening when we are in exposed water rather than the protected Inside Passage. I will say though that compared to last summer it’s so much better and much much more beautiful on this run from Vancouver. If any of you desire to sea Alaska by cruise ship I highly recommend Holland America (very traditional and not a party ship compared to the other lines) and also would highly recommend the Inside Passage cruise from Vancouver. It is well worth the hassle of flying or driving into Canada as the port of origin.
Tonight we had our photo scavenger hunt and the kids were SO WELL BEHAVED. I was really amazed at how wonderful they did. They really worked well together, got along really well and had great teamwork/ sportsmanship. That really makes my job fun when I have such a conscientious group of kids.
After work I played Spider Solitaire on my computer. My friend Kim emailed while I was in isolation and asked if I was playing that again like I did last year when I was isolated because of my roommate. It actually hadn’t occurred to me this summer to play that game in my spare time until I was reminded. Way to go Kim, now I’m addicted to it again! :) I have also rekindled my passion for reading, another something I don’t think of doing when I have the internet and TV so readily at my disposal at home. I have TV here but not much of anything to watch and the internet is way too expensive to use it for entertainment purposes, so reading it is. It’s free and educational!
Friday August 3rd: Tracy Arm / Juneau, AK
It is so gorgeous today in Tracy Arm. The glacial ice is so aqua I kick myself for always forgetting to bring my camera to Club Hal on this day. Maybe next week I’ll remember. Tracy Arm is a very narrow passageway carved by a glacier that our ship must slowly navigate and make very sharp turns super carefully. A few weeks back we canceled Tracy Arm because we couldn’t see well enough to navigate it safely and not hit any of the icebergs. Not wanting to be a modern day Titanic we skipped it and sailed straight on to Juneau instead. Today though it was gorgeous.
In Juneau I wasn’t able to get off the ship until late because we had a meeting for all members of the Passenger Notification Team at 4 pm. So I took my camera and went to the Governor's Mansion and the Capitol building.
Tonight’s theme was supposed to be Brave the Night, but I had one boy (Henry) show up. He started out the week quite shy and withdrawn but tonight we had a great time together. He is very courteous and respectful and helps to pick up without being asked. He looks for ways to help out. I love that in a kid. Well, I asked him what he wanted to do and he didn’t care he said I could pick and he’d be fine with it. Wow! Well I insisted that we do what he was interested in, so we finally picked out a game to play and towards the end of the night one other boy finally showed up that was Henry’s age. John and Henry really hit it off that night and became fast friends. The boy’s ended up playing foosball for about 30 minutes using John’s tokens and then they helped me clean up the room and reset it for the next day.
Saturday August 4th: Skagway, AK
Today I walked around in Skagway once again but my journey also took me on some beautiful new trails. If the weather cooperates this next cruise I plan to pack a picnic lunch and spend the day at this new location because it is so relaxing and makes me feel like I’m either at my grandparent’s old cabin in northern MN or back at Camp Forest Springs in northern WI. The climb is 500 ft almost at a 10:00 type angle until you get to the top and then it levels out to a beautiful wooded trail and mountain lake. It is called Lower Dewey Lake. Moira, if you read this you need to go there when you get back on board before the Z leaves Alaska because thought the climb is steep it is so worth the effort when you get up there. There is a picnic table and some beautiful trails and it is so quiet and serene it’s completely amazing. And yet I didn’t worry about bears because even though I hiked independently there were lots of other people coming and going the whole time so I was never technically “alone”. Look at my album this week to see a brief snippet of the beauty of Lower Dewey Lake.
Tonight our Country Carnival was a huge success. The kids had fun and were very well behaved. The night started out really slowly, but by the time we got to the carnival games they were very animated and eager to play for prizes and win tickets. All in all a fun evening with fun kids. It’s really cute watching the older ones help the younger ones and they did it willingly.
Sunday August 5th: Glacier Bay National Park
It was warm and sunny today in Glacier bay - at least 65 degrees with the sun heating the air to maybe the lower 70’s when it came out right at Marjorie Glacier. This week we didn’t see quite the magnificent calving that we saw last week, but just enough small chunks to keep the kids waiting for more until it was time to go in for lunch.
This afternoon the weather was still amazing and the Park Ranger and guest singers came up for their activities. Afterwards I sent the kids out on a scavenger hunt and then we ate ice cream. How great is that! I love the kids this week - they are so super sweet. I’ve been so fortunate to have had 3-4 groups in a row of good kids. This trend can’t possibly last can it?
Movie night was good and there was no late night baby sitting so I was able to make it to the fellowship meeting. I had prepared sufficiently to lead the message portion, per a request from two weeks ago when I ended up with late night baby sitting, and was thankful that my stomach was hanging in there because the sea is quite rocky tonight. The meeting went very well, I feel so blessed after going and know that in that group are true friends that care about me in a right way. After the meeting we sat around and sang praise songs until about 1:30 or 2:00 am (thankfully for ME tomorrow is Ketchikan and I don’t work until the pm, but unfortunately the others still have to get up in a few hours and go back to work).
Monday August 6th: Ketchikan, AK
Today I slept in for a bit and got off the ship around 11 am. I went over to the local internet cafe and purchased 5 hours of time for $20.00 (not quite half price as the ship but almost) and finally filled out my FAFSA form for student aid and signed up for one class. I now have to wait until Juneau to see if it was approved and then fill out the request for loans from UWM and US Bank. Hopefully I can get it all to go through rather quickly as I only have a month until classes start. I already know though that I’ll receive a rejection notice in the mail because of a notice on my credit regarding a misplaced wallet from 3 years ago. Now all online credit approvals are rejected and I have to call an 800-number to approve the application being filed in my name. This is fine by me, but the timing had to be worked out so that when I apply for aid on Friday it will have 2 weeks to come in the mail as rejected and then I’ll have to call and take care of it right when I get home and then hopefully I’ll have approval and disbursement before the 3rd week of classes when payment is due. It wouldn’t matter if I’d done it earlier because I wasn’t home to receive the rejection notice. So anyways, I finally got that all taken care of using high speed internet. That’s one thing I’m really looking forward to having again when I get home, but I have been so thankful to have internet in my cabin this summer I am not complaining about the slow speed (I don’t know anyone else that can get it in their cabin, I just happen to live right across the hall from the hotspot).
After going to the internet cafe I then walked to City Park and sat on a bench and called friends. It was overcast, but not raining and so it was really peaceful and pretty. I enjoyed the tranquility. I love the fact that I can safely find places to be alone and have such gorgeous surroundings.
Tonight’s theme was more scavenger hunts. My kids are so great working together in teams that I let them pick their own and they did 2 scavenger hunts for prizes. I even broke out the good prizes because they are such great kids.
Tuesday August 7th: Final Sea Day
Today we hung out in the Loft and played UNO and then went to Playstation and the cooking class. This afternoon they did another scavenger hunt and had an ice cream eating contest.
For the farewell party I brought back the Brave the Night theme night for most of the games because we didn’t do that earlier in the week and I thought they might enjoy it. So with a few of those games combined with t-shirt decorating and some other stuff we had a very fun final night together. I’m going to truly miss these kids. :)
I hope that your week was a fabulous one like mine and I look forward to hearing from you! :)
T
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Week 10 of 14: July 25 - August 1, 2007
Wednesday July 25th: Vancouver, B.C.
Today was a very beautiful day in Vancouver. I had mandatory IPM for today but was able to get off the ship for about an hour and a half after straightening out a switching dilemma with security. I knew that I didn’t have a ton of time to go back to Stanley Park, but I did want to walk and enjoy the gorgeously sunny day anyway.
I took my camera back to the park where I shot the heron in hopes of seeing it again, but instead saw Canada geese and ducks and a very young and unintimidated crow that appeared to be dead until I was only about a foot away from it and it started to move away from me. I stayed as long as I could and then I made my way back to the ship where I got ready to cover gangway detail.
The 5:00 pm meeting went well. Julie wasn’t able to lead it so she assigned parts for each of us to lead. I really enjoy speaking about stuff I know so it was much more interesting than standing there like we usually do while she says all the info. Afterwards we got ready for our welcome aboard party.
Crystal had a migraine this week and was unable to join us. I was really sad about that because this week the kids looked at me the first night as though I was an alien from outer space when I asked them to dance for one of the games. They wouldn’t move around at all (I don’t expect much - just a little finger jiving or SOMETHING) so I kept moving from game to game to find something that might intrigue them. Overall the night ended fine, after 2/3rds of my tweens signed themselves out before 9 pm due to boredom, but HEY I would rather they go where they will be more entertained if my best isn’t good enough for them. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of things to come for this week. We’ll have to wait and see :)
Thursday July 26th: First Sea Day
Today the seas where a little rough and many of the kids looked a little green. I ended up taking both halves of the Bonine and ate a stack of ginger snaps to ward off the green monster myself. Even after the other half of the medication I still felt the headache, but I failed to wear the wristbands today so who knows.
I was a bit nervous this week about doing scavenger hunts. These kids have some crazy tendencies that came out today but I divided them up by simply numbering them off and not doing anything special to orchestrate the groups and they worked together perfectly. They had such a blast they actually want to keep their same teams and finish the rest of the scavenger hunt on Monday night. Wow!
Friday July 27th: Tracy Arm & Juneau, AK
Tracy Arm was very lovely today and slightly sunny. I’m hoping that the overcast weather on our sea day will translate into sunny ports this week. Strangely with the sunny sea days we kept having rainy ports, so I’m hoping that the opposite will hold true this week. One can only hope.
Juneau this week was gorgeous! If I’d had more time I would have definitely gone up the tramway or to Mendenhall Glacier it was so nice.
This week though, in an effort to not waste all my tip money on internet cards, I went to the library until close at 5 pm to try and register for two more classes and fill out financial aid paperwork. Unfortunately in my haste to finally get off the ship I failed to bring all the documents I have collected along and therefore could only just start the FAFSA for this semester coming up. I also was only able to register for one class and not two as the other newly added class still conflicts with my schedule. So, this fall I so far have only 3 classes and need to find out if I am able to get financial aid for less than full time or do I simply pick up a class like bowling in order to get financial aid. A fun class would allow me to relax a little and get some exercise maybe. I wasn’t serious about bowling, but maybe there is something else I might enjoy. Dad suggested a business class, but I’m already so extended with the three classes I will be taking that I would need a no brainer type class to enjoy and not stress over if I want to stay sane and keep up the GPA, so I’ll have to think long and hard about what I will take. I only have 4 weeks to decide so hopefully I’ll have a quick revelation.
For our survivor night most of the kids had to leave early so it was a little weird to do mystery food at 9 pm when usually it’s the last activity at 9:45. I have two great boys this week though that really wanted to do it before going home for the night so I revamped the order of activities for them. It ended up being girls night after that so we ended on Eye Q test with picture puzzles and snack and they seemed ok with that. Yay! :)
Saturday July 28th: Skagway, AK
Today I planned to go to Haines, AK on the ferry and spend the day there taking pictures. The weather was supposed to be nice for once and I was really looking forward to it. I woke up though with some gastro problems and had stomach cramps and really didn’t feel up to going. During out monthly General Drill I felt unwell and so after I relaxed until 11:15 am when I was to meet Rebecca to go to the ferry. I prayed about whether or not I should make the trip, I didn’t want to be too far from a bathroom and also knew I wouldn’t fully enjoy the trip and my prayer was answered. When we got to the ferry terminal it was closed with no mention of whether or not there would be a ferry that day anyway. Turns out in my frenzy to get ready while not feeling completely 100% I also forgot my wallet, so it’s a good thing we didn’t go.
On the dock we saw an amazing sight that made up for missing the ferry. We saw harbor seals playing about 20 feet from us in the water.
I guess playing isn’t really what they were doing, they were hunting salmon. I watched for about an hour as they stalked their prey and herded it to the place of no escape and dived for the prize. At one point two of the seals started fighting cuz I guess one got the other’s prized fish and they had to “take it outside”. :) They were quite cute. Many said they were sea lions, but they were definitely harbor seals. Sea lions have little flaps at the ear canal that look like little ears and harbor seals simply have flat holes in the sides of their heads. I’ve included a few photos of them in my collection for this week.
After watching the seals for a while James from Shore Ex came over and talked to me again for a bit. I am convinced that he is trying to take his chances with me again after a bit of a reprieve. I honestly haven’t done ANYTHING to encourage the guy, but he’s now asking me to dinner again. I keep politely changing the subject, but he just doesn’t get it. I will unfortunately not be able to ever look at him the same again either after talking to him on the pier with a huge wad of chewing tobacco in his bottom lip. I was so repulsed I thought I would vomit right there on his shoes but kept a stoic face out of kindness. Thankfully I only run into him occasionally and don’t actually work in his department.
Country Carnival was a sweeping success tonight. It truly was about the most fun I’ve had at a carnival this summer. They kids had fun, behaved quite well, and really appreciated what we did for them in preparation and execution. I really honestly like this week’s kids even though I was a little skeptical at the beginning of the week.
Sunday July 29th: Glacier Bay Day
It was overcast with low hanging clouds in Glacier Bay National Park today. This actually was ok as the temp was decent and the air was only mildly misty at times. The tweens and I hung out at the railing for a full half hour watching some amazing avalanches cascade down the face of Marjorie. It was truly breathtaking and I was so glad to have been able to witness it. One of my guys had wanted to go in and then all of a sudden a huge crack and boom was heard and a good 10 second avalanche and he no longer wanted to go in but rather stay out even longer than we were able. :) It just takes some cool sights in nature to pique a child’s interest.
For movie night we watched Cheaper by the Dozen, the new version with Steve Martin, while the kids sat and talked and quoted the movie. Normally I would have been shushing them but no one seemed to mind not being able to hear so why get my “britches in a knot”. I had already seen the movie and wasn’t missing anything, so I ate my popcorn and enjoyed spending time with the kids. After the movie ended we played spoons. This weeks kids are spoons fanatics, fine by me because the game is really fun! We play whenever there is down time between activities.
I went to the fellowship meeting tonight, but was unable to sing again this week due to laryngitis. Instead I shared about how despite the fact that I couldn’t sing praises to God I could still PRAISE God with every breath that was in me. Praise Him in any way that I was able to. There were a handful of visitors there this week, guests who’d been invited by our very bold Lido friend Prayudi. More than one of them piped up to say that being in our fellowship was actually the highlight of their cruise. Wow. You just never know when and how you might be a blessing to someone else. Keep that thought in mind this week.
Monday July 30th: Ketchikan, AK
Well, sadly I must report that I had 3 bouts of the “runs” between 12 am and 2 am and so I decided to not attend my excursion that I was scheduled to go on. I do at times have episodes after eating certain things, but usually they happen within an hour and usually within about 20 minutes of ingesting the offending cuisine. I hadn’t had anything since about 9 pm last night so I don’t think it was related to that, but who knows. I decided to lay low and just rest and catch up on sleep.
By 4:40 pm I still had a lot of gurgling going on but hadn’t had any new episodes, but Liz said that I had to go to the Health Services anyway to be cleared to work. I didn’t want to go there, because it was only those few times and such, but if I should have the dreaded N virus that will remain nameless it would not be good if I spread the contagion to other crew and guests. So, I went and saw the doctor and was promptly placed in 72 hour quarantine in my cabin. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Thankfully the 72 hours began at the time of my last episode, so I’ll be back to work on the first sea day. So I am now looking at 2 full days locked in my room to rest, relax, catch up on e-mails, watch tv, and not have anyone bother me. I feel really bad though for Liz because now we are short a Club HAL staffer, but thankfully I don’t room with anyone from Club HAL or we’d be down 2. There is an upside to that.
I received phone calls from a few people wishing me well, and of course a concerned “please let me know if there’s anything I can do” call from James and then it was blissfully just me. I know this sounds bad, but I’m grateful for the 2 days off.
Tuesday July 31st: Final Sea Day
Today I was awakened by the room service guy calling to see if I was ready for breakfast. Sure, why not. I ordered a bagel and jam, fresh fruit and grape juice. Unlike last year in isolation (when I was the well roommate) I ate like a queen. This summer I’m not enjoying the privilege so much as I’ve now gone the opposite direction gastro-intestinally speaking and am not really that hungry.
After breakfast and an hour of television I went back to sleep until about 3 pm. I guess I really did need a break and am thankful to have this opportunity to get rest. My sinuses are acting up again, causing my laryngitis, but I’m hoping to not have to go back on antibiotics but rather rest and drink lots of fluids and hope and pray it dissolves on its own.
I ordered lunch around 4 pm and then caught up on a tv series I’m watching on DVD per a friend loaning them to me. Thankfully I’d gotten them prior to my isolation so that I’ve had something to do. I also finished a long novel in the past 2 days. It was a suspense novel that actually kept me in suspense until the end without the usual disgust at suspecting every plot twist and turn. Maybe it’s my film training and knowing what makes a successful script, but this plot was actually suspenseful and I was glad for that.
Hopefully tomorrow will be restful and enjoyable as well because then it’s back in the trenches full force on Thursday.
Hope you had a good week. This one certainly went differently then I had planned, but it just goes to show you that He is in control and His timing is perfect, how ever crazy that may seem.
Be blessed and be a blessing,
T
Today was a very beautiful day in Vancouver. I had mandatory IPM for today but was able to get off the ship for about an hour and a half after straightening out a switching dilemma with security. I knew that I didn’t have a ton of time to go back to Stanley Park, but I did want to walk and enjoy the gorgeously sunny day anyway.
I took my camera back to the park where I shot the heron in hopes of seeing it again, but instead saw Canada geese and ducks and a very young and unintimidated crow that appeared to be dead until I was only about a foot away from it and it started to move away from me. I stayed as long as I could and then I made my way back to the ship where I got ready to cover gangway detail.The 5:00 pm meeting went well. Julie wasn’t able to lead it so she assigned parts for each of us to lead. I really enjoy speaking about stuff I know so it was much more interesting than standing there like we usually do while she says all the info. Afterwards we got ready for our welcome aboard party.
Crystal had a migraine this week and was unable to join us. I was really sad about that because this week the kids looked at me the first night as though I was an alien from outer space when I asked them to dance for one of the games. They wouldn’t move around at all (I don’t expect much - just a little finger jiving or SOMETHING) so I kept moving from game to game to find something that might intrigue them. Overall the night ended fine, after 2/3rds of my tweens signed themselves out before 9 pm due to boredom, but HEY I would rather they go where they will be more entertained if my best isn’t good enough for them. Hopefully this isn’t a sign of things to come for this week. We’ll have to wait and see :)
Thursday July 26th: First Sea Day
Today the seas where a little rough and many of the kids looked a little green. I ended up taking both halves of the Bonine and ate a stack of ginger snaps to ward off the green monster myself. Even after the other half of the medication I still felt the headache, but I failed to wear the wristbands today so who knows.
I was a bit nervous this week about doing scavenger hunts. These kids have some crazy tendencies that came out today but I divided them up by simply numbering them off and not doing anything special to orchestrate the groups and they worked together perfectly. They had such a blast they actually want to keep their same teams and finish the rest of the scavenger hunt on Monday night. Wow!
Friday July 27th: Tracy Arm & Juneau, AK
Tracy Arm was very lovely today and slightly sunny. I’m hoping that the overcast weather on our sea day will translate into sunny ports this week. Strangely with the sunny sea days we kept having rainy ports, so I’m hoping that the opposite will hold true this week. One can only hope.
Juneau this week was gorgeous! If I’d had more time I would have definitely gone up the tramway or to Mendenhall Glacier it was so nice.
This week though, in an effort to not waste all my tip money on internet cards, I went to the library until close at 5 pm to try and register for two more classes and fill out financial aid paperwork. Unfortunately in my haste to finally get off the ship I failed to bring all the documents I have collected along and therefore could only just start the FAFSA for this semester coming up. I also was only able to register for one class and not two as the other newly added class still conflicts with my schedule. So, this fall I so far have only 3 classes and need to find out if I am able to get financial aid for less than full time or do I simply pick up a class like bowling in order to get financial aid. A fun class would allow me to relax a little and get some exercise maybe. I wasn’t serious about bowling, but maybe there is something else I might enjoy. Dad suggested a business class, but I’m already so extended with the three classes I will be taking that I would need a no brainer type class to enjoy and not stress over if I want to stay sane and keep up the GPA, so I’ll have to think long and hard about what I will take. I only have 4 weeks to decide so hopefully I’ll have a quick revelation.For our survivor night most of the kids had to leave early so it was a little weird to do mystery food at 9 pm when usually it’s the last activity at 9:45. I have two great boys this week though that really wanted to do it before going home for the night so I revamped the order of activities for them. It ended up being girls night after that so we ended on Eye Q test with picture puzzles and snack and they seemed ok with that. Yay! :)
Saturday July 28th: Skagway, AK
Today I planned to go to Haines, AK on the ferry and spend the day there taking pictures. The weather was supposed to be nice for once and I was really looking forward to it. I woke up though with some gastro problems and had stomach cramps and really didn’t feel up to going. During out monthly General Drill I felt unwell and so after I relaxed until 11:15 am when I was to meet Rebecca to go to the ferry. I prayed about whether or not I should make the trip, I didn’t want to be too far from a bathroom and also knew I wouldn’t fully enjoy the trip and my prayer was answered. When we got to the ferry terminal it was closed with no mention of whether or not there would be a ferry that day anyway. Turns out in my frenzy to get ready while not feeling completely 100% I also forgot my wallet, so it’s a good thing we didn’t go.
On the dock we saw an amazing sight that made up for missing the ferry. We saw harbor seals playing about 20 feet from us in the water.
I guess playing isn’t really what they were doing, they were hunting salmon. I watched for about an hour as they stalked their prey and herded it to the place of no escape and dived for the prize. At one point two of the seals started fighting cuz I guess one got the other’s prized fish and they had to “take it outside”. :) They were quite cute. Many said they were sea lions, but they were definitely harbor seals. Sea lions have little flaps at the ear canal that look like little ears and harbor seals simply have flat holes in the sides of their heads. I’ve included a few photos of them in my collection for this week.After watching the seals for a while James from Shore Ex came over and talked to me again for a bit. I am convinced that he is trying to take his chances with me again after a bit of a reprieve. I honestly haven’t done ANYTHING to encourage the guy, but he’s now asking me to dinner again. I keep politely changing the subject, but he just doesn’t get it. I will unfortunately not be able to ever look at him the same again either after talking to him on the pier with a huge wad of chewing tobacco in his bottom lip. I was so repulsed I thought I would vomit right there on his shoes but kept a stoic face out of kindness. Thankfully I only run into him occasionally and don’t actually work in his department.
Country Carnival was a sweeping success tonight. It truly was about the most fun I’ve had at a carnival this summer. They kids had fun, behaved quite well, and really appreciated what we did for them in preparation and execution. I really honestly like this week’s kids even though I was a little skeptical at the beginning of the week.
Sunday July 29th: Glacier Bay Day
It was overcast with low hanging clouds in Glacier Bay National Park today. This actually was ok as the temp was decent and the air was only mildly misty at times. The tweens and I hung out at the railing for a full half hour watching some amazing avalanches cascade down the face of Marjorie. It was truly breathtaking and I was so glad to have been able to witness it. One of my guys had wanted to go in and then all of a sudden a huge crack and boom was heard and a good 10 second avalanche and he no longer wanted to go in but rather stay out even longer than we were able. :) It just takes some cool sights in nature to pique a child’s interest.
For movie night we watched Cheaper by the Dozen, the new version with Steve Martin, while the kids sat and talked and quoted the movie. Normally I would have been shushing them but no one seemed to mind not being able to hear so why get my “britches in a knot”. I had already seen the movie and wasn’t missing anything, so I ate my popcorn and enjoyed spending time with the kids. After the movie ended we played spoons. This weeks kids are spoons fanatics, fine by me because the game is really fun! We play whenever there is down time between activities.
I went to the fellowship meeting tonight, but was unable to sing again this week due to laryngitis. Instead I shared about how despite the fact that I couldn’t sing praises to God I could still PRAISE God with every breath that was in me. Praise Him in any way that I was able to. There were a handful of visitors there this week, guests who’d been invited by our very bold Lido friend Prayudi. More than one of them piped up to say that being in our fellowship was actually the highlight of their cruise. Wow. You just never know when and how you might be a blessing to someone else. Keep that thought in mind this week.
Monday July 30th: Ketchikan, AK
Well, sadly I must report that I had 3 bouts of the “runs” between 12 am and 2 am and so I decided to not attend my excursion that I was scheduled to go on. I do at times have episodes after eating certain things, but usually they happen within an hour and usually within about 20 minutes of ingesting the offending cuisine. I hadn’t had anything since about 9 pm last night so I don’t think it was related to that, but who knows. I decided to lay low and just rest and catch up on sleep.
By 4:40 pm I still had a lot of gurgling going on but hadn’t had any new episodes, but Liz said that I had to go to the Health Services anyway to be cleared to work. I didn’t want to go there, because it was only those few times and such, but if I should have the dreaded N virus that will remain nameless it would not be good if I spread the contagion to other crew and guests. So, I went and saw the doctor and was promptly placed in 72 hour quarantine in my cabin. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Thankfully the 72 hours began at the time of my last episode, so I’ll be back to work on the first sea day. So I am now looking at 2 full days locked in my room to rest, relax, catch up on e-mails, watch tv, and not have anyone bother me. I feel really bad though for Liz because now we are short a Club HAL staffer, but thankfully I don’t room with anyone from Club HAL or we’d be down 2. There is an upside to that.
I received phone calls from a few people wishing me well, and of course a concerned “please let me know if there’s anything I can do” call from James and then it was blissfully just me. I know this sounds bad, but I’m grateful for the 2 days off.
Tuesday July 31st: Final Sea Day
Today I was awakened by the room service guy calling to see if I was ready for breakfast. Sure, why not. I ordered a bagel and jam, fresh fruit and grape juice. Unlike last year in isolation (when I was the well roommate) I ate like a queen. This summer I’m not enjoying the privilege so much as I’ve now gone the opposite direction gastro-intestinally speaking and am not really that hungry.
After breakfast and an hour of television I went back to sleep until about 3 pm. I guess I really did need a break and am thankful to have this opportunity to get rest. My sinuses are acting up again, causing my laryngitis, but I’m hoping to not have to go back on antibiotics but rather rest and drink lots of fluids and hope and pray it dissolves on its own.
I ordered lunch around 4 pm and then caught up on a tv series I’m watching on DVD per a friend loaning them to me. Thankfully I’d gotten them prior to my isolation so that I’ve had something to do. I also finished a long novel in the past 2 days. It was a suspense novel that actually kept me in suspense until the end without the usual disgust at suspecting every plot twist and turn. Maybe it’s my film training and knowing what makes a successful script, but this plot was actually suspenseful and I was glad for that.
Hopefully tomorrow will be restful and enjoyable as well because then it’s back in the trenches full force on Thursday.
Hope you had a good week. This one certainly went differently then I had planned, but it just goes to show you that He is in control and His timing is perfect, how ever crazy that may seem.
Be blessed and be a blessing,
T
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Week 9 of 14: July 18 - 25
Wednesday July 18th: Vancouver, B.C.
Today I don’t have gangway until 2 PM, but we have a new crew member coming on board for both Club HAL and the Explorations Cafe so I will be showing them around and getting them oriented after about 1 PM. Until then I intend to find my way to Stanley Park. Last week James from Shore Excursions told me how to get there and that it was only about 30 minutes away, so today I’m going to find it.
The weather in Vancouver today is lightly rainy, so I’m going to wear quickly drying clothes and grab an umbrella. I desperately need to wash my hair anyway before wearing my gangway uniform, so it really doesn’t matter if I get wet or even soaked. The air isn’t too cold so I’m simply going to brave the elements and get out there.
Walking to Stanley Park took me about an hour this morning. It wasn’t further than I anticipated, but my route was quite scenic.
I followed the sea wall instead of taking direct streets, so I wound my way through all sorts of lovely condos and apartments - the kind that you’d expect near the waterfront and marina. There were a couple parks along the way as well as a really nice bike / walk path that leads all the way to the Park. Once I was there I found where the Aquarium is, I hope to get there maybe next week, and then it was time to start walking back already. On the way back I stopped at one of the parks that had a pond and saw ducks splashing in the water. After taking their picture (not very good though cuz I only brought my small camera with limited zoom out in the rain) I noticed there was also a heron (or is it a crane??) 
standing in the water along the side. I definitely took its picture a couple different ways. I was caught off guard as it was so unexpected! :) I then made it back to the ship taking the shorter route and it took much less time then going there. I enjoyed the walk but on the way back it started to rain harder. Actually I made it back just in time, as I got to the gangway it started to come down much harder. The sky was dark and heavy and overall gloomy. Thankfully we saw the sun yesterday or I’d have been really depressed by now. We haven’t had nice weather in weeks.
The two new crew girls, Rebecca and Peg, arrived while I was on gangway duty so I was not able to take them around right away. After my shift ended though I caught up with them and we began the process of orientation. I am excited to have them on board - unlike our previous new crew member these are two responsible intellectually capable girls who will do a great job in their respective areas. Peg is from Chicago and Rebecca is from Dallas.
Our meeting at 5 PM went well, we had about 20 people there and the kids all seemed really nice. I look forward to this week being pretty fun. Last week’s kids were great and hopefully it’ll be two cruises in a row of fun kids.
The first night’s party was a blast. My 12 year olds are really fun kids and so far they all play really well together (from 8 - 12 years all together). Crystal came up again to hang out with the kids and they have such a fun time with her I love it when she helps! The energy is just right when she’s there - she gets the kids grooving to the music and laughing and playing. She leaves in 2 weeks and I’m really sad about that.
We had after hours baby-sitting tonight for a family that is staying on deck 7. The family is super nice and uber rich, so it’ll be interesting to see what this week brings.
Thursday July 19th: First Sea Day
Today was a partly sunny sea day with calm waves in the gorgeous inside passage. I’m learning to really enjoy sea days to their fullest this summer as they provide the only sunshine we see in Alaska. We took the kids outside for a bit to run around and enjoy the fresh air and they enjoyed it. This week the kids won’t be playing Ghosts in the Graveyard like last cruise - much too active - but that means they’ll enjoy games like tag!
Rebecca is fitting in nicely. We all really enjoy her a lot. She’s super sweet and friendly and really catches on quickly. She can already find her way mostly around the ship and it’s only the second day. Yay! She came up while we were running Bingo and helped our 4 year olds with their cards. Bingo is always quite the challenge when half the room doesn’t know how to read large numbers like O75 or B15 on their cards.
Raid the Arcade was a hit as was fusion beads and funky frames. The kids love to do crafts maybe even more than video games, surprising but refreshing actually. :) By the time we had Ice Cream Frenzy on our schedule for this afternoon we only had about 9 kids left and by the time we made it out the door we were down to about 6. Prior to that we had about 13 little ones and about 11 big ones, a little crazy being all in the same room. Six is a much better number for a field trip to the Lido.
After dinner it was Spy Night. I only had 6 kids, three girls and three boys, show up so we paired them girls against boys for the hunt. They did a really great job and their manners are amazing. I’ve never had kids who were so rules conscious and making sure they were doing only what is right. If they keep it up I’ll love them immensely this week.
We once again had after hours baby-sitting, one of the girls from last night and a little girl from a different family. The girl who came last night and tonight (Erin) loves us so much we’ve already been told that most likely she’ll be there until midnight every night this cruise. Normally I might groan inwardly a bit about that but she is such a great kid (and the extra money never hurts either) that it won’t be a problem. A little less sleep for sure, but not in anyway stressful.
Today was our Captain’s birthday as well as a crew party celebrating our passing the USPH inspection last Skagway. The party was held on the mooring deck with a free bar, food and music. Julie, my supervisor, was so excited that it was on the mooring deck so that I could actually show up as the smoking situation would be better than when parties are in the crew mess where I choke due to my allergy. I decided that I would actually show up, really only because it was the Captain’s birthday and because my friend Crystal was going to be singing. I don’t really enjoy standing all herded together with drunk people en masse, never have been anything but a party pooper in that sense, but I went. Unfortunately (fortunately?) the smoking situation was still bad enough that I put in about a 10-15 minute appearance and had to leave before Crystal started her set because the smoke was causing me to have breathing problems. I didn’t want to have a full blown anaphylactic reaction so I left before it got that bad so I missed hearing her sing. I was really sad about that, but other than that I didn’t really miss out on anything I wanted to be at.
Instead I watched a couple of episodes of TV on DVD that the crew has been passing around. It’s so great to have whole seasons of shows on DVD’s these days as I never get to actually watch normal television when it’s actually airing. Then I went to bed to get ready for Juneau day. Unfortunately it’s going to rain AGAIN tomorrow in Juneau for about the 6th straight week. It may have been even longer than six weeks? The last time it was sunny was way back at the beginning of my contract when I got really sick and slept through Juneau instead of getting off the ship. I am really wanting to see sun soon here because I want to do excursions again. It has been steady rain for weeks so that I don’t have the desire to do any. I hope to be able to before summer ends. It seems strange that I only have 6 cruises left.
Friday July 20th: Tracy Arm scenic cruising and Juneau, AK
This morning we were doing activities in the kids room and the captain came on the speaker and announces that due to fog and rain in Tracy Arm (mixed with icebergs in the water) that we would not be actually cruising through there today. Normally we can steer safely through the icebergs, but with fog to hinder navigation the captain decided to be safe rather than sorry. We certainly appreciated that! He is such a great captain.
We will arrive in Juneau at 12 PM instead of 2:30 PM so hopefully we’ll get off the ship sooner and be able to have a bit more time for shopping at Fred Meyer. Normally I have to really rush and only have about an hour, but today we should have about 2.5 hours. I’m going with Rebecca because she wasn’t told anything about theme wear and needs to find some costume items and Fred Meyer has absolutely everything. I also need more Bonine motion sickness medication as I’m now out of it and definitely need to have it. Because of Bonine and the wrist bands I’ve now gone 9 weeks without incident beyond my very first sea day. Yay!
We had to wait an hour for a bus, that was sad and a waste of our precious time, but unless you hit it just right you have to wait. With it raining quite steady here I didn’t want to walk over to the other bus stop and Rebecca wanted the express and not the long bus. Express bus gets to the valley in about 15 minutes and the other in 45. The only advantage of the regular bus would have been getting on sooner and being out of the rain but she didn’t want to ride the bus for 45 minutes. Thankfully both cost only $1.50 each way so we waited. She found basically everything she wanted except a pirate sash and I found all of the stuff that I wanted, so it was a good trip.
We had to ride the long bus back and we were riding sideways and both Rebecca and I felt very motion sick after the ride. I came back to my room and ate some ginger snaps (another must that I discovered as they have real ginger and are very snappy - Nabisco brand) and took a half Bonine tablet and then laid down until it was time to get up for work.
Brave the Night theme night went well, even though I only had 3 kids tonight. Crazy! They are all older kids though, so I wanted to keep them with me instead of going into the kids room where they had 11 or so little ones doing camp night.
We had after hours again tonight, not a shocker at this point, with the same two girls as last night and also the second girl’s brother who is 10 from my room. We also found out that tomorrow we’ll have to stay on the ship for in port activities ALL DAY until 5 PM. Because it’s Country Carnival night I’ll have to be back on the ship by 6:30 at the latest so I’ll get a whopping’ 1.5 hours off the ship. Oh well, rain is predicted for all day tomorrow. This is great napping and tv watching weather and not much else. I really want to be able to do another excursion soon and it’s just not working out at all. Ok done whining.
Saturday July 21st: Skagway, AK
I slept in this morning until 10:30 AM because I won’t be getting off the ship as I have to help with in port activities. We have two girls on board - the two in after hours baby-sitting each night - that have been on 4 cruises and know that Holland America offers baby-sitting while in port. Bummer. We do not receive compensation for this at all and it is our time off so we do not relish this task at all. Thankfully I did not have to do the morning shift, I’m going to work at 11 AM. The only upside is that it is once again raining in Skagway, only not foggy today like last week, so there isn’t anything I want to do in this port anyway. Skagway is my port to go hiking. Everything costs a lot here due to its remoteness so I tend to hike and then get back on the ship after making phone calls, but because of the rain I don’t desire to do either as I’d just be getting wet.
The girls watched 2 movies in a row and then we played a game briefly and then went downstairs to get some lunch. Some of the other families were very upset with us that we wouldn’t take their children off their hands as well because they were bored and excursions had been canceled, but IPA is something that needs to be signed up for ahead of time. So we simply told all of them that we were doing private baby-sitting for that family and weren’t actually “open”. It was the truth, but we just called it something other than in port activities because we try our best to NOT advertise it so they won’t leave their kids in the next port. I know we’re terrible but it is the only real time off we get. Otherwise we’ve been putting in 16-17 hour days and we don’t get paid any extra for the overtime.
The parents came back at 5 PM and then we went to dinner and had to get ready to work again by 7 PM to set up for Country Carnival. The night was a success and afterwards we again had after-hours baby-sitting with 4 kids tonight. Each night we’ve simply popped in a movie for them and they seem to enjoy it enough to keep coming back the next night for late night baby-sitting.
I was supposed to be leading the Sunday night fellowship meeting and singing a duet this week, but we already found out that we have after hours tomorrow for sure so that’ll have to wait I guess.
Sunday July 22nd: Glacier Bay National Park
The sun is shining and it is warm outside in the sun today!! Yay!!!!!!!!!! I haven’t seen the sun since the first sea day and then it was partly sunny, that was three days ago. Today though is gorgeous and I’m so glad. I actually had some guests say they didn’t care if every single port rained they came on this cruise just to see Glacier Bay - so for their sakes I was thrilled we had such gorgeous weather.
The kids this week are being so excellent. They are having fun with our activities and they have great manners. I LOVE them and want to keep them!!! We had 3 guest speakers in the park and for the park ranger talk it was so beautiful outside we actually relocated outdoors on the tennis court. The other reason though that we went outdoors is because the kids room is only 17.5 C, which is roughly 58 F? Something like that. It’s COLD in there. I guess the temperature sensor in the room is reading at 25 C which is plenty warm and so the air kept trying to cool off the room. Hopefully it’ll get fixed soon because we wear lots of layers and wrap up in wool blankets and still freeze. I knew that it was really cold because the second I walk in the room the tip of my nose starts to freeze. Yikes. That’s not healthy for little kids at all. The good thing is that the Chief Electrician’s daughter is four and in our care this week and so he saw first hand what was going on and resolved then and there to champion our cause and get it fixed.
On ships it definitely pays to know the right people. Don will fix our AC problem, Megan’s friend the Chief Officer Tom got our shower fixed instantly (it had been broken for 4 weeks when I came on board and for the first 2 that I was there until she came), our friend Linda the Lido Restaurant Manager ordered all the arts and crafts supplies the former manager wouldn’t, etc. I believe it’s important to treat everyone with kindness, not just to get favors but because it’s the right thing to do towards others, so I’ve noticed that most people on the ship tend to respond positively towards me in return. Amazing how that works out! :)
Movie night was fun, the kids watched “Cars” and the tweens watched “Open Season”. I hadn’t seen that film yet so it was even enjoyable for myself. The kids that came were cute. We had 4 stay again for after hours, so I didn’t go to the fellowship meeting - which I’d thankfully already warned the others that I probably wouldn’t be so they wouldn’t be shocked that the speaker wasn’t there and could plan accordingly.
Monday July 23rd: Ketchikan, AK
Today it is not just raining, it is pouring. I slept until 9 AM, and then had the responsibility of going upstairs to put out the sports equipment but because of the rain I didn’t. I don’t have an umbrella out there and I refused to get soaked even if it was my responsibility so I just opened up the Playstation room and then had Brendan the internet manager look at my internet problem. We figured out that Google Mail needed to get reset in the internet portion of the mail program, it wasn’t something on my computer causing the problem, so I can now send AND receive mail again, YAY!! So, if you send me mail I will try really hard to get back to you. My hours this summer have been slightly crazy, but I’m going to try. Just so you all know, I do think about you even if you don’t hear from me.
Tonight I had only 3 kids show up for the scavenger hunt and they are fun kids. They decided to take on pirate persona from “Pirates of the Caribbean” even though the little kids were doing pirate night and not them. They were super funny and extremely well behaved. Have I mentioned that I want to KEEP all of them??!
We had after hours baby-sitting again tonight - what a shocker I know. :)
Tuesday July 24th: Final Sea Day
There was definite motion in the ocean today. I took half a Bonine pill and I’m so glad that I did or else I would have “tossed my cookies”. I forgot to wear my wristbands and so I felt nauseous. I thankfully had the other half of the pill in my pocket and so I ended up taking it about 2 hours after the first half and then by lunch the seas were calm again.
The cooking class was fun. We had about 6 kids there of different ages. Chef Valentine was gone now, we have a new guy who isn’t as good. I’m hoping that he’s just shy and will warm up to the kids, it was fine overall just not as good as when Valentine was there. He was REALLY good with the kids. We’ll see how it goes in the future. Teresa the party planner helps and I help and we get the kids all motivated so it’s still a fun class.
The last sea day afternoon is really easy. We color a farewell banner, write letters to the captain, watch cartoons and then after 1 hour it’s time to close and get ready for Build a Bear. We had 2 girls build bears, I got to build one too and bring it “home” with me. So now my moose from last summer has a Club HAL cousin to hang with in Milwaukee.
Our final party was fun with all the kids and then we ended up with about 8 kids in after hours baby-sitting. It was crazy how that all worked out this week, but here’s the really crazy part: we earned $390.00 collectively between tips and baby-sitting fees this week, so each of us took home $130.00 Normally I don’t get into stuff like that in detail but I am so shocked I had to share. :) I will be able to buy a couple more internet cards with that money! Yay. It’s all working out in that department which is great.
Well, this cruise is over and it was super fun. Even though we had more kids than last week these two weeks were very relaxing and great. It may be my midsummer reprieve (like I got last summer when I spent a day in the infirmary because my roommate had Norwalk) in order to be able to handle the last five cruises of the summer, but hopefully it is simply 2 fun weeks in a row and 5 more fun ones ahead. We’ll see. In two weeks time I’ll be training in 1 to 2 new crew members and taking the lead in Club HAL as the senior staffer. Maybe by that time Rebecca will want to step up, but I think most likely it’ll either be me alone or we’ll split the tasks evenly. She’s very competent and catches on quickly, so I trust that she’ll do great once we all leave at the end of August and she’s doing it by herself until she goes home in November.
Hope your week was sun powered as well as Son powered. My batteries need recharging, but I see on weather.com that it is supposed to be beautiful in Vancouver tomorrow.
I will write again soon!
Luv,
T
Today I don’t have gangway until 2 PM, but we have a new crew member coming on board for both Club HAL and the Explorations Cafe so I will be showing them around and getting them oriented after about 1 PM. Until then I intend to find my way to Stanley Park. Last week James from Shore Excursions told me how to get there and that it was only about 30 minutes away, so today I’m going to find it.
The weather in Vancouver today is lightly rainy, so I’m going to wear quickly drying clothes and grab an umbrella. I desperately need to wash my hair anyway before wearing my gangway uniform, so it really doesn’t matter if I get wet or even soaked. The air isn’t too cold so I’m simply going to brave the elements and get out there.
Walking to Stanley Park took me about an hour this morning. It wasn’t further than I anticipated, but my route was quite scenic.
I followed the sea wall instead of taking direct streets, so I wound my way through all sorts of lovely condos and apartments - the kind that you’d expect near the waterfront and marina. There were a couple parks along the way as well as a really nice bike / walk path that leads all the way to the Park. Once I was there I found where the Aquarium is, I hope to get there maybe next week, and then it was time to start walking back already. On the way back I stopped at one of the parks that had a pond and saw ducks splashing in the water. After taking their picture (not very good though cuz I only brought my small camera with limited zoom out in the rain) I noticed there was also a heron (or is it a crane??) 
standing in the water along the side. I definitely took its picture a couple different ways. I was caught off guard as it was so unexpected! :) I then made it back to the ship taking the shorter route and it took much less time then going there. I enjoyed the walk but on the way back it started to rain harder. Actually I made it back just in time, as I got to the gangway it started to come down much harder. The sky was dark and heavy and overall gloomy. Thankfully we saw the sun yesterday or I’d have been really depressed by now. We haven’t had nice weather in weeks.The two new crew girls, Rebecca and Peg, arrived while I was on gangway duty so I was not able to take them around right away. After my shift ended though I caught up with them and we began the process of orientation. I am excited to have them on board - unlike our previous new crew member these are two responsible intellectually capable girls who will do a great job in their respective areas. Peg is from Chicago and Rebecca is from Dallas.
Our meeting at 5 PM went well, we had about 20 people there and the kids all seemed really nice. I look forward to this week being pretty fun. Last week’s kids were great and hopefully it’ll be two cruises in a row of fun kids.
The first night’s party was a blast. My 12 year olds are really fun kids and so far they all play really well together (from 8 - 12 years all together). Crystal came up again to hang out with the kids and they have such a fun time with her I love it when she helps! The energy is just right when she’s there - she gets the kids grooving to the music and laughing and playing. She leaves in 2 weeks and I’m really sad about that.
We had after hours baby-sitting tonight for a family that is staying on deck 7. The family is super nice and uber rich, so it’ll be interesting to see what this week brings.
Thursday July 19th: First Sea Day
Today was a partly sunny sea day with calm waves in the gorgeous inside passage. I’m learning to really enjoy sea days to their fullest this summer as they provide the only sunshine we see in Alaska. We took the kids outside for a bit to run around and enjoy the fresh air and they enjoyed it. This week the kids won’t be playing Ghosts in the Graveyard like last cruise - much too active - but that means they’ll enjoy games like tag!
Rebecca is fitting in nicely. We all really enjoy her a lot. She’s super sweet and friendly and really catches on quickly. She can already find her way mostly around the ship and it’s only the second day. Yay! She came up while we were running Bingo and helped our 4 year olds with their cards. Bingo is always quite the challenge when half the room doesn’t know how to read large numbers like O75 or B15 on their cards.
Raid the Arcade was a hit as was fusion beads and funky frames. The kids love to do crafts maybe even more than video games, surprising but refreshing actually. :) By the time we had Ice Cream Frenzy on our schedule for this afternoon we only had about 9 kids left and by the time we made it out the door we were down to about 6. Prior to that we had about 13 little ones and about 11 big ones, a little crazy being all in the same room. Six is a much better number for a field trip to the Lido.
After dinner it was Spy Night. I only had 6 kids, three girls and three boys, show up so we paired them girls against boys for the hunt. They did a really great job and their manners are amazing. I’ve never had kids who were so rules conscious and making sure they were doing only what is right. If they keep it up I’ll love them immensely this week.
We once again had after hours baby-sitting, one of the girls from last night and a little girl from a different family. The girl who came last night and tonight (Erin) loves us so much we’ve already been told that most likely she’ll be there until midnight every night this cruise. Normally I might groan inwardly a bit about that but she is such a great kid (and the extra money never hurts either) that it won’t be a problem. A little less sleep for sure, but not in anyway stressful.
Today was our Captain’s birthday as well as a crew party celebrating our passing the USPH inspection last Skagway. The party was held on the mooring deck with a free bar, food and music. Julie, my supervisor, was so excited that it was on the mooring deck so that I could actually show up as the smoking situation would be better than when parties are in the crew mess where I choke due to my allergy. I decided that I would actually show up, really only because it was the Captain’s birthday and because my friend Crystal was going to be singing. I don’t really enjoy standing all herded together with drunk people en masse, never have been anything but a party pooper in that sense, but I went. Unfortunately (fortunately?) the smoking situation was still bad enough that I put in about a 10-15 minute appearance and had to leave before Crystal started her set because the smoke was causing me to have breathing problems. I didn’t want to have a full blown anaphylactic reaction so I left before it got that bad so I missed hearing her sing. I was really sad about that, but other than that I didn’t really miss out on anything I wanted to be at.
Instead I watched a couple of episodes of TV on DVD that the crew has been passing around. It’s so great to have whole seasons of shows on DVD’s these days as I never get to actually watch normal television when it’s actually airing. Then I went to bed to get ready for Juneau day. Unfortunately it’s going to rain AGAIN tomorrow in Juneau for about the 6th straight week. It may have been even longer than six weeks? The last time it was sunny was way back at the beginning of my contract when I got really sick and slept through Juneau instead of getting off the ship. I am really wanting to see sun soon here because I want to do excursions again. It has been steady rain for weeks so that I don’t have the desire to do any. I hope to be able to before summer ends. It seems strange that I only have 6 cruises left.
Friday July 20th: Tracy Arm scenic cruising and Juneau, AK
This morning we were doing activities in the kids room and the captain came on the speaker and announces that due to fog and rain in Tracy Arm (mixed with icebergs in the water) that we would not be actually cruising through there today. Normally we can steer safely through the icebergs, but with fog to hinder navigation the captain decided to be safe rather than sorry. We certainly appreciated that! He is such a great captain.
We will arrive in Juneau at 12 PM instead of 2:30 PM so hopefully we’ll get off the ship sooner and be able to have a bit more time for shopping at Fred Meyer. Normally I have to really rush and only have about an hour, but today we should have about 2.5 hours. I’m going with Rebecca because she wasn’t told anything about theme wear and needs to find some costume items and Fred Meyer has absolutely everything. I also need more Bonine motion sickness medication as I’m now out of it and definitely need to have it. Because of Bonine and the wrist bands I’ve now gone 9 weeks without incident beyond my very first sea day. Yay!
We had to wait an hour for a bus, that was sad and a waste of our precious time, but unless you hit it just right you have to wait. With it raining quite steady here I didn’t want to walk over to the other bus stop and Rebecca wanted the express and not the long bus. Express bus gets to the valley in about 15 minutes and the other in 45. The only advantage of the regular bus would have been getting on sooner and being out of the rain but she didn’t want to ride the bus for 45 minutes. Thankfully both cost only $1.50 each way so we waited. She found basically everything she wanted except a pirate sash and I found all of the stuff that I wanted, so it was a good trip.
We had to ride the long bus back and we were riding sideways and both Rebecca and I felt very motion sick after the ride. I came back to my room and ate some ginger snaps (another must that I discovered as they have real ginger and are very snappy - Nabisco brand) and took a half Bonine tablet and then laid down until it was time to get up for work.
Brave the Night theme night went well, even though I only had 3 kids tonight. Crazy! They are all older kids though, so I wanted to keep them with me instead of going into the kids room where they had 11 or so little ones doing camp night.
We had after hours again tonight, not a shocker at this point, with the same two girls as last night and also the second girl’s brother who is 10 from my room. We also found out that tomorrow we’ll have to stay on the ship for in port activities ALL DAY until 5 PM. Because it’s Country Carnival night I’ll have to be back on the ship by 6:30 at the latest so I’ll get a whopping’ 1.5 hours off the ship. Oh well, rain is predicted for all day tomorrow. This is great napping and tv watching weather and not much else. I really want to be able to do another excursion soon and it’s just not working out at all. Ok done whining.
Saturday July 21st: Skagway, AK
I slept in this morning until 10:30 AM because I won’t be getting off the ship as I have to help with in port activities. We have two girls on board - the two in after hours baby-sitting each night - that have been on 4 cruises and know that Holland America offers baby-sitting while in port. Bummer. We do not receive compensation for this at all and it is our time off so we do not relish this task at all. Thankfully I did not have to do the morning shift, I’m going to work at 11 AM. The only upside is that it is once again raining in Skagway, only not foggy today like last week, so there isn’t anything I want to do in this port anyway. Skagway is my port to go hiking. Everything costs a lot here due to its remoteness so I tend to hike and then get back on the ship after making phone calls, but because of the rain I don’t desire to do either as I’d just be getting wet.
The girls watched 2 movies in a row and then we played a game briefly and then went downstairs to get some lunch. Some of the other families were very upset with us that we wouldn’t take their children off their hands as well because they were bored and excursions had been canceled, but IPA is something that needs to be signed up for ahead of time. So we simply told all of them that we were doing private baby-sitting for that family and weren’t actually “open”. It was the truth, but we just called it something other than in port activities because we try our best to NOT advertise it so they won’t leave their kids in the next port. I know we’re terrible but it is the only real time off we get. Otherwise we’ve been putting in 16-17 hour days and we don’t get paid any extra for the overtime.
The parents came back at 5 PM and then we went to dinner and had to get ready to work again by 7 PM to set up for Country Carnival. The night was a success and afterwards we again had after-hours baby-sitting with 4 kids tonight. Each night we’ve simply popped in a movie for them and they seem to enjoy it enough to keep coming back the next night for late night baby-sitting.
I was supposed to be leading the Sunday night fellowship meeting and singing a duet this week, but we already found out that we have after hours tomorrow for sure so that’ll have to wait I guess.
Sunday July 22nd: Glacier Bay National Park
The sun is shining and it is warm outside in the sun today!! Yay!!!!!!!!!! I haven’t seen the sun since the first sea day and then it was partly sunny, that was three days ago. Today though is gorgeous and I’m so glad. I actually had some guests say they didn’t care if every single port rained they came on this cruise just to see Glacier Bay - so for their sakes I was thrilled we had such gorgeous weather.
The kids this week are being so excellent. They are having fun with our activities and they have great manners. I LOVE them and want to keep them!!! We had 3 guest speakers in the park and for the park ranger talk it was so beautiful outside we actually relocated outdoors on the tennis court. The other reason though that we went outdoors is because the kids room is only 17.5 C, which is roughly 58 F? Something like that. It’s COLD in there. I guess the temperature sensor in the room is reading at 25 C which is plenty warm and so the air kept trying to cool off the room. Hopefully it’ll get fixed soon because we wear lots of layers and wrap up in wool blankets and still freeze. I knew that it was really cold because the second I walk in the room the tip of my nose starts to freeze. Yikes. That’s not healthy for little kids at all. The good thing is that the Chief Electrician’s daughter is four and in our care this week and so he saw first hand what was going on and resolved then and there to champion our cause and get it fixed.
On ships it definitely pays to know the right people. Don will fix our AC problem, Megan’s friend the Chief Officer Tom got our shower fixed instantly (it had been broken for 4 weeks when I came on board and for the first 2 that I was there until she came), our friend Linda the Lido Restaurant Manager ordered all the arts and crafts supplies the former manager wouldn’t, etc. I believe it’s important to treat everyone with kindness, not just to get favors but because it’s the right thing to do towards others, so I’ve noticed that most people on the ship tend to respond positively towards me in return. Amazing how that works out! :)
Movie night was fun, the kids watched “Cars” and the tweens watched “Open Season”. I hadn’t seen that film yet so it was even enjoyable for myself. The kids that came were cute. We had 4 stay again for after hours, so I didn’t go to the fellowship meeting - which I’d thankfully already warned the others that I probably wouldn’t be so they wouldn’t be shocked that the speaker wasn’t there and could plan accordingly.
Monday July 23rd: Ketchikan, AK
Today it is not just raining, it is pouring. I slept until 9 AM, and then had the responsibility of going upstairs to put out the sports equipment but because of the rain I didn’t. I don’t have an umbrella out there and I refused to get soaked even if it was my responsibility so I just opened up the Playstation room and then had Brendan the internet manager look at my internet problem. We figured out that Google Mail needed to get reset in the internet portion of the mail program, it wasn’t something on my computer causing the problem, so I can now send AND receive mail again, YAY!! So, if you send me mail I will try really hard to get back to you. My hours this summer have been slightly crazy, but I’m going to try. Just so you all know, I do think about you even if you don’t hear from me.
Tonight I had only 3 kids show up for the scavenger hunt and they are fun kids. They decided to take on pirate persona from “Pirates of the Caribbean” even though the little kids were doing pirate night and not them. They were super funny and extremely well behaved. Have I mentioned that I want to KEEP all of them??!
We had after hours baby-sitting again tonight - what a shocker I know. :)
Tuesday July 24th: Final Sea Day
There was definite motion in the ocean today. I took half a Bonine pill and I’m so glad that I did or else I would have “tossed my cookies”. I forgot to wear my wristbands and so I felt nauseous. I thankfully had the other half of the pill in my pocket and so I ended up taking it about 2 hours after the first half and then by lunch the seas were calm again.
The cooking class was fun. We had about 6 kids there of different ages. Chef Valentine was gone now, we have a new guy who isn’t as good. I’m hoping that he’s just shy and will warm up to the kids, it was fine overall just not as good as when Valentine was there. He was REALLY good with the kids. We’ll see how it goes in the future. Teresa the party planner helps and I help and we get the kids all motivated so it’s still a fun class.
The last sea day afternoon is really easy. We color a farewell banner, write letters to the captain, watch cartoons and then after 1 hour it’s time to close and get ready for Build a Bear. We had 2 girls build bears, I got to build one too and bring it “home” with me. So now my moose from last summer has a Club HAL cousin to hang with in Milwaukee.
Our final party was fun with all the kids and then we ended up with about 8 kids in after hours baby-sitting. It was crazy how that all worked out this week, but here’s the really crazy part: we earned $390.00 collectively between tips and baby-sitting fees this week, so each of us took home $130.00 Normally I don’t get into stuff like that in detail but I am so shocked I had to share. :) I will be able to buy a couple more internet cards with that money! Yay. It’s all working out in that department which is great.
Well, this cruise is over and it was super fun. Even though we had more kids than last week these two weeks were very relaxing and great. It may be my midsummer reprieve (like I got last summer when I spent a day in the infirmary because my roommate had Norwalk) in order to be able to handle the last five cruises of the summer, but hopefully it is simply 2 fun weeks in a row and 5 more fun ones ahead. We’ll see. In two weeks time I’ll be training in 1 to 2 new crew members and taking the lead in Club HAL as the senior staffer. Maybe by that time Rebecca will want to step up, but I think most likely it’ll either be me alone or we’ll split the tasks evenly. She’s very competent and catches on quickly, so I trust that she’ll do great once we all leave at the end of August and she’s doing it by herself until she goes home in November.
Hope your week was sun powered as well as Son powered. My batteries need recharging, but I see on weather.com that it is supposed to be beautiful in Vancouver tomorrow.
I will write again soon!
Luv,
T
Friday, July 20, 2007
Cruise 8 of 14: July 11 - 18
Wednesday July 11th: Vancouver, B.C.
Today was gorgeous, hot and sunny in Vancouver. I had to work at 1:30 pm today so I got off the ship for a while in the a.m. and wandered around near the terminal a bit. Thankfully everything in Vancouver that I NEED to get to is within a 10 minute walking radius and everything that I WANT to get to is within about a 45 minute walking radius. So that makes it very easy to get off for a quick jaunt to the store or whatever.
I so needed to get off the ship after this past cruise. I needed some time to unwind in the sun and unwind mentally and emotionally.
It was great to just leisurely stroll around. The temp was about 80 F too, compared to our average range between 46 - 65 F that we’ve been experiencing in AK. I snapped some pics with my big camera that you can view in my linked album for week 8.
On the gangway I am ashamed to admit that we didn’t promote Club HAL to anyone who didn’t eagerly come to our table. This week there is a projection of 88 kids on board and after last cruise we are literally wiped out. I am so tired I can hardly think straight and so we are hoping that by only encouraging those that really seem to want to be there that we’ll have a nicer group of kids show up.
Boat drill was great. I had two families with infants that weren’t wearing a mandatory lifeboat wristband. Normally I wind up with grumpy parents that think the bands are silly when their infant “won’t be leaving their sight”, but I try to remind them that in the event of an actual emergency anything could happen and we’d want to know where their child belongs. Well, anyway, this week both families were very understanding and extremely good natured about it which means this week is already off to a good start! :)
Our parents meeting at 5 pm yielded all of 4 kids and they were all 8-12 years old. The kids all seemed really cool, so we’ll see what happens tonight at our Welcome Aboard party.
The party was a blast. Our Crow’s Nest singer, Crystal, has been coming up on the first night to play games with the kids (she’s a really big kid inside despite her years and I think has even more fun than they do!) and she really livens up the party. We played Domino Races, Musical Chairs, Four Corners, In the River/On the Bank, Find Monty, and Mummy Wrap. She was so competitive it was hilarious. The kids loved her so much, we are so happy that she loves coming up to play with us too because the first night Liz is registering everyone in the reception area so I was usually left in the room by myself to play with the kids. It’s great having such a fun energetic person to play off of with the kids. Crazy enough though we only had about 9 kids total! This may be a sign of good things to come for this week. It was all girls too, which was great and they were all really quiet and well behaved. “WOW!,” (To quote my favorite kids book “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse”) “That’s all I could say, WOW”.
Thursday July 12th: First Sea Day
The sea today is super calm, eerily so, and the temps are still super warm and the sun is shining brilliantly. I hope that it stays this nice all week because it’s been pretty rainy lately overall. We only had about 6 girls this morning and it was nice and quiet. We had our Del Sol coloring contest and awarded the prizes instantly. The older girl winner received a really cool frisbee that changes from a clear plastic light orange to a deep shade of red. Pretty cool! The younger girl won a cloth beach bag that changes from all khaki with black outlines of cartoony scenes from Alaska to be all colored in. We never knew what color everything turned before, because it’s either really cloudy the day we do the contest or because we couldn’t go outside to test them out, but today with so few kids we opened the emergency door and HAD to make an emergency trip outside (every few minutes or so) to test out the Del Sol rings and prizes. Too fun. :)
I’ve been napping a lot lately and can’t seem to ever catch up on sleep. I sure hope that this passes. I napped after lunch today for 30 minutes and again after dinner for an hour and 30 minutes and still felt tired for the photo scavenger hunt (2 girls showed up for it and I sent them out together to find stuff). I went right to bed after late night baby-sitting was over. One of our moms went to the Crow’s Nest tonight so she left her girl there and we watched a movie.
Friday July 13th: Tracy Arm/Juneau, AK
Tracy Arm was quite lovely and partly sunny. The clouds rolled in though as we neared Juneau and I wouldn’t have even bothered to get off the ship if I didn’t need to go to Fred Meyer to get some things. It was raining pretty good. I took the bus to the Nugget Mall and then walked to Fred Meyer and by the time I reached the store I was soaked and sloshing in my shoes. It was a warm rain though (probably in the upper 60’s) so I really didn’t mind. I knew I’d dry eventually. :)
I needed to find a way to store my summer photos, the reason for the trip to the store, and went there with the intention of picking up a flash drive to transfer photos in 4 GB chunks to burn to DVD’s from my roommates computer. A 2 GB flash drive cost $79.99 and that was pretty pricey for my budget and it was rather discouraging as I have about 20 GB of photos on the hard drive. Between the transferring and 4 GB max DVD’s I would have been going at it for a really LONG time trying to get everything backed up. Thankfully I found a better solution. There was a portable palm sized hard drive that is MAC/PC compatible that was only $99.00 for 80 GB. For $20 more I get 76 more GB of storage space. I am terrible, horrible, insanely awful at math but even I could figure out that the $99.00 was a much better value for something that I had to have (hard drive completely full, no more space period). My mom would be proud at my solving this story problem! :)
I took the bus back to the ship and the whole time completely panicking. I forgot until I was ON the bus that I didn’t have Juneau off completely, only until 6 p.m. because I had switched IPM to Megan for the afternoon. Normally my bus doesn’t get back until about 5 to 10 minutes after 6 p.m. but I simply prayed that the Lord would help me get back to the ship on time so that I wouldn’t get in trouble. “Strangely” enough there was zero traffic in intersections that normally take a good 10 minutes to make a left turn into, not many transfers or stops requested and even the drive was amazed at the fact that we arrived at the dock by 5 minutes to 6 p.m.!! I thanked God the whole way running up the gangway and I clocked in with a minute or so to spare. Whew! Funny thing is when I got back to my room Megan came in right behind me and let me know that she’d taken my IPM on for the entire day that day so I panicked for nothing, but God worked it out anyway so that I didn’t have to worry. It’s true when the Bible says “don’t worry” but I too often forget that He has everything under control. :)
Tonight we had 3 kids in Club Hal. We combined Camp night and Brave the Night into one theme and the kids had fun. It was so laid back that we didn’t really even do that much and all three were my tweens, so the games didn’t go completely over their heads like usual on combined night. They LOVED mystery food as well, as messy and gross! I love it too. He-he. It is so nice to have nice kids that are fun and want to be there and are not out of control. Love it!
Our teen staff member didn’t show up for work tonight. He was out “socializing” at the Viking (a crew hangout in Juneau) until after he was supposed to back on the ship at work and then realized (thankfully) that he was in no condition to be working with children and so didn’t come upstairs until he was a little more in control. We, Liz and I, were furious with him as we are always at work an hour or so before we open and he is always late and now didn’t even show up at all. Well, he will be dealt with and will end up with extra IPM for sure (they can’t fire him because he was out with the rest of the supervisory positions from the Entertainment Dept. and they were “socializing” just as much and should have also been on the ship.).
Saturday June 14th: Skagway, AK
I didn’t have to get up this morning until 9 a.m. to get dressed for raft drill. When it was time to haul my body out of bed I was curious as to the weather conditions and such for the day so I turned on the trusty TV channel that has a 24 hour camera off the Bridge in the front of the ship and couldn’t see anything but dark stormy looking skies. Yuck. The temp is in the mid 60’s and it is RAINING.
If this part of AK could thunderstorm I believe that today it would have because it was so dark and gloomy. When we went to raft drill I was shocked at how foggy it was. Skagway has such high winds I never thought it would be that eerie. With the fog socked in like it was super calm and we could only see a few feet off the stern of the ship, couldn’t see up into the mountains and across the water as it was mostly foggy as well. I took a few photos of this to show you why I couldn’t take out the big camera today to do more. It was a very low contrast, hard for the camera to focus, wet kind of day. I also didn’t get photos in Juneau because of the rain and not wanting my $1,000 equipment getting ruined. Yikes. Raft drill was quite entertaining and then I got off the ship. I decided that no matter what the weather I was going to go and get some exercise and buy an Odwalla B Berrier juice drink. They are delicious and full of antioxidants and they are at my favorite cute little train depot natural foods store at the end of town. I then began walking laps around the town by going all the way up the 16 blocks one way and back down another street. I need more exercise cuz none of my pants are fitting well at the moment. Oh dear!
I decided that today would be a great day to phone as many people as possible, because it is Saturday so I can reach most people and also because of the eery lack of wind. I reached everybody I had hoped to and chatted for a good while with each of them. After last week and an incident that we had happen this morning with a family I needed to talk to friends. It really lifted my mood in a great way, I believe that one family actually prayed for me after the call because I instantly starting feeling better and better for the rest of the day. It’s so nice to have like minded friends that will pray for me and care about me like that.
I got back on the ship with enough time to grab some snack food and rush up to Country Carnival to get set up for tonight’s festivities. We had a good number of kids there, considering how few are actually registered this week. We started with a horse race and then we moved on to face painting. Even my boys that were “too cool for school” caved and had me paint their arms. I painted balloons on one girl’s cheek that turned out super cute. They were all quite pleased and then excited to move on to playing the games. We played the carnival style games for about 20 minutes and then stretched out the prize redemption portion for another 10 minutes until the kids got picked up. At the beginning of the night, right at eight o'clock, a family signed her kids in for after hours baby-sitting. That’s fine with us because it means extra cash, but these kids decided they didn’t want to be in baby-sitting (they were 7, 11, and 12) so they tried to do everything they could to be “bad enough” to get sent home. It was annoying but actually quite comical. I could tell straight off that they weren’t actually bad kids because even in the midst of “acting up” I told one of the boys to put on his shoes cuz the odor was knocking me out and he immediately went and put them on without argument. Another time they threatened to leave the room but when I glared and said they had to stay in the room they walked away from the door and pouted. Any bad kids would have actually acted quite differently and run in three different directions at the same time to make me crazy. So, to repay them for annoying me for 2 full hours nonstop I gave mom and dad a FULL report on the nights activities and accompanying behavior and did they ever get in trouble. I received a full apology and the parents told the boys that their Club Hal days were over. No PS2 video games, nothing. Well, they did deserve to be corrected but hopefully they won’t be totally grounded because they weren’t mean and nasty, just overly annoying and slightly rude. The 7 year old was an angel though and I impressed that highly on the mom. He did everything he was asked and had a fun time with me. Yay. Well, the little ones usually do always like me and the big ones like me if they give me a chance.
Sunday July 15th: Glacier Bay Day
Well, unlike yesterday’s weather today in Glacier Bay I can once again report gorgeous sunny skies and warm weather. It is the perfect day in the Bay and I’m so glad that these guests can see AK at its best. :)
Our guest speakers in Club Hal were very good today, well prepared and carefully guarding their mouths after last week’s fiasco, and only about 4 kids participated in the talks and sing along. Oh well, the four that were there were sweet.
We had movie night tonight with only 2 kids that were super fun to have around. They laid in the paint bucket wrapped like burritos in wool deck blankets (because the kids room is only about 55 degrees) watching the movie while I sat wrapped in a deck blanket across the room trying to stay awake and stay warm. All in all, couldn’t have asked for a better night!
After we finished, and didn’t have baby-sitting, I grabbed my stuff for the fellowship meeting and headed upstairs. I walked a few laps on deck 3 because it was so warm and then went upstairs to the meeting. It was very nice to spend time with friends in Christ and relax and be my true self for a couple of hours. We sang some great worship songs and met some friends of Norm and Moira (even though they are no longer on the ship) and then after it ended I stayed for about 30 more minutes for a jam session with the guitarists. I love to sing, so very much, so I was racking my brain for the best songs that I loved and one of the guitarists (I think his name is Natal - from Indonesia) and I harmonized for a while. Because of this I have now been instructed to prepare to be the special music for next week (granting that I don’t have baby-sitting - which I won’t know until 10 p.m. Sunday evening for sure) and also that I will be giving the message. So, if you read this before next Sunday please say a prayer that I will not have baby-sitting and that I will speak words that my friends may be blessed by hearing. For God is truly the one I seek to glorify and not myself, so may they be His words for my friends and not my own. I enjoyed the singing and now I have to find all the words to the song that we are going to sing. :) That’s my homework for the week!
Monday July 16th: Ketchikan, AK
It is raining really steadily here today and is dark and gloomy like Skagway. I feel REALLY bad for the passengers as I have the opportunity to simply say, this week is rainy so I’ll wait until next week to ...” but they only have this one chance and every port this week has been really rainy. They have been such good sports about it though. I really haven’t heard complaining. This goes to show you how good a cruise this is this week.
I got off the ship to go to Wal-mart. The perfect rainy day location to hang out in as I needed a few items there. I decided to be brave and walk back to the ship as well. Just like in Juneau it was fairly warm today, despite the rain, so I didn’t worry about getting soaked. I have to shower anyway before working tonight so it doesn’t matter if I look terrible by the time I reach the ship. :) It was a really nice walk overall and the exercise again is only GOOD for me right!
Tonight’s theme for the kids was pirate night. We had exactly one kid show up, Breanna our really funny girl, so we had one to two ratio of kids to counselors. She really wanted to stay and didn’t care what we did while she was there, so we dragged her out on a pirate treasure hunt (meant for 3-7’s and she’s much older) decked out in pirate face paint and such and she was such a good sport about it :) I love Breanna.
Tuesday July 17th: Final Sea Day
Today was warm and gorgeously sunny again. How strange that all of our ports have been so icky but our sea days have been wonderful. It was so warm out today that we actually played a game on the sports court where you have to lay super still and the first person to move is out, you try to get everyone out by the way, and the last person out gets to be the next judge of movements. We laid there without moving for a good 30 minutes in the sun enjoying the warmth. That was the best game ever and the kids themselves requested it.. I know some really mischieveous adult created the game, but kids love it and today I LOVED it as well :)
The afternoon was very quick, we closed at 3 p.m. for the kids and I took the 2 tweens to the PS2 room and then down to eat ice cream. Torture. The evening pillow/pj party was fun. We had about 10 kids max and they were so fun. I was really sad when the evening ended because this has been the most relaxing fun week this summer. The kids were so easy to please and had such low expectations of how to be entertained. They simply loved being there to hang out with us and didn’t care one bit what exactly we were going to do. Loved every minute of it. I’m feeling so refreshed and upbeat at the end of this cruise compared to how badly I felt at the beginning. Yay!!
I hope that your week was as joyous and relaxing as mine was. Please write me really soon friends :)
Luv ya,
Trisha
ps. I’m having internet problems. I’m not getting all of my messages in my Mail program and have to stay on the internet to read everything on the very slow server so I apologize that I haven’t replied to several of you that emailed me after last week’s plea for friendly mail. I WANT to get back to all of you, but without my Mail program working I’m using up the expensive internet cards every 3 days or less. Yikes.
pps. I typed this update at 1 a.m. so if my sentences don’t make sense at times please email me to correct it because it all sounds right in my head, but my head and hands don’t always match up :)
Today was gorgeous, hot and sunny in Vancouver. I had to work at 1:30 pm today so I got off the ship for a while in the a.m. and wandered around near the terminal a bit. Thankfully everything in Vancouver that I NEED to get to is within a 10 minute walking radius and everything that I WANT to get to is within about a 45 minute walking radius. So that makes it very easy to get off for a quick jaunt to the store or whatever.
I so needed to get off the ship after this past cruise. I needed some time to unwind in the sun and unwind mentally and emotionally.
It was great to just leisurely stroll around. The temp was about 80 F too, compared to our average range between 46 - 65 F that we’ve been experiencing in AK. I snapped some pics with my big camera that you can view in my linked album for week 8.On the gangway I am ashamed to admit that we didn’t promote Club HAL to anyone who didn’t eagerly come to our table. This week there is a projection of 88 kids on board and after last cruise we are literally wiped out. I am so tired I can hardly think straight and so we are hoping that by only encouraging those that really seem to want to be there that we’ll have a nicer group of kids show up.
Boat drill was great. I had two families with infants that weren’t wearing a mandatory lifeboat wristband. Normally I wind up with grumpy parents that think the bands are silly when their infant “won’t be leaving their sight”, but I try to remind them that in the event of an actual emergency anything could happen and we’d want to know where their child belongs. Well, anyway, this week both families were very understanding and extremely good natured about it which means this week is already off to a good start! :)
Our parents meeting at 5 pm yielded all of 4 kids and they were all 8-12 years old. The kids all seemed really cool, so we’ll see what happens tonight at our Welcome Aboard party.
The party was a blast. Our Crow’s Nest singer, Crystal, has been coming up on the first night to play games with the kids (she’s a really big kid inside despite her years and I think has even more fun than they do!) and she really livens up the party. We played Domino Races, Musical Chairs, Four Corners, In the River/On the Bank, Find Monty, and Mummy Wrap. She was so competitive it was hilarious. The kids loved her so much, we are so happy that she loves coming up to play with us too because the first night Liz is registering everyone in the reception area so I was usually left in the room by myself to play with the kids. It’s great having such a fun energetic person to play off of with the kids. Crazy enough though we only had about 9 kids total! This may be a sign of good things to come for this week. It was all girls too, which was great and they were all really quiet and well behaved. “WOW!,” (To quote my favorite kids book “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse”) “That’s all I could say, WOW”.
Thursday July 12th: First Sea Day
The sea today is super calm, eerily so, and the temps are still super warm and the sun is shining brilliantly. I hope that it stays this nice all week because it’s been pretty rainy lately overall. We only had about 6 girls this morning and it was nice and quiet. We had our Del Sol coloring contest and awarded the prizes instantly. The older girl winner received a really cool frisbee that changes from a clear plastic light orange to a deep shade of red. Pretty cool! The younger girl won a cloth beach bag that changes from all khaki with black outlines of cartoony scenes from Alaska to be all colored in. We never knew what color everything turned before, because it’s either really cloudy the day we do the contest or because we couldn’t go outside to test them out, but today with so few kids we opened the emergency door and HAD to make an emergency trip outside (every few minutes or so) to test out the Del Sol rings and prizes. Too fun. :)
I’ve been napping a lot lately and can’t seem to ever catch up on sleep. I sure hope that this passes. I napped after lunch today for 30 minutes and again after dinner for an hour and 30 minutes and still felt tired for the photo scavenger hunt (2 girls showed up for it and I sent them out together to find stuff). I went right to bed after late night baby-sitting was over. One of our moms went to the Crow’s Nest tonight so she left her girl there and we watched a movie.
Friday July 13th: Tracy Arm/Juneau, AK
Tracy Arm was quite lovely and partly sunny. The clouds rolled in though as we neared Juneau and I wouldn’t have even bothered to get off the ship if I didn’t need to go to Fred Meyer to get some things. It was raining pretty good. I took the bus to the Nugget Mall and then walked to Fred Meyer and by the time I reached the store I was soaked and sloshing in my shoes. It was a warm rain though (probably in the upper 60’s) so I really didn’t mind. I knew I’d dry eventually. :)
I needed to find a way to store my summer photos, the reason for the trip to the store, and went there with the intention of picking up a flash drive to transfer photos in 4 GB chunks to burn to DVD’s from my roommates computer. A 2 GB flash drive cost $79.99 and that was pretty pricey for my budget and it was rather discouraging as I have about 20 GB of photos on the hard drive. Between the transferring and 4 GB max DVD’s I would have been going at it for a really LONG time trying to get everything backed up. Thankfully I found a better solution. There was a portable palm sized hard drive that is MAC/PC compatible that was only $99.00 for 80 GB. For $20 more I get 76 more GB of storage space. I am terrible, horrible, insanely awful at math but even I could figure out that the $99.00 was a much better value for something that I had to have (hard drive completely full, no more space period). My mom would be proud at my solving this story problem! :)
I took the bus back to the ship and the whole time completely panicking. I forgot until I was ON the bus that I didn’t have Juneau off completely, only until 6 p.m. because I had switched IPM to Megan for the afternoon. Normally my bus doesn’t get back until about 5 to 10 minutes after 6 p.m. but I simply prayed that the Lord would help me get back to the ship on time so that I wouldn’t get in trouble. “Strangely” enough there was zero traffic in intersections that normally take a good 10 minutes to make a left turn into, not many transfers or stops requested and even the drive was amazed at the fact that we arrived at the dock by 5 minutes to 6 p.m.!! I thanked God the whole way running up the gangway and I clocked in with a minute or so to spare. Whew! Funny thing is when I got back to my room Megan came in right behind me and let me know that she’d taken my IPM on for the entire day that day so I panicked for nothing, but God worked it out anyway so that I didn’t have to worry. It’s true when the Bible says “don’t worry” but I too often forget that He has everything under control. :)
Tonight we had 3 kids in Club Hal. We combined Camp night and Brave the Night into one theme and the kids had fun. It was so laid back that we didn’t really even do that much and all three were my tweens, so the games didn’t go completely over their heads like usual on combined night. They LOVED mystery food as well, as messy and gross! I love it too. He-he. It is so nice to have nice kids that are fun and want to be there and are not out of control. Love it!
Our teen staff member didn’t show up for work tonight. He was out “socializing” at the Viking (a crew hangout in Juneau) until after he was supposed to back on the ship at work and then realized (thankfully) that he was in no condition to be working with children and so didn’t come upstairs until he was a little more in control. We, Liz and I, were furious with him as we are always at work an hour or so before we open and he is always late and now didn’t even show up at all. Well, he will be dealt with and will end up with extra IPM for sure (they can’t fire him because he was out with the rest of the supervisory positions from the Entertainment Dept. and they were “socializing” just as much and should have also been on the ship.).
Saturday June 14th: Skagway, AK
I didn’t have to get up this morning until 9 a.m. to get dressed for raft drill. When it was time to haul my body out of bed I was curious as to the weather conditions and such for the day so I turned on the trusty TV channel that has a 24 hour camera off the Bridge in the front of the ship and couldn’t see anything but dark stormy looking skies. Yuck. The temp is in the mid 60’s and it is RAINING.
If this part of AK could thunderstorm I believe that today it would have because it was so dark and gloomy. When we went to raft drill I was shocked at how foggy it was. Skagway has such high winds I never thought it would be that eerie. With the fog socked in like it was super calm and we could only see a few feet off the stern of the ship, couldn’t see up into the mountains and across the water as it was mostly foggy as well. I took a few photos of this to show you why I couldn’t take out the big camera today to do more. It was a very low contrast, hard for the camera to focus, wet kind of day. I also didn’t get photos in Juneau because of the rain and not wanting my $1,000 equipment getting ruined. Yikes. Raft drill was quite entertaining and then I got off the ship. I decided that no matter what the weather I was going to go and get some exercise and buy an Odwalla B Berrier juice drink. They are delicious and full of antioxidants and they are at my favorite cute little train depot natural foods store at the end of town. I then began walking laps around the town by going all the way up the 16 blocks one way and back down another street. I need more exercise cuz none of my pants are fitting well at the moment. Oh dear!I decided that today would be a great day to phone as many people as possible, because it is Saturday so I can reach most people and also because of the eery lack of wind. I reached everybody I had hoped to and chatted for a good while with each of them. After last week and an incident that we had happen this morning with a family I needed to talk to friends. It really lifted my mood in a great way, I believe that one family actually prayed for me after the call because I instantly starting feeling better and better for the rest of the day. It’s so nice to have like minded friends that will pray for me and care about me like that.
I got back on the ship with enough time to grab some snack food and rush up to Country Carnival to get set up for tonight’s festivities. We had a good number of kids there, considering how few are actually registered this week. We started with a horse race and then we moved on to face painting. Even my boys that were “too cool for school” caved and had me paint their arms. I painted balloons on one girl’s cheek that turned out super cute. They were all quite pleased and then excited to move on to playing the games. We played the carnival style games for about 20 minutes and then stretched out the prize redemption portion for another 10 minutes until the kids got picked up. At the beginning of the night, right at eight o'clock, a family signed her kids in for after hours baby-sitting. That’s fine with us because it means extra cash, but these kids decided they didn’t want to be in baby-sitting (they were 7, 11, and 12) so they tried to do everything they could to be “bad enough” to get sent home. It was annoying but actually quite comical. I could tell straight off that they weren’t actually bad kids because even in the midst of “acting up” I told one of the boys to put on his shoes cuz the odor was knocking me out and he immediately went and put them on without argument. Another time they threatened to leave the room but when I glared and said they had to stay in the room they walked away from the door and pouted. Any bad kids would have actually acted quite differently and run in three different directions at the same time to make me crazy. So, to repay them for annoying me for 2 full hours nonstop I gave mom and dad a FULL report on the nights activities and accompanying behavior and did they ever get in trouble. I received a full apology and the parents told the boys that their Club Hal days were over. No PS2 video games, nothing. Well, they did deserve to be corrected but hopefully they won’t be totally grounded because they weren’t mean and nasty, just overly annoying and slightly rude. The 7 year old was an angel though and I impressed that highly on the mom. He did everything he was asked and had a fun time with me. Yay. Well, the little ones usually do always like me and the big ones like me if they give me a chance.
Sunday July 15th: Glacier Bay Day
Well, unlike yesterday’s weather today in Glacier Bay I can once again report gorgeous sunny skies and warm weather. It is the perfect day in the Bay and I’m so glad that these guests can see AK at its best. :)
Our guest speakers in Club Hal were very good today, well prepared and carefully guarding their mouths after last week’s fiasco, and only about 4 kids participated in the talks and sing along. Oh well, the four that were there were sweet.
We had movie night tonight with only 2 kids that were super fun to have around. They laid in the paint bucket wrapped like burritos in wool deck blankets (because the kids room is only about 55 degrees) watching the movie while I sat wrapped in a deck blanket across the room trying to stay awake and stay warm. All in all, couldn’t have asked for a better night!
After we finished, and didn’t have baby-sitting, I grabbed my stuff for the fellowship meeting and headed upstairs. I walked a few laps on deck 3 because it was so warm and then went upstairs to the meeting. It was very nice to spend time with friends in Christ and relax and be my true self for a couple of hours. We sang some great worship songs and met some friends of Norm and Moira (even though they are no longer on the ship) and then after it ended I stayed for about 30 more minutes for a jam session with the guitarists. I love to sing, so very much, so I was racking my brain for the best songs that I loved and one of the guitarists (I think his name is Natal - from Indonesia) and I harmonized for a while. Because of this I have now been instructed to prepare to be the special music for next week (granting that I don’t have baby-sitting - which I won’t know until 10 p.m. Sunday evening for sure) and also that I will be giving the message. So, if you read this before next Sunday please say a prayer that I will not have baby-sitting and that I will speak words that my friends may be blessed by hearing. For God is truly the one I seek to glorify and not myself, so may they be His words for my friends and not my own. I enjoyed the singing and now I have to find all the words to the song that we are going to sing. :) That’s my homework for the week!
Monday July 16th: Ketchikan, AK
It is raining really steadily here today and is dark and gloomy like Skagway. I feel REALLY bad for the passengers as I have the opportunity to simply say, this week is rainy so I’ll wait until next week to ...” but they only have this one chance and every port this week has been really rainy. They have been such good sports about it though. I really haven’t heard complaining. This goes to show you how good a cruise this is this week.
I got off the ship to go to Wal-mart. The perfect rainy day location to hang out in as I needed a few items there. I decided to be brave and walk back to the ship as well. Just like in Juneau it was fairly warm today, despite the rain, so I didn’t worry about getting soaked. I have to shower anyway before working tonight so it doesn’t matter if I look terrible by the time I reach the ship. :) It was a really nice walk overall and the exercise again is only GOOD for me right!
Tonight’s theme for the kids was pirate night. We had exactly one kid show up, Breanna our really funny girl, so we had one to two ratio of kids to counselors. She really wanted to stay and didn’t care what we did while she was there, so we dragged her out on a pirate treasure hunt (meant for 3-7’s and she’s much older) decked out in pirate face paint and such and she was such a good sport about it :) I love Breanna.
Tuesday July 17th: Final Sea Day
Today was warm and gorgeously sunny again. How strange that all of our ports have been so icky but our sea days have been wonderful. It was so warm out today that we actually played a game on the sports court where you have to lay super still and the first person to move is out, you try to get everyone out by the way, and the last person out gets to be the next judge of movements. We laid there without moving for a good 30 minutes in the sun enjoying the warmth. That was the best game ever and the kids themselves requested it.. I know some really mischieveous adult created the game, but kids love it and today I LOVED it as well :)
The afternoon was very quick, we closed at 3 p.m. for the kids and I took the 2 tweens to the PS2 room and then down to eat ice cream. Torture. The evening pillow/pj party was fun. We had about 10 kids max and they were so fun. I was really sad when the evening ended because this has been the most relaxing fun week this summer. The kids were so easy to please and had such low expectations of how to be entertained. They simply loved being there to hang out with us and didn’t care one bit what exactly we were going to do. Loved every minute of it. I’m feeling so refreshed and upbeat at the end of this cruise compared to how badly I felt at the beginning. Yay!!
I hope that your week was as joyous and relaxing as mine was. Please write me really soon friends :)
Luv ya,
Trisha
ps. I’m having internet problems. I’m not getting all of my messages in my Mail program and have to stay on the internet to read everything on the very slow server so I apologize that I haven’t replied to several of you that emailed me after last week’s plea for friendly mail. I WANT to get back to all of you, but without my Mail program working I’m using up the expensive internet cards every 3 days or less. Yikes.
pps. I typed this update at 1 a.m. so if my sentences don’t make sense at times please email me to correct it because it all sounds right in my head, but my head and hands don’t always match up :)
Friday, July 13, 2007
Cruise 7 of 14: July 4 - 11
Update 7/14/07: I purchased an 80 gig portable HD yesterday at Fred Meyer for $20 more than buying a 4 gig flash drive. So I will now be able to transfer off the photos and add more to my hard drive as I take them. Yay! This week has been terrible for weather. If the rainforest we are in could thunderstorm it would be doing that. So, today is a perfect day for working on photos from weeks past :) Have a great day.
Important note 7/13/07: I don't have any pics this week yet because my hard drive is completely full and I don't have a DVD burner to take photos off. I brought CD's to burn but am discovering that I've been so gung ho on photo taking that each day has between 250mb to 2.1gig of content and I've got 7 weeks worth on this computer so far and a whole week still sitting on the camera. I've got to figure out how to get them safely off my computer and to secure storage so that I can continue to take pics in these upcoming weeks. Yikes! No worries though, Juneau is supposed to rain again this week as is Skagway so I'm not too worried about getting out with the camera anyway unless I do an excursion. We'll see. I need to find a portable hard drive or something so that I can burn these folders to DVD or something, I don't know. It's so tricky in AK when I can't just run to Circuit City to pick up what I need and ordering takes so long to actually get the item at some port in the future. Yikes.
Wednesday July 4th: Vancouver, B.C.
Happy Independence Day! We are in Canada today, but thankfully the ship is still decorated really nicely for the 4th!! I have 55 tweens this week on board, so it’ll be interesting to see how many of them come to programming.
Well, I didn’t have to wait long to see that I did too good of a job promoting myself on the gangway to the kids. By quarter to eight this evening I had 22 kids waiting to break down the doors and pile in. That hopefully isn’t a sign of things to come.
Our new staff member is having a hard time adjusting to ship life so we’ll have to see how long he lasts. We did have a couple of entertainment staff crew come up to play with us tonight and I’m SO GLAD they were there. With the combo of my kids and the little kids we had over 30 in the tween room for the welcome aboard party. Yikes! That’s all I can say is YIKES!
Thursday July 5th: First Sea Day
The seas were quite calm today so I felt fine this morning for activities. It was good not worrying about feeling ill while having so many to program for. A bunch of them slept in, but I still had at least 12 off and on, maybe more, I forget. The new guy had a safety meeting and some other meetings that he was supposed to be at today, but he missed them and it’s looking like he may actually be disembarking tomorrow. We thought we were desperate for staff, but maybe not so desperate after all.
These kids this week are very loud and very hyper. I am trying to get their attention for games and such and they simply sit there and talk to each other with their backs turned and ignore me. I’m really glad that they all made friends, but I’d appreciate a little respect as well. We’ll see how the week pans out.
Tonight’s theme: Top Secret Assignment was a disaster. The photo scavenger hunt had so many kids participating that I broke them up into 4 teams in the fairest way I knew how, but because they didn’t pick their own teams they were miserable and taking it out on each other. They screamed while out and about the ship, went running through the library multiple times, etc. The Chief Security Officer and my roommate had to talk to them multiple times. Because of their bad behavior I’m going to have to cancel all of the rest of the fun scavenger hunts for the rest of the week because they can’t seem to handle themselves unsupervised. Oh and I almost forgot, to make the night even better -- about 4 of my boys tonight on two different teams got beat up by two teenagers while on the scavenger hunt. Of course that went over well with all of us and especially the parents of the boys. I felt terrible that that would happen while they were signed into my care, but unfortunately there wasn’t anything that I could have done to prevent that. The parents are mad at the boys and disappointed with me. I did tell them to contact security and file a report, because they will be better equipped to bring the culprits to justice if we can track down who they are. I didn’t see them, so hopefully the boys themselves will point them out to an adult as they see them around the ship.
Friday July 6th: Tracy Arm, Juneau, AK
At the end of our morning programming Liz and I went to hang with Steve in the Loft for a moment as he was finishing up a movie with the teens. As I was sitting there a boy with longish hair came in with a plate of fries and another boy came in a moment later and stood next to the post I was sitting against. All of a sudden one of the moms of my tweens that got beat up last night runs in and points out these two boys as the ones that did the beating. We now have our culprits and they will be dealt with accordingly.
Our staff member left today without so much as a goodbye. We are not too sad to see him go to be quite frank. I hated that it didn’t work out, I want everyone to have a chance to prove themselves, but in this case it is for the best that he left sooner than later. Now we can calm down and get back to work.
The weather was rainy again, so I didn’t get off the ship. I wanted to go up Mt. Roberts tramway or go to Mendenhall Glacier but with the bad weather I’ll save my money for a sunny (or at least not rainy) week. It was pretty foggy this week too so I wouldn’t have been able to see much. I am still exhausted this week and am napping every second that I can. I think all the drama that has happened since last Ketchikan (that I’m purposely not being too detailed about) has simply worn me out. Not to mention the really atrocious kids we have this week. I thought a few weeks back the kids were misbehaved and rude, this week tops that and then some.
Brave the Night theme night was a royal disaster. Out of 10 games we did 3 plus snack. I spent the entire night trying to get the kids attention. I simply should have given up and told them to go home for all the good my efforts were doing.
Saturday July 7th: Skagway, AK (today is 07/07/07)
Skagway was a bit overcast this morning. I got off around 10 or so and wandered around. I didn’t really have any ambitious plans today because I’m so tired and feeling burned out. I DID walk on my favorite trail and saw baby eaglets that were flying around above my head. I tried to get high enough up the hillside to see where their nest was exactly (I had a general location) but couldn’t so in the end I came back down and enjoyed watching them circle around.
By one o'clock it was blue skies and sun with high 70’s for the temp. It was a beautiful day, but windy as usual. I always have to “hang on to my hat” and also my lens caps! so that they don’t blow away in Skagway.
I tried to contact my friend Kristin today but her cellphone was now disconnected from the Davenport, IA number and I didn’t have the updated info. Thankfully her parents haven’t moved since I’ve known her so I called them to get the updated info and chatted with her dad for a bit. That was nice and then I called Kristin’s house and talked with her for a bit as well. It’s so weird that she’s back in MN close to Amee, but great too!
After calling people on the phone I went to the Kone Kompany and had a dish of real lemon sorbet that was like tart frozen lemonade in a cup. It was SO DELICIOUS! I also took a few pictures of the town as Mom and Dad have requested more building shots. I personally find building shots a little boring and touristy snapshottish, but if there is a demand I’ll try and meet it. Hopefully I’ve captured a few interesting angles to please the parentals as well as my own artistic sense :)
For the Country Carnival tonight we had over 30 kids attend the first part, but then the behavior got out of hand and so we had to ask a couple of them to leave. We had an actual playground type fist fight tonight (the kind where the kids all circle and cheer on the bully) between two brothers while Liz and I were dishing out snack around the corner. One small boy comes running over and says that so and so is crying because such and such happened. Oh dear. So the bully was kicked out of Club HAL and I’m not sorry. As soon as he left all of the older kids left as well and so by the time we actually played the carnival games there were only about 12 kids left and they had a fun time.
We found out tonight that the boys who caused all the trouble beating up my tweens have indeed been brought to justice. I don’t know all the details, but suffice it to say they had to make formal apologies to crew and kids and further actions were taken by the crew and parents. I’m glad that’s over finally.
Sunday July 8th: Glacier Bay National Park
We had a slow morning with only about 4 kids between 3-12. I’m so angry over all the bad behavior I’ve seen this week that I purposely held all of my programming in the little paint bucket room because this week’s tweens are “way too mature for that room”. Well good, then they won’t come and cause problems today on the longest sea day of our itinerary. :) I figure two can play their game. They want to disrespect me and waste my time I can play with 3 year olds and not say a word about moving back to the “big kids room”. When they act their ages we can resume programming for them and otherwise they can join the little bitties.
This afternoon was another disaster - this time due to crew mishap. We have guest entertainment and education all afternoon and one of these parties messed up their bit and actually used the F word and J#$% Ch#$% quite loudly and well pronounced right in front of the children. It was awful! When children get mad at the person and say “you shouldn’t use bad words” you know it’s bad. What else can happen this week.
Let me tell you! Three of our 4 hammocks in the teen hangout outside, the Oasis, have been ripped so that the centers have big holes in them. This causes the teens to fall out, very hard, when they swing the hammocks in full 360’s. Yep, you heard correctly, they are trying to flip each other around in full circles. Well, obviously not everyone has this much talent and so when they fall they have gotten quite seriously maimed. One girl’s eye is so bruised it has swollen almost shut and her face looks like someone beat her up. One boys arm is swollen by the elbow to midway up his arm in both directions. Where was the supervision you might wonder? Well, the geniuses that designed the Oasis didn’t provide any sort of permanent doors to this area of the ship. So, every time we kick the teens out for misbehaving (we can hear them in the paint bucket room as it’s so loud we think the ceiling will surely fall in this time) they immediately sneak back up about 10 minutes later. We have no way of blocking off the area to prevent this and spend all day chasing them away. They of course have now latched on to this fun game and laugh at us for not having control - they have taken control. It is clearly the most fun thing they can possibly think of on this glorious cruise to Alaska.
The damage to Club HAL in general is so bad (did I mention that the fire alarm got busted off the wall in the Playstation Room as well as cabinet door locks being broken clean off in the teen room?) that we are now on complete lock down and security as doing extra rounds as often as they can to try and help us out. Things are being broken, stolen, etc. at such an alarming rate I am ready to throw them off the ship tomorrow in Ketchikan. In all of my 20 cruises now to AK these are by far the worst group I’ve ever encountered. Can it get any worse?
Monday July 9th: Ketchikan, AK
Today I treated myself to a haircut in the spa. My layers were getting too long to have any lift in this temperate rain forest climate so it was time to get it chopped. I took off a good 3 inches from each layer and now it’s cute and bouncy again. Yay! My hairdresser is from Melbourne, AU and was very good at her job. I’m quite pleased.
After the haircut I got off the ship with Moira (this is her last week on board I’m SO SAD that they are leaving!!) and we walked to McD’s for a McFlurry and then I bought my Nabisco brand ginger snaps with real ginger and real molasses. I’ve tried a lot of brands this spring and believe me these are the BEST ever if you like a LOT of kick in your snaps. These things get me through the rough sea days when I normally don’t eat anything. I will have a handful of these babies and my half Bonine tablet and I’m good to go. :)
Afterwards we walked back to town in the rain, it was quite steady rain at this point, and went to a wonderful store called Ketchikandies. They have the best homemade candies and chocolate covered oreos there. So good! I bought a box of them for Liz for all the extra hard work she does for Club HAL without any remuneration of any kind. I really appreciate her so much. After buying the candy I went back to the ship. With the rain and cold it was so dark and yucky I was really tired. I went back to my cabin and ... napped of course. As if you thought I’d have done anything else. Why am I so tired? The staff member tired me out, the kids tire me out and something I haven’t mentioned until this point -- we’ve had late night baby sitting every night as well this week for a little “angel” and haven’t finished up until 12:30/1:00 am in the morning. So, I’m getting a maximum of about 6 hours of sleep at night, but usually more like 4-5 hours. That takes it’s toll when having to be so active during the day.
Tonight’s theme was supposed to be another scavenger hunt night, but the kids lost that privilege the first sea day. So, last night it was girlie movie night (to keep out all the misbehaved boys) and tonight is little kid movie night (to keep out all the older tweens in general). Again, two can play their game and I’m beating them at it without having to be mean or say a word. They have the choice to come to the “fun” activities I’m providing for them or not, and most are choosing to NOT. :) I’m SO BAD!
Tuesday July 10th: Last Sea Day
This morning we had hang time in the Loft for an hour and chilled out to some cartoons. Because the kids are now not in the habit of attending (after my antics with their schedule the past two days) we had 4 well behaved kids show up only. Awww. Then we went into the Playstation room and played for an hour (that room has been on permanent lock down since the fire alarm incident) and again not many checked in and so they missed it. Awww. I feel so bad for them :) Then they didn’t come to the cooking class they signed up for and we made such delicious snacks and got to eat them. It was a great day.
This afternoon I once again combined with Liz for activities and sure enough it kept out all the kids that definitely didn’t want to be there. Ohhhhh noooooo. For the final party we were combined in the tween room and a bunch of my kids showed up, but they didn’t get to do many games because they refused to listen. So, finally I asked a whole group of them to simply sign-out and go away because I was tired of their rudeness and it took me about 10 minutes to get them to vacate the area. They didn’t want to leave, they just preferred talking amongst themselves to listening to me. Finally they left and we finished out games, cleaned up and boogied out the door by 11:30. I plan to get to bed quickly now as I will have a little bit of time in Vancouver tomorrow to get off the ship in the AM before working gangway at 12:30 pm. The forecast for tomorrow is hot and sunny - YAY!!!! I NEED NEEED NEEEEEEEED to see some sunshine, I’m so deprived in AK overall. I am thankful that Skagway had some sun this week or I’d have gone crazy.
Well, I don’t have to deal with these kids any more. Tomorrow they’ll all be off the ship by 9:30 am and I can wash my hands of them and move on. Tomorrow will be better, it’s a new day and a new cruise with new kids. They certainly won’t be worse than this week so no worries.
I certainly hope your week was better than mine. I need to unwind and de-stress before tomorrow.
Blessings to you,
T
ps. I haven’t heard from anyone out there in a LONG time. If you’re reading this blog pleeeeeease email me. I need some fun emails to read in my “spare” time. :)
tlbuster75@gmail.com
Important note 7/13/07: I don't have any pics this week yet because my hard drive is completely full and I don't have a DVD burner to take photos off. I brought CD's to burn but am discovering that I've been so gung ho on photo taking that each day has between 250mb to 2.1gig of content and I've got 7 weeks worth on this computer so far and a whole week still sitting on the camera. I've got to figure out how to get them safely off my computer and to secure storage so that I can continue to take pics in these upcoming weeks. Yikes! No worries though, Juneau is supposed to rain again this week as is Skagway so I'm not too worried about getting out with the camera anyway unless I do an excursion. We'll see. I need to find a portable hard drive or something so that I can burn these folders to DVD or something, I don't know. It's so tricky in AK when I can't just run to Circuit City to pick up what I need and ordering takes so long to actually get the item at some port in the future. Yikes.
Wednesday July 4th: Vancouver, B.C.
Happy Independence Day! We are in Canada today, but thankfully the ship is still decorated really nicely for the 4th!! I have 55 tweens this week on board, so it’ll be interesting to see how many of them come to programming.
Well, I didn’t have to wait long to see that I did too good of a job promoting myself on the gangway to the kids. By quarter to eight this evening I had 22 kids waiting to break down the doors and pile in. That hopefully isn’t a sign of things to come.
Our new staff member is having a hard time adjusting to ship life so we’ll have to see how long he lasts. We did have a couple of entertainment staff crew come up to play with us tonight and I’m SO GLAD they were there. With the combo of my kids and the little kids we had over 30 in the tween room for the welcome aboard party. Yikes! That’s all I can say is YIKES!
Thursday July 5th: First Sea Day
The seas were quite calm today so I felt fine this morning for activities. It was good not worrying about feeling ill while having so many to program for. A bunch of them slept in, but I still had at least 12 off and on, maybe more, I forget. The new guy had a safety meeting and some other meetings that he was supposed to be at today, but he missed them and it’s looking like he may actually be disembarking tomorrow. We thought we were desperate for staff, but maybe not so desperate after all.
These kids this week are very loud and very hyper. I am trying to get their attention for games and such and they simply sit there and talk to each other with their backs turned and ignore me. I’m really glad that they all made friends, but I’d appreciate a little respect as well. We’ll see how the week pans out.
Tonight’s theme: Top Secret Assignment was a disaster. The photo scavenger hunt had so many kids participating that I broke them up into 4 teams in the fairest way I knew how, but because they didn’t pick their own teams they were miserable and taking it out on each other. They screamed while out and about the ship, went running through the library multiple times, etc. The Chief Security Officer and my roommate had to talk to them multiple times. Because of their bad behavior I’m going to have to cancel all of the rest of the fun scavenger hunts for the rest of the week because they can’t seem to handle themselves unsupervised. Oh and I almost forgot, to make the night even better -- about 4 of my boys tonight on two different teams got beat up by two teenagers while on the scavenger hunt. Of course that went over well with all of us and especially the parents of the boys. I felt terrible that that would happen while they were signed into my care, but unfortunately there wasn’t anything that I could have done to prevent that. The parents are mad at the boys and disappointed with me. I did tell them to contact security and file a report, because they will be better equipped to bring the culprits to justice if we can track down who they are. I didn’t see them, so hopefully the boys themselves will point them out to an adult as they see them around the ship.
Friday July 6th: Tracy Arm, Juneau, AK
At the end of our morning programming Liz and I went to hang with Steve in the Loft for a moment as he was finishing up a movie with the teens. As I was sitting there a boy with longish hair came in with a plate of fries and another boy came in a moment later and stood next to the post I was sitting against. All of a sudden one of the moms of my tweens that got beat up last night runs in and points out these two boys as the ones that did the beating. We now have our culprits and they will be dealt with accordingly.
Our staff member left today without so much as a goodbye. We are not too sad to see him go to be quite frank. I hated that it didn’t work out, I want everyone to have a chance to prove themselves, but in this case it is for the best that he left sooner than later. Now we can calm down and get back to work.
The weather was rainy again, so I didn’t get off the ship. I wanted to go up Mt. Roberts tramway or go to Mendenhall Glacier but with the bad weather I’ll save my money for a sunny (or at least not rainy) week. It was pretty foggy this week too so I wouldn’t have been able to see much. I am still exhausted this week and am napping every second that I can. I think all the drama that has happened since last Ketchikan (that I’m purposely not being too detailed about) has simply worn me out. Not to mention the really atrocious kids we have this week. I thought a few weeks back the kids were misbehaved and rude, this week tops that and then some.
Brave the Night theme night was a royal disaster. Out of 10 games we did 3 plus snack. I spent the entire night trying to get the kids attention. I simply should have given up and told them to go home for all the good my efforts were doing.
Saturday July 7th: Skagway, AK (today is 07/07/07)
Skagway was a bit overcast this morning. I got off around 10 or so and wandered around. I didn’t really have any ambitious plans today because I’m so tired and feeling burned out. I DID walk on my favorite trail and saw baby eaglets that were flying around above my head. I tried to get high enough up the hillside to see where their nest was exactly (I had a general location) but couldn’t so in the end I came back down and enjoyed watching them circle around.
By one o'clock it was blue skies and sun with high 70’s for the temp. It was a beautiful day, but windy as usual. I always have to “hang on to my hat” and also my lens caps! so that they don’t blow away in Skagway.
I tried to contact my friend Kristin today but her cellphone was now disconnected from the Davenport, IA number and I didn’t have the updated info. Thankfully her parents haven’t moved since I’ve known her so I called them to get the updated info and chatted with her dad for a bit. That was nice and then I called Kristin’s house and talked with her for a bit as well. It’s so weird that she’s back in MN close to Amee, but great too!
After calling people on the phone I went to the Kone Kompany and had a dish of real lemon sorbet that was like tart frozen lemonade in a cup. It was SO DELICIOUS! I also took a few pictures of the town as Mom and Dad have requested more building shots. I personally find building shots a little boring and touristy snapshottish, but if there is a demand I’ll try and meet it. Hopefully I’ve captured a few interesting angles to please the parentals as well as my own artistic sense :)
For the Country Carnival tonight we had over 30 kids attend the first part, but then the behavior got out of hand and so we had to ask a couple of them to leave. We had an actual playground type fist fight tonight (the kind where the kids all circle and cheer on the bully) between two brothers while Liz and I were dishing out snack around the corner. One small boy comes running over and says that so and so is crying because such and such happened. Oh dear. So the bully was kicked out of Club HAL and I’m not sorry. As soon as he left all of the older kids left as well and so by the time we actually played the carnival games there were only about 12 kids left and they had a fun time.
We found out tonight that the boys who caused all the trouble beating up my tweens have indeed been brought to justice. I don’t know all the details, but suffice it to say they had to make formal apologies to crew and kids and further actions were taken by the crew and parents. I’m glad that’s over finally.
Sunday July 8th: Glacier Bay National Park
We had a slow morning with only about 4 kids between 3-12. I’m so angry over all the bad behavior I’ve seen this week that I purposely held all of my programming in the little paint bucket room because this week’s tweens are “way too mature for that room”. Well good, then they won’t come and cause problems today on the longest sea day of our itinerary. :) I figure two can play their game. They want to disrespect me and waste my time I can play with 3 year olds and not say a word about moving back to the “big kids room”. When they act their ages we can resume programming for them and otherwise they can join the little bitties.
This afternoon was another disaster - this time due to crew mishap. We have guest entertainment and education all afternoon and one of these parties messed up their bit and actually used the F word and J#$% Ch#$% quite loudly and well pronounced right in front of the children. It was awful! When children get mad at the person and say “you shouldn’t use bad words” you know it’s bad. What else can happen this week.
Let me tell you! Three of our 4 hammocks in the teen hangout outside, the Oasis, have been ripped so that the centers have big holes in them. This causes the teens to fall out, very hard, when they swing the hammocks in full 360’s. Yep, you heard correctly, they are trying to flip each other around in full circles. Well, obviously not everyone has this much talent and so when they fall they have gotten quite seriously maimed. One girl’s eye is so bruised it has swollen almost shut and her face looks like someone beat her up. One boys arm is swollen by the elbow to midway up his arm in both directions. Where was the supervision you might wonder? Well, the geniuses that designed the Oasis didn’t provide any sort of permanent doors to this area of the ship. So, every time we kick the teens out for misbehaving (we can hear them in the paint bucket room as it’s so loud we think the ceiling will surely fall in this time) they immediately sneak back up about 10 minutes later. We have no way of blocking off the area to prevent this and spend all day chasing them away. They of course have now latched on to this fun game and laugh at us for not having control - they have taken control. It is clearly the most fun thing they can possibly think of on this glorious cruise to Alaska.
The damage to Club HAL in general is so bad (did I mention that the fire alarm got busted off the wall in the Playstation Room as well as cabinet door locks being broken clean off in the teen room?) that we are now on complete lock down and security as doing extra rounds as often as they can to try and help us out. Things are being broken, stolen, etc. at such an alarming rate I am ready to throw them off the ship tomorrow in Ketchikan. In all of my 20 cruises now to AK these are by far the worst group I’ve ever encountered. Can it get any worse?
Monday July 9th: Ketchikan, AK
Today I treated myself to a haircut in the spa. My layers were getting too long to have any lift in this temperate rain forest climate so it was time to get it chopped. I took off a good 3 inches from each layer and now it’s cute and bouncy again. Yay! My hairdresser is from Melbourne, AU and was very good at her job. I’m quite pleased.
After the haircut I got off the ship with Moira (this is her last week on board I’m SO SAD that they are leaving!!) and we walked to McD’s for a McFlurry and then I bought my Nabisco brand ginger snaps with real ginger and real molasses. I’ve tried a lot of brands this spring and believe me these are the BEST ever if you like a LOT of kick in your snaps. These things get me through the rough sea days when I normally don’t eat anything. I will have a handful of these babies and my half Bonine tablet and I’m good to go. :)
Afterwards we walked back to town in the rain, it was quite steady rain at this point, and went to a wonderful store called Ketchikandies. They have the best homemade candies and chocolate covered oreos there. So good! I bought a box of them for Liz for all the extra hard work she does for Club HAL without any remuneration of any kind. I really appreciate her so much. After buying the candy I went back to the ship. With the rain and cold it was so dark and yucky I was really tired. I went back to my cabin and ... napped of course. As if you thought I’d have done anything else. Why am I so tired? The staff member tired me out, the kids tire me out and something I haven’t mentioned until this point -- we’ve had late night baby sitting every night as well this week for a little “angel” and haven’t finished up until 12:30/1:00 am in the morning. So, I’m getting a maximum of about 6 hours of sleep at night, but usually more like 4-5 hours. That takes it’s toll when having to be so active during the day.
Tonight’s theme was supposed to be another scavenger hunt night, but the kids lost that privilege the first sea day. So, last night it was girlie movie night (to keep out all the misbehaved boys) and tonight is little kid movie night (to keep out all the older tweens in general). Again, two can play their game and I’m beating them at it without having to be mean or say a word. They have the choice to come to the “fun” activities I’m providing for them or not, and most are choosing to NOT. :) I’m SO BAD!
Tuesday July 10th: Last Sea Day
This morning we had hang time in the Loft for an hour and chilled out to some cartoons. Because the kids are now not in the habit of attending (after my antics with their schedule the past two days) we had 4 well behaved kids show up only. Awww. Then we went into the Playstation room and played for an hour (that room has been on permanent lock down since the fire alarm incident) and again not many checked in and so they missed it. Awww. I feel so bad for them :) Then they didn’t come to the cooking class they signed up for and we made such delicious snacks and got to eat them. It was a great day.
This afternoon I once again combined with Liz for activities and sure enough it kept out all the kids that definitely didn’t want to be there. Ohhhhh noooooo. For the final party we were combined in the tween room and a bunch of my kids showed up, but they didn’t get to do many games because they refused to listen. So, finally I asked a whole group of them to simply sign-out and go away because I was tired of their rudeness and it took me about 10 minutes to get them to vacate the area. They didn’t want to leave, they just preferred talking amongst themselves to listening to me. Finally they left and we finished out games, cleaned up and boogied out the door by 11:30. I plan to get to bed quickly now as I will have a little bit of time in Vancouver tomorrow to get off the ship in the AM before working gangway at 12:30 pm. The forecast for tomorrow is hot and sunny - YAY!!!! I NEED NEEED NEEEEEEEED to see some sunshine, I’m so deprived in AK overall. I am thankful that Skagway had some sun this week or I’d have gone crazy.
Well, I don’t have to deal with these kids any more. Tomorrow they’ll all be off the ship by 9:30 am and I can wash my hands of them and move on. Tomorrow will be better, it’s a new day and a new cruise with new kids. They certainly won’t be worse than this week so no worries.
I certainly hope your week was better than mine. I need to unwind and de-stress before tomorrow.
Blessings to you,
T
ps. I haven’t heard from anyone out there in a LONG time. If you’re reading this blog pleeeeeease email me. I need some fun emails to read in my “spare” time. :)
tlbuster75@gmail.com
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Cruise 6 of 14: June 27 - July 4
Make sure to check out the links section on the left and click on Week 6 Photos to see the complete online collection :)
Wednesday June 27th: Vancouver, B.C.
I mentioned the goings on of this day last blog, so I won’t rehash other than to say that this week we will be running all three ages with the three of us and LOTS of kids on board!
Thursday June 28th: First Sea Day
This morning the sea was very calm for a sea day. Several of our kids stayed in their rooms because they were not well, but overall everyone was feeling well and doing good. Last night we had a large number of registrations come in for the 3-7 year olds - so far my age group only has about 9 registered - but this MORNING, oh my goodness. We had 22 of the 27 kids on board in our little paint bucket room. It was very very busy in there. I stayed in the tween room with my few because they are older and more mature than the kids have typically been and so combining with the little kids would turn them away completely this week.
I’ve been napping a lot lately trying to get over this respiratory illness that I’ve contracted. I’m on the antibiotics and today I woke up with no sore throat and I actually did have a voice. After last night I was so sore I didn’t think I would actually have a voice this morning, but praise God I did. :)
These kids LOVE arts and crafts projects. That’s great for us because we have so many of them. We have a project called fusion beads on the schedule for an hour in the afternoon today and the project lasted 2.5 hours and they still wanted more but we had to take them down to eat ice cream. While we were trying to get out the door we had even MORE registrations in the age groups. Yikes. I think kids now has 25 of 27 registered. It’ll be a very busy day and week.
Top secret assignment night (spy night) with the little kids didn’t go over too well. There were way too many of them and they were acting totally crazy. My kids went out on their photo scavenger hunt and the girl’s team couldn’t get it together. They kept getting lost and frustrated. They found 3 of 12 items whereas the 2 boys teams found 7 or 8 of 12 items. One of the girls is extremely bossy and it’ll be interesting to see how the week goes with her there.
Friday June 29th: Tracy Arm and Juneau, AK
Today is a beautiful day in Tracy Arm. The sun is shining and the air is warm. I took my kids outside this morning for an hour to burn off some energy and I loved just being out there in the nice weather looking at the glaciers in Tracy Arm. After lunch I rested for a brief bit because my nasty cold is still keeping me pretty out of it. I have just the right amount of oomph to do my job and then I fizzle out between shifts. But, I only need what I need and I’m not asking for extra. I am content.
I was able to get off the ship in Juneau and I decided to go to the Nugget Mall in the Valley and then back to Fred Meiers. I love the convenience of the express bus in Juneau and the cost can’t be beat at $1.50 per trip. The mall was small, only about 10 stores or so, but they had 3 really nice clothing stores, a Payless Shoes, a Joann’s, and a GNC. Considering this is the only mall and it is the capital of Alaska on a landlocked peninsula it was slightly shocking, but oh well - it is Alaska after all.
I walked from the mall to Fred Meier’s and it took me about 15 minutes or so to get there. At the store I discovered that it is a full grocery store as well as a full department store. The store is literally larger than the mall and has way more stuff to offer. I picked up a few snacks and I also needed a new LCD screen protector for my pocket size camera (my previous piece of plastic was all scratched so it was hard to see if the pictures were in focus or not. They had everything that I needed and the prices were only about $.50 to a dollar higher than back home. I couldn’t take the express bus back to Juneau, so I had to sit for 45 minutes on the bus waiting for it to get to all the other stops along the way, but because I’ve now ridden it a couple times I looked like a pro pulling the cord to request a stop before the driver called out my location. Yay me!
Our theme night was slightly crazy. No one even really showed up until after 9 pm, so we only got to do about 3 games, one being my favorite called mystery food. My bossy girl has been very faithful in attending and she is grating on the other kids nerves, but I do have a couple of kids that are SUPER cool. They are 10 and 11.95 (the .95 is very important to him!) and are so so cool - Dylan and Tyler. They are so gentle and helpful towards the younger kids and nice cool fun guys with kids their own age (heartbreakers for some lucky girls in the future). I wish I could adopt them, but the parents are super cool too so I don’t think they’d let me. :)
Saturday June 30th: Skagway, AK
I have IPM this week in Skagway, but the weather isn’t that great overall so I’m not going to be missing too much. I managed to trade the morning hours to my roommate so that I got off the ship until 1:15pm, but instead of getting off the ship at 8 am I slept until 9 and got off by 9:20 am. I just don’t have my energy back yet to be up and moving rigorously on port days. Hopefully soon.
I took a few pictures in Skagway and then went to the waterfall and just hung out in the woods looking for interesting picture opportunities.
It was very enjoyable and brief but it was cold and very windy (go figure that I’d encounter wind in Skagway!). On my way back to the ship I saw a car wash that you could only say you'd see in a SMALL town like Skagway in the summer. :)
At 2 pm I jumped back into my day uniform and headed upstairs to put out sports equipment and then came back to my room to work on pictures and typing out this blog for last week. I lost a whole week due to lack of energy and being so ill, so sorry for the delay. I didn’t finish typing before dinner though because I had to also do a 5 pm teen activity in the Loft that no one attended. I caught up on my teen gossip magazines and then went to dinner.
Tonight was Country Carnival and if you can believe it we got even more new kids tonight. We drop off and pick up guest in Skagway that are also doing a land portion to their vacation up in Denali and we lost 4 kids and gained about 12. Most of them were all in my tween group, so now we have a full group of tweens on board that WANT to come to Club HAL.
I had after hours baby-sitting tonight as well for 4 kids, so I made $20.00 that was nice - internet card here I come! - and the kids were fun. We played UNO and Sorry.
Sunday July 1st: Glacier Bay National Park and Canada Day (celebrated like our July 4)
Happy Canada Day! We saw the sun in Glacier Bay today for the first Sunday since I arrived on board. It was warm and beautiful and I managed to snap a couple of photos, but I didn’t have my big camera so I could only zoom so far. I was thrilled to take any photos at all in sunshine though!!
Our Huna Tlingit Cultural Interpreter this week was the supervisor, Bertha, and not the new trainee. I hope we didn’t totally petrify her last week, but thankfully we did have a knowledgeable person this week and the kids really got into asking questions and such.
The park ranger, my favorite gal Adrianna, came this afternoon and it was great that the majority of kids there were actually my tweens and they seemed really into her talk and asked some really great questions. That warmed my heart :) Afterwards we had our guest naturalist Chris come up to do a sing along with the kids and they also really enjoyed that. Yay, my tweens love Club HAL. It always makes me so excited when they are having such a great time.
For movie night we actually separated the kids and tweens tonight so that the tweens could watch a little bit older aged movie. We ended up watching Cats and Dogs (where the cats are trying to take over the world and the dogs are secret agents with really cool spy gear - cute flick that I recommend for the family) but our sound system is still just as bad as last summer so we could hardly hear it. I’m going to ask Steve if next week we can change rooms for those two hours so we can watch a movie in the Loft and actually hear what the dialogue is. Hopefully he’ll agree!
We didn’t have late night baby-sitting tonight. We had thought me might and then I wouldn’t have been able to go to the Fellowship meeting. It was very interesting tonight. Mixing different denominations is very different. The theology was a little mixed up, but the spirit and intention is genuine so we all have to learn to get along and be open to each other and not judging our differences. They are really trying hard to encourage me to lead a meeting in the future, they seem to have latched on to me very strongly and feel that I would do a great job, but I keep trying to explain to them that I don’t set my own schedule and that I don’t know until a few minutes before hand if I’ll be baby-sitting or finished cleaning or anything by 11 pm. I would hate for them to count on me and not be able to follow through. I did agree to sing a solo for the praise song “Draw me Close” because if I’m not there I’ll simply sing it during a week that I am there. I don’t feel so bad about that. It was really nice fellowshipping with the other believers and I’ve starting having conversations more often now in the Lido and when they come to clean our bathrooms in Club HAL etc. It’s nice.
Monday July 2nd: Ketchikan, AK
I am so tired today after staying out late last night and being on medication. I am starting to feel a little energy return though so that is good. We docked in Ketch at 10 am, but I didn’t get off the ship until around 12 pm. I still had a good 5 hours off the ship and I WALKED.
The roads in Ketch are like San Francisco or Duluth, MN. If you can imagine what I’m talking about and then stack them 3 times higher. It’s like going up a steep staircase without the stairs to help you. I walked up a road such as this and then walked along the sidewalk on the top of this bypass road so that I could see the whole Ketch valley and it was really beautiful. The day was really cloudy and would occasionally spit rain at me, but I’ve learned to take photos regardless of the weather because in AK any day that isn’t actually raining is a good day. It’s also interesting to see the interesting clouds on overcast days - they hold their own splendor. 
After walking high up on the bypass I came down slowly and stopped at McD’s for a PB cup McFlurry and then set out again for another hike. This time I walked to the opposite extreme of town and went on a road that lead me to a very funny house. In their front yard they had a donkey, a goat and a shetland pony. I had to take pictures because I couldn’t believe how close I was to these animals in town in a residential area. I called out to the goat and captured a funny expression as he turned his head around.
Walking past that house I took a road that I didn’t realize would lead me ALL the way back UP the mountain to the height I was at earlier in the day only this time with no access to back down except the way I’d just come. At that point it was too late to make it back to the ship and I was nervous about not making it back in time. I certainly couldn’t have walked it, but thankfully I had my trusty cell and I have the cab companies on speed dial for several of the ports and put in a call to get picked up. The friendly driver came about 10 minutes later and within five minutes I was back at the dock to board the ship with 10 minutes to spare. Whew!!! Call that cutting it close! I wasn’t ready to be fired for missing the ship, I NEED this job.
We got another new staff member today. Kind of weird to get a staff person at the end of the cruise, but he flew in to Ketch today and got on board. We’ll see how he works out. Let’s just say he isn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree and literally gets lost trying to find his way out of a paper bag. Hopefully in a couple of days he’ll come around, but he has never been to college - lives with mommy and daddy - never had any responsibilities and so far only thinks of himself and no one or anything else. That doesn’t really work in this line of work so hopefully he’ll shape up.
Tuesday June 3rd: Last Sea Day
The seas were slightly large today, but nothing too horrible to handle. I’ve started taking my 1/2 Bonine Tablet the night before right before bed so that I am already medicated by morning when the seas could be swelled and rolling. That seems to be a good thing!
Cooking class went well, we had 5 kids sign up and we made delicious cheesy pretzels (soft pretzels that have the consistency of homemade biscuits), blueberry granola (great over ice cream - hot and gooey), and ice cream sandwich cookies. Yummy. :)
We had some drama in Club Hal between some staff today and everything hit the fan to the point where one person seriously threatened to get off the ship when we dock in Vancouver tomorrow. I seriously hope that doesn’t happen because I can’t run Club HAL by myself with the people we would have left. Please pray for our staff, we need some resolution of some issues. I appreciate it.
The pajama party and after hours baby-sitting were fun. We then had some crew bonding time afterwards with a few of us and we ended up staying up until 4 am. Not the best thing to do when you don’t get days off, but we needed to spend some time together. Thankfully I don’t do that every night!
Tomorrow is embark day, so I need to go to bed and get ready for the new children. :)
Hope your week was blessed and please don’t hesitate to write when you get a chance: tlbuster75@gmail.com
Luv you all,
Trish
Wednesday June 27th: Vancouver, B.C.
I mentioned the goings on of this day last blog, so I won’t rehash other than to say that this week we will be running all three ages with the three of us and LOTS of kids on board!
Thursday June 28th: First Sea Day
This morning the sea was very calm for a sea day. Several of our kids stayed in their rooms because they were not well, but overall everyone was feeling well and doing good. Last night we had a large number of registrations come in for the 3-7 year olds - so far my age group only has about 9 registered - but this MORNING, oh my goodness. We had 22 of the 27 kids on board in our little paint bucket room. It was very very busy in there. I stayed in the tween room with my few because they are older and more mature than the kids have typically been and so combining with the little kids would turn them away completely this week.
I’ve been napping a lot lately trying to get over this respiratory illness that I’ve contracted. I’m on the antibiotics and today I woke up with no sore throat and I actually did have a voice. After last night I was so sore I didn’t think I would actually have a voice this morning, but praise God I did. :)
These kids LOVE arts and crafts projects. That’s great for us because we have so many of them. We have a project called fusion beads on the schedule for an hour in the afternoon today and the project lasted 2.5 hours and they still wanted more but we had to take them down to eat ice cream. While we were trying to get out the door we had even MORE registrations in the age groups. Yikes. I think kids now has 25 of 27 registered. It’ll be a very busy day and week.
Top secret assignment night (spy night) with the little kids didn’t go over too well. There were way too many of them and they were acting totally crazy. My kids went out on their photo scavenger hunt and the girl’s team couldn’t get it together. They kept getting lost and frustrated. They found 3 of 12 items whereas the 2 boys teams found 7 or 8 of 12 items. One of the girls is extremely bossy and it’ll be interesting to see how the week goes with her there.
Friday June 29th: Tracy Arm and Juneau, AK
Today is a beautiful day in Tracy Arm. The sun is shining and the air is warm. I took my kids outside this morning for an hour to burn off some energy and I loved just being out there in the nice weather looking at the glaciers in Tracy Arm. After lunch I rested for a brief bit because my nasty cold is still keeping me pretty out of it. I have just the right amount of oomph to do my job and then I fizzle out between shifts. But, I only need what I need and I’m not asking for extra. I am content.
I was able to get off the ship in Juneau and I decided to go to the Nugget Mall in the Valley and then back to Fred Meiers. I love the convenience of the express bus in Juneau and the cost can’t be beat at $1.50 per trip. The mall was small, only about 10 stores or so, but they had 3 really nice clothing stores, a Payless Shoes, a Joann’s, and a GNC. Considering this is the only mall and it is the capital of Alaska on a landlocked peninsula it was slightly shocking, but oh well - it is Alaska after all.
I walked from the mall to Fred Meier’s and it took me about 15 minutes or so to get there. At the store I discovered that it is a full grocery store as well as a full department store. The store is literally larger than the mall and has way more stuff to offer. I picked up a few snacks and I also needed a new LCD screen protector for my pocket size camera (my previous piece of plastic was all scratched so it was hard to see if the pictures were in focus or not. They had everything that I needed and the prices were only about $.50 to a dollar higher than back home. I couldn’t take the express bus back to Juneau, so I had to sit for 45 minutes on the bus waiting for it to get to all the other stops along the way, but because I’ve now ridden it a couple times I looked like a pro pulling the cord to request a stop before the driver called out my location. Yay me!
Our theme night was slightly crazy. No one even really showed up until after 9 pm, so we only got to do about 3 games, one being my favorite called mystery food. My bossy girl has been very faithful in attending and she is grating on the other kids nerves, but I do have a couple of kids that are SUPER cool. They are 10 and 11.95 (the .95 is very important to him!) and are so so cool - Dylan and Tyler. They are so gentle and helpful towards the younger kids and nice cool fun guys with kids their own age (heartbreakers for some lucky girls in the future). I wish I could adopt them, but the parents are super cool too so I don’t think they’d let me. :)
Saturday June 30th: Skagway, AK
I have IPM this week in Skagway, but the weather isn’t that great overall so I’m not going to be missing too much. I managed to trade the morning hours to my roommate so that I got off the ship until 1:15pm, but instead of getting off the ship at 8 am I slept until 9 and got off by 9:20 am. I just don’t have my energy back yet to be up and moving rigorously on port days. Hopefully soon.
I took a few pictures in Skagway and then went to the waterfall and just hung out in the woods looking for interesting picture opportunities.
It was very enjoyable and brief but it was cold and very windy (go figure that I’d encounter wind in Skagway!). On my way back to the ship I saw a car wash that you could only say you'd see in a SMALL town like Skagway in the summer. :)At 2 pm I jumped back into my day uniform and headed upstairs to put out sports equipment and then came back to my room to work on pictures and typing out this blog for last week. I lost a whole week due to lack of energy and being so ill, so sorry for the delay. I didn’t finish typing before dinner though because I had to also do a 5 pm teen activity in the Loft that no one attended. I caught up on my teen gossip magazines and then went to dinner.
Tonight was Country Carnival and if you can believe it we got even more new kids tonight. We drop off and pick up guest in Skagway that are also doing a land portion to their vacation up in Denali and we lost 4 kids and gained about 12. Most of them were all in my tween group, so now we have a full group of tweens on board that WANT to come to Club HAL.
I had after hours baby-sitting tonight as well for 4 kids, so I made $20.00 that was nice - internet card here I come! - and the kids were fun. We played UNO and Sorry.
Sunday July 1st: Glacier Bay National Park and Canada Day (celebrated like our July 4)
Happy Canada Day! We saw the sun in Glacier Bay today for the first Sunday since I arrived on board. It was warm and beautiful and I managed to snap a couple of photos, but I didn’t have my big camera so I could only zoom so far. I was thrilled to take any photos at all in sunshine though!!
Our Huna Tlingit Cultural Interpreter this week was the supervisor, Bertha, and not the new trainee. I hope we didn’t totally petrify her last week, but thankfully we did have a knowledgeable person this week and the kids really got into asking questions and such.
The park ranger, my favorite gal Adrianna, came this afternoon and it was great that the majority of kids there were actually my tweens and they seemed really into her talk and asked some really great questions. That warmed my heart :) Afterwards we had our guest naturalist Chris come up to do a sing along with the kids and they also really enjoyed that. Yay, my tweens love Club HAL. It always makes me so excited when they are having such a great time.
For movie night we actually separated the kids and tweens tonight so that the tweens could watch a little bit older aged movie. We ended up watching Cats and Dogs (where the cats are trying to take over the world and the dogs are secret agents with really cool spy gear - cute flick that I recommend for the family) but our sound system is still just as bad as last summer so we could hardly hear it. I’m going to ask Steve if next week we can change rooms for those two hours so we can watch a movie in the Loft and actually hear what the dialogue is. Hopefully he’ll agree!
We didn’t have late night baby-sitting tonight. We had thought me might and then I wouldn’t have been able to go to the Fellowship meeting. It was very interesting tonight. Mixing different denominations is very different. The theology was a little mixed up, but the spirit and intention is genuine so we all have to learn to get along and be open to each other and not judging our differences. They are really trying hard to encourage me to lead a meeting in the future, they seem to have latched on to me very strongly and feel that I would do a great job, but I keep trying to explain to them that I don’t set my own schedule and that I don’t know until a few minutes before hand if I’ll be baby-sitting or finished cleaning or anything by 11 pm. I would hate for them to count on me and not be able to follow through. I did agree to sing a solo for the praise song “Draw me Close” because if I’m not there I’ll simply sing it during a week that I am there. I don’t feel so bad about that. It was really nice fellowshipping with the other believers and I’ve starting having conversations more often now in the Lido and when they come to clean our bathrooms in Club HAL etc. It’s nice.
Monday July 2nd: Ketchikan, AK
I am so tired today after staying out late last night and being on medication. I am starting to feel a little energy return though so that is good. We docked in Ketch at 10 am, but I didn’t get off the ship until around 12 pm. I still had a good 5 hours off the ship and I WALKED.
The roads in Ketch are like San Francisco or Duluth, MN. If you can imagine what I’m talking about and then stack them 3 times higher. It’s like going up a steep staircase without the stairs to help you. I walked up a road such as this and then walked along the sidewalk on the top of this bypass road so that I could see the whole Ketch valley and it was really beautiful. The day was really cloudy and would occasionally spit rain at me, but I’ve learned to take photos regardless of the weather because in AK any day that isn’t actually raining is a good day. It’s also interesting to see the interesting clouds on overcast days - they hold their own splendor. 
After walking high up on the bypass I came down slowly and stopped at McD’s for a PB cup McFlurry and then set out again for another hike. This time I walked to the opposite extreme of town and went on a road that lead me to a very funny house. In their front yard they had a donkey, a goat and a shetland pony. I had to take pictures because I couldn’t believe how close I was to these animals in town in a residential area. I called out to the goat and captured a funny expression as he turned his head around.
Walking past that house I took a road that I didn’t realize would lead me ALL the way back UP the mountain to the height I was at earlier in the day only this time with no access to back down except the way I’d just come. At that point it was too late to make it back to the ship and I was nervous about not making it back in time. I certainly couldn’t have walked it, but thankfully I had my trusty cell and I have the cab companies on speed dial for several of the ports and put in a call to get picked up. The friendly driver came about 10 minutes later and within five minutes I was back at the dock to board the ship with 10 minutes to spare. Whew!!! Call that cutting it close! I wasn’t ready to be fired for missing the ship, I NEED this job.We got another new staff member today. Kind of weird to get a staff person at the end of the cruise, but he flew in to Ketch today and got on board. We’ll see how he works out. Let’s just say he isn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree and literally gets lost trying to find his way out of a paper bag. Hopefully in a couple of days he’ll come around, but he has never been to college - lives with mommy and daddy - never had any responsibilities and so far only thinks of himself and no one or anything else. That doesn’t really work in this line of work so hopefully he’ll shape up.
Tuesday June 3rd: Last Sea Day
The seas were slightly large today, but nothing too horrible to handle. I’ve started taking my 1/2 Bonine Tablet the night before right before bed so that I am already medicated by morning when the seas could be swelled and rolling. That seems to be a good thing!
Cooking class went well, we had 5 kids sign up and we made delicious cheesy pretzels (soft pretzels that have the consistency of homemade biscuits), blueberry granola (great over ice cream - hot and gooey), and ice cream sandwich cookies. Yummy. :)
We had some drama in Club Hal between some staff today and everything hit the fan to the point where one person seriously threatened to get off the ship when we dock in Vancouver tomorrow. I seriously hope that doesn’t happen because I can’t run Club HAL by myself with the people we would have left. Please pray for our staff, we need some resolution of some issues. I appreciate it.
The pajama party and after hours baby-sitting were fun. We then had some crew bonding time afterwards with a few of us and we ended up staying up until 4 am. Not the best thing to do when you don’t get days off, but we needed to spend some time together. Thankfully I don’t do that every night!
Tomorrow is embark day, so I need to go to bed and get ready for the new children. :)
Hope your week was blessed and please don’t hesitate to write when you get a chance: tlbuster75@gmail.com
Luv you all,
Trish
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