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 :)
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