You can buy apples and oranges all the time. Bananas and grapes are also usually readily available, and if you need a lemon or lime for something they’re not too hard to find at the supermarket. Peaches, blueberries, and raspberries are common too. Even mangos, figs, and coconuts are not too hard to find these days. But there are literally thousands of fruits, some of which are much more unusual than others.
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Just a brief update. The diet is going reasonably well; tonight right after dinner I had some milk and a pear and felt like I’d eaten too much, which is probably a good thing. The food continues to be tasty; the breakfasts have not been too interesting but the lunches and dinners have been quite good. I saw my first fake meat in tonight’s Tamale Veggie Pie, and the Black Bean & Feta Wrap I had for lunch was really good, as was the little wild rice dish that went with it, which had chopped pecans and cranberries. Yummy stuff, I’m enjoying the food on this diet. Still get hungry though; hopefully that will change.

• Apparently I need Remedial Walking classes. In addition to falling down the stairs at home a couple of weeks ago and injuring my right foot, today I fell down the stairs of the parking lot shuttle bus and hurt my left leg! So I am now forced to just go around in a bit of pain, because I don’t have any undamaged legs remaining. It’s not very bad, and I’m sure it will be better in the morning, but damn it’s embarrassing to have forgotten how to use stairs…
• Today I bought my first jar of peanut butter in a long time. This may sound strange to those of you who know my passion for all things peanut butter, but every time I went grocery shopping I’d see the calorie/fat content of the peanut butter and put it back on the shelf. I’ve been using :MK:’s lately, and it’s not fair to keep taking her peanut butter (and bread and jelly) so I bought my own. Reduced Fat Skippy Superchunk. Mmmmmm. I also bought a pint of Chubby Hubby, which is my favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor, and I managed to eat just one serving, which is appropriate!
• I wore my new corset to work today, under my clothes. This is something I actually would like to do on a semi-sort-of-regular basis, and it was pretty comfortable for most of the day. Unfortunately it started hurting along the sides in the last few hours of the day, and when I took it off my skin was lightly chafed - I guess my liner isn’t very good or something.
• I still love Faerie Bubbles and the Mechanical Turk but I have also been having fun converting my blog templates directory into a tagged collection and playing Retro and Passport.
• My holiday season is probably going to be pretty boring at work, because my primary client has 110 hours of use-or-lose leave that has to be used up by January 6th and he’ll be taking days off here and there and leaving early on other days. I have other clients, so I’ll still be in the same place, but he’s the one who keeps me the busiest.
• CSI was good tonight - finally something for Paul Guilfoyle to sink his teeth into! Now how about an episode focused on the doctor?

Here I am aboard the Oosterdam. (It’s “oh” like “toast.”) It is far too late for me - 11:30pm, and I think I’m still jet-lagged. I think I will just tell everything in chronological order. Oh, except first I will mention that I forgot a timepiece other than my Sidekick, dammit. I suspect they have them in the shops so I will get one when they open in the morning.

So the morning did not go well when it started with the car being 30 minutes late and then getting us lost - what kind of professional driver doesn’t know which streets will be one-way? We finally made it to Port 30 (where the Diamond Princess was also docked) and fortunately managed to get priority boarding. We couldn’t access our rooms yet so we got drinks, I had a Long Island Iced Tea. We met a few of the deaf people, one of whom I recognized; I think I saw him around at the NTC a few months back. I went to inquire at the front desk about emergency pagers for the terps, while my two co-terps went to meet the stage manager. Their mission was successful; mine resulted in a promise of a voicemail. Eventually I did succeed in getting just one pager, so we are going to take turns with it. Unfortunately I had to put my name down for the $75 security deposit!

Our bags arrived in our room shortly before 5pm; mine were actually there before J’s. (She’s my roommate and the other female interpreter, the male terp is M.) I forgot to write about the muster drill, it was fine except that the crew kept insisting we were on the wrong side. We waved most of them off, but one tried to challenge me so I assured him we were in the right place; if I’d been more snarky I’d have added a “dammit bitch” on there. On the way back from the drill I tried to figure out where I knew another deaf person from; turns out I recognize him from the leather events I’ve interpreted in DC.

The bon voyage party was okay, I guess. The three of us were together and when the two of them lit up cigarettes I said I was going to get a soda. I waited until I figured they were done smoking, but when I went back they were gone. So I hung out alone for a bit, and I picked up an inflatable pink flamingo drink holder and a really awesome inflatable pink poodle! I made plans with a couple of deaf people to meet them at dinner and I went to get dressed nicely. J showed up when I was almost ready, so I waited while she got ready and we went together; I found the deaf people and we ate with them. My appetizer was off the main menu, it was a tiny fruit salad. I finally got a vegetarian menu brought to me and I ordered tofu stroganoff which turned out to be delightful! I had a vanilla ice cream cup for dessert with cut-up mango on it. Afterward I wandered back toward the main auditorium for the show. On the way I checked my Sidekick for the time and found two e-mails from my mom! I didn’t realize I had a signal at all. (Oh, I did get to talk to A - fortunately I had a signal when she called to return my voicemail! I wanted to talk to her forever, I miss her terribly.) I had time, so I answered my mom’s emails before going to the main auditorium.

I wanted to be first to interpret but the huge auditorium freaked me out and I did a rotten job! (It doesn’t help that the host talks incredibly fast.) Fortunately afterward I chatted with the two deaf women, one of whom was my ASL teacher at Gallaudet, and I’d met the other one once there too! They’re very cute together. We found a bar and lounge and got drinks; this time I had an apple martini. Afterward we came back to the room and I waited around while J got ready to go party. And now I’m ready for bed.

Quick note on William Rehnquist - it’s too bad he wasn’t the one who retired a few months back, because now they have to figure out someone else. Okay, bed now!

I just sent this via the IHOP.com “contact us” form:

Today was the first time I have visited IHOP in several weeks, and I noticed that you have a new menu. I was pleased to see you have added Chocolate Chip Pancakes to the menu, but I was quite dismayed to find that the Potato Pancakes are no longer available. I have not found these at any other major breakfast chain (Denny’s, Bob Evans, etc) and they were a major reason I chose IHOP over other chains. I still enjoy the rest of IHOP’s menu but I am very sorry to see the potato pancakes gone.

I guess I will have to start making latkes at home…IHOP’s potato pancakes were never anything like homemade latkes, but they were certainly easier!

I occasionally stop at 7-11 to get coffee in the morning. I don’t normally add any flavor shots - those syrups you can add to your coffee - because they have some calories. Granted, it’s not many calories, but they are there.

When I stopped in today, I noticed they now have a sugar-free syrup. I checked the nutritional information on the bottle, and sure enough it had no calories. But I was still uncertain I should get it, though, because it’s mocha flavor. That’s right: your adding coffee flavor to your coffee. I know mocha implies some chocolate has been added, but it’s still coffee.

Normally I like what the people at BevNET have to say about various drinks. But I disagree with them completely on their review of Holiday Spice Pepsi.

If you haven’t seen this concotion in local stores, don’t look for it. If you have, don’t buy it. It’s among the weirdest things I’ve ever had the displeasure of drinking. It does have “spice and bite” as the BevNET review says, but the spices are too mixed and it’s hard to figure out what’s in there. It might be cinnamon, but I’m not sure…I like my spices to taste like they’re supposed to. If something is flavored with nutmeg, I want to taste the nutmeg, even if only slightly.

Now, it probably doesn’t help that I’m not normally a regular Pepsi drinker. I usually drink diet sodas exclusively (I haven’t succumbed to Mountain Dew Pitch Black or LiveWire because they don’t come in diet), and when I do get plain cola it’s usually Diet Coke rather than Diet Pepsi. (I prefer Diet Coke with Lemon over Diet Pepsi Twist, but on the Diet Vanilla ones I like them both.) Anyway, I can definitely taste the fact that this is regular, and not diet, so that might be coloring my perception a bit…but I still think it’s horrid. That said, I’m still using it to take my meds with in the morning at night, and I probably will until it’s all gone or goes flat, whichever comes first. That way it’s only two swallows a day of a non-diet soda.

Saturday came too soon, of course. A and I ate our leftovers from the night before, and then had plenty of time to kill. Eventually we went to the pool bar, where I got more than a little drunk on Banana Quit and Coconut Kooler - for some reason none of the bars offered any kind of food, which might have helped me out a bit. C and :R: joined us for a bit, but then :R: left to go back to air-conditioning. The three of us moved over to Spicer’s (I think I was able to walk on my own) and shared a couple of plates of fries. We found :R: in the Television Lounge in the main hotel building, and we sat around and watched music videos for a couple of hours until it was time to go. Getting to the airport was no problem, but we did have a bit of a wait to check in. Of course they had problems printing my tickets, so it was a while before we could join the next line, the preliminary security check. While the other three stood in that line, I went and paid the $20/person departure fee. When I rejoined my friends, they’d moved about halfway through the line - only one man was checking everybody’s passports! Once we got past him, it was the usual metal detector check and then on to the waiting areas. A bought a couple of things in the duty free shops, and then they announced our flight, so everybody got up and formed a line…and stayed put. They finally announced a problem and said that boarding was canceled, so everybody sat back down…and stayed put. They didn’t update us for a long time, and finally I heard that if you showed your boarding pass at the snack bar, you could get a free non-alcoholic drink. I presented ours and got a couple of sodas; meanwhile A had ordered some cheese sandwiches from the upstairs restaurant to be brought to the snack bar, because after passing through security you had to stay there until your flight left. She also tried contacting US Airways because we could tell we’d miss our Philadelphia connection, but she couldn’t get any further than the Grenadian operator; the gate agents were utterly useless as they promised everything would be taken care of by the time we got to Philly. Our cheese sandwiches arrived within minutes of our flight being actually called for boarding; A held onto both of them even though we were in separate rows. When the flight attendant came around with the snack bags, she said “here’s your vegetarian meal” and handed me…a low-fat meal. With meat. I pushed the button and got her back, and she realized that she’d given my meal to :R: “and he’s already eating it.” Okay, fine, could she please go up to Row 12 and ask the woman for one of the cheese sandwiches? It took a while for her to figure out what I was asking (and apparently she still wasn’t clear when she asked A about it), but she did return with my cheese sandwich. I missed out on the plaintain chips and cookie, but the sandwich was heavy and compensated somewhat. The rest of the flight was uneventful; C and I did my crossword puzzles together, and we played Scrabble on my Visor. Of course we did get to Philadelphia quite late, and because that was our port of entry we all had to wait for the baggage to be unloaded and show up on the carousel, and then we had to go through customs and immigration. The baggage was the longest wait - the legal proceedings went fairly quickly, we’re American citizens and only bought souvenirs overseas, and we weren’t in a country where Mad Cow Disease is prevalent - but I don’t think there was any chance we could have made our connecting flight to BWI, even if we hadn’t been two hours late leaving Grenada.

Friday was our last full day in Grenada. C had decided that in order to get any good snorkeling in we should go in the morning, so the three of us (:R: wasn’t interested) put on sunblock and rented equipment. I was amazed at how easy it was - I’d expected it to be much more difficult to breathe, but when I was in the water I just swam around and looked at the coral and the fish. It was a really cool experience! My mask was pinching my face, though, so after a while I treaded water and tried to fix it…but ended up loosening it instead, and even holding onto A for support I couldn’t get it back together. I was getting very nervous and panicky, so A patiently followed me as I doggie-paddled back to land; I’m very grateful to her for not sending me off on my own. I got out and stood on the beach for a little while, then fiddled with my mask and decided to go back in. I swam around a bit more and took some pictures with C’s underwater camera, then decided I’d had enough. While trying to climb ashore, I slipped on the coral and immediately felt sharp pain in my left ankle. I screamed (A later told me I’d worried some people relaxing on the beach), and had no idea if I’d cut myself or broken something. C was right beside me and was telling me to get out of the water; I was in a lot of pain and insisted I couldn’t, but he told me I had to. So I finally swam/crawled/hobbled along, clutching my left ankle, and what do you think happened then? Bingo! I slipped and cut my right ankle. I bawled again and dragged myself out of the water, barely remembering to make sure my bikini top wasn’t too revealing - it’s illegal to go topless in Grenada. I stumbled back toward the dive shack to return my snorkeling equipment (it was halfway around the resort from where I’d come ashore), and on the way I managed to peer at my ankles. I’d really done a number on the left one, which was quite bloody but hadn’t yet dribbled onto my water shoes. I paused to dab at it, and when I got to the dive shack and handed in my gear I asked if they had a first aid kit. The guy gave me the biggest band-aid he had (it wasn’t big enough) and some spray-on Bactine, but I had no freshwater to rinse it with. I sat in a chair outside the dive shack and patted it dry the best I could, trying to push the dirt out of the way. As I was finishing up, one of the braid ladies came up and offered to do my hair. I had been planning to get some braids done before leaving, but right then all I wanted to do was go back to my room and rinse my cuts a little better, then raid C’s first aid kit. The woman was very aggressive, though, and I ended up having my hair done on the spot. She did more than I wanted to - I’d asked for five on each side, which at $2/each used up the $20 I’d budgeted for having my hair braided - and I wound up with eight braids on the left and six on the right, a total of 14 for which I was charged $25. She’d promised to make the right side even with the left, so she cheated me out of two braids, but at least she made them even so it wouldn’t be too obvious. For dinner we went to the Brown Sugar Restaurant (which provided free transportation), which was wonderful. The prices were all-inclusive, which meant you got an appetizer, salad, main course, and dessert. I chose callaloo soup for my appetizer and ate my salad, but by the time my pumpkin ravioli arrived I was too full to eat more than one of them! They were delicious, I wish I had the recipe. I had the rest boxed up, of course. For dessert I chose what sounded like a delightfully unique cheesecake, only to find that the only dessert they had left was a chocolate cake I could have anywhere. I was grumpy about that, but got them to give me a free drink instead; I had another “Your Business Brown” which I think came in a bigger glass than the one I’d had at the beginning of the meal.

We took a taxi into St. George’s and had ourselves dropped off near the Grenada National Museum. It was a very tiny place; one of the major attractions was the marble bathtub used by Josephine Bonaparte when she was a child in Martinique. There were also exhibits on Grenada’s relationship with Great Britain, and the history of Grenada’s political turmoil during the mid-20th century. The first building was awfully cramped and dark, but after stepping outside and around a corner the second building (upstairs from the first?) had more space and light. The current highlight was an art exhibition, which was very nice. Another exhibit that interested me was the model of Grenada; it gave me a much better sense of the island’s physical layout than I’d had previously. After leaving the museum we stopped off at a convenience store (”Low Budget Drug Store” to be exact) to pick up some conditioner, because A and I knew our hair was going to be in awful shape from the salt water. We then visited two arty-crafty type stores, and C bought an expensive batik shirt in one of them. We wandered through the city for a while after that, ducking briefly into a supermarket and getting persistently invited for a tour of the fish market before getting ourselves lost by going in circles. :R: finally decided that we should split up, so he and A went one direction and C and I headed…up the hill. St. George’s seems to be on two very different levels, with major climbs and long staircases between them. C and I still managed to walk in a circle, so when I ducked into a bookstore to apply more sunblock (my shoulders had felt like they might be burning) we also picked up a map of the island. We wanted to sit down for a bit and look it over, so we headed toward the only semi-recognizable place: a “Royal Castle” that looked awfully like a White Castle (I didn’t see a single McDonald’s or other chain anywhere). On the way there, I had ended up a few feet ahead of C and found myself getting ogled a bit. He went to stand in line for sodas while I sat at a booth and started looking over the map, and I could feel the eyes of the young men at the next table boring into me and trying to get me to look up (I didn’t). When C came to the table, I put my arm around him in an attempt to discourage the guys…but it didn’t work, so I didn’t look up from the map the entire time we were there. C finally managed to figure out where we were and how to get where we wanted to be, so we set off again. We made it to the Carenage and peeked in a couple of shops before deciding to head back. It occurred to me that we should get some food before heading back to the Land Of Expensive Eating (aka our resort), so we wandered back to Hughes Street and stopped at the Island Thyme Cafe. I was delighted with their veggie pizza - it had lots of oregano, some carrots, and other vegetables. It only came in a whole pizza, so I had plenty to bring home, but Grenadian pizza seems to be thin crust so I ate it up fairly quickly because it wasn’t very filling. We caught a cab back to the hotel.