Oh hai! Here I am. Does anybody notice when I don’t post for four days in a row? Anyway, I’m done with school for the semester!! Only two of my grades are in, but they are both A’s - Deaf Studies, and Sex & Gender. kawaiibishounen already got his linguistics grade, so I am frantically checking the online system for mine, but it’s still not there! I only just had the history final exam today, so I don’t expect that grade tonight. Grades are due by Monday at noon, though, so hopefully I’ll have them by then!

Not a whole lot has been going on. I’m hoping to organize my workdays so that I’ll be working 10-1 and 2-5, though I’m not sure they’ll go for that…it’s basically because a 30-minute lunch break isn’t enough for me, emotionally or physically. We only get an hour paid lunch if we work 8+ hours, and I don’t work more than a 6-hr day, so I shouldn’t be getting an hour lunch…but I’m giving up my 30-min paid lunch in order to have a 60-min unpaid lunch, so they ought to go for it, I would think…we’ll see. The scheduler approved it for this coming Monday, but I think he’s going to talk it over with the boss because he didn’t say it was approved for the whole week as I had requested.

I’m finally playing The Sims again! My Sims blog is called My Sims Stories, and it’s just fun to keep a log of what’s happened. I started a new character using the romance aspiration to see if I could play it, but then I just used the InSIMinator cheats so I’m not sure it really counts. Oh look, this person instantly loves me! Now I can woo-hoo with them! Yeah, not very challenging.

I really want to travel this summer, it seems like everybody I know is traveling in some way or another. I want $1500 to burn on travel, I could have such a fabulous time with that, but I spent $5700 on hearing aids so that’s not very likely. I get to go to New Orleans in July anyway…I just have to be patient and wait for that to come around rather than lusting over trips for June or August. Anyway, I can’t afford to take so much time off, I need to work the whole summer!

The final word of wisdom I would like to impart right now is: Ben & Jerry’s Cheesecake Brownie ice cream is simply astonishingly wonderful. NOM NOM NOM.

Had a great time in San Francisco yesterday. Did some geocaching with necanthrope…unfortunately we only found one out of the three we searched for. Got to have dinner with tuliphead, dissonant_etak, crayonbeam, and other wonderful people who I haven’t seen in millennia. One of my dearest friends, who I hadn’t seen in about 7+ years, actually showed up…thanks man, really missed you! And several of us trooped over to a friend’s house after, where I learned something I wasn’t previously familiar with, thanks to gilmore427.

Today was pretty laid back, did some shopping at Torrid and got a cute miniskirt (I think this one) and pretty shirts (can’t find either on the website). We also went to BevMo where I was suitably stunned by the selection - remember, I come from little ol’ Virginia, where you have to shop at a state-run store if you want liquor! Alas, no Dr. McGillicuddy’s vanilla schnapps. No Kristov chocolate vodka either, but there was a Polish chocolate-infused vodka so we are having drunken egg creams anyway! I also took a really long nap and woke up at 10pm, whoops!

Today I did practically nothing except fly a lot. I did get to see Enchanted without having to subject any loved ones to it; it was nowhere near as good as I’d heard or even as good as I’d hoped. (Hey, I wonder what we’re flying over, there’s weird areas of green light! We’re descending into Sacramento as I write this.). Anyway, the highlight of the movie for me was Susan Sarandon. She was smokin’ while in human form, and devilishly entertaining when she was a dragon. Oh, and I spilled yogurt all over myself during my brief layover in Chicago. Slick, huh? Man, I forget what else I was going to say. I’m just writing this because I can’t turn on my connection, I’m tired of reading about sao braphet song for a while (that’s part of my paper on transgender children), it turns out my iPod has no battery charge, and one can only lose so many rounds of BrickBreaker before one gives up. I’ve been playing DopeWars too, but the interface sucks. So I’m writing this entry instead. Oh, here comes the turbulence they warned us about. Writing this entry is good for practicing character entry on my Blackberry, too - I’m already quite fast, but the keys are much closer together than on my Sidekick 3 so I fatfinger them more often. I keep typing m’s as n’s. Hey, this turbulence is pretty turbulent! Kinda fun, since I’m not really worried about safety…it feels like it should be scary but I know we’re fine. My ears have been doing okay so far; after January’s descent into Washington I have been worried each time I take off and land. (Just in case I never mentioned that, what happened in January was I couldn’t pop my ears, and I was in so much pain I was crying. Thank goodness for reassuring flight attendants.). So even though I’ve landed and taken off - let’s see - 11 times since then, I still wonder each time if it’s going to hurt. The audiologists at Gallaudet told me not to be surprised if that does happen again though. Oh that reminds me - I got to chat with somebody while waiting at the gate at National. Suddenly somebody sat down next to me with a Sorenson VRS backpack! Turns out he’s an audiology grad student at Gallaudet, and his girlfriend is deaf so he actually (gasp!) knows sign. Not many audiologists do, oddly enough. Same with speech therapists…there are a lot of people who work directly with people with hearing loss every day, but they don’t sign. I don’t get it, myself. Man, are we there yet? When I started writing this they had just announced we’d probably be on the ground in about 30 mins, it sure feels like it’s been that long already. I haven’t gotten to stretch at all since we left Chicago…when flying with a friend or family member you can invade their personal space for a moment to stretch, but I wouldn’t do that to a stranger. Oh hey, flight attendants prepare for landing please, guess we are almost there - I gotta turn this off now!

Just a quickie post. We made it back fine, got home last night around 9pm. All the flights were on time and everything. We spent several hours hanging around the airport in San Juan, and then had barely enough time to grab dinner in Atlanta before our next flight. Fortunately, that flight was only about one-third full, so we got to spread out a little bit. I did my reading for Sex & Gender class on the plane, and I discovered that in addition to being very feminist, the book is also a little transphobic. Oh well. We took Metro home from National Airport and a cab from the Vienna station. Today I did some Deaf Studies homework and some grocery shopping. Tomorrow I have class in the morning and then my audiology appointment for the brain scan. I have a list of stuff I have to catch up on, and I’ll fit it in somehow. We are back to dieting, because I’ve gained 5 pounds and 12 pounds on past cruises, so I know I gained this time. I refuse to check how much, though. I just cheated and had a big snack for dinner because I am having trouble sleeping and I know that having a full tummy will make it easier to go to sleep. Tomorrow I will double up on my sleep meds so I don’t cheat with food again. Back to the grind! (Oh, and we’re looking at Curaçao rather than Aruba, because it’s more gay-friendly and they have a school for the deaf there, so I might be able to find a job.)

Sea days are a little on the boring side, if you ask me. I was woken up at 10am by the cruise director making a long announcement about the disembarkation talk, which is great to attend if you’re a first-time cruiser, but pretty useless if you’ve been there and done that. We laid out plans for the day that included “ultimate trivia” in the afternoon, but I didn’t make it to the trivia. We looked in the shops one last time, and I found a great ring that unfortunately didn’t look right with my wedding ring, or I would have gotten it. (It didn’t fit on the other hand, and the setting wasn’t resizeable because it was an estate-type setting.)

We had lunch next, and I was excited to find three delicious choices on the vegetarian menu - I ended up selecting the “Thai noodle salad” which was under the cold dishes. I was terribly disappointed in it - it was slightly spicy, but not in a Thai way, and it tasted very much like there was too much mayo in it. Despite this, a woman at the next table got my attention, and asked what I was eating; I told her that it was from the vegetarian menu. She called her waiter over and said “I didn’t like this, I want what she’s having” - the first time I ever heard of anybody wanting something off the vegetarian menu! It was amusing, but I hope she didn’t get annoyed when it turned out to be icky! (A thinks it was probably perfectly to her liking, considering that most people on board prefer pretty bland food, as evidenced by the normal menus.)

In the afternoon, we did some gambling. I lost $10 in a nickel slot machine, and A played $10 and won $20 in the machine next to mine, so if you consider our finances pooled, we broke even. (Technically it was my money anyway, I gave her the $10!) We cashed out about halfway through and played directly with the nickels…your hands get really dirty that way though. At 4:30 we went over to the theater to play bingo, which we never win. It cost $30 per card, and we each got one card, so I was really hoping to win the $1000 jackpot - it would have paid off our onboard account plus we would have had a couple hundred dollars left over. I got really excited because I was just one number away from winning at blackout bingo (you have to mark ALL your numbers) but of course someone beat me to it. She didn’t sound particularly excited, which I thought was weird. Two other people also had valid bingos, so they split the jackpot.

At dinner, we had a cake brought to us for our 10th anniversary - our waiter was so good, he had remembered from when I told him earlier in the week that I wanted one on Friday! They always remember everything on cruise ships…sometimes I think a perfect memory is a standard job requirement. Our waiter, assistant waiter, maitre d’, and another random assistant waiter sang “Happy Anniversary to You” for us, we blew out the two candles together, and then the waiter took it away and brought back a slice of cake with ice cream for each of us. I hope the crew got to eat the rest of the cake, or somebody at least, because it was a really big cake and we each only had one piece!

I had to burn up my internet minutes in the evening, and I ended up being the last person they chased out of the computer center. I noticed that the guy didn’t try to warn me or anything like he did with the other people…he just let me go on and on until about 15 minutes past closing. When he did chase me out, he explained the server would be getting reset, rather than just saying “we’re closed” - somehow he picked up on me being a nerd, I guess.

We had an outstanding time in Aruba. We got there really early, and we had to roll out of bed early for an 8:30am tour. It was with the Pied Piper group, and there was some confusion in the morning because the bus was supposed to be private, and there were a couple of women on there who weren’t part of our group. They finally got them offloaded, and off we went. Our first stop was the Casibari rock formation, where we took pictures, but not the right ones to claim the cache I wanted there. We all piled back in the bus and went off to some lava rocks; Aruba is a volcanic island and people pile them up and make wishes, so we all did that too. We went to the site of the former Natural Bridge there, which had been created by thousands of years of water wearing away at the rock, but in 2005 it collapsed - around 5am, so nobody was on it! There is still a “baby” natural bridge at the site, but all you can see of the big one is that it’s collapsed. We got back in the bus and went on a drive around the island, and the guide rattled on and on about how great Aruba is. She told us some great housing prices, and when she drove us through a fancy golf course, the housing prices there were not that much higher. A and I got to talking, and we are seriously considering buying a home in Aruba - either to move to permanently eventually, or to rent out, or to start a business from, etc. We have even been talking about learning Dutch or the local language, Papiamento, because we are really interested in Aruba. Our next vacation will be a fact-finding mission there, I think. We stopped by a real estate office in the afternoon and were again bowled over by the prices!

Anyway, after the tour ended, we got off the bus and walked around in downtown Oranjestad. There are several malls there - including a fabulous pink one - and we cruised through them all. I fretted over which “Aruba” shirt I wanted to buy, and I ended up buying two! It is such a gorgeous place and we can’t wait to go back. Moving there would be more complicated than moving to Puerto Rico: we’d both have to learn the language, there is no VRS center there, it’s not the U.S. anymore, we’d have to make twice-yearly trips back home to get our teeth cleaned (not sure why A is insistent upon that one), we’re not sure what we’d do with the cats, etc. But it’s cheaper than Puerto Rico, and much safer and cleaner. (The guide pointed out that the Holloway case was done by an off-islander, a Dutch boy.)

After we walked all we could and came back on board, it was time to get ready for formal night. Dinner was uneventful except for the baked alaska parade at the end. We went to see the production show “Thoroughly Broadway,” but - this was really weird - we’ve seen it before. They tacked on a couple of numbers from The Lion King on the end, and I’m not sure if we saw the Hairspray parts before, but I know we saw most of that show before. It must have been in 2006 when we were on the Zenith. It was clearly a different presentation, because the singers and dancers weren’t the same people, but all the costumes and everything were the same! It was downright weird seeing all that again.

We spent today in Bonaire, which I knew only as a scuba destination, because a friend of mine spent something like three weeks here over the summer. We arrived in the afternoon as planned, but we didn’t tender as expected. The cruise director made an announcement saying that we had actually docked, and we should all thank the captain for securing us a berth. I’m sure right after that announcement was made, 95% of the people on board forgot about thanking him, so he never got thanked - oh well.

We went outside when we were ready, which was well before our tour at 2:30. We did a little shopping, and I found a bookstore that sold stamps so I stamped four postcards and sent them out from Bonaire. A said I could have just sent them from Puerto Rico with U.S. stamps, but I wanted them to have at least a slight chance of getting to their recipients before we got home! So we shopped around, donated $5 to the Aruba Animal Shelter’s spay-and-neuter project, and shopped some more. Our daily newsletter on the ship had mentioned that not every vendor in Bonaire sold the same thing, as they do in other ports; I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were indeed many unique handcrafted items available. There was, however, a donkey sanctuary booth - yes, they have a donkey sanctuary in Bonaire - that was selling plush dolls of the donkey from Shrek. Oh well, so much for creativity. They also sold plush flamingo dolls, because there are more flamingos on the island than humans!

At 2:30 we went on our scheduled tour, kayaking through the mangroves with the Mangrove Center. As usual, I sat in back to do the paddling, and A sat up front and looked pretty. That’s how we always kayak, because I have lots more paddling experience - unlike others on our tour, I could actually make the boat go where I wanted it to! It was a little difficult getting through the mangrove channels, because at times it was too narrow and low for a high-reaching stroke close to the boat. We made it through, of course, and I pronounced it “too easy” with just A on board - I said I needed a couple extra passengers so I could have a workout! Well, I got my workout when we left the protected waters of the mangrove area and headed across the bay to a little beach. I had a rather difficult time staying in one spot along the beach because the current was so strong, and it wanted to carry us into the shallows where we would have damaged the sea grass which is the primary food for the endangered green turtles there. (We didn’t want to get out onto the beach because we would have gotten MORE SAND on us…I am still finding sand from Sunday!) On the way back across the bay, I got really tired out and I asked A to paddle a little bit. We made it back into the more protected areas and back to shore with no problem.

A was a little grumpy after the excursion, though, so we had room service delivered instead of going to dinner. (Room service is free on cruise ships, though you do have to tip.) I had wanted to go to dinner because I love Celebrity’s vegetarian menus, but oh well - we had veggie burgers and dessert delivered instead. I did run down to the dining room at our dinner time so I could ask the Pied Piper leader about our tour in the morning in Aruba - it’s scheduled for 8:30am!

We didn’t do a whole lot in Grenada. Because we spent a week here in 2003, there was nothing we really felt obligated to see; there are a couple of geocaches on the island but none of them are anywhere near the cruise port. If A were also into geocaching I would have suggested taking a cab to those locations, but she wouldn’t have had much fun. So after we finished breakfast, we ambled off the ship and into the cruise terminal. This was the first place on the trip that actually had customs for people returning to the ships, but getting off was no problem. (There were actually three ships at St. George’s today…us, the Crown Princess, and a Pullmantur ship that was tendering from a little ways offshore.)

We wandered up the street that the cruise terminal is on, discovered that it basically went nowhere because the sidewalk ended, and wandered back. We spotted a little market so we turned up that street, and our first stop was a grocery store because A was hoping to find some Nut-Med to bring back as gifts. They didn’t have that, but they did have a single-serving boxed drink called Choc-Nut so I got that and it was delicious! I also got some “Coca-Cola Light” (what most of the world has, as opposed to Diet Coke) so we could have drinks back in our room. We went back out of the grocery store and looked around at the market. A had gotten some Eastern Caribbean Dollars for change, so she wanted to buy something. She was hoping to find 5 or 6 bottles of Nut-Med for $20 US, but most stands wanted $10 per bottle so that wasn’t going to happen. She ended up spending all of the EC money on a bottle of Nutmeg Jam, which should be pretty good, and I suspect $8 EC was a reasonable price.

Upon the advice of the woman who sold her the jam, A wanted to find a pharmacy because she heard the Nut-Med would be cheaper there. Unfortunately it was still $10 US per bottle, so that didn’t pan out. We came back on the ship and had a nap, and then started drinking for the rest of the evening! We read books and had drinks on the back of the ship, then we came back to the room and read books and had homemade drinks (rum and coke), then we went to the Captain’s Club party and got a bunch of free champagne, then we went to dinner and had mango daiquiris with dinner. There was a Pied Piper party at 11pm with an open bar, but I fell asleep in our bed around 10pm so we didn’t make it to that!

Today we had a much more leisurely time getting going in the morning. I was surprised that I didn’t wake up until something like 9:30am, but A said she wanted to let me sleep so my burn could have more time to heal. I brought my laptop up to the breakfast area and had my most favorite cruise food: muesli. I have never seen it anywhere but on cruises, but I love it. It’s got oatmeal and fruit and raisins and it’s in milk and I don’t know what all else is in it. I’m not talking about Mueslix, which you can buy in the store. I will have to take a picture of it tomorrow or something, because it is my absolute favorite. Anyway, I ate my breakfast, and went back to the room to put on sunblock. Today we had a tubing tour, and I was going to wear my t-shirt, but I needed to put sunblock on anyway.

We got outside and I realized that there was a cache somewhere, so I went back on the ship and got my GPSr. When I got back outside, I found the cache was about a tenth of a mile away. We didn’t have time to find it, of course, so I just put the GPSr in the bag and waited for the tubing trip. When the guide finally got there, they announced that there was a delay with the first group of the day so we were going to be delayed too. As a result, we got a mini-tour; we went up to Morne Bruce and got pictures of the capital city below, and we went to the botanical gardens and saw a banyan tree…I’m not sure there was anything else there that was particularly botanical, but we saw parrots and a school bus that had been crushed under a tree during the big hurricane 30 years ago.

After what felt like a really long drive, we piled out of the bus next to some stairs leading down to the river. We were each given a whitewater helmet, a life vest, and a paddle - the latter, we were instructed, was for pushing away from the bank, not for actually propelling yourself anywhere. A and I had a tubing experience in 1999 or so that involved some very scraped butts, so we were happy to have hard boards strapped to the tubes this time! I had a great time on the river, and I laughed every time we went through a rapid and got soaked. There weren’t nearly enough rapids, but we had a really good time anyway. A and I got separated early on, and didn’t link back up until near the end - once I grabbed her tube, though, I didn’t let go until it was time to get out! When we did, there was rum punch and local fruits waiting, including raw coconut, which I had never had before.

When we got back to Roseau, where we were docked, A and I tried looking for the cache. Unfortunately my Palm Pilot had decided to stop accepting taps again…I think maybe it is an issue with heat, but I have no idea. Anyway, I had no clues for what I was looking for, so although I was in the right place, I didn’t find the cache. We came back on the boat and had a very late lunch - pasta is the only thing you can get at that hour - and then I did some reading of my Out of This Furnace book for history class…and took a nap! Oh, and when I took a shower, I still had sand in my suit. I am not happy with the way my Speedo suit is constructed, and I might write to them and complain that the sand cannot be gotten out from between the liner and the outside. Did I already mention this yesterday? Oh, and my burn is a little better, though my right outer thigh and my left shoulder and back are still really tight.

Tomorrow is Grenada. Because we spent a week there in 2003, we are comfortable doing things on our own without any tour. I know the Brown Sugar restaurant closed after the hurricane in 2005 but I am hoping the delicious pizza place on the Carenage is still there!

I’m writing this in Notepad, because I’m not planning to get online tonight - it’s almost 11pm already. Our excursion tomorrow isn’t until 11:15am so I will probably just bring my laptop to breakfast so I can upload this entry and check my e-mail - I didn’t do that today either.

Today we did the “aquaboat safari and snorkel” tour. We were supposed to meet the tour at the Hertz rental counter, so we went over there and were immediately solicited by the other rental agencies. (I’m not sure what exactly we were solicited for…definitely for rental cars, but it felt like something else.) Anyway, we ended up joining a tour that was actually a Jeep-driving AND aquaboat tour. I assume this one was through the ship; ours was booked independently. Because we weren’t driving a Jeep to the aquaboat site, another guy working for the same company drove us over there. We got ready by putting our stuff in a drybag and putting on life vests, then once everyone else arrived we climbed onto our aquaboats. It was interesting to hear the explanations, because they were done in three languages - English, French for some Canadians who were along, and Spanish for some other people. Our guide also spoke Dutch and Papiamento but he didn’t demonstrate any of that for us. His assistant only spoke French, though - practically no English.

In the beginning, A drove the aquaboat. We started at Simpson Bay on the Dutch side, and went under a bridge to the French side where we ended up at Happy Bay, at least I think that’s what it was called. I had fun riding behind A; the aquaboat is kind of a combination jet-ski and dinghy. We bounced along like ducklings in a row behind the guide, two people per vehicle. I chided A for not staying within the wake of the boats ahead of us, but she said she just wasn’t very good at operating the boat - on the way back, I discovered what she was talking about! Anyway, when we got to the stopping point, the guides passed out masks with attached snorkels. I think I was the first one in the water, which I did with my usual count-to-5 trick. I had forgotten what seawater tastes like, though - it is beautiful and blue and deceptively gentle-looking, but it tastes AWFUL. It had also been a long time since I’d used a snorkel, and I tried to remember to breathe slowly but it was nervewracking because I kept tasting water. I got out on the shore and walked around a little - a naked guy walked by, hello there! - and then got back in the water. I had a little bit of difficulty getting back out into the ocean because the currents at the shore were so strong, and I found myself spinning around on my butt more than once. (It was fun, though.) I went back to our boat to toss my snorkel and mask back in, since they weren’t helping me, but I ended up getting back into the boat. The French-speaking assistant helped haul me in, and I said “Merci” and he said “you speak French!” I said “un peu” (a little) and we had a brief conversation…he was very impressed, said I spoke without any mistakes, and the couple from Montreal was right next to us and they were surprised too. The main guide laughed about “elle parle plus de français qu’il parle d’anglais!” (She speaks more French than he speaks English!) So that was amusing.

It was my turn to drive the boat on the way back, and it was hard. I wanted to give A a nice smooth ride but I think I tossed us around a little bit. When we got back to shore, it was agreed that we would go along with the guide in his Jeep, even though we hadn’t paid for that part of the excursion, so we got not only an extra tour, but basically a private tour because we had the guide right there! We ate lunch at a place on Orient Bay, and they charged me $10 for a damn cheese sandwich. After stopping at Oyster Pond for a brief talk from the guide, we went back to the ship. Because A and I had both gone swimming in the ocean, we picked up a bottle of conditioner from the sundries shop before we got back on the boat. It was well worth it! I took my shower first, and when I peeled off my swimsuit, about half the beach came with it. There was a TON of sand in the shower. Fortunately the head was on a hose and I took it down and washed the sand from the floor down the drain, off my body onto the floor and down the drain, and off my swimsuit onto the floor and down the drain. It wasn’t nearly as easy to rinse the swimsuit as I had been hoping…I’m not sure my nice (formerly new) expensive Speedo suit will ever be the same, but we’ll see how it is when it dries.

Tonight was formal night, so I put on my dress and some makeup, but I didn’t feel pretty at all. The main reason is because I got a huge sunburn on my upper arms and upper back, despite putting on sunblock. It is pretty bad and it hurts, and I am at very high risk for skin cancer so it’s dangerous too. But mostly it’s just ugly and I hate it. Oh well, it’s done, right? We went to the Pied Piper meetup at 7:30, before dinner. I was surprised to find out that we had a table for two, I had forgotten that I’d made that request. It was odd though, we were seated at a table for six, but there were only our two chairs! Tonight’s dinner was much better than last night’s, so I am looking forward to the usual good food I’ve come to expect from Celebrity. There was even fake meat in my stuffed red pepper! Yummy.

Tomorrow is Dominica, where we are going tubing at 11:15am. There’s also an 8:15 departure but we said screw that! So I will have plenty of time to post this and check my e-mail. Now I’m going to read some of the latest Sue Grafton (hey, I read my Gender textbook earlier!) and pass out for the night.