At Sea

Yes, it is Saturday March 25th yet again. We have crossed the International Dateline and find ourselves in a Groundhog Day situation. Yesterday’s March 25th was fun, and today’s March 25th looks like being fun too! We are crossing the International Date Line AND the Equator all in the same day. There is a rather splendid symmetry to that!

I was chatting to a lady in the launderette this morning and she was explaining that she never has to cook at home because her son is a “streamer”. This was something I had never heard of before. Apparently he installed several video cameras in her kitchen, and the feed from these streams live to viewers all over the world. His main focus is cooking, so every day he broadcasts the preparation of their meals to his faithful following. She has no idea how this works, but he makes a good living doing it, and has no other job. It’s a sort of reality show I suppose. She says it is fine now, but there were a few problems in the beginning because she would go into the kitchen, and forget the live streaming was going on, leading to some very embarrassing moments. She never goes into the kitchen any more.

I suppose we do live streaming from the ship as our bridge cam is always there for the world to view, and I remember that a on Princess ship we had a lobby cam so folks at home could see the goings on in the lobby. However, I am glad that Carnival has not decided that a new source of revenue would be to do live streaming from the launderettes or the Lido. That could be the latest hit reality show.

Due to having too much fun doing the laundry (where is Roscoe’s mother when you need her?), I missed the first 2 talks, but did get to John Brinkley’s excellent talk on the eruptions of Vesuvius and Mt Pele in Martinique. The Theater is very conveniently placed for the Golden Lion pub, so after the talk we went there for lunch. I felt the need for fish and chips and a Strongbow again.

We then went up to the Lido to collect supplies for this evening’s soiree, we couldn’t find everything we wanted, but that’s life. We put the cheese into our fridge and headed up to the Pavilion Pool to watch the crossing of the line ceremony.

Brian is now a Shellback, so he did not need to participate in the ceremony, but there were a number of willing Pollywogs, and it was fun to watch. Covered in gunk, the participants jumped into the pool to wash off, so after the ceremony the pool was closed for cleaning. So there will be nice fresh clean water tomorrow, yay!

The boat building brainstorming soiree in our cabin went well, and fueled with whisky and the bottle of Contessa sparkling wine from the quiz, we came up with a PLAN. Now we will just have to wait and see if it floats.

As there is the Hawaiian Luau party tonight the show was at 7:00. It featured a Canadian magician, Nathaniel Rankin. He did some amazing tricks, but somehow he just didn’t impress me as much as previous magicians on board.

After dinner we headed up to the Lido Deck for the Hawaiian Luau party. Synergy was playing, and people were dancing, but it was wet and very windy on deck, so we decided to give it a miss and have an early night. There is significant movement of the ship tonight, and the option of being rocked to sleep as we bounce along the waves was way too tempting.