Christmas Surprises

Hello,

It’s been a bit since my last entry. I have to say that this itinerary has been a real let down after Europe. But it’s also been a let down in terms of weather, we’ve only been swimming twice. It’s been super windy and fairly chilly. Now, I know that I have nothing to complain about on the weather front what with the conditions in the rest of the country but I’m complaining anyway so there.

I had worse holiday blues this year than previous contracts. Or at least it felt worse. I missed being with my family and was worried that the holidays were going to be very depressing. Maybe it was my low expectations but Christmas was great....

The cast exchanged Secret Santa names about 6 weeks ago. I had Rance. He’s very hard to buy for but he gave me a detailed list and I mostly stuck to that. I got him a timex watch w/ a velcro band, a workout book, a six pack of Mug root beer and a reindeer tongue lollipop. I think he loved the lollipop best. Basically it was a plastic drum shaped reindeer head with a candy lollipop shaped like a deer’s tongue that you push out to suck on. So Rance got to french kiss a reindeer for Christmas....and that was actually on his list.

We had a bit of a surprise on this last cruise. We popped into the dance show one night and we looked over to see an older couple. I felt like I recognized the man. As I stared I realized that he’d been a student of mine at the Schoodic Arts Festival - I knew him. So we chatted with him and his wife and later in the cruise we had dinner with them. It kind of felt like we had family onboard even though we didn’t....it was nice to have dinner with someone not from the ship. No offense to any of my shipmates but having dinner with a “land person” gave me a sense of normalcy that I’d been lacking.

I had a funny feeling today. At the end of our season at ImprovAcadia, I frequently feel tired and not very creatively ambitious. I might do a bit of knitting or even drawing but I kind of go fallow. I know that I’m still doing shows and yes, they require creativity but not on the scale of my summer schedule. So I’ve been waiting to feel like I have a surplus o’ creativity. Today I started to get the feeling that the fallow period is coming to an end - I am filled with nitrogen!

We’re about to change itineraries which I’m really looking forward to. We have one more week of the Bahamas and then we go to four 10 day Caribbean cruises. We have a great itinerary - NYC, 2 sea days, St. Thomas, Barbados, Antigua, St. Maarten, Tortola, and 2 sea days. There should be lots of good snorkeling on all of those islands. I’ve never been to St. Maarten and I’ve only been to St. Thomas once.
I hope to get over to St. John’s and see the National Park. Larrance and I bought new masks and snorkels this year. Our masks are super fancy - they have glass that goes around the side so we have better peripheral vision. I need to try it out!

Check out my flickr site - I put up more photos.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Bieeeeee!

~Jen