The Laundry Fairy – C4 C5

Even though it has been just over a week since we left, we were both starting to get low on some items of clothing.  Yesterday Stephanie filled one of the provided laundry bags, and left it on the bed.  This morning a bag a freshly washed clothes appeared as if by magic.  It’s like Christmas-time, “Wow, clothes, and they’re just my size.”  Woo hoo!

Stephanie’s Class, Including Peggy the Lifelong Learner

Yesterday morning, I had breakfast with one of Stephanie’s students.  He commented that there was a mutiny brewing in her class.  In her last class session before Trinidad, she announced all of the assignments for the semester, and the students felt like they would have to spend every remaining minute on the ship trying to complete the assignments.  I said I’d mention it to her to “prime the pump” so to speak.  She came in for breakfast not too much later, and I got my coffee press and some of the coffee from the previous days trip, and joined her.  Before I could broach the subject of her class she said she was up for a few hours the previous night, and that she realized the assigned work was way too much and wouldn’t enable them to take in all the experiences being offered by Semester at Sea, and she had already sent an email earlier that morning announcing that the open-ended final team project and several other assignments she had just announced before Trinidad would no longer be required and that there would be more in-class case studies and more focused take-home assignments.

Steph and Katie from Vermont

Also at that breakfast was Katie, one of our “Extended Family.”  In talking with Greg and me, she talked about Vermont (where she’s from) and Greg says he always gets Vermont and New Hampshire confused.  Katie explained that not only are the shapes of the states flipped 180 degrees but the people and the philosophy of the state are as well.  I chimed in with: New Hampshire’s motto is “Live free or die” whereas in Vermont is more like “Free love and tie-dye”.  (I’m so witty.)

You Are Here

Much of my day yesterday was taken up with organizing the photos I’ve been taking.  I’m up to a total of 1100 so far.  Collating the photos from the two cameras, stitching together any panoramic shots, renaming them to something better than DSC0889.jpg, adjusting the exposure and color balance, then selecting the best, downscaling them, uploading them to the blog, and then creating galleries of the images and linking them to the associated blog entry.  Man, for essentially doing nothing on the ship, I’ve been keeping awfully busy.

Steph in Glazier Lounge before the Dancing Began

In the evening there was the Dean’s reception in the lounge, with various fried, heavy appetizers: corn fritters, fish fingers, empanadas, fried plantains, jerked chicken, shrimp skewers, and rice and beans; and free drinks.   At that reception I learned that later that evening one of the SAS staff was having a party in the lounge with mini-burgers, more drinks and dancing.

We debated whether or not to go since it started at 23:00.  We went and got there too late for the mini-burgers, and sat listening waiting for something danceable to come on, but the music selection kept changing style and never got to the narrow band that I consider “danceable”. Stephanie kept wanting me to come dance, but I couldn’t get into the music.  After a couple of recent pop tunes including “If you like it you’d better put a ring on it”, the DJ switched to a lengthy rotation of Rap, Hip-Hop, Urban, whatever, which cleared the dance floor.  I wondered aloud if the DJ was a guy we knew from Ohio, (Kyle), who moon-lighted as a DJ, and who came to a party we were at where that dance floor was full, and hopping, and he stopped the song that was playing, switched to CCR, and the floor was empty in about a minute.  During the Hip-Hop songs, though, people started coming back out to the dance floor, and were having a lot of fun, but I couldn’t get into it and we went back to the room.

This morning as I’m writing this, the TV is on the Semester At Sea location information channel was playing music that made me think, “Well that I could have danced to!”