My how the Time has Flown!

Man, I haven't updated this thing in... well ages. So...er...here I am. Hi.

The last year with RCCL has been long but productive, I've managed to work my way into a promotion: meaning my own cabin (I'm too old for room mates) and a ten thousand dollar raise in addition to other little perks. I'm off to the Freedom of the Seas out of Port canaveral after a week of training in Las Vegas. As for stories, well, the last year seems like one great big story and it all blurs together so swimmingly it's hard to pick out a few to tell.

Let's see, the Holidays on a ship:

From what I'm told the holidays' were a good time for me on the LB, I say that because most of it we all spent in a drunken stupor. You couldn't go an hour without running into a wandering crew christmas/hanakah/tet/whatever crew party and ng force fed booze by the senior staff. Our days were spent not with the normal work but sitting around Studio B with the department drink beer/wine/eggnog/horse swill/*punch(more on that later) wrapping presents, blowing up balloons, building christmas trees, and trying to get dancers to take their tops off. S the only ones to oblige were the gay men.

Our tech department christmas party is even more of a blur. I have feint memories of a secret santa contest, where you had to guess who bought your present and if you guessed wrong you had to chug an entire solo cup of hard alcohol. (One "shot" per guess until you got it right. My liver decided to spend the holidays in Utah where they don't believe in alcohol. The kidneys were not pleased with this decision by liver and decided to evactuate the only way they knew how: chewing their way through the stomach and out my bellybutton.).

By the next morning I had discovered that I was covered in clever sharpie sayings that I had decided to let one of our ice skaters author. Whilest these hijinks were occuring my friends Oliver, Maryke, and myself were discovering *punch. *Punch is the leftover's from *everyone's* glasses, plus whatever vile sludge was left in the ice bowl mixed together with half a bottle of an undetermined liquor and another substance I can only refer to as "Pud" as I have no idea what it was, but that was the sound you made when you drank it. Obviously this was the most delicious thing we had ever tasted, and drank approximately a gallon of it. This of course made Shawn-the-ice-skater very angry as I was wiggling and giggling too much for him to complete his masterpiece of caligraphy entitled "I love dick" on my backside.

(As a side note, *Punch actually turned out to taste pretty good, somehow. We saved the bowl in our cabin and discovered it two days later; and what do you do when you find strange purple-ish liquid in your bathroom? Drink it of course!)

New years was alright, I ended up standing guard on the promenade for the orchestra until we fired off our balloon drop. At this point it was an "All rules are off" party for guests and crew alike. I tastefully had a glass or two of champagne, witnessed my supervisor get into an argument with the captain over whether it was New Years or Christmas, and went to bed.

"went to bed": English, verb, article and subject. Pronunciation: "full-of-shit" etymology; derived from the latin shitus facedis. Definition: To not remember wandering around the ship with one's suit jacket on backwards and inside out trying to kiss everything in site in a jovial manner. Yep, no desperation there. Authoritative but distracting whistle

So there were the holidays. I'll update again either tomorrow or at the end of next week when I'm on the Freedom with the following stories:

The infamous Gay Cruise: Or "Some Things You Can't Un-See"

My South African Friends Say the Damnedest Things

The Black Cruise: Or "Bitch You did NOT just say that!"

Hope all's well on your end,

Matty