I managed to catch Bob’s cold on Tuesday evening.  Fortunately for me, my work schedule this week was such that I’ve had enough time to sleep and start to recuperate. Combined with the long weekend, I should recover quickly.

But whenever I have a cold, I always start to think about the cough drops we used to get when I was little.  Next to useless, we pretty much looked upon them as candy and ate them as such.  Not like these serious cough drops they sell now — the Robitussin ones are very clearly cough syrup (and taste like it) and also actually have an anaesthetic ingredient that numbs your mouth!

When I was little, though, aside from Halls, which was rejected as being mediciney, there were two main brands of cough drops.  These were found up near the checkout at the drug store, mixed in with the breath mints, the gum, and the candy bars.

Pine Bros. was my favorite.  I did not like the honey flavor, but the cherry was great.  These were elliptical in shape, and as cough drops, had the flavor, consistency and effectiveness of Swedish Fish.  There were 15 in each box, making them an expensive treat, because they were always eaten very quickly.

Smith Bros. was okay, but I only ever got those when for some reason the Pine Bros. was out of stock.  These were smaller, about the size of M&M’s, and were hard candies virtually indistinguishable from cherry Lifesavers aside from the lack of hole in the middle. At that time in my life, I was quite familiar with Lifesavers, but not with Swedish fish, so these were not such a novelty.

Picked up the underwater pictures from CVS today. 21 out of the 27 were actually useable (2 didn’t come out at all, 2 were really bad, and 2 were accidental shots of random water) which is a very good ratio for me with a disposable camera. I’ve had rolls come back with less than 2/3rds actually developed. I never understand why that is.

E now has her record of our cruise up. Read what happened when I wasn’t around!

Though I must say, I was there for breakfast on Sunday too! I spilled orange juice all over my tray.

I finally got most of the cruise photos up.

A warning — our camera decided that the cruise would be an excellent time to start having a stroke. It was intermittantly freaking out during the whole trip, and the main thing that was affected was the focus. So quite a lot of the images are more blurry than I’d like (or really, than anyone would like :P) I may eventually have time to futz with them in some real photoediting software, but for the moment, this is what we have.

Snorkelling pictures from the underwater camera will be coming next week, after CVS finishes developing them.

I’d been tired of the default theme for quite a while now, but creating a theme from scratch is not something I have time for. So I’ve been working on modifying several themes I found around the internet.

While it seems like this should be an easy proposition, in practice, dealing with even a slightly complex stylesheet rarely is. So while this is not the permanent new theme, and has not been modified enough by me that I can call it at least 75% my own creation, I’ve at least wrestled it into looking more or less like something I’m satisfied with.

At least I won’t cringe looking at the front page any longer. But I may have just killed what was motivating me to finish the real theme…

Edit: Now I’ve messed around with it a lot more, separating out comments and trackbacks, fixing the broken comment.php page, and changing the header and the colors. It definitely feels more ‘mine’ now that it’s been extensively personalized.

Good:
* The ease of getting food. It was not hard to get food at any time, though sometimes it could be a hassle to get exactly the food you wanted.
* The quantity of food. There was plenty, you just had to ask for it.
* The cabin. We were surprised by the fact that the beds were bunks, having expected two slightly larger beds, but the cabin itself was larger than I expected.
* Ease of staying on budget. This was mostly because of the food deal, but there were no surprise charges and we did not overspend at all.

Bad:
* There were these hand sanitizers all over the ship, and you were forced to use them any time you went into a restaurant. I do know how to wash my hands, thank you.
* For the first half of the cruise, you weren’t allowed to serve yourself from the buffets. They were making the crew serve the items to you, which really gummed up the works. They abolished this by the end of the journey.
* The waiters in the restaurants were really hit or miss, and mostly miss. They didn’t always provide the most stellar service.

Whatever:
* The programming on the ship. I didn’t go to much of it, and I didn’t feel like I missed much, but if/when we do another one, I may make more effort to try some.

So, overall, I would recommend this cruise. It was inexpensive, and if you’re in the Boston area, the departure makes it extremely convenient. But you shouldn’t go in expecting 5-star dining service, just good, decent food and ok waitstaff.

We got up quite early so we could have time for one last free meal before we disembarked. So at 7am, we headed up to the breakfast buffet. I loaded up on bacon, because I rarely get enough at home, and I was sort of hoping to sate my interest in it for a while – -when I overloaded at Olive Garden at age 10, it was years before I could eat the stuff again.

I did eat too much of it, but I’m not repulsed by it now, so apparently it wasn’t too much.

After we ate, we went back down to the cabin to wait for the express people to be called. Eventually they were, and we hauled our bags up the flight of stairs to try and join the line on the 5th floor. The line was not yet moving when we got there, and the whole corridor was filled up, making it impossible for us to get to the actual ‘back’ of the line. So we stood there, behind some other people in the same predicament, and waited. Some people came up behind us then, and the woman started bitching at us that we weren’t moving — apparently dissatisfied that we weren’t interested in shoving our way into the already full corridor.

We finally yelled at her to go around if she was so damn impatient to get going, and she moved away. Then the line started to go, and we merged in, and we ended up ahead of her anyway. Ha. I was sort of hoping that she’d get pulled over by customs and searched, but it doesn’t seem like that happened.

It was rainy and pretty cold in Boston, so instead of trying to navigate the T, we decided we’d just take a cab back out to E’s place. We joined the taxi line and soon had stuffed ourselves into one with all of our luggage.

We got back to E’s at 9:15, and thus the cruise was officially over.

I called mom on the cell phone to let her know we were coming. As I dialed, I had the brief thought that she might still be asleep, but figured it was pretty late for her to be in bed.

The conversation went something like this:
Mom: Hello?
Me: Hello?
Mom: Hello hello hello hello hello hello hello
Me: .oO(WTF?)
Me: Are you drunk?

But she was not drunk. She just thought I was Clara. Anyhow, we warned her we were coming, she was startled at our earliness, and we left E’s place by 9:30. On the way there we got our first good look at the flooding that was occuring all over the region, and had to slow to a crawl several times so everyone could drive through giant puddles and wet areas.

But we made it to mom’s easily, and after I upgraded her Firefox installation, we and her and J1 all went out to lunch at Chili’s for mother’s day.

Saturday morning, I slept in, sort of. I woke up for a while and couldn’t get back to sleep, but finally did. So it was more of a nap than actually sleeping in.

In any case, the first meal of the day was lunch again, and we went up with E and Carl to the restaurant, where I had a burger and a french dip sub. They weren’t calling it that, but that’s what it was. The food was good, but unfortunately, that whole restaurant is at the rear of the ship, and our table in particular was very near the engine or propeller or something, and the area was vibrating. Not so much that it disturbed the meal, but enough that it was very much like being in a moving car, and I started to feel ill.

So after lunch, I went to lie down in the cabin for a while. After 45 minutes or so, I was feeling better, so went with E and Carl to one of the trivia events, which turned out to be the game Scene It. It was just for fun, so there was no competitive stress, and we just sat there with the other people shouting out answers when we knew them. It was fun, though normally I would have preferred it to be a real contest.

After that was over, I tried lying down again, but felt good enough to also play with the Game Boy for a while as well. Still, none of the dinner choices really appealed to me, so when we went, I asked for just spaghetti with marinara sauce. I was apprehensive, since the waiter did not seem to understand right away, but the order was delivered exactly as I wanted, and it completely hit the spot.

We went back to the cabin to hang out some more, play with the Game Boy, read, and pack up all of our belongings. E and Carl had earlier determined that if we waited for the normal disembarking, we would probably have to wait a couple of hours. But if we didn’t check any of our luggage, we could do “express” disembarking and leave the ship around 8:15, without having to wait at all. Though reluctant to get up quite that early, we did agree to do this, in the interests of not sitting around for hours wasting time.

So after we’d gotten everything packed up that we could, we went to bed. And even though I stayed up for a while reading before I turned off my light, I still couldn’t fall asleep right away. After lying there for what seemed like hours and hours, I grabbed up my watch and was startled to find it was only 1:30 am! Not too long after that, I managed to fall asleep, but I was still exhausted when we got up shortly before 7.

Friday, the ship was due to leave port right around lunch. I slept through it, as by the time Bob and I went up to the restaurant to have some lunch, we were on our way back to Boston.

After a burger and some other stuff, we went back to the cabin to hang out, and ended up playing Game Boy and reading for pretty much the whole afternoon. Not much to say about that, except I was ridiculously amused by the fact that while I was playing Monopoly as the dog, named Sirius, (against Arthur), he kept getting sent to jail almost every turn.

Dinner was good, pasta again, with a red chili marinara sauce that was really tasty. And, unlike some of the meat dishes, you got a large helping of the pasta, so I felt satisfied at the end of it. Though not so satisfied that I couldn’t help Bob split a plate of beef stroganoff, too. That was also good, though weird, because it was garnished with beet shreds and a dill pickle. (Seriously. A dill pickle?)

We returned to the cabin and resumed our Game Boy playing, though as Carl did not have one of his own, he was sort of at loose ends for a while, until he turned on the TV and we found that they were showing the Producers movie (the new one), and we all stopped what we were doing to watch it.

That night was the Chocoholic Buffet, about the only midnight buffet offered on this particular cruise. We were all looking forward to it, though we had a minor disagreement — the boys felt that they should go up and eat some pizza before it started, while E and I felt that eating before it was a ridiculous notion and would only make it impossible to take full advantage of the buffet itself. As it turned out, the movie ended around 11:15 and they didn’t have time to make their pizza experiment, but it was a strange discussion nevertheless.

We went up to stand in line after that, and found that people were already being let in. We had no objections, and trotted right on with the rest of them. The plates were very small, and I ended up piling mine about 3 layers thick by the time I was done with the row of food. We secured ourselves a table and gorged ourselves on what we’d selected. The mousse was excellent, and was a component of several of the things I’d got, of which I heartily approve. After a glass of milk (which order strangely surprised our waitress) we left, having eaten too much, but happy — at least I was.

It was after midnight by then, so there was not much to do but go to bed.

Thursday was the day I really planned to get up for breakfast. Really I did.

Except that I didn’t. I was tired and not ready to eat at breakfast time, so Bob went off with E and Carl and I stayed in bed for a while longer instead.

I got up and got dressed and was just about ready to go by the time they returned to the cabin just before 11. It was our last full day in Bermuda, and as we were going on our excursion in the afternoon, if Bob and I wanted to go souvenir shopping, it was really now or never — we’d never manage to get ourselves out of bed and into town the next morning before the ship left.

So we left E and Carl to their own devices and headed into St. George’s. We didn’t want to spend too much money or time, so we went into the shop nearest to the boat and looked around. There were some nice watercolor paintings — the view from the cruise ship, the town, various other places around Bermuda, and we selected one for ourselves as our souvenir of the trip. Then we looked around for a present for my mom, and found some cool ornaments with pink sand in them. Those purchases made, we headed into the next shop, where we secured our second group of postcards.

Then we headed back to the ship, having spent a grand total of about 20 minutes on the shopping excursion. Back at the cabin, we filled out the rest of the postcards and got stamps on them, and I stuck them in my bag so I could put them in the mailbox as soon as I had a chance. Then we went to have an early lunch. We went to the restaurant, though we knew they were notoriously slow, but we felt we had plenty of time to risk it.

And it worked out quite well. We finished out lunch and arrived at the place on deck where we were supposed to gather for our snorkeling trip a good 15 minutes before it was time. From there, we were happy to discover we had a prime view of the harbor (the view shown in our painting, by coincidence) and could watch a group a little ways away doing a reinactment of a colonial punishment — ducking a woman for being a shrew. After she was thoroughly wetted (The Puritan version of the wet t-shirt contest, we decided) and the demonstration was over, other people had gathered and our two guides, Shaun and Leo, showed up.

In short order, equipment was issued and tried on, and all of us headed down off the ship and to the charter boat that was to take us out to the reef, our first destination of the afternoon. There was some brief confusion with the ship, which looked like it was about to dock on one side of the harbor, but fooled us all and actually went to the other (but providing me with a perfect opportunity to duck over and mail my postcards in the process). And then the ferry was coming, so we all had to dash on board so our boat could get out of the way.

We all settled in on the top deck of the ship and listened to the captain and his assistant tell us things about the shore we were passing. We saw a lot of old forts, and got a brief lesson in how the rainwater collection works (Bermudan houses collect rainwater with their specially designed roofs, and this supplies the water for the house.) We also learned that traditionally, Bermudans have used cess pools as their means of disposing of sewage, and this natural process had worked perfectly for hundreds of years until some bonehead decided everyone needed to start using anti-bacterial everything. Now the bacteria that used to control all the sewage isn’t doing its job and there are major problems.

Returning to more pleasant subjects, we arrived at the reef before anyone could get too ill from the rocking of the smallish ship. The reef was located near the shore, and the boat anchored itself in some shallow water so everyone could get off easily and stand. The Bermudans apologized profusely for how cold the water was, but as most of the passengers were from Boston, we all thought it was actually quite warm.

The snorkeling itself is probably best expressed by the pictures we took, which will go up as soon as they get developed. But in short, it was really fun and very interesting. We first went around the edge of the reef, looking at the fish and lobster and plants and corals, and then we (carefully) swam over it on the way back to get a closer look.

After everyone returned to the boat, we took off, heading for our second destination, one of the many shipwrecks around the island. Our instructors recommended against reapplying sunscreen at this point, because they felt it would just wash off again, would cause problems with your goggles, and would pollute the water. But in Bob’s case, at least, this turned out to be a big mistake. This was the one really sunny, hot day we had on the island — we were, in fact, fortunate that our excursion was this day, as it was originally scheduled for Wednesday — and we were right out in it for the whole drive to the shipwreck.

The water there was much deeper and thus more chilly than that at the reef. Some of the people didn’t come off the ship for this one, but we all did. You could see the wrecked parts of the ship under the water, but none were really close enough to get to easily. Apparently it is possible to dive down and swim through the wreck itself, but one has to have extremely good lung capacity to do it. No one from our group made the attempt. The charter captain and the instructors told us a little bit about our wreck, but they didn’t tell us if the crew made it off or not — I’m assuming they did, being quite close to the island at the time, and there weren’t any obvious skeletons down amongst the wreckage we looked at.

We got back onto the boat after poking around for a while, and headed back to the pier. We learned more interesting Bermudan facts, including the fact that the only restaurant franchise on the island is a single KFC in Hamilton (which we passed when we were there). After that went in, the Bermudans freaked out and started denying all the others who wanted to build.

Back at the cruise ship, we showered and changed, and headed up for dinner. The theme of the evening was “International Dinner”, but that just says they couldn’t think of a good theme, since it wasn’t really international at all. I had turkey and some coconut sherbet, and then we played Uno for a while again.

We were still a bit hungry, though, so we soon headed up to the buffet, where the theme was Mexican, and here this was the real theme. There were fajitas and nachos and plenty of interesting things. The salsa was very good, and I was too lazy to go through the line again, a fact which I sort of regret now, but at the time was probably a wise choice — no reason to overfill myself.

We returned to the cabin to laze about, and E got out her postcard printer so she could get her own postcards ready. While she wrestled with that (it was being recalcitrant), a repairguy came buy to fix our clogged shower drain. By the time he was done and E had finished using the printer, we were ready to play cards again. Carl, who had also borrowed a Hoyles book from the library, taught us the rules to Whist, and we played that for a time, intermittantly listening to Bob ruminate on the mythical game of Dirty Clubs.

Room service was ordered again, and after chowing down on that, Carl headed off to put some postcards in the mail and returned to inform us that there were police outside the ship and the strong smell of pot in the hallway.

But we didn’t hear any raids, and soon went to sleep.