Two Days at Sea – Including Davin’s Birthday! (April 11, 2016 & April 12, 2016)

Reading Length: Afternoon Cuppa Tea

Kristin Reporting!               

April 11th:

Today the captain told us: The color khaki was invented by the British who created the color by mixing mud, coffee, and curry powder and soaking cloth in the mixture for two days. The resulting color almost perfectly camouflaged the soldiers in the Indian terrain! Fascinating!

I'm having a good day today. First, I prepared the next six circumnavigation blog entries and loaded them onto an SD card to send them over to D (so he can add his interjections).

Then, we had lunch and I went to choir. On the way to choir, I realized I had failed to send Scott a recording. Bad Kristin! So I made one, and Scott will be getting two of them on April 11 now.

Next up was writing about yesterday (I can't get further behind!). BUT, I needed a break, and this morning when I took 10 minutes to run upstairs to have an English Muffin, I had an idea pop into my head for a piece of wall art for Castle Loric. So, I spent two hours making that as a break from my usual routine!

I started working on Erich's blog posts, and I filed all of our photos from March 10, 2016 through today.

I almost died in the gym from pushing myself to win the race– but I did it! I was raining down sweat! Yuck!

Chicken Curry is good, so don't ask me what that face was for!

We went to the 10:30PM show. Tonight was the vocalist Phillip Browne. I guess he used to be a bus driver in the West End of London. Then he went to an open audition for Disney's Lion King and after 8 weeks of auditions he got a part! He sang all kinds of things from Lion King, to Nat King Cole, to modern radio hits (that I don't know the name of cause I don't know anything about that stuff!). He was funny, fun and very talented. His range was the most amazing. He could clearly sing bass, but also could get up to low soprano/high alto. I really liked his singing of 'The Circle of Life'.

[Davin Interjection: Browne was indeed a very talented singer, and I enjoyed his show.  Amusingly I also recognized Browne as being one of the people from the gym lifting weights (he was really ripped).  You bump into a lot of people up in the gym, from singers to the ship’s Captain.]

April 12th:

“Happy Birthday to Davin!”

D's birthday was a success.

The day started off great with the Pancake Station being back! Yum! What a perfect day for it to show up again! So Davin got the perfect birthday breakfast!

Then I worked on my backlog of newspaper digests and got through about half of them. I was reading for a few hours!

We lifted early so that we could go to the sit down dinner.



Davin received a special birthday card from the captain and hotel manager and entertainment manager!

I snuck out of the room under the pretense of writing postcards and made D two birthday cards and painted the fronts with my water color paints to make them more festive. Inside I wrote what his I.O.U birthday presents are going to be.

D basically guessed that he was going to get a cake, but he wasn't 100% sure so that counts as a success considering how many times he told me to go to the purser’s desk to order one, and the fact that we haven't gone to the sit down dinner at all so by going tonight it was a dead give-away! The waiters brought the cake to the table and sang "Happy Birthday".

The cake was pretty good for a $30.00 cake. It was a chocolate deluxe cake. It was a two-layer cake with chocolate frosting. The only bummer was that they put a nasty cherry flavor between the two chocolate cake layers, but it was possible to eat around it. Also, the only way to get a chocolate cake was to buy the largest cake available! So we have a ton leftover and don't know how it can fit in the fridge! We eventually devised a method to fit it all in.

Back in the room, I played Davin the recording of Scott and Mom singing “Happy Birthday”. I had requested that they get together and record this so that I could sing along to it. So he got his second singing in. (I didn't want to do it at dinner because the 8 waiters would have just overpowered the recording.)

After “the family” had sung to D, he opened his presents. He open his cards and found that he had received: 1) From Mom, a new full set of Warhammer paints; 2) From Me and Scott, a framed 16 x 20 framed print of the picture of him defeating Sir Case from their duel at our wedding– it's such a great shot!

That was the conclusion of Davin’s awesome birthday party aboard the Queen Elizabeth!

To wrap up the evening, I finished the last 2 Erich blog posts that need to go up before Scott can post his Laurel event on 3/27. And I finally recorded the lullaby Guten Abend for Scott! I’ve owed him that recording for about two months!

Tomorrow we will be exploring our second stop in India.

[Davin Interjection: I think I kept reminding Kristin on a daily basis about this for like a week before.  But I wasn’t sure whether or not she’d gone through with it.  I did highly suspect it though.  Unfortunately, up to this point I think I was doing alright in terms of maintaining my weight, but the cake pushed me over the top.  There was just so much of it, and we couldn’t just let it sit forever in the fridge.

I can’t believe I’m 35 years old.  Sometimes I ask myself where all the time has gone.  And at times in the past I have not believed I would make it this far (thanks to my health issues).  But I’m still here.  For how much longer, who’s to say.  I think I’m good for another five years or so, but beyond that, with no improvements I don’t honestly know.  It’s tough sometimes not knowing whether I need to plan to live to be 100, or not even to 45 or 50.

When I was younger, I was so cocky, thinking I’d never even have to use my high deductible health insurance plan.  It just goes to show you never know what is going to happen.  If I have two wishes for the next year, it’s to solve my health problems, and also make significant headway in writing my story.  Even if I only manage a pace of one chapter a month, I should be able to finish it within two years.]