Back on Board

My time at home was great and definitely recharged me for the difficult task of living on a cruise ship for six more months. We had all gone different places while we had our week off so it was fun to reconnect and find out where everyone had gone and who they had seen. I was the only ones who had seen Tony Award winners and Emmy Nominees like JASON BATEMAN in the flesh, though, although Paul and Sue went to a Night Ranger concert when they went to the McHenry County Fair in Illinois. I just realized Night Ranger played the theme song from “Secret to My Success,” which starred Michael J. Fox, who was the original Teen Wolf, while Jason Bateman took up that mantle in “Teen Wolf Too,” so I guess our vacations did have thematic similarities. The only reason I know that Night Ranger sings the theme song from “Secret to My Success” is because Paul and Sue reported that Night Ranger really played up the fact during their concert.

My week off the ship made me realize that my immunity against the sleep inducing charms of the ship’s rocking had worn off, and I feel like not a lot has happened this week because I have spent so much time taking naps. I’m also embarrassed to admit that I have spent a large amount of time this week reading the new Harry Potter book. I finished it on Thursday and all I can say is, “Well done, Ms. Rowling. Well done.” Harry Potter has caused some minor friction in the group this week, because Beth is a hundred pages from the end of the fifth book, and Randall unwittingly revealed who gets killed in that book at dinner on Tuesday. I am not very good at keeping secrets myself, so I am sweating bullets until everybody else who is interested in the group has read the latest book. (But seriously, I was totally taken by surprise by who the Half-Blood Prince is).

We went to our beloved Merritt Mall on Tuesday, and saw “Wedding Crashers,” which we all really enjoyed. Jason and Randall saw “Fantastic Four,” which they later admitted was a huge mistake, but I think we had all enjoyed the “I need names and I need shots” clip from the preview so much that we had allowed ourselves to get swept up in “F4” fever.

It’s also fun to see the new crop of passengers. There are three Asian high school graduates who were in the gym today. I think they only met each other on the ship, and they were brought together by their love for weight training. There was a ringleader who was leading another of the guys through some kind of program, which caused him to say things like, “We’re just doing obliques” to me as he dragged a bench away. I later heard him say, during a conversation about their respective colleges, “If corn was water than Purdue would be an island.” The third member of the triad was pretty negative about everything, and talked loudly about his friend who’s a running back for an Ivy League school who struggles to maintain weight because he’s smaller and does so much cardio in practice, how you don’t get results until you’ve lifted for ten years (when his friend said he had only been lifting for two months and had gotten results, he sneered, “What results?”), and how he wasn’t going to start lifting until he got to college because then it would be free. I tried to think of a subtle way to tell the other two that they should drop Negative Nan, but could never get their attention.

So that’s all the news of the past two weeks. We found out that a bona fide celebrity (hint: “Everybody Loves” her tv son) will be on the ship next week so we are busy plotting how we can get our pictures taken with her. Wish us luck.