Thu, 3/6/25 At Sea

Day 60 - Thursday, March 6th, 2025 – At Sea

This day started uneventful. We went to breakfast. We came back to the room and did what we do. There was no poker at 1:30 so we decided to get some exercise. I went to seven and pushed. Mary went to the gym and she did the treadmill or whatever device she's using now. I got my hour in listening to my book. I haven't mentioned it in the past, but I'm on my second book of the trip. The first book was very interesting. It covered the basic history of everything you use every day in your house. Why do most forks have four tines?  Where does the phrase room and board come from? I could go on. It’s 500 pages of these types of facts. It's one of those I'd like to read again just because I missed so much the first time. It's actually a fun book to read.

I'm working my way through the second book. I stress the term working. The history in the first book is fun. The history in the second book is complicated and really requires you to concentrate. I spend a lot of time going back and forth over sections just because I didn't get them the first time. It's safe to say I will have listened to this book 3 or 4 times by the time I actually get through it. Don't get me wrong? I love it. This is the type of book I love.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life

In these pages, the beloved Bill Bryson gives us a fascinating history of the modern home, taking us on a room-by-room tour through his own house and using each room to explore the vast history of the domestic artifacts we take for granted.

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI 

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill.

We spent the afternoon in the cabin. At about 5:00 we headed out. We had two events we needed to go to. The first was a cruise specialist get together. If you remember, cruise specialist is our travel agent. They have travel agents on board and they had a little get together. For about an hour we drank and ate the appetizers while talking to the people about this and that. These are all people that have booked their cruise through cruise specialists. We knew a lot of them so there was a lot of good conversation. I spent quite a bit of time talking to a guy named Mike who had these unbelievable pictures of everything from fish to birds to landscapes. He's one of these guys that talks camera bodies, lens, aperture, speed, etcetera. I wanted to tell him I press the button on my iPhone but I didn't think he'd be impressed (He’d think smart a**) 😊 It was a fun event.

I still don't know why we were invited to the second one, but it was another of these meet and greets senior officers of this ship. Mary said this had something to do with those being elite members. Frankly, I didn't want to go but Mary wanted to so off we went. If I were comparing the two events, I would say that the booze was better at the 1st place but the food was better at the second place - not that I'm keeping count. We did run into some familiar faces. We've run into Malcolm more than once. He's the guy that runs what they call the hotel. What this exactly entails I'm not sure. It must be a big thing because he's a senior officer. We ran into another lady who was in charge of all of the room stewards. She had a weird laugh but she was a nice lady. That's what I remember of her. Not necessarily what she did but how she laughed. Does that make me shallow? Guess what? I don't care. The captain stopped by. He's a very personable guy. He's getting off in Cape Town, so we have a new guy coming in. We talked to him for 10 or 15 minutes. They have a ton of food. We did our best to make a dent into it and there was still a ton left.

On the way back to the room, we sat and listened to a jazz band. I’m not a huge jazz fan, but we listened for 30 minutes. We were seated under the stairs so we couldn’t see much.

I had enough food so we decided we were not going to go to dinner. We went back to the cabin. Mary ordered herself room service. Before we went to bed, Mary stepped out onto the balcony. She came in and said you have to look at all these stars. I went out there and was amazed at the number of stars you could see. In the past you're never able to see that many stars because of the light generated by the ship. I went out there and immediately saw the Belt of Orion. There's an app I have on my iPad which is called Skywalk. It gives you a view of the sky as you see it. It takes a little bit to get it configured but then you should be able to tell exactly what you're looking at. So I got it set up and I could clearly see the belt of Orion on the screen. I use this as a reference point to guess at what else we were seeing. I'm pretty sure we saw Jupiter and Mars. I couldn't tell, but I'm about 80% confident. We will have to look for other clear nights to see what else we can see. Stargazing has always been something I like to do.

We spent an hour out there and then we headed to bed. It had been another successful day.