I’m currently in the Charlotte airport on my way back to Indianapolis. It’s hard to believe that I’ve left my home for the past 8 months. Anyways, I just want to say that my current address to receive mail is:

924 Lindberg Rd.
Anderson, IN 46012

Once I get to my next ship I’ll update with a new address.

Has the last 8 months of my life been a success? Well the answer is a resounding YES. I haven’t changed the world, been hired by National Geographic or cured cancer, but I have done a few particularly good things. I have been to more countries in the last 8 months than the rest of my life. And that’s saying something. I’ve made a lot of GREAT friends. I’ve made (and saved) some money. I’ve learned a lot of great skills in photography, sales and basic dealing with people skills. I’ve had SO much fun.

I’ve learned a lot about people too. Living with so many different kinds of people really forces you to get to know other types of people and learn to either like it or deal with it. I think working on a cruise ship is a great way to broaden your horizons and stretch yourself out of your comfort zone in a big way. My next contract isn’t official yet, but I’m pretty sure I know what it will be. I’ll post about that later once it’s official. I do know that I’m coming back to Indiana for sure on February 27th, which is this Sunday! I’ll have around 6 weeks vacation to sleep, eat and see friends. Don’t ask me to do any work, I won’t.

For the rest of this week, I’m gonna be having a lot of fun. I’ll be going to a nice waterfall in Jamaica, going around Cayman with Mrs. Fraizer, hanging out in Cozumel with friends, and enjoying the last night on the ship in the OB. I’m gonna miss all you my Ryndam friends, the cool thing is though that I’ll see many of you again on another ship.

And now I must return to the ship or I’ll be left behind here in Keywest…

My contract has been extended one week because of some inspections that the ship is going through. Apparently I need to be around for this, so I’m staying on one extra week for that. This means I’ll be going back to Indiana on February 27th. I’m gonna have about 6 weeks break and then my next contract starts on April 13th. I’ll be joining the Volendam in Singapore and traveling north around Asia for about a month before the ship goes over to Alaska. After Alaska it will be going down to Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand. So I’ll have another very interesting contact coming up.

As I mentioned in my last post, I participated in the Miss Ryndam contest. I didn’t win, but I sure had a lot of fun. Apparently I was in the running to win but I didn’t change my dress between the talent portion and the portion where you answer a question. Apparently I was supposed to be wearing a different dress for that, but I didn’t know. Anyways I had a ton of fun and I know most of the people there wanted me to win…why…I’m not sure. I will say however that since the show, every single day I have had someone tell me that I make a beautiful girl. The first two days I couldn’t keep track of how many people told me that, but it’s been more than a week and people are still commenting on it. Don’t tell anyone but…. I secretly liked it. Shhhh…. The sound system was screwed up so I didn’t do as good at the dancing part as I would have liked, as I couldn’t really hear my song. But there is a video and I’m currently trying to figure out how to convert a .vob file to .mov without buying a program to do it. Once that is figured out I’ll upload a video to Youtube. In the meantime a few photos will have to suffice.

Today is the first day that I got a full day off. We’ve been having this competition the last 4 weeks in the photo department on who gets the most Black Label bookings, who sells the most photo packages and things like that. Well I won and so the reward is that I get a whole day off. My goodness, let me tell you how nice it is to get a whole day where I don’t have to talk to passengers, deal with the printer, or touch a camera. It’s been super nice and I feel truly refreshed.

This coming Friday is the Ms Ryndam competition, aka Miss Ryndam. This is a cross dressing Miss America type competition. Each department is supposed to have somebody competing, so I’m going to be the cross dressing addition to this year’s Ms Ryndam competition for the photo department. Oh yes, it is going to be quite a sight. I’m not sure exactly what type of dress I’m going to be wearing, but I will indeed be in some sort of dress. There’s also a talent competition. I wouldn’t spill the beans if I expected any of you to be in attendance, but as you won’t, I plan to sing along with Vitas, a Russian singer. The particular song that I’ll be singing with is the very high pitched screaming that he does. I’ll also definitely come up with some super talented dance moves to go with the song and I’m sure it will be a treat for everyone who happens to be at this competition. There might even be some video recording that takes place, so I might be able to post a link to the video on YouTube some time in the future, but please don’t hold your breath for that. Anyways it’s gonna be a lot of fun to be a complete idiot in front of all my friends….

Right….

If you think of my 8 month contract as a really long 5 day week, and the time that I get off between contracts as my really long 2 day weekend, it is SOOO Friday. My 8 month contract has exactly 245 days, and I have currently worked 204 of them. That means I’m 83.265306% done. Now if you think of that in terms of a 40 hour week, that would be 33.3061224 hours. If you also assume I worked from 9-5 5 days a week, that would mean it is currently 10:18 on Friday morning. My weekend is almost here.

I bet I saw more places this week than you.

Also, Happy New Year! I’ve done and seen a lot of crazy things in 2010 and I imagine 2011 is going to be twice as crazy.

A REALLY big boat. For comparisons sake, here is a photo of my ship, the Ryndam, next to the Allure of the Seas, which is the largest cruise ship in the world. I like to think that I am on a relatively large ship, but it is just that, relatively. My ship holds 1250 passengers, and the Allure holds 7000. The Allure has an ice skating rink, rock climbing and well just a lot more things than my ship. They have cabins above the top of my ship. Yeah, there’s a bit of a difference.

Also, Merry Belated Christmas! I worked for about 13 hours Christmas day so I didn’t really have much of a chance to be very festive. Honestly it didn’t really feel like much of a Christmas and I feel a little like I lost it this year. I kinda felt the same way about Thanksgiving because there was no football on TV or playing football with family, or really good food. The food was just kinda normal. For Christmas though I did get a pretty fancy meal. All the crew were invited to a Christmas banquet and I had lobster and some nice steak. The best thing about Christmas though was the I got to see my parents and grandma and a few other family members. They drove down to Tampa where my uncle lives and so my parents and grandma were able to take a tour of the ship. That was great.

I’ve got less than 2 months left on the ship, I’m getting excited about a break.