Day 2- At Sea

The Glory of Room Service

This morning we had breakfast, not quite in bed, but near it. Every night they give you a card to fill out, with your options for room service, which you hang on your door, and in the morning the food appears, which is really quite miraculous. The choices are limited, and you do have to remember to ask for milk for your tea, but those aren’t what I’d call serious deficiencies.
Today was a sea day, which meant that there wasn’t a whole lot to do. The Regal Princess is a slightly older ship, smaller than the absolutely huge new ones, with correspondingly fewer activities- most of the things planned for the day seemed to involve playing board games with the cruise staff. That was fine by me; I found a quiet spot (in the casino, no less) and settled in read and write for most of the morning (translation: read and play with my hair, stare out the window, think about starting a jigsaw puzzle, check my watch and get about a paragraph down on paper, most of which I’ll probably have to cut in the second draft). Megan’s day was apparently less productive, and she seems to be getting kind of antsy. I don’t think she has as much practice at sloth as I do. In the afternoon we attended the art auction, where the salesman tried to convince all the people who had shown up for the free booze that the cheap reproductions of ugly paintings were worth multiple hundreds of dollars, with some success. I only kind of watched this, because I was involved with the Internet Problem.
Here’s the problem: Internet access for the ship is provided via a connection to a very temperamental satellite. So when I bought my (non-refundable) access code, $10.50 for a half hour, and I sat down to use it, I found I was going nowhere fast. Okay, I thought, I’ll try again later. And I did. I tried again, and again, until Megan was giving me such a hard time about it that I had to retaliate by pointing out how many times she talked about wanting to have cell phone service so she could talk to her boyfriend. Anyway, as of this writing I have yet to actually confirm that this ‘internet’ thing actually exists, but I remain hopeful. I hear they have a library in Haines.
Our two missing people turned up at dinner tonight- an elderly mother and her middle-aged son- and I have to say they aren’t much of an improvement over the empty chairs. The mother isn’t so bad but the guy is a real waste of oxygen, a loser who thinks he’s an alpha male, with the world’s most rudimentary sense of humor and without two brain cells to rub together. Of course he’s sitting next to me.