Walk the Walk

Well, the word is that the Pacific is experiencing some low pressures that are abnormal, and we are experiencing the swells that are a consequence.  As you can see above, most of us have learned to lean into the sway of the ship.  This guy is actually standing perpendicular, and the ship has rolled so much to make him appear leaning.

The student stores took a hit overnight with lots of stuff falling off the shelves.  The conversations at breakfast this morning were mostly stories of how little sleep everyone got and what moved in their cabins. Everything moved in our cabin and much of it ended up on the floor.  I'm glad I started with putting it there myself.  Nancy got up during the night and stood by the bed and slid all the way across the room to the cabin door. She grabbed the door handle, or she would have slid all the way back as the ship rolled the opposite direction.

The good news is that we had the books in the library stabilized so that only a few fell off the shelf.  I wish I could say the same for the library computer--it was on the floor (but it was fine, Mary).  That would have been a good advertisement for Dell.
And, ironically, when I turned on my MP3 player at the gym this morning, the song that came up was: "Wasn't that a Mighty Storm

As I walked around the ship yesterday, the students were having great conversations--about their classes, about their cultures, about their plans for port trips, about sexuality and about diversity.  There is also a constant list of procedural things to do. We thought we had spent the last 4 months taking care of everything, but everyone still had forms to fill out for our Brazil passports since they couldn't be done very far in advance. We had some of our remaining trip requests due, and we are still discovering little things about the ship.  I met a student--Keith--this week, and he had gotten accepted for the program on Jan. 6.  He got all the things done in a few days that most of us had taken weeks to do, and I'm talking about shots, passports, and packing.  Keith will go far in life.

I've started marking off days on our big ship calendar in the library since we don't really have a reference point to know what day it is. No Global studies today, so everyone is getting their teams together for the global studies project where they will create a sustainability lesson plan for high schools.

My birder friends will want to see the picture of the Albatross -there were three of them yesterday.