8.13

I apologize to my thousands of readers, but it's been a few days (4) since I've written anything. I honestly haven't had the time or energy at the end of the day to open my computer to write. Even right now I'm struggling to remember what happened the past few days, but in a nut shell here are some highlights.

I continued to work with the head broadcast tech to make some changes to the broadcast room. We really cleaned up the place and it looks and functions better than it did before! This week I created the Cruise in Review DVD entirely by myself. Val was usually around the ship if I needed assistance, but I did it all myself so I know what to expect when the extra techs leave tomorrow. For my first time things went pretty smoothly. We are all still getting used to the workflow with the new cameras and we definitely still haven't figured out the best process yet, but hopefully in the upcoming weeks I can work to find the best procedure.

Because the new cameras can only shoot 16:9 (widescreen), I am going to slowly work to replace the old stock footage that is in the Cruise in Review with new widescreen footage that I shoot so everything matches and is the same quality. There is footage in the CIR that is from the ship's maiden voyage in 1993 so you can imagine the quality difference! It's going to be a fairly big project to reshoot the entire DVD, but it will be rewarding to really make a difference in the product. I had a meeting with the traveling broadcast tech today and he gave me the go ahead to shoot any projects I can dream up and if I make them generic enough (as in it would make sense to play the piece on ships other than just the Serenade) it could potentially broadcast fleet wide! He also told me that there's a good chance I won't be on the Serenade my entire contract, as he'd like to put me on a bigger ship where I could work on even more projects. We'll see what happens!

The highlight of my week happened on Wednesday (I think) when I had a free afternoon to get off the ship in Aruba. I signed up for a crew tour. The ship offers tons of different tours/trips/explorations that guests can sign up to do while in each port. There are a million different things like diving, fishing, hiking, airplane rides etc. Well I found out the crew can also sign up for these tours at a MEGA discounted price. Sweet! In Aruba there was a crew tour, meaning the trip isn't even offered for guests, but only to crew. We went to a water park on a private island that had just recently opened, which is why the tour isn't available for guests yet.

IT. WAS. AWESOME. For $40 we stepped off of the ship and were picked up by a charter bus which drove us to the boonies (there were a lot of cacti and at times I thought I was in Texas) and then suddenly we arrived at a dock. We went to this hut and were given wrist bands which granted us access to EVERYTHING! We hopped on a small boat and motored over to the island. It was really windy and the small boat was really rocking in the waves. It was a lot of fun and we got wet from the waves before we even went to the water park! There were probably 20 of us and it was mostly cast from the shows and cruise staff as those were the people that had some time off. Once on the island we were literally like little kids.

The wrist bands let you do anything and everything. The food was free, the drinks were free (even alcoholic) as were all the activities! They had a water park structure similar to The Boardwalk at HP with slides and water gun things all over the place. They also had the big dumping bucket which was a crowd favorite. Aside from the water park, they also had a huge snorkeling area, banana boat rides (you're towed behind a speed boat on a banana shaped inner tube), private beaches, beach volleyball, a diving excursion thing where they had a bus and other automobiles sunken to explore and a bunch of other things I didn't get to see. Oh did I mention free food?

I received my first Caribbean sunburn while snorkeling. Yes mom, I had put on a bunch of sun screen before the water park, but realized (after it was too late) that going down the slides on my back probably wiped it all off. Well I snorkeled for about an hour and as you can imagine my back was bobbing under the sizzling sun all that time. Yeah… it's pretty red but actually hasn't been that painful! On the plus side, the snorkeling was amazing! I some really cool coral and massive fish which I was told by people who had done a lot of snorkeling in the past were some of the biggest fish they'd seen! I'm on currently on the hunt to buy an underwater camera so hopefully I'll have it for my next excursion!

We returned to the ship around 1630 and I really just wanted to take a nap, but had work to do before dinner. That evening I was going "out" to dinner at Portofino's, one of the fancy restaurants on the ship. Because my team won the Quest game last week we were given a free dinner! The dinner also served as a going away dinner for two members of the cruise staff who are leaving/transferring. There were about eight of us at dinner, the food was amazing and it was a really fun time.

This evening I received my own set of keys, cards and a phone so I have officially replaced the other broadcast tech. I also ran the remote cameras and switcher for the farewell show which was really cool to do. It's hard to use the joystick to manipulate the cameras in a fluid motion as you're also directing the show in your head, switching between cameras, graphics and switching the camera controls from camera to camera, but I started to get a feel for it towards the end of the show and look forward to producing future shows!

Tomorrow starts my first week of "normal" duties so we'll see how it feels. No wait, scratch that, I just remembered we have immigration for the entire crew tomorrow morning. It seem the schedule never turns to true "normal."