I've gotten very lazy, I know. To recap what you've missed: Work, sleep, heat. And food.
Actually it's been a fairly eventful week or two. Allow me to indulge you:
After a crew drill in St. Lucia one of our lifeboats could not be retrieved from the water. Something was wrong with the mechanism that pulled the boat back out of the water. We typically leave St. Lucia around 17:00, but I noticed it was 20:00 and we still hadn't left yet. We couldn't leave without one of our lifeboats (Titanic anyone?) so we continued to sit in St. Lucia until the engineers could figure it out. I suggested we just tow it behind us but no one seemed to appreciate my suggestion. We finally set sail around 21:45. Keep in mind the guests had no idea what was happening and didn't know we were supposed to set sail much earlier so we HAULED to get to St. Croix on time. We typically cruise around 12 knots and at one point around midnight I noticed we were doing 22 knots! Oh and it turns out the lifeboat wasn't actually completely fixed. They pulled it out of the water and back up to Deck 5, but they couldn't retract it all the way back into the ship so part of it was hanging out over the water. Every port after St. Lucia they would put the lifeboat back in the water to work on it. I'm pretty sure it's fixed now.
Well, incase you missed it, Halloween happened. And incase you were wondering, yes, people love to celebrate Halloween on cruise ships (at least this one!). Sunday night we worked from midnight until 3:00 to decorate certain areas of the ship. We hung spider webs, set up projectors, piled up pumpkins, ect. Oh and we even built an awesome haunted house in the conference center. The guests awoke on Monday to a completely different looking ship. Monday night we had costume parties, parades and dances; all of which had to be recorded by yours truly. I picked up a Grim Reeper outfit in St. Thomas that I wore which made it a little difficult to operate the camera, but it was totally worth it for the looks I got from the guests.
This past Wednesday was the start of the crew olympics. Basically the different departments on the ship compete against each other in a variety of events. The first event was the Quest. Now the normal Quest gameshow that the guests attend can get pretty crazy, but crew Quests are about 100 times more insane. I'm actually surprised no one was injured from the two hundred or so people running around full speed in the Safari Club completing Quests. The next event is Dodgeball.
On Thursday I returned to the private island water park where I had gone my first week. Ricky (cruise director) treated the cruise division to a trip there as a way of saying thanks because our division has been having such high ratings. About 30 of us went and it was a ton of fun. I will try to post some pictures and video (internet is too slow). It was the last time we'll be in Aruba (major bummer) as our itinerary is changing in one week.
