Keeping Busy By Doing Nothing.

---

Geo: 8.50713, -132.205

We sleep in a little since we lost an hour of sleep with the time change. After breakfast, we're on our way to the room when a kitchen aid asks us if we want to go on a kitchen tour. OK. We enter through the same doors that our waiters exit from with our food when eating in the dining room. The equipment is basically the same as one would have in their home except that there are many and each one is huge in comparison. Our guide points out freezers that hold pallets of food, bread ovens stacked one on top of another and food prep areas where 8 workers can assemble deserts at once. 96 people work in the galley and 122 more service staff out in the dining room. The staff make most everything from scratch, including baking all bread. This deck 4 galley prepares the food for the dining room only. The Lido buffet upstairs has their own facility. The tour is quick, lasting less than 10 minutes. Now Mom checks out the $10 item sale on the ship while I go to the 11am "Life in the Mangroves" lecture at the theater. Even in my absence, Mom shows restraint and spends only $10. After that, we hang out at the pool. We lay in the sun for a bit but I'm out in 20 minutes. While the sunlight only peeks through the clouds occasionally, it's very hot when it does which seems the norm for this part of the world. I retreat to the shade, followed shortly thereafter by Karen herself.

We stop to check out the ship's photo department for the latest pictures and Karen struggles to pick our 4 best photos taken on the trip. Karen's already making lists of all the stuff she has to do when she returns home. She can't relax. She wanted to wash more clothes today but I stopped her. She will wash everything anyway, clean or dirty, when we get home. Dinner tonight will be in the dining room. After that, it's the 8pm show with virtuoso pianist Hyperion Knight. He plays all the classics like "Flight of the Bumblebee", Rhapsody in Blue" and many other classics. He's very good, however, we're old so we return to our stateroom where I do what I do, assemble the blog while watching the news and Mom putters around the room.

It's around 11 o'clock at night when she tells me she accidentally took the wrong medicine, having taken short acting insulin instead of long acting and this screws up her whole night. She drinks a coke and eats several small candy bars in our room, waiting for the worst. But it never comes. Her reading stays fairly constant although we monitor into the night.

Finally. Something exciting. Goodnight.

---