I have very long hair about which I am inordinately vain.

I am a swimmer.

I color my hair.

Now common wisdom would say my hair is so fried I’d have to cut it off. Or, that I must spend a million dollars on the special shampoos and conditioners. I don’t. That two dollar a bottle stuff works just fine.

Matter of fact, the one single thing I do to ensure that swimming doesn’t ruin my hair doesn’t really cost much in the way of money at all. You see, I do what they tell you and shower before I get into the pool, completely saturating my (rather porous) hair. This means that the water that has more of a chemical saturation can’t penetrate my hair as easily.

As a side note, I know a lot of people don’t shower before they get in the pool. It’s gross. They’re often the same people who complain about the “chlorine smell” or worse, think a swim can substitute for a bath. Well that smell isn’t actually chlorine. It’s a by-product of the filth the chlorine is breaking down, and it means you’re getting the pool nastier than the chemicals can keep up with. Yes, yes, the pool manager does test the water every hour or two and adjusts the chemicals going into the water to compensate for this. At least, they do in well-maintained pools. Even so, shower before you get in the damn pool. It helps reduce how much needs to be dumped into the water.

I like Shakespeare. Okay, I know. Who doesn’t? That’s on up there with “Pain hurts” for non-controversial statements. I’ll see a performance whenever I get the chance. I do watch the movies, but I like it better when I can actually see a play.

Up until I was in my early twenties, though, I read the plays, and while I enjoyed them okay, it wasn’t that big a thing. Read ‘em in school. Sure, sure, the teachers were competent. They got the students to read them aloud, at least.

I read Romeo and Juliet as a freshman in High School, same as about 90% of people educated in America.¹ But when we read Romeo and Juliet; we read an expurgated version with the (mildly) dirty bits taken out. Nope, I’m serious, we did. Go Stafford School board… I didn’t learn Shakespeare was often rather saucy until much later. Yeah, I thought Romeo and Juliet was kind of a cool story. Wasn’t as cool as The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, which we read after that, but it wasn’t as mind-bogglingly dull a Great
Expectations, either.²

I didn’t wind up touching Shakespeare again until I was a senior. We read Macbeth. I was in love. I even put aside some new Heinlein stuff I was reading to finish it, then re-read it. Loved, loved, loved it.³

But that was the sum total of any Shakespeare I experienced until I was in my early twenties. I got a volume of the Bard’s plays for my 20^th birthday and read a few. But I admit I didn’t get much into them.

Then, when I was twenty-two or so, my in-laws invited my husband and me to a Shakespeare in the Park event in DC at the Folger outdoor theater to see The Merry Wives of Windsor. My husband and I wanted to see it at least in part because an actor who’d appeared in a Star Trek movie was playing Sir John Falstaff.

Now, the connection between Shakespeare and Star Trek has been discussed once or twice⁴, so I’m not going to get too heavily into it other than to speculate that it’s probable that many people my age got into The Bard at least in part due to its influence.

But going to see a live performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor gave me a much better perspective on Shakespeare in general. Reading the plays is okay, and the movies are often good. But to really enjoy it, you need to see a good live performance. Now, a Luddite, I’m not. Technology is awesome and all, but there’s something about Shakespeare plays that just needs a stage, and it’s the way I prefer to experience The Bard’s work.

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¹And like some 90% of them studied it side by side with West Side Story.

² Other than being very fond of A Christmas Carol, I’m just not that into Dickens.

³ Yes, Throne of Blood is my favorite Kurosawa film, too.

⁴After all, you’ve never experienced Shakespeare until you’ve heard it in the original Klingon.

I have a wood stove, and while I love it, it has some of the drawbacks of something that uses ambient heat to raise the temperature in the house. The heat tends to stay in a single room.

When I was a child, our wood stove was in the basement in the laundry room. Sure, sure, there was a straight line from the wood stove up the stairs to heat the house, but still, when it was 90 in the laundry room it might be 60 upstairs.

Daddy rigged up a fan system that was controlled by a temperature switch to help with this. I never did pay attention to the details, other than knowing it existed, but that was enough to help me solve my own problem in my house.

My wood stove is in the jungle room, a plant-filled entryway to my house that leads into my kitchen through a large open doorway. It also has an open window frame leading into the dining room and living area of my home. Without a fan, I can heat the jungle room to around 80 without significantly warming much more than the kitchen. I like hanging out in the jungle room, as it has comfy chairs and it’s nice to be in a room with lots of windows and plants, but I’d rather get more efficient heat in the rest of my house!

I have a fan with a temperature control, though I can’t just set it to, say 65F. It’s just a wheel with no actual gauge, but that’s okay. I can put a thermometer next to it and set it to come on when the temperature gets where I want it, manually. Then, if I put the fan in the window leading to the rest of the house it automatically will blow the warm air from the jungle room into the living and dining room, making the wood stove a much more efficient source of heat for a larger part of the house. It’s also nice because we don’t have to turn it off at night. When the fire goes out and the temperature drops, it’ll turn off all by itself.

Yes, this is rigged with duct tape. Possibly next summer I’ll build some sort of fancy frame to insert into the window for it, but hey… it has a light side, a dark side and it binds the Universe together.

I got a Kindle for my birthday. I’ve been reading books electronically for years, so obviously as e-readers became more accessible, it was inevitable I’d want one.

I really, really like it. I’ve already read a couple of novels on it (I’m in the process of re-reading Snow Crash). I’ve also explored several of its features, but for me, it’s about the books.

All my Baen Free Library books, as well as several I’d bought from Baen are already loaded on it. Basically, if it was in a format Mobipocket could read and is not DRM protected, you’re golden. Yes, yes, you have to use the USB cable to do it, rather than download it directly to the device, but I don’t consider that a major problem.

And, of course, I’ve a plethora of books from the Gutenberg Project. They’re also happily nestled on my device.

That being said, yeah, yeah, I’m buying and downloading from Amazon, too. But it’s less than 15% of my electronic collection.

So, how’s the device versus the way I’d been reading on the netbook and my Android?

It’s superior the netbook and my phone for reading a book. The e-paper display does imitate a book better, and the fact that the screen is not backlit does make it much nicer to read in bright sunlight. It also means that there’s less of a battery drain. I read for hours at a time, so this is very significant. It’s lighter than my netbook, and has a larger screen than my phone – better imitating the positives of the paper book experience. It has 4GB of memory, but that’s effectively a little over 3GB for the user. To give some perspective? I have 197 novel-length books on my Kindle right now, and still have 2.8 GB free.

The Kindle also has a lot of “nifty features” that I probably won’t use much. Text to speech? I’m an audiobook addict and all, but it doesn’t replace a human performance. Oh yeah, audiobooks! I have an Audible account that I did wind up linking to my Amazon account. However, I’ll probably be pretty unlikely to use the device for listening to audiobooks. I still want a more portable device for that, as I tend to listen to audiobooks while I’m doing chores. Also, it doesn’t have a sleep timer, so it doesn’t serve my habit of listening to audiobooks as I fall asleep.

You can browse the web some from it. It’s okay, but my phone serves that purpose better for my on-the-go needs.

So, I don’t love the Kindle for the add-ons. I love it, but I love it because it’s very, very good at what it was designed for – to read books!

One of the delights of being Da Mama is to send a husband and child out on a shopping trip. Watching them screw up is fun. There is nothing more enjoyable than the anticipation of a soul-cleansing scream at the family for Doing It Wrong when being sent out shopping.

My parents understood this perfectly. Mom would write out a list on the back of an envelope and hand it to my father. Dad would take the envelope as importantly as a five year old sent to the corner store and go to the grocery store. The list would say:

• Butter
• Milk
• Eggs
• Cream
• Chocolate chips[1]

Simple, yes?

Well, we usually ate margarine on our bread, but Dad realized vaguely that margarine and butter weren’t quite the same thing. He’d stand perplexed in front of the dairy aisle for at least 20 minutes, while time was dribbling away to get the damned Toll House cookies done so that we could have food to feed our ravening hoard of relatives come some sacred holiday.

Daddy, a Captain in the Overthink Army, would get some weird oil product we’d never bought in our lives. Never mind that for the past 20 years of marriage, his wife had always used butter and only butter to bake those confections of delicious goodness, chocolate chip cookies.

Eggs were another conundrum. Should how many should he get? And what size? Does the color of the shell matter? These things are a terrible dilemma. Getting it wrong meant that he was not being a Very Useful Engine and a fate not to be borne.

As far as chocolate chips? Look, there’s only one type of chocolate chip. We all know that if you’re making Toll House Cookies, you only use Nestlé’s semi-sweet chocolate chips, even if they are encouraging third world mothers to starve their babies using watered down formula. You gotta have standards, people.

Did Daddy understand this? He did not. As far as he was concerned Hershey’s was the final name in chocolate[2]. But Hershey’s chocolate chips do not have the piquant bite of Nestlé’s, and the cookies would be All Ruined in the eyes of his children. Really. There’d be tears, weeping and refusal to eat cookies. Honest.

So, all in all, that was a lot of pressure to put on a man who might be able to program a missile to follow an escaping Godless Commie spy out of honest American airspace, but was helpless when he was faced with the complications of kitchenry.

The eyerolling at home was wonderfully entertaining.

Do I get this pleasure? No, I do not. If my son (to pick a person at random) in a fit of forgetfulness while contemplating whether Sonic the Hedgehog could beat Starscream in a battle to the death forgets to bring his grocery list with him, I just get a text message and a request to email it. Worse? If the guys aren’t sure what they’re supposed to bring home, do they guess like any normal male so I can roll my eyes at how little they understand about how the home is run?

No.

I get a phone call.

I am deprived of the little pleasures. Pity me and my sad existence.

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[1]Mom only sent Dad out for small lists when she was in the middle of doing Serious Baking in anticipation of guests arriving the next day.

[2] Households with interfaith marriages do have their challenges, don’t they?

I’m not wearing purple today.  No, not because I don’t care about ending bullying.  I care.  I just didn’t have anything purple clean.

So, here’s the deal.  My way of helping to end bullying is to call kids on it when I see them doing it, offering kids a safe place in my house that’s a no-bully zone, and if someone who has been bullying behaves him or her self, why there’s a place at my kitchen counter for cookies and help with homework for them, too.

Not hyperbole.  I’ve stopped kids from bullying (throwing rocks, actually), offered a safe place for kids who felt unsafe on the street, helped with homework, fed kids snacks and meals, and a former bully (the rock thrower) is a regular guest at my table with the understanding that he has to at least be non-destructive to the people around him to keep the privilege.

Purple is cool.  But that’s the first step.

Think about what you can do for Step Two, then go do that.

We spent the fourth morning touring Nassau.  This is where I really wish I’d had a chance to do my research.  My knowledge of Nassau (or more correctly, New Providence) begins with about 1716 and ends in 1720.  Yes, the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, Ned Teach, Anne Bonny, Jack Rackham, Mary Reade and Woodes Rogers.  An interesting time, but a whole country can hardly be defined by a bunch of murdering thieves, no matter how romantically they’re painted.

So, I was quite excited to get to see some of Nassau and learn some history.  Obviously, in a three hour tour, you’re not going to learn too much, but we saw some forts and got an idea of how Bahamians feel about their home, how proud they are of being a young and independent country, and found myself a bit concerned at how depenedent they are on tourism. (Though, what in hell can one expect from an island 7 miles wide?  The fact that it’s beautiful is their resource!)

The areas I saw were more well to do than I’d expected. One of my strongest memories of a Caribbean island was Puerta Plata in the Dominican Republic back when I was fifteen and cruise ships were still going there.  We didn’t see any tin can roofs -just homes appropriate to the climate, narrow streets that would have scared me to drive on, but were fine for the people who did it every day, and lots of government buildings and banks.

We toured Paradise Island, saw the Atlantis resort and some homes of the wealthy ex-pats.  I felt kind of weird about how that was emphasized in the tour.  However, the driver left a local talk show on, which was awesome, as I got to hear what people who lived there were thinking about, at least a gloss over of the politics of the place and was really impressed by how the host was really breaking bad on rudeness.  I think at least in the public arena, a certain graciousness of behavior is more valued, and I think we could take a cue from the Bahamians that I heard on that show.

The driver had not been told that we needed to be back to the ship by 11, so we were quite late, and would have held up the ship sailing.  (If you book a shore excursion through a cruise ship, and the party is late, you don’t get left.  You book it on your own and yes, you’re on your own).

We spent the afternoon laying by the pool after we sailed out of Nassau.  Dinner was shrimp and lobster with a mushroom pastry appetizer and a dark rich chocolate souffle with cream for desert.  Ummmm.

After dinner we had the best time dancing at a 70s party.  Now our cruise director (His first name was Jimmy and I THINK his last name was Rhodes) had enough energy to power New York.  He was very invested in people playing, which was so cool.  All the 70s disco favorites were featured with dancers, singers, and Jimmy in a police uniform from the Village People to do some favorites from that era.  He was great at getting people up and out on the dance floor, doing conga lines and all that.  We had the best time.

We were able to sit in the bow of the ship eating lunch while The Enchantment of the Seas docked at Nassau.  It was awesome to watch.  There’s a dock that can take about four cruise ships. To give you a general idea, a cruise ship that is full has about 2,500-3,000 passengers.  The port area of Nassau really isn’t that large, so you can do the math in terms of the activity around the port.

We decided that we couldn’t miss the opportunity to go snorkeling.  It was great.  We sailed out on a catamaran out to a reef and played with the fishies for about an hour — seeing the most amazing variety of tropical fish and coral reef with brain coral, delicately-colored blue, or zebra fish (among MANY others) and enjoying the tropical sea.  We sailed back drinking rum punch, though  and I limited ourselves to a cup each even though considerably more was being urged on us.  Oh we were being sooo smart, weren’t we?

Yeah, right.

I was 15 the last time I’d been in the Caribbean, and had been with my parents who are pretty experienced travelers.  So, while I knew that people who make their living from tourists can be pretty aggressive salesmen, I’d forgotten how much so!

After we got off the catamaran, we wandered briefly around an open air market.  I wanted to buy a sarong, and did, from a woman who gave me $5 off because I was such a sexy lady <snerk>.  Yes, I probably could have bargained her down, but considered the price I paid plenty fair for a sarong.

Then this woman wandering around the market came right up to and put a necklace around my neck and said, “Now you a Bahama Mama, honey.” then turned to , putting another necklace around his neck, pronouncing him a Bahama Papa.  She asked for a donation “for the children” for the necklaces.   Yeah, we’re suckers.  We gave her a ten spot. 

Did that put us on our guard enough?

Hell no!

I got a lot of offers to get my hair braided.  Now, I’ve always rather wanted to try some of the more elaborate cornrow styles and figured this was a good chance to do so.  So I asked how much it would cost, and the woman charged $7.00 a braid.  I don’t even go to the beauty salon to get my hair colored, so I don’t know how much this type of thing is worth in real life, mind you, nor did I realize how MANY braids my hip-length and very thick hair would take.   I was figuring she’d do maybe ten or twelve cornrows, not a series of microbraids in the back and cornrows in the front.

I have nearly fifty braids in my hair.  Yes, I have a hairstyle that I paid over $300 for.  I could have argued, but I didn’t.  Why?  I haven’t the faintest idea what the going rate really is, and I didn’t want to cheat her out of pique.  However, it took her about two hours to do it, and I’m not really sure that most hairdressers charge $150/hr to work in an open-air market.

That said, she did a great job on the hairstyle.  It looks good and is damned convenient for a cruise, especially the wind.  In fact, if I find out this is really cheaper to get done in Stateside hair salons, I’ll probably get it done like this again for cruises and/or beach trips. 

I had tilapo for dinner on a bed of Japanese ratatouille (meaning they put ginger in it.  Yes, it was delicious). 

After dinner we went to a show with movie themed music and dancing.  The concept was goofy but damn the performers were outstanding.  The female singers especially had some pipes, let me tell you what!

On  Day Two, our first full day at sea, the swells were still in the 2.5 to 3m range, so we were finding that many of our fellow passengers were pretty seasick. Neither Peter nor I were effected, which was something of a surprise.  Both of us have been seasick before.  Peter on a fishing boat and me back on my first cruise in quite flat seas.  (Not, throwing up in  my case, but certainly mildly queasy and not feeling like eating anything).

We had breakfast at the Windjammer again, and were able to get a seat right in the bow.  Since it was on Deck Nine, we started calling it Nine Forward.  We sat there for breakfast and lunch almost every day.

The Enchantment of the Seas does have a library, so we snagged a couple of books and headed over to the solarium for some sunning, swimming, a drink and reading.  But, the noise of the belly flop contest got us curious, so we had to go inspect it.

Here’s the thing about cruises — if you go prepared to play, you’ll have a great time.  The cruise director for the Enchantment of the Seas is quite the party guy, so there were constant games, silly contests, good shows… you name it.  He had a real sense of fun and theater as well as a talent for getting people to play along with him.

After the belly flop contest, we hung out in the main pool. Remember those rough seas?  Well, even though the ship wasn’t really equipped with a wave pool… we had a wave pool.  The pitching of the ship was enough to make the water slosh back and forth in the pool enough that you could body surf nearly the length of it.  While we were doing so and laughing our fool heads off, we met a lady from Fairfax, VA who was also on her 20th anniversary celebration.  She’d gotten married Sept. 15th, the same as we had.   We gushed a bit about that, how beautiful the weather was on our wedding day (and it was gorgeous that day!), and had a good time chatting.

Dinner was formal.   and I clean up good, if I do say so myself.  He wore a tux and I wore a simple black gown with pearls.  At dinner, I had escargot just because I’d never tried them.  Mostly they tasted of butter and garlic and I can think of other foods as a butter and garlic delivery system I’d like better.  Peter has duck for the main course and I had prime rib.  They used a hint of nutmeg in the potatoes.  Amazingly, it really worked.

We got in one dance before seeing a goofily written show with some very skilled performers.

And dammit, I’m NOT on a boat now.  :(  I wanna go back!

[Edit: There have been complaints that there was not a pic of both of us.

We got to the airport a bit too early, but that was okay.  The shuttle took us to the Port of Baltimore without a hitch and we were among some of the first to board Royal Caribbean’s Enchantment of the Seas.  We were scheduled to go to Bermuda, but due to Hurricane Igor, we were re-routed to Nassau in the Bahamas, and we were given a significant shipboard credit to make up for the inconvienience.  Oh pity us… :)

It’s been a little over 25 years since I’d been on a cruise,  and when I went, Daddy had handled all the details.  I was a bit nervous about making sure we’d gotten all the paperwork done, and everything arranged properly.  It was, so getting on board was no problem.  We walked up the gangway and I was so excited I about cried.  Have I mentioned I love cruises?

We had to wait to go to our staterooms, which makes sense, since it had probably been less than three hours since someone else was in them. So we went to the Windjammer Cafe, the ships buffet-style dining area, for lunch.  The food was better than you usually get on a buffet, but that’s pretty much par for the course on a cruise.

After that we kind of hit the wall and went to our stateroom for a nap.  Since we’d gotten up at four in the morning, this proved to be a good idea.

When we got up, of course we had a pre-embarkation lifeboat drill.  This is not actually a joke, and they’ll hustle you to your assigned lifeboat station if  you don’t go. I heard a lot of snark about how women and children first was no longer in effect from fellow passengers.  (It’s not about equal rights, you nitwits.  It’s about survival of the species… Jesus!)   A lot of people wandered off after some instructions but before the Captain dismissed them.  That got under my fingernails, even though I know a cruise ship isn’t exactly military discipline.  It made me feel a little cold to realize that in a real emergency, some people would have gotten some harsh lessons damn fast.

Then we watched the ship set sail.  The Enchantment of the Seas is about the usual size these days for a cruise ship, which means less than a meter of clearance under the Key Bridge.  I found out later that the Captain finds sailing out of Baltimore an irritation because of that.  (No KIDDING.  Makes a ship even more a slave to tides than usual).

First afternoon was pool and Jacuzzi.   The Enchantment of the Seas has a solarium where young kids aren’t allowed (not that there were many on this cruise), and was a great place to relax, hang out and watch the Chesapeake go by as we headed to the atlantic.

We had dinner at the late seating, and oddly enough were the only people at our table the whole cruise.  While this didn’t exactly destroy our fun, I was mildly disappointed as a lot of the fun of a cruise is getting to know other people.  We had a great dinner.  I had watermelon gazpacho (which I’d never tried before) and sea bass.  Peter had a shrimp appetizer with quesadillas.  I adore the hand and foot service you get on a cruise, but it’s especially nice in the dining room, and we had a fantastic waiter.  We went to bed right after dinner because we were dead on our feet.  Because of Hurricane Igor, the seas had quite signifcant swells (2.5-3 meters), but it felt like we were being rocked to sleep.

Have I mentioned I love being at sea?