With yesterday being our overnight in Barcelona, many people are feeling a bit rough today. I was joking this morning that there was a reason the buffet had fried chicken on the main line for lunch today (“carbs, god please give me carbs!”) for myself I found I simply had no desire to party shore-side. Barcelona is an awesome city and one day I will have to ‘do’ it properly, but for me that requires the exact right group of people and the exact right set of circumstances – and I just wasn’t feeling it. Besides which, Spain is pricey and I’m already over budget for this month.
Not to mention it was my turn for gangway duty this morning. 7am found a handful of us representing each department waving and smiling and thanking the guests as they left us. All that was going through most of our heads at the time was that the sun wasn’t’ even up yet and we could still be asleep. In fact if it hadn’t been my turn on the rotation then I could have slept until something ridiculous like noon since it was Shadow’s morning on. Alas, the things we have to do for this amazing job sometimes.
That said, it was probably one of the most relaxing embark days I’ve had in a long long time. Since Shadow needed to do the admin and prep work alone so that we were certain that she could do it alone (she is, after all, still technically a trainee), it meant that I had large chunks of the afternoon off. A lot of this was obviously spent catching up with my big brother, the rest of it was spent playing utterly mindless games of solitaire and watching the X-files. I don’t dare get out my embroidery on embark day because you’re never really sure if you might get called away for something and since I lay out my work on my roomie’s bunk (she has the bottom bunk whereas I am relegated to the top), I don’t like to run the risk of having my stuff all over her space if she wants to come back and sleep.
That said, most of the day I spent running back and forth to work. As it turns out I don’t do well with that much time off, so – even though I didn’t have to be up there – I was forever going upstairs, fixing stuff, fixing more stuff, going away again. Shadow said I was like the book fairy, she’d come back up to shift and everything would be put away.
This is what happens when Shaughnessy has too much time on her hands…