Can you Keep A Secret? – Homer, Alaska – [08/08/2018]

Posted on August 9, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

This is a standard Alaska run, and standard Alaska runs follow something of a formula. Get up, go teach, go to show, come home. Nice and easy, on occasion somewhat …dull? No, that’s not the right word, just…routine.

Every so often, its’ really nice when something comes along to break the routine. Especially when it turns out to be something that makes you laugh.

The Cruise Director needed an extra panel member for tonight’s game show. The game shows on board are…somewhat ridiculous. Which is what makes them fun. Tonight’s was “Secret Identities” which involved having a sign put above my head with a name that I then had to guess. At one point I was Marylin Monroe, and then at another I was…a plate of chicken nuggets? Yup, you read that right, a plate of chicken nuggets.

You can tell how ridiculous this whole thing got.

But sometimes a ridiculous is a really good thing. It’s not that I don’t laugh normally, I actually laugh more than I used to these days, but last night was the first time in ages I’ve laughed that much.

Impossible to explain unless you were there…but for a while “Cornish game hen” is going to make me giggle.

Of all the chicken-things in the world you come up with Cornish game hen?

It made sense in my head!!!

I am absolutely convinced the world is in need of more silliness (the good kind).

Just doing my bit!

 

 

Posted in Steam Heat 2018, Theme Events | 1 Comment

Hope – Ketchikan, Alaska – [08/01/2018]

Posted on August 2, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

Every so often you get someone wandering into your life that you actually have the opportunity to help. Really actually help. The last time this happened for me it was when I had a student who was legally blind, I set him up on how to use the digital assistant on his computer so that he could get back in touch with his grandkids via voice dictation, and he – and his daughter – cried. Before that it was the gentleman who had me type his emails every night on the world cruise, and by the end of that voyage it felt like I knew his daughter and his cat both.

Tonight, a fellow wandered into my Q&A session. A little confused, a little confident, a little lost…a lot somehow…sad. As it turned out, his wife passed away a year ago, and he is on this trip to try and distract himself from the terrible sadness of a house that’s now empty. As it is he’s trying ot learn everything, all this new stuff that he now doesn’t have anyone to help him learn, or anyone to learn it for. Something about this man…touched me. His requests weren’t difficult, he only wanted to know how to load his pictures from his phone onto his laptop; so I showed him that, and how ot make them bigger so they’re easier to see, how to delete the ones he didn’t need. Just little stuff, but …he said I had given him a little bit of hope.

Hope, I gave someone hope…

I’ve said this many times before, and I’ll say it many times again: sometimes I hate ship life, the hours are long and the days are often hard, and sometimes even the work you love is totally thankless…

But sometimes…in fact most of the time…

Freya do I ever love my job….

Posted in Below the waterline, Steam Heat 2018 | 1 Comment

Riverside – Ketchikan, Alaska – [07/19/2018]

Posted on July 22, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

When you’ve been to Alaska as many time as Amras and I have, its’ easy to think that you’ve run out of things to see. But there’s always something – even if it’s just walking around enjoying truly fresh air. Today we decided to head out to the part of town that we never really visit, because it’s past the tourist area – but only 15 minutes away from the ship’s dock is the Totem Heritage Center , which houses the collection of the only 44 original totems in Alaska. They are old, and weather beaten, but they are still breathtaking – kept carefully inside a museum, tucked safely out of the elements, they are no longer painted and colourful – except one or two small traces of black and blue paint on the faces. I was startled that they allowed photography, and was still very careful to turn off my flash.

Right next to the heritage center is the city park – which I had never been too. Small but beautiful, it’s full of wandering ponds and tiny waterfalls that make the kind of sound we really miss out here. Something about rushing water makes me feel incredibly at home. And no, living on the water doesn’t have the same soundtrack. There’s something different about it. I swim in the ocean for hours, but I think I could sit by the river for days. There is a river that runs through Ketchikan, and at certain points, which gave me the chance to get some really nice pictures! Also, next door to the city park is a salmon hatchery (not to be confused with a farm, I actually found out that it is illegal to farm finned fish in Alaska) – so I now have a bunch of pictures of little itty bitty fish! They will make an excellent opening shot for this season’s memory reel.

Beyond the main street of town, it’s obvious how much things have changed. The shop where Amras and I spent hours playing pinball has closed it’s doors, as has the music store and the new age shop I used to visit all the time. They’ve been replaced by other shops in some cases, but are just as frequently empty store fronts, which I find very sad. It’s as if no one wants to bother coming up the road past the big tourist places – that’s a shame, because there’s a lot of cool stuff up there. One of the local movie rental places is going out of business so we were able to pick up a bunch of new games ,and I now finally own Inside Out, which makes me possibly more happy than it should.

And all the pictures I took at the museum came out nearly completely black because I had the wrong settings but hey…it’s a learning experience right!?

 

Posted in Alaska, Steam Heat 2018, Summer Contracts | 1 Comment

Wayward Musings – Seattle, USA – [07/16/2018]

Posted on July 17, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

Hey look, no cryin’
Though they’ve got one foot out the door
I could be crying’
It ought to hurt a little more
I could resent them, try to prevent them
Whatever for…?

Disclaimer: this has NOTHING to do with anything specific really, just in case anyone ends up wondering, this is just musing on a theme…that is spun from something completely different.

There are some people in your life, that no matter how much you care about them are not meant to stay in your life. Some people simply change too much, perhaps in some ways get beaten down too much, and that leaves them scarred and resentful and you have to ask yourself – can you really handle that level of toxicity in someone you once cared so deeply for. Once loved. You might know that person is there somewhere, and I am a big believer in people being brought back, but there comes a point when you have to accept that even if that is true, that person can no longer be retrieved.

I am …terrible…with keeping in touch. Since I went out to sea my number of true friends back home has dwindled alarmingly and that is mostly – if not totally – my fault. And my job’s fault. It’s difficult and busy out here, and most times lines of communication are literally unavailable. We are an insulated community and reaching out is not always even available to us. So yes, I have fallen by the wayside of most people’s lives. Sometimes even including my own. But there have always been a steadfast few who get it – who understand that this is not a perfect world, and I can’t always do exactly what I want when I want (who can) and that I honestly do the best with what I have. To those few I give everything I’ve got available, I can’t give more than that. No one can.

And when I lose one of those people, in a way that is painful, and probably not reversable, …there is a sorrow there that is …odd. I am sad, yes. But the truth is in these cases almost everyone involved has  somehow been fighting the battle, have been trying to save the situation for so long now, that there is a huge part of me that is weary enough to be relieved in the motion of putting down my sword and raising my hands…and backing away.

I cannot give more than what I have. I acknowledge that what I have may not always be enough, and few know exactly how sad I get about that, how much I wish it were different.  But it’s not, and I can’t. As quite a few of my dear friends are prone to day – I do not have enough spoons.

I started this blog as a means of countering the fact that I am terrible at keeping in touch in other ways. Every single one of the people who is important to me (or even just that I think would be interested) has – at one point or another – been given the link and the password. You can even sign up to get the posts by email. The idea being that I can put the big updates here, and it provides one central place for everyone who wants to keep in touch with me to do so. Something that is quick and easy to access and respond to.

That really really is the best I can usually do.

I’m so sorry if that isn’t enough, I’m so sorry if you need more from me and I am unable to give it. But this is what I have…given my current (not at all negative) circumstances of life, love and employment (that last one is really the one that messes up communication the most).

And for those of you that I have lost, without any intention of doing so, know that I miss you, and you will always ALWAYS have a place in my heart, and be welcome there.

Posted in Below the waterline, Reflections | 2 Comments

Tigers and Bears and….oh….my – Anchorage, Alaska – [07/09/2018]

Posted on July 9, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

I may not be the biggest fan of zoos, but I do value their educational possibilities. Moreover, most of the zoos in Alaska are primarily rescue operation – these are animals that have been injured or near death and cannot be released into the wild. So instead they serve as ambassadors to the rest of the world and its visitors (and I think we all qualify as visitors to this world, if we are truly honest with ourselves). And sometimes those lessons come in the most unexpected of ways…

Anchorage presented us with much more of the usual Alaskan weather than we had enjoyed in the last few ports. It was cloudy and threatening rain, but thankfully not too cold. Not shorts weather by any means, but not so cold that you felt like you needed a parka. Anchorage has a lot to offer, but most of it is a long way out of town, and neither one of us is exactly rolling in extra funds right now. I had been trying to tabulate whether or not I could afford a cab out to the zoo when I realized that there was probably a free shuttle from the visitor’s center. Thankfully I was right. Also, it turns out that the price of the tickets was negatable when compared to what was inside.

The Alaska zoo is a tiny place, at least it feels that way until you really start exploring it. In truth it’s much bigger than it looks. And while the habitats are small, they are well maintained and the animals are obviously very well cared for, and those that need huge enclosures have them. More on that later.

I can now officially say I’ve seen a polar bear (no I don’t have a pet one, contrary to popular belief about Canadians) – though only from a distance as we never did make our way around to the far side of that enclosure. And that was just the second exhibit (the first was harbour seals, which, while adorable, were not a new thing for me to see). Then there were falcons (they had a Peregrine ….swoon)…eagles (both bald and golden) and more forms of owls than I had really computed existed.  There foxes who sat and looked straight at my camera as if asking me whether or not I was getting their good side. And baby musk ox who managed to get themselves tangled up in their toys (I not quite sure how he got himself free, but he was disentangled by the time we got back to that exhibit). There were even Siberien Tigers, which I was quite pleased were far away and asleep. Beautiful animals, but I much prefer to respect them from a distance. Same with grizzly bears (yup, those were there too) and black bears. There was even a pair of coyotes, who were content to look at us sleepily until Amras managed to catch their attention and cause one of them to jerk up and look directly into my camera lense. I was not quite ready for that and the shot came out blurry, but definitely better than nothing.

But as amazing as all of those living breathing ambassodors of nature were – even the snow leopard – none of them were nearly as important to me as just one enclosure…and I didn’t even know where it was. I knew they were there of course…but I didn’t know where, and for some reason I hadn’t looked at the map. As it turned out, they were in an area I never even would have looked, far away from everything else, on the other side of an open gravelled courtyard where there were cardboard photo-cutouts for people to take pictures with. It was Amras who found them first..

Hey, there’s your buddy….

And I turned the corner and was face to muzzle with a grey wolf…

And I couldn’t stop crying. Those strange tears that come with absolutely no sound because they are born not of sorrow or joy, but of some kind of an emotion you can’t even properly put a name to…

I’ve never…never really seen one up close…

And those incredibly wise eyes just stared at me…and I just …stared back.

And then I heard it…deep, throbbing and eerie, and throwing chills down my spine and tears to the corners of my eyes: they started to howl.

That was when I realized it wasn’t just one wolf, it was a pack. A pack of siblings, rescued from a nearby den (probably orphaned) of five siblings, who roamed a huge enclosure near the back of the zoo.

And I just knelt down at the edge of the gravel path, and watched. And watched. And watched. I could have sat there, and watched them all day. I can’t even figure out quite how much time I lost.

The sign read that the wolf population in Alaska is stable, and as such, hunters and trappers “harvest” between 1,000 and 1500 per year. Harvest??? How could they use such a cold unforgiving word? Making these beautiful creatures sound like…like corn, or wheat or…coffee beans. These animals are in so many ways so much more intelligent than we are, they are complicated and cultural and have a social structure that we can barely even begin to understand. And they should not be “harvested”.

I have seen many things in my life, many incredible amazing things, but I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite so beautiful as that wolf’s eyes…just…looking at me.

I’m pretty sure I know what my first choice of how to spend my day will be, every single Anchorage from now on.

 

 

Posted in Ports of Call, Steam Heat 2018 | 3 Comments

Climb Ev’ry Mountain – Juneau, Alaska – [07/06/2018]

Posted on July 6, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

The weather in Alaska is …incredibly surprising right now. Normally Alaska is…well…Alaskan. It’s rainy, it’s wet, it’s definitely the opposite of warm.

Except this week

The weather hasn’t broken yet. Our all day call in Juneau today was beyond breathtaking. Amras had IPM, but I have somehow been released from the IPM rotation (no one has the slightest clue how that happened or how long it will last) so I’m able to go out whenever I want until further notice.

I spent most of the time wandering through bookstores, because you never know what you might find. Case in point: much to the extreme joy of my inner geek, I found a copy of Buffy Season 8: Volumes 3 & 4! I have been looking for those for almost two years! The series has moved onto season 11 so it’s almost impossible to find the first set of graphic novels now. So I now have 1 of the two and am hoping that I can get the next one next cruise. Ha! I finally get to know all the bits I didn’t know yet!

Having satisfied my inner nerd, I took the tramway up Mount Roberts where I spent the remainder of the afternoon walking/hiking up the looping mountain trails, pausing every so often to snap picture of the carvings that have been etched into the trees, and hoping that I was not going to provide a tasty morsel for a passing bear (it happens, though thankfully not often!). Days like this you can feel the trees and undergrowth growing, reaching up towards the rare bright sunlight. The fresh air clears out the cobwebs from the back of my mind and leave all the corners feeling clear and refreshed.

The hike up to the top of the trail loop was intense, probably more climbing then I’ve done in a long long while. But the view from the top? Absolutely worth it. Alaska makes you feel so…tiny. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I mean it in an oddly reassuring way – somehow the vastness of these mountains, the intensity of the colours, the sheer size of it all…it gives me a sense of hope. As if there is something here, something at the very core of this place, that we cannot touch, cannot destroy, cannot harm. No matter what terrible things we do to the world, I am sure these mountains will stand long after we are but a memory…

I really really need to get myself outside more often…

 

 

Posted in Alaska, Ports of Call, Steam Heat 2018, Summer Contracts | 1 Comment

Party in the USA – Ketchikan, Alaska – [07/04/2018]

Posted on July 5, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

There are perhaps a lot of things that I disagree with in regards to the attitude of our neighbours on the other side of the border, but one thing is for certain they know how to celebrate. Especially in a comparatively little town like Ketchikan, where it seems that everyone knows everyone.

We knew we were calling here on July 4th, so we were prepared for a great deal of red, white and blue – but I wasn’t prepared for just how much cheer was everywhere. Smiles were as big a decoration as the buntings and massive American flags.

And there was a parade…

Oh how I love parades…

I haven’t been to a city parade in years, in fact I don’t think I even really remember when the last time I made it downtown for the Victoria Day Parade was – there are reasons for that I suppose, but standing there in the beating warm sun (yup, sun, in Alaska, it was hot…so strange!) listening to the police sirens announce the start of the parade, none of those reasons really seemed quite right. Parades bring people together, and perhaps next year I will make a point of getting downtown for ours. There is something about the opening of parades – no matter where they are – that brings tears to my eyes. I am the most Canadian girl pretty much ever, I will bristle if anyone so much as even hints otherwise, but I am still a major sucker for patriotism, and when the bagpipes marched by playing the national anthem I will absolutely admit to tearing up. The other thing that brought tears of course was the dance schools…there’s always at least one in every parade, and the routines haven’t changed much since I was doing them myself. Some things are always going to bring tears of nostalgia.

Happily munching on candy from the parade (yeah, everyone deserves to ‘misbehave’ once in a while), we wandered through the bright summer sun to the local museum – which is a tiny little place that is none the less steeped in so much of interest. Especially photographs – there is something really beautiful about old photographs. Film is a lost art, though thankfully not lost completely. It has a life that digital simply does not have. And of course in every museum I go to I learn something, in this case the fact that the city has a tradition of having every guest who comes to their table sign their names on a tablecloth, after which the names are embroidered and the whole thing once it’s full gets hung on a wall somewhere. Such a cool tradition! If and when we end up on land, I suspect it’s one I may adopt.

Then off we went in search of ice cream and photo opportunities. And there are plenty of both on the 4th of July. Creek Street looks different in the sunshine, it takes on a whole new persona that seldom gets seen. It makes all the colours brighter.

And for the first time that I can ever remember, I got sunburn in Ketchikan!

Yup, this? This was definitely one of those awesome days.

 

 

Posted in Steam Heat 2018 | 1 Comment

On the Wing – Sitka, Alaska – [06-29-2018]

Posted on June 29, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

I’ve always loved Sitka; though it’s been years since I’ve gone further than the edge of the National Park. I had hoped that today I would finally be able to make the trip to the Fortress of the Bears, but alas – the tour slot went to someone else (it is random after all). So …at least 8 seasons in Alaska, and I still have not seen a bear. Oh well, maybe next time! Instead of bears, I went for birds..

The Alaska Raptor Center is about a half an hour walk outside of town, and the easiest path to get there passes through the National Park, so it’s definitely a pretty half hour walk. I hadn’t been to the raptor center since my very first contract, which feels like much longer ago than it actually was come to think of it.

It’s a smaller building than you would expect; although I’m sure there’s much more too it than you see initially, I still haven’t been to the back to see the full recovery areas. The center’s purpose in life is to find birds of prey in the wild that have been injured (usually by people…grrrrr) and bring them back to a state where they can be released into the wild. It’s definitely not a zoo, but there are a few birds that are in residence permently because they have been damaged so badly that they would be unable to fend for themselves in the wild.

One of these was Spirit, the young bald eagle that was brought out as part of the educational presentation that comes with your ticket. I’ve never been that close to an eagle. If we had been allowed to stand (which we weren’t, as it could startle her) you could have reached out and touched her. She wasn’t hooded, or fettered, although you could see the trusses attached to her legs that the handler could tighten her grip on if she started to bait. That eagled weighs 11 pounds…and her talons have a crushing strength powerful enough that even through five layers of leather the handler said she was easily able to feel the pressure on her arm. If a bird that strong wanted to bait? I think I’d just let her fly…which is why I will likely never fly an eagle.

The rest of the resident birds are in large spacious habitats outdoors. They have at least five bald eagles, a snowy owl, a screech owl…and…a peregrine.

I could stare at that bird all day.

One of the fastest falcon’s in the world, and only small by comparison to its much larger companions – I have loved the peregrine for longer than I can recall. The ability to fly one is probably the only reason I am so dedicated to one day getting my hawking licence. I want to get to know bird.

The peregrine in residence at the center has been there for almost twenty years, he is basically fully acclimated to people (never ever call a bird of prey “tame” they aren’t tame, they will never be tame, they become used to people and people earn their respect, but they are not tame) – and I think if I ever found out who was responsible for the fact that he has an obviously damaged left wing,….well it’s probably best that that meeting never occur.

Some people leave places like the center as soon as they take their photos, but I could have sat there all day and just stared at that one tiny blue and white bird…

Who, of course, had absolutely no interest in me whatsoever…

Posted in Alaska, Steam Heat 2018 | 3 Comments

Sea Day Raider – Anchorage, Alaska – [06/26/2018]

Posted on June 27, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

Two weeks off…hours upon hours to myself…not really enough space to lay out the embroidery, and a ton of videos I’ve watched before…most of which I will watch many times again. This is definitely not a complaint…

Never the less I am always looking for new things to do…

Anchorage has a wide variety of pawn shops and second hand stores…all of which carry a huge variety of used video games..

Gee, what’s a gamer to do.

Why hello Lara Croft, how lovely to finally meet you…

I have never played any of the Tomb Raider games…and the one I picked up is I think third in the series (I also have my eye on the ‘reboot’ version, but had no budget left this month to grab it, perhaps next time) – but I am so far having great fun watching her flip and back-bend her way through ruins and drop strange objects on the heads of giant octopi (yup, that happened). When Amras bought us the PS3 a month or so ago I honestly didn’t think we’d end up using it quite this much, but now we’re having to almost flip a coin for who spends time on it…

But Lara, Lara will be coming home with me at the end of this contract…as we happen to have the same system at the house..

 

 

Posted in Below the waterline | 2 Comments

Stealing the Sun – Ketchikan, Alaska – [06/21/2018]

Posted on June 21, 2018 by GypsyShaughnessy

You don’t always realize what a blessing sunshine is until you’re in an area that doesn’t get it every day. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Alaska, and I honestly do like the rain – but after a season of liquid sunshine, I swear we start to develop a little bit of vitamin D craving.

But Ketchikan is the last place you expect to see sun. In fact, we usually joke that Ketchikan gets 390 days of rain per year (see what we did there). But today proved to be the exception – it was gloriously sunny out, enough so that everyone was shedding their layers and walking around in short sleeves and light summer pants. Which was perfect timing for Amras and I to go up to the resteraunt on the hill – something the rain had prevented us from doing on previous calls (there’s not a lot of point in dining on top of a mountain if you can’t see anything but rain).

After lunch, there were totem poles to visit and trails to hike ,and art galleries to explore. No matter how many times life brings me, I never ever seem to grow tired of this place…

There are some days when you just don’t need anything else except a hand in yours and a good dose of sunshine.

Mum & Dad have loaned me their much higher-quality-than-mine camera for the duration of this contract, so I spent most of the day being a complete shutterbug, trying to figure out all the various settings. And then once we did get back, trying to figure out how to take the mountains of raw data (really, raw, as in the file format, and when you shoot in that format, it is supposed to be run through an editor program to bring it up to replicate what you actually saw) into something remotely resembling what I was actually looking at – this is proving to be a bit of challenge as photographer I am not, and photo-editor I am definitely not.

But I am relatively pleased with how the pictures turned out.

Great, just what I need another hobby 😛 Perhaps hobbies just come when you’re happy, as I seem to be accumulating them as of late.

 

Posted in Leisure Lady, Vacations/Shore-Side | 2 Comments