July 17

July 17, 2012
It’s strange having a later morning than the rest of the youth staff. I still get up and eat breakfast with them, but I can come back to the room and finish getting ready afterwards! I’ve been having at least 15 teens at any given time hanging out in the Loft; it’s almost as if they have a system, if one leaves, a few minutes later another or a group comes in. We had no schedule for today so we kind of just hung out, talked and listened to music. Pretty much what we do all the time anyway. The morning went by really quickly. I had lunch with Jessica and Ashley and spent the remaining portion of my break in the library studying Italian. A couple came down and sat near me to read, when the wife went to get coffee, the husband started talking to me. Turns out they’d spent a few weeks on vacation in Italy a few years ago; it was nice just casually talking to a passenger about places around the world.
This afternoon, we did finally get a printed schedule. They saw dodgeball on it for tonight and wanted to play it this afternoon instead, so we played dodgeball for about an hour. I mainly looked at icebergs, took pictures, watched for animals and made sure they were playing nice. Dodgeball lasted about an hour! I’m surprised that they didn’t get bored sooner, especially since they’re usually always eating something. We had ice cream and then went outside to watch for the glacier wall. We ended up going out right in time because it had just come into view! I have a few pictures of it (and me), and some of the comparison of a small boat (small compared to the cruise ship at least, we think it’s a yacht) to one of the medium sized icebergs floating around. My teens were excited, but not nearly as much as I was, haha.

They actually requested that I take them to the show tonight, the comedian on-board’s last performance before she leaves us in Juneau to go on another HAL ship. I have no idea what we’re doing before that because the schedule says “Olympics” but we’ll probably end up playing cards again, that’s the usual fallback that they love. I’m hoping for a semi-early night tonight because I had to actually kick them out at 1, then clean up a little bit before I got to come to bed.
Oh, other news, I’m changing rooms again! The ship finally has a life stylist again (whose room Jessica and I are in now), so we have to be moved. I’m moving back up to the fourth floor! Yay for bigger rooms. Not excited about packing all my stuff back up to take it up a few floors, but at least we’ll have more room to move around, and no tile floors! The downside is that I will be further away from Jenn, and that I’ll be further from the time computers so I’ll have to really think about going to put in my hours for the day (after 11:59pm, before 11:30am the day after I work… so, I have to remember that I need to add in my 12am-1am time in the next day… confusing). Oh well, things like this apparently change a lot.

Evening:
My kids were crazy tonight. I went in a bit late even though I arrived early because I met up with Jessica and Megan outside the room; Megan told us to go ahead and get our new keys because we have to be out of our room in the morning. When I got back to the Loft, we went outside and played dodgeball again for a while with the fewest number of teens I’ve had all week: 8. After an hour of that, we just hung out on the couches and talked until the show at 10. They weren’t really impressed by the comedian (I wasn’t really either to be honest, I mean I giggled some, but I wasn’t dying laughing.) but at least the conversation about the comedian lasted a while. Since everyone was tired, we just sat on the couches again, talking. These kids eat ALL the time, they’re constantly going downstairs for juice, ice cream, sandwiches, desserts, etc. The horrible thing is that they leave all the dishes in the room. That means I either have to take 20 glasses/bowls downstairs myself or put them on the try our snacks came on. Tonight, a good few helped me by each taking 4 items downstairs so the Lido staff could get them washed.

I did have to threaten to kick some of the teens out of the Loft tonight; they started laughing at something and would not stop, getting louder the longer they went on and it went on for about 15 minutes before I kind of stopped it. It got to the point where I couldn’t think, couldn’t hear the music I’d put on and when I walked down a floor, could still hear them. I ended up just telling them that if they were that tired, then they should just go to bed and they actually listened to me!

Strangely enough, despite all the bad things and the craziness, I like hanging out with the teens, it's a nice schedule (aside from the 1am close time) and it's really relaxed so I have a lot of say in what we should do.

So, Jessica and I are now in the “secret cabin” at least until the end of the week (3 rooms in 3 weeks for me). It’s on fourth floor, and it is BIG for a crew cabin. We had to ask someone to help us find it because it’s hidden behind a crew-only door which lead to the crew elevators. Wow is about all I can say. We were freaking out for a while because we’d walked all over and could not find the room anywhere; luckily one of the security team who comes to check on me at night in the Loft happened to walk by and we asked him where to go. I moved up half my stuff tonight and will finish in the morning. I really just threw everything into my suitcase when I got back to the room, then dumped it all out in the new room so I could bring it back down for the second load in the morning. I have less stuff here than I thought I did.

Tomorrow’s Juneau, I have to get used to my new room, but I might end up going on a crew tour which I just found out about. Yay for free internet as well!

July 18, 2012
Morning: I’ve now moved into my new room. I’m about to go to shore so figured I’d go ahead and type some stuff. The new room is HUGE, Jessica and I each have two closets; I don’t know why they didn’t just put the new lifestylist in here. Apparently there’s a chance Jessica and I may have to move again at the end of the week. That would make 4 rooms in 4 weeks. Moving is typical, but average of every week is not.

Nothing too new to report yet, I helped Jessica find the laundry room so she could finally wash her uniform, and in return she’s washing the little bit of clothes I have. We’re getting along a lot easier than me and Jordan. She gets lost easily, so she likes to have me around explaining how to get places around the ship. It’s really throwing her having to move rooms, because she only just figured out where the room was!