Lieutenant's Log #11

March 6, 2017

Lieutenant's Log #11

 

I finally met "N'awlins", the classical pianist from New Orleans. "I wouldn't say I'm a classical pianist, I just play music." Whatever the case, he's very good. Of course he is, he's from N'awlins.   Like Choko, Alabama, N'awlins and myself, a lot of the ship musicians are surprisingly older players.  It's as if we've been sentenced to do time on cruise ships while the young guys are having fun in the real world. :) Seriously, I don't know if it's intentional or not, but given the vast clientele, it's not a bad idea to have musicians that have almost encyclopedic music knowledge and references.  The older guys have it by default. The young guys, good as they may be, probably couldn't pull a Michel LeGrand tune out of their musical hat. "Who's that?" I'm not saying that there aren't any young musicians aboard, I'm saying that there are lot of older players. 

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Meat and potatoes. Particularly potatoes. Mashed, baked, boiled with skins, without skins, not eaten potatoes from the day before, thrown in a white sauce. Always potatoes.  And meat. Hunks of beasts, rare to medium rare. I haven't eaten this much meat since that the last time I was on the ship. Now that I think of it, we don't see chicken much.

I'm not a picky carnivore. I tolerate what's in front of me in small proportions. 

If I don't like the taste, I leave it. I specify 'taste' because some of us are against the idea of eating any animal that's not a pig, cow or chicken. 

I never cared to ask, "What's today's beast?"  Alabama on the other hand won't touch anything without asking, "What's that?" "I don't eat no deer."  Deer? Bulgarian Moose? Norwegian Yeti? I had no idea I'd been consuming these animals.   I'll start asking from now on.  

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It's been an interesting couple of days on the ship.  Cowboys and Cowgals everywhere. 

I was pretty certain that the cowboys were from the states. Wrong. They were all Norwegians.  Apparently, if you take a fresh looking Norwegian, toss him down a flight of stairs, they make great looking cowboys. Some of the passengers weren't too pleased, as their family weekend had to be shared with drunkards with hats. "We've been on this cruise many times. If we had known about these rowdy cowboys we never would have..." "My young girls have never seen a drunk..."  

I found this very amusing. I thought that all Norwegians did was drink and eat Yeti.

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 I suppose it's odd that at night, when I'm undressing for bed, I close the curtains. I'm in the middle of the ocean and I close the curtains as if there's a band of Amazon pirates spying in my window.  "Look at him lassie. Just the way I like em. Bone thin." "Oooo let me see?"