From there we all went to lunch in the DaVinci Dining Room (chicken tortilla soup and Greek salad for me, followed by Baba au Rhum, which is like the Tortuga rum cakes sold on Grand Cayman). G and I stopped by the increasingly busy front desk to get a copy of our on board statement before returning to the cabin, me to start this post, and him to change for a hot tub. There are three NFL games being shown on MUTS this afternoon:
2:00pm: Lions v. Eagles
5:30pm: Seahawks b. 49ers
9:15pm: Panther v. Saints
I really didn't care much about the first game, and, at any rate, a huge rain shower had just passed over and everything was wet out there. Instead I tried to get the game on the cabin TV but no luck (I still haven't figured out if a game shown on MUTS will be shown on the TV, but I keep listing the MUTS games in my blog posts so that perhaps someone can figure out if there is a rhyme or reason to what's shown on the ship, such as perhaps they're all ESPN games or something like that. So instead I listened to, for the gazillionth time, the Love Boat episode with Sonny Bono. Spell it with me: D-E-S-P-E-R-A-T-I-O-N.
Luckily I wasn't desperate for long. At 3:30pm, I joined some friends from past cruises- Mona, Adelle and Diane- and new cruise friends for afternoon tea in the DaVinci Dining Room. I hadn't done this yet this winter (we eat dinner so early that additional sustenance at 3:30pm is generally not required, but, of course, this had nothing to do with nourishment and everything to do with friendship and that made the calories not count (right? right?)). It was great to have a last hurrah and say goodbye until...when? We never know when we'll sail together again. and that is the nature of cruise friendships.
G was ready for Skywalkers when I returned to the cabin. He had been watching the snow falling on the Eagles game being played in Philadephia while sitting in a hot tub (and LOLing; he was really enjoying that). I quickly changed and we met Greg and Suzan in Skywalkers before going to dinner. I was not even the slightest bit hungry, because I had spent the. entire. day. eating, but still managed to consume salmon with watermelon for dessert. That's it...no more food until least 7am tomorrow! I want to feel hunger pangs again. Pretty sunset from our dinner table though...
We had time to listen to a few songs by Playthoven in the Piazza, and we are really intrigued by them. We finally met them a few days ago...they are from Romania (Anca and Radu, if I remember their names correctly) and are so entertaining. They're on until February 27th and I'm glad of that.
Pianist Ryan Ahern did two shows in the Princess Theater tonight. He had told us last night that this second show would be more classical in nature (yay!), and we went to the 7:15pm show. He started playing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and I wanted to fly home to my piano right away, and not even wait until tomorrow, but that feeling passed more quickly than I could say "Arctic temperatures" and my heart was here again. But getting back to Ryan Ahern's two performances on board...he played everything from "Phantom of the Opera" to Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" to Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" to the aforementioned Beethoven and never before has a single performer managed to satisfy my eclectic musical tastes so completely. I'm hoping we see him again this winter. A lot.
I wanted to get up to MUTS to watch football, but G was done for the evening, and in the spirit of love and unity (hey, Ryan had played the theme from Love Story and I was emotionally moved), I decided to stay in the cabin with him watching TV (that same damn Love Boat rerun, and if that ain't love...). We move clocks back an hour tonight, but turnaround morning still comes early.