Beyond the Dateline

February 16, 2008

We crossed the international dateline last night. When I was a kid, we had a globe in the house and I remember the little rotating pressed metal plate on top of the thing that figured the time zones. I’d line up the time in Massachusetts and try to figure out what the time was in some of the cities that I heard about on the radio, television or in the paper. Now I’m going to be in Tonga, for crying out loud, although none of us is counting on getting off the ship because it’s a tender port. I have IPM too. I also happen to have a brother-in-law, about to become a transplanted Texan as his son will play for SMU, who was born and raised in Tonga.

For those of you home gamers who don’t know, IPM stands for In-Port Manning. You get IPM every eighth port on this ship, and you’re obligated to stay on the ship for the entire day in case anything goes wrong. 

Brad asked me a couple days ago if I wanted the bandleader job in the Queens Room. He was conveying to me the wishes of the office, but I’m going to turn him down. First, we have a young trombone player who wants the job so bad it hurts. Stu will do a fine job and he knows the gig better than anybody, having been on the band since last June. Second, I’m wary of the additional responsibilities. I’d rather help Stu however I can by writing and keeping up the standards of play rather than deal with passenger complaints about how fast a cha cha ought to be. You can’t win in the Queens Room. You have two factions that are trying to rip the band apart at all times. Any decision the bandleader makes is going to cause an eruption from the opposite faction that feels like it’s been slighted. 

This is the second sea day since Papeete, Tahiti, although on the calendar it looks like we did three because of the dateline. Another two days separate Tonga and Auckland, which has a proper port. That’ll be Thursday, then another two sea days and we’re in Sydney for an overnight.

Today at dinner, Siân and Patrick are miffed at the absence of milk--the allocation thing again. You can’t deprive an Englishman, or for that matter an Irishman and a Welch harpist--of milk for their tea and not expect to hear about it. They do not disappoint. Siân finally manages to get one of the manager girls, the one who has her waiter guys tucking napkins into the serving pans so they don’t appear so messy, to make a call up to the passenger areas and order some milk. How they expect to balance their books with irritations like this one is anyone’s guess. 

In addition, right before the latest milk allocation this evening, a roach climbed the wall of the mess. Nothing you can do about that, I’m thinking. We are in the tropics, and some are bound to stow away with the food provisions loaded up in Tahiti. Then again, my experience says that if you see one, there are thousands hiding in the walls, breeding. We have an inspection in Sydney on the 24th. 

Looks like we are getting off in Tonga, though. The larger boats will be used for tendering. Siân will be leading a tour without a tour guide. That’s what they do in Tonga. I might take a stab at getting off the ship even though I have IPM. 

Blood Pressure

I started using a cuff to monitor mine when the pressure of adapting to this ship caused my BP to soar into the near-dangerous range. I started taking pills that I’d stopped when I was on shore, to see what would happen. on the 25th of November my BP was 172/85 with an 85 BPM pulse.I started a FileMaker database to see where it would go. 

This morning, almost 3 months later, my BP is 112/56 and my pulse is 54. I have lost weight on this trip. The food is dreadful except for our 20 minutes of glory in the Lido after work. And I have to climb 5 flights to get almost anywhere worth getting to. I’m not making a big deal about it, just going about the business of the day and adding a couple pills, climbing the stairs a few times every day, passing on the food that’s awful, substituting something raw that they can’t mess up.

Today we played another Jazz at the Lion at 12:45. This time, Brad just indicated that the whole Queens Room band would play, ending the unintentional policy of setting up de facto groups. We are playing very well together. We opened with Sofrito, then Tin Roof Blues, On the Sunny Side of the Street, a ballad medley like in Jazz at the Philharmonic, and closed with Mood Indigo. It pleases me that we cover so much ground, so much so that we are hard to pin down stylistically. I was the announcer, which is a lot of fun.  

Monday, February 18, 2008

It’s been a pain going through the South Pacific staying connected with email. For that reason, I’ve been using the ship’s wifi. At 50 cents a minute it’s an expensive way to go, but there’s a bit of business I need to do that requires internet access. My guess is that things will get better when we hit Australia and from there on out.

Archie is on the coals because, although he might be sick, he didn’t try to tell Brad until 11 this morning, thereby making his job a lot more complicated. Because the entertainers for the day were already set in the Daily Programme (yes that is what it’s called), Brad is sending Stevie down to work with us tonight. That ought to be interesting, the triumphant return to the Queens Room of one of its former bandleaders. I won’t even begin to describe the torments that the Queens Room had for the rather unassuming Stevie, other than to say that, at the time, it was decided that ProShip had an exclusive monopoly to book the band and they sent the sorriest bunch of losers ever for Stevie to lead. Then the passengers, having something to complain about, proceeded to make it all a hell of a lot worse. 

I spent much of my lunch time with Trevor trying to convince me that I had made the wrong decision to turn down the gig leading the Queens Room band, but I was having none of it, despite his best efforts.