Cabin and Laundry - January 13, 2018

Laundry 
 
Today is my first day to use laundry service so it’s prompted me to give some more details about the cabin.

I’ve been pretty successful washing things out as I go.  I brought my Ikea octopus of hooks along so I can hang many individual socks to dry.  There is laundry service at $6 per bag.  Interesting how motivated you can get to wad clothes into small balls to fit them in a bag.  I was  quite proud of my accomplishment until I went to complete the request slip that goes with the bag and saw I had to indicate how many items of each type I was including.  Since I hadn’t counted as I packed things up, I had to dump it out and start again

There are 3 small closets in my cabin so I have designated one for warmer clothes another for shirts and pants and the last one as laundry.  We made a run to Target after we boarded but before the students arrived so I was able to pick up a couple of bins to keep clothes sorted. The bar for hanging clothes goes from front to back of the closet which is a little weird.  Apparently that is a unique feature of my particular cabin.  

There is a small safe in the closet for our valuables and 4 small cupboards and drawers in the room itself.  There's even a mini fridge so I have a little stash of seltzer ready to go. 
It all feels relatively spacious until I remember that students have 1-2 other people in their cabins.  I’m sure that would feel snug.

Time

Time is surreal so far.  Between the regular turning back the clock (thank heavens we are going West so we gain an hour) and the power packed days, it feels like I have been away somewhere between a day and a year.  People had warned me that we would lose track of the days of the week –which is indeed true—since every other day while we are on board is either an A Day or B Day of classes.  Each class day has its own number, so today for example is not Sunday, January 14, but rather A4.  This makes sense as a way for the students and faculty to track class days. 

Yesterday I did some organizing in my cabin and went up for breakfast at 9:00 to realize that breakfast had ended at 8:30. Today I got smart and went to breakfast a little after 8 and am just realizing now that I never turned my watch back so I was actually there at 7:15.  Ah well, more time to blog!

In addition to class days there are a few random days thrown In every so often as Study Day so it isn’t even an every other day routine.  We cross the international dateline in a few days, so I will not get to live January 16, 2018.  That will be weird.  There’s one student whose birthday is that day so he got 2 tickets for a meal in the high-end dining room.  (More on that whenever I eat there.
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Hours are done with a 24- hour clock (ship time) so I am trying to conquer the notion that 9 pm is 2100 (the usual times for the Student Life to do programming.  It’s good that I am a late-night person but it probably doesn’t matter since my biological clock has no idea what its standard time is.)


Note: We still haven't figured out a good way to send pics on ship wi-fi, but hope to have some more posted soon!

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