BlueperB's Blueprints

Things have been a little crazy at my house so it has taken me longer than expected to show you all of the fun things on our ship!  I’m excited to share my week on the Odyssey of the Seas with you!

We’ll go deck by deck.

All of the maps I saw started with deck 3.  I know that all of the people that worked on the ship had cabins on deck 2.  There was a hospital on that deck too.  I did not do any work or get sick so I never saw deck 2.

Deck 3 had a lot of fun things – the dining room, the casino, the music hall, and the Royal Theatre.  The dining room was big and fancy.  Every time we sat down to eat, it looked like they had emptied the whole silverware drawer for just me.  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with three forks, two spoons, and two or three knives.  It looked like each kind of food on my plate was supposed to be eaten with a different utensil.  The problem was I didn’t know which utensil went with which food.  By the end of the week, I think I had it figured out, but I prefer the one utensil meals that we have at home.  And if the multiple choice utensils were not enough to stress out this furry little blue and orange monster, all of the table cloths and napkins were white!  Who thought that was a good idea for little monsters?   I did not take any pictures in the dining room because I was afraid that wasn’t polite…and in the picture  I might have had the wrong fork on my plate or have spilled something on the white tablecloth and that would have been embarrassing!

Mr. Jim took me to the casino.   I didn’t know what a casino was, but Mr. Jim is always fun so I went with him.   He said that at a casino you pay money to play games and sometimes you win more money, but most of the time, you lose your money.  That didn’t sound like much fun.  I didn’t want to lose my money because I wanted to buy a new t-shirt.  We went to the casino anyway.

It was fun watching all of the colorful spin-y things on the machines even though I didn’t know what they meant.  Mr. Jim put money in the machine.  We didn’t get any back.  Is it rude to say that I’m glad we lost his money and not mine?

We went to the Music Hall and the Schooner Bar a few times to play some games.  That was fun because we got to meet other people on our ship.  It was cool to be on a team with people from all over the world!

Every night we went to the Royal Theatre for some kind of performance.  There were people who sang all kinds of different music, and dancers, and people who said funny things to make us laugh, and bats who looked like people flying around on ropes and rings.  I was very entertained!  I wanted to get to the theatre early every night so that I could sit in my favorite seat in the front row.

Deck 4 had the balcony for the Royal Theatre.  We never sat there because it was too far away from the stage.  It also had more of the fancy dining room.  We never ate there.  Mostly on this deck were places to shop…and a Starbucks and a pizza shop  I liked going to Starbucks and the pizza shop for snacks because I didn’t have to worry about any utensils!

I spent the money that I didn’t lose at the casino in a shop on deck 4 where I bought a t-shirt.

They didn’t have too many monster-sized shirts to choose from, but I did find a blue and orange one!  That made me happy.

Then Mr. Jim took me to look at clocks that you wear on your wrist.  He likes these wrist clocks a lot!

The first ones he showed me were called roll X.  That sounded kind of like something that we were supposed to do with one of the games in the casino if we wanted to take our money home.  Mr. Jim said that these wrist clocks cost A LOT of money, way more money than the machines at the casino took from us.  I’m not sure why anyone would spend a lot of money for one of these things.   Everyone has a cell phone and it always knows what time it is.  The Lady didn’t even have to push any buttons on her phone to change its time when we lost six hours on the airplane between Dallas and Rome!  I still don’t know how we lost those hours!  Thankfully, we found them on our way home.

Mr. Jim did show me some less expensive wrist clocks that matched my fur.

I liked the colors, but my fur hid the clock part and my arms already have stripes that look like wrist part.  My takeaway?  I don’t need a wrist clock, but it was fun to look!

Deck 5 had mostly ship business stuff and fancy restaurants.  We didn’t spend much time on this deck except in a little bar where they played nice music.

Deck 5 also had fancy tecnical theatre, that was on the stern of the ship, where we got to watch virtual fireworks!  That was a lot of fun because there were no loud noises like with real fireworks!

Decks six through thirteen were are all cabins.  That is a lot of cabins!  Odyssey of the Seas has cabin space for as many as 5,500 people…and a few little monsters who stow away!  I only saw decks 8 and 10 because our cabin was on deck 10 and Mr. Jim and Mr. Sepherson were on deck 8 forward on the starboard side.  I liked this sign that was on deck 8.

I dare to be rare every day!  How many furry little blue and orange monsters have you met?

On deck 14 there was a less fancy food place that had all kinds of different things to eat!  And, you could have as much as you wanted!  My favorite part of deck 14 was the place where you could get fancy frozen drinks!

There were also chairs that matched my fur!

The Lady and Mr. Jim played a game called corn whole.  They tossed bags of beans across a big dome thing into a board with a wooden hole.  I have no idea what this had to do with whole corn, but they seemed to have fun.

Deck 16 had more games.   The Lady said that she liked to play ski ball so asked if I wanted to try that.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to ski on a ball on a rocking ship with no snow, but I said I’d try.   Then I saw the sign…SKEE BALL.  I don’t know what that means but it was obvious it didn’t have anything to do with skis and snow!

Skee ball was fun, but I only rolled a couple balls because The Lady really likes skee ball so she rolled the rest.  This seemed a lot like the vegetable game with the corn and beans except that you roll a ball into the hole rather than toss a bag.

This deck also had bumper cars.  I liked that there was an orange car, but I was too short to drive so we could only watch.

That’s OK because I’m not sure how I’d like people running into me or me running into them on purpose.

And honestly, my favorite thing to do on the ship was to be still and watch, listen, and smell the beauty of the water.

First things first.  Never say boat when you are clearly on a ship!  Do you know the difference?  I now know that a boat is something that navigates along coastal and inland waters.  Ships sail on the ocean.  Ships are also bigger than boats but I don’t know how much bigger.   The Lady told me that ships always have names.  Ours was called the Oddest of  the Seas.  That was interesting.  I wondered what made it the oddest of the seas.

Then I saw the name…ODYSSEY.  Odyssey means an eventful, adventurous journey that is often marked by good fortune.  Odyssey sounds like a better name for a ship than Oddest.  After I roamed Rome, I went on an odyssey on The Odyssey!

Once I learned that we were staying in a cabin on a ship and not a room on a boat, I thought I was good to go with ship words.  Nope.  I had more ship-speak to learn.

Despite there being lots of stairs and elevators like in a hotel, ships don’t have floors, they have decks.  Well, I think I walked on the floor, so they sort of have floors, but the different levels between all of the stairs and elevators are called decks,  Deck numbers told you whether you are close to the water or high above it.  All of the decks had maps on them.

The maps  used the words forward and aft to talk about the front and the back of the ship.  I understand why they say forward.  That is the front of the ship so you have to move forwrd to get there.  But aft?  That sounds like it should be after, but forward and after don’t make sense together.  Why, if the front of the ship is called forward,  is the back of the ship not called backward?

I borrowed The Lady’s fun to look up what the word aft means.  Aft means.

Near or toward the stern of a ship.

That was not helpful because I didn’t know what the stern of the ship was.  Back to Google to look that up.  The stern of a ship is:

the back or aft-most part of a ship or boat

Since ships and boats both have an aft-most part, a stern, I guess ships have big sterns and boats have little sterns.  Hmmm…Is it nice to say that your ship has a big stern?

This whole aft and stern thing got me thinking.  If aft means toward the stern, what are you close to when you are forward-most?   Google told me that the front of a ship, and a boat, is called the bow.  That’s funny.  The front of our ship didn’t have any ribbon.  I asked The Lady about this bow thing.  She said,  “it is not bow, it’s bow.”  That cleared things right up!  Not.  Then she said that it is not b+o, but b+ ouch without the ch part.  I get it!  Bow like at the end of theatre production!  But wait.  If bows happen at the end, why is the front of the ship called the bow?  And I don’t want the bow to bow because then it will be in the water and this furry little blue and orange monster obviously doesn’t know much anything about ships, but I’m pretty sure the bow being in the water is not a good thing!  I think this may be b-ouch with the ch!

I finally sort of got the whole aft-forward and stern-bow stuff figured out and then I see two more new words on the map – port and starboard.

I thought I knew what port meant.  It is like a driveway for a ship.  We went to the port where the ship was parked to get on it.  Starboard sounds like a control panel on a spaceship!  I quickly learned that port and starboard are ship-talk for left and right.  Starboard comes from two Old English words for steer and boat, being mushed together.  Most sailors steered with their right hand so that is why when facing forward on a ship, the right side is the starboard side.  In the old days, the right handed sailors always drove so that the left side of the boat was the loading side, the side that was closest to the port.  This all sort of makes sense, but I wonder if the left-handed sailors get confused.

In case you are wondering, our cabin was on deck 10, port side aft.  We did not have a room on the tenth floor toward the back of the boat on the left.

I was going to show you around the Odyssey of the Seas in this post, but my monster claws are tired from typing and my monster brain is worn out from explaining all of this ship talk.  I promise my next post will be more fun!

 

 

Good Friday night, everyone!  My kitty and I are ready to put this week to bed.

Today was a good day!  It was the first day of The Lady’s summer break and we went on a little adventure.  First, Mr. Guy, The Lady, and I went out for lunch and coffee.  I had a banana for lunch and Mr. Guy shared his coffee with me.  Mr. Guy told me that he didn’t think that it would be healthy for a furry little blue and orange monster to have a whole cup of coffee of his own.

After lunch, Mr. Guy and The Lady took me to the Red Circle store to get a new shirt.  Yay!  I was very excited.   I always find cool shirts at this store.  As Mr. Guy rolled me in the cart back to the little monster section, I was thinking about what color shirt I wanted and what words I might like on it and what picture  would be fun.  Even after all of this thinking I still didn’t know what I wanted.  We finally got to the right place for my size.  I looked at the shelves of shirts.  I kept looking and kept looking.  I didn’t see anything that looked just right for this little monster.  The words on one sad said, ‘Coolest brother.”  I’m not a brother so that one wouldn’t work\.  Lots of others had pictures of beach stuff on them.  Since we don’t go to Delaware, where there is a beach, anymore, these shirts didn’t feel right for me either.  I was very disappointed.  I finally saw a shirt that was The Lady’s coral color.  Do you remember that she has to take pictures of coral, without an ‘H’, stuff this week?  I decided this shirt would be OK.  It’s not like any of the shirts that I already have.

It has plants on it.  We have lots of plants at our house so I guess it is a good shirt for me.  I wondered what kind of plants they are.  I used Mr. Guy’s computer to find out what they might be.  I may not be the best Googler, but the computer told me that some of my shirt plants look like poison sumac.   Poison?!  That didn’t sound good.  I read that poison sumac makes you itch and turn red and bumpy.  I think adding red bumps to my orange and blue fur might be a little too much color for me.

Mr. Guy said that he didn’t think my shirt had poison sumac leaves on it.  He thinks they are more like palm leaves and leaves from tropical plants.  I hope he is right because just thinking about poison sumac makes me itch.

Even though my shirt shopping trip was a little disappointing, I still had a good day.  I hope we have lots more like it this summer.  And, The Lady said that we can look somewhere else for a new shirt.  I hope I am a better shirt Googler than plant Googler.

Do you ever have days that are both happy and sad at the same time?  We had one of those days today.

The Lady gave a big test to her class today.  She does that at the end of every one of her teaching semesters.  I think having to take a big test makes the day a sad day!   The Lady’s students didn’t seem too sad about having to take a big test.  Maybe that is because they are all very smart and knew all of the answers for the test.   I think they were most happy when they were all finished with the big test.

Everyone was sad because these students have all been in a class together for more than two years.  It was four different classes all in a row.  (After four classes in music theory I sure hope they knew all of the answers to the questions on their test!)  Now they are all done.  Some of the people are going to go to different schools soon so all of these friends may not see each other again.  That is the sad part.  The happy part is that those people will get to go learn more stuff and work hard to make their dreams come true.   I bet there will be some more big test days in their future that might make them sad.  Hopefully they will get to play and compose enough music to make them more happy than sad!

I get to go to school with The Lady on the last day of the last class and meet her students.  They are all very nice and were happy to take a picture with me.  Mr. Sam was especially happy to meet me.  He asked if he could hold me for our picture.  I was sad when we had to say good-bye to everyone.

But, I am happy that The Lady is almost done with work and will be home with me for a few weeks.  Maybe we will have time to go on some big adventures before she has to go back to school in June.

I guess you have to feel sad sometimes to also feel the happy times and you have to know happy times to get you through the sad times.

That’s a hard test for this furry little blue and orange monster!

I hope your day was more happy than sad!

XOXOXO

Do you want to hear something funny?

GRAPEFRUIT.

Grapefruit is funny.  Do you want to know why I think that grapefruit is funny?  If not, you should probably stop reading right now.

• A grapefruit looks and tastes nothing like grapes but we call it grapefruit.
• Grapes have been around since 6500 B.C.  Grapefruit has only been around since the 18th century.  Surely someone could come up with a new name for this new fruit.
• Mr. Guy and The Lady say that fermented grape juice, something they call whine, or maybe it is wine if we are still not using H’s), is tasty, fermented grapefruit juice not so much.
• I can eat the flesh and skin of grapes.   I only eat the flesh of grapefruit.  Its skin is only good if it is grated and sprinkled in little amounts in or on another kind of food.

You see, there are lots of differences between grapes and grapefruit.  But, you know what?  They have more things in common than you might think…kind of like people of different Skins and colors and sizes.

• Both grapes and grapefruit are actually berries.  We could call them grapeberries and grapefruitberries.  That’s funny!
• Both grow in clumps.  That is actually how grapefruit got its name.  Someone thought these clumps of round fruit growing a the tree looked like growing grapes.  I’m not sure if that is funny or scary.
• Both grapes and grapefruit are healthy foods.   This is good!

I like both grapes and grapefruit, but today grapefruit is my favorite because its juice is coral colored!

 

Yay!  It is a new week!  That means no more black and white photos.  My world can be colorful again.  I am very excited about that and couldn’t wait for The Lady to tell me what we were going to take pictures of today.  She said that all week we are going to be taking pictures of choral things.  

Every day this week we have to take pictures of people singing?  That was easy when we were in England because that is why we were there…so the choral people could sing every day.  (Mr. Guy and I just sat and listened, or drank tea and ate scones.  We don’t do choral stuff.). At home, I don’t see singing people every day.  I started to think that taking pictures this week might be even harder than the ones last week.

I asked The Lady if she was going to sing today.  She said that she wasn’t because she had too much work to do so I asked her who then was going to sing for us?  She looked confused.   “For our picture, because we need choral,” I said.

The Lady said, “Choral without an H.”  

We have to find someone singing songs that don’t have any H’s?  This picture stuff is getting harder and harder.  And then I thought, How would anyone know in a picture if the singers were singing songs with H’s.  

I tried to think of songs that I know with no H’s.  I decided maybe I could  sing Rocket Man or Yellow Brick Road  since Bohemian Rhapsody and Happy Birthday were off limits because of their H’s.  The Lady got a little annoyed with me because she was trying to work and I had Pandora playing Elton John kind of loud.  (I hope is doesn’t matter if the singer has an H in his name!)  She asked me why I was listening to Elton John over and over.  I told her I was trying to learn all the words so I’d be ready for our picture when she was done working.  For once, she looked more confused than me.

”Why do you need to learn an Elton John song for a picture?, she asked.

”Because you said we need a picture of choral without an H!”

“Not choral without an H!  Coral, the color coral, coral without an H!”

Hmm…coral, a color.  Maybe I should sing Color My World.  It has no H and has color.

The Lady and I finally got this all sorted out.  All I needed was to find something that was the color coral.  Next problem.  I had no idea what color coral is.  The Lady tried to explain to me that it was sort of orange and sort of pink but not really orange or not really pink.  (Maybe I was better off with black and white!)

I started pulling shirts out of drawer asking her if any of them were coral.  I found one with lots of colors.  She told me that it did have some coral in it.  Yay!  And it is one of my favorite shirts.  My friend Ms. Joni gave it to me!

It has coral without an H but coral with an L.  Even better a rainbow and an L for LOVE!  Anything that has to do with everyone loving everyone makes this furry little blue and orange (not coral) monster very happy!

Maybe I should sing All You Need Is Love.  It doesn’t have any H’s!

 

Today was a calm and quiet day at our house.  I had a lot of time to enjoy being with Mr. Guy and The Lady and to think about things.  I like to think, but sometimes I think I think too much.  This morning, The Lady told me that our picture-taking prompt for the day is sought after.  I wondered if she was confused and meant to say after-thought.  Nope.  She meant what she said, sought-after.  I had to give that some forethought before I had an idea for our picture.

First I had to figure out what “sought after” means.   Did you know that “sought” is the past tense of “seek?”   And, sought-after is a derivative participle?  (Whatever that means.). The best I can do with understanding this is that sought-after means something that I was seeking for yesterday…or the day before…or maybe two years ago.  I’m not sure how long ago I was supposed to be seeking for something before it becomes sought-after instead of still seeking.

After thinking about all of this for awhile, I decided that I don’t really seek things.  I just let things happen.  I go places with Mr. Guy and The Lady and other people, but they are never places that I decided that I wanted to go.  (I’m not complaining.)  I do things and I eat things and I experience all kinds of fun things, mostly things that I had never thought about seeking.  That is what makes them so much fun.  I do shop for t-shirts when I go, do, and have fun, but this is not because I want the t-shirts but because when I pull the shirts from my drawer and put them on  I want to remember all that I experienced and all of the people with whom I shared those experiences.

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When I opened my drawer today to get dressed, several of the shirts right on the top of my stacks all reminded me of special times and special places.  And, I noticed that they were given to me as gifts by special people in The Lady’s picture taking group!

One of my favorite memory shirts is my Dirt Shirt.  It was given to me by Ms. Michele when we spent a day with her and Ms. Peggy, both picture takers, when we were visiting Delaware back when The Captain was sick.  I wrote about my visit with my friends that day here.

One of the other memory shirts on the top of my stacks today was given to me by Ms. Rene Mac Donald.  I traveled a long way to meet her.  She lives in Scotland but she came all the way to Bristol, England to visit me and The Lady when The Lady was there singing.  This shirt has The Loch Ness Monster on it.  Ms. Rene thought I would like it because I am a monster too, but not the same kind of monster.   This monster hides in the water.  I don’t do that because, well, because water does funny things to my fur.  Also, there are not pictures of The Loch Ness Monster.  Some people don’t believe that this monster is even real.  There are lots of pictures of me.  I am very real!!!

I have lots of fun memories with The Lady’s friend, Ms. Joni., too  She and The Lady do lots of things together with sticks and string and stuff that looks like clothes but doesn’t have any arm or head holes.  Even though Ms. Joni doesn’t live close to us, she and The Lady talk a lot.  Ms. Joni gave me another of my shirts on the top of my shirt piles that I saw today.  She also made me a sweater and my very own quilt!  She went to Alaska with us.  And one year, I got to be on her Christmas card picture with her!  The Lady told me that Ms. Joni is coming to visit us in Texas this summer!  Once we are done with these black and white photos, I will show you my quilt.  Guess what colors it is.  HINT: It is not black and white!

Only one more day of black and white photos.  I can’t wait!

Anyway… back to this idea of “sought-after.”  I like to think about things that I have done and may do sometime, but mostly I like to think about today.  I like to be happy with the people that I am with right now even if sometimes we are together because something sad has happened.  I like to have as much fun as I can doing whatever it is that we are doing.  I like to make people smile.  Mostly I like to be a happy furry little blue and orange monster.