Week 26: Crew Mess Food is a Hot Mess

For those who warned me that I needed to watch the food on the boat because it could sneak up with me were right. Not for the reasons you think. The food on the ship is wonderful, fresh, and delicious: if you are a passenger. Granted we have the same fresh fruit that the guests to, but that is the only highlight of the crew mess. The only other safe food is self-prepared sandwiches or ice cream. I can get burnt out of sandwiches…ice cream is a different story. I was having chocolate ice cream and a butt load of added peanut butter for almost every meal. The other food is questionably not food at all. I gained 10 pounds from this ice cream diet. 

I bought a scale, step on and nearly had a heart attack. As it read 161 pounds, I released a long stream of profanities from my mouth. No sir! I refuse to back track. Since stopping my in take of desserts, getting over bronchitis, and getting slowly back into my workout routine, I have lost 4 pounds. I am now at 157. Getting closer to where I was before I came on board. My pants are still a little snug. I freaking hate that feeling. It is the feeling of failure cutting into the angry chub-a-muffin.

This week I had STCW training through the Coast Guard. During this week, most people go to training and get the rest of the day off. Not us. We worked our normal shifts on top of 40 hours of training. The overtime will be glorious but I am so exhausted that I do not know what to do with myself. I live off of caffeine. I would die without it here. The physical fire training and water safety course was on Saturday and a ton of fun. I didn’t realize how much I was going to enjoy it. Although I want to join the medical team on board, I will keep the fire team in the back of my mind (both teams get to use the guest gym up stairs which is a HUGE bonus). Currently, I am an assembly leader in the case of an emergency. This means, I will check in and organize guests into lifeboats if need be. This also means I will be one of the first crew members off the boat if we are going down. Booyeah! 

The crew gym is rather pathetic. I try to avoid it whenever possible. I like to move around on the beach or the crew deck (the top deck on the ship) to get some yoga, stretching, cardio, etc in. The gym de-motivates me very quickly.

I am getting a few hours here and there to go exploring. I got to fulfill my dream of swimming with turtles this week in Kona. 

My schedule this week rocks as far as timing goes. I work from 4:30pm-2am. It sounds sucky, but I get ALL day to explore the islands. It is amazing. The job they have me doing is FAR from glamourous. I am organizing silverware and folding napkins for main and formal dinning. I can literally feel my college educated brains turn to mush as I do so. After, I get to vacuum the entirety of both dinning rooms. They are HUGE. But I get to play in the Hawaiian islands during daylight, so it is worth it.

Today I am in Maui (although this picture I took in Kona). It is a beautiful day.