Freckles & Our Bird (June 23)

While on the Bridge tour the other day, I was informed that on the morning of the 23rd, we would be passing some islands! I was not about to miss the sight of land after seeing nothing but ocean for a week. Did I see the land? No. Did I get breakfast? No. I slept through both. :( Some people did see the land and I was sooo jealous. LAND, and I missed it!

Today in my classes, I learned something new. I think I’m allergic to Expo markers. In both morning classes, the teachers whipped out Expo markers for the board. Since I was in the front row, I got a strong whiff of the smell. And then started sneezing. And sneezing. And sniffling. And got a stuffy nose. I know it usually irritated me, but it never made me that bad! Also in that class, I felt like a creeper. The notes were projected onto the screen in the classroom, but my professor was standing in front of the screen lecturing at one point. When I was copying the slides and got to her shadow, I had to look on her body for the missing words! ALSO during that class, there was a crew emergency drill, so every (about) 5 minutes we heard the captain’s voice over the loudspeaker. And another thing- I felt a little tingle on my face, and felt it to find that it was a double bug bite of some sort right next to my eye. Great, attacked by the bugs again. Always me! I went into the bathroom to check it out and make sure it wasn’t anything bad- it wasn’t, it was just two very large connected bumps. Lucky for me, it disappeared by the end of the day!

Later in the day, I decided that I would join the tannies and expose my skin to a little sun. Don’t worry Mom, I wore sunscreen! :) It was so nice being all warm laying out doing homework! Except then one of my friends Brittany came out, and the whole homework thing went down the drain- we ended up talking for about 2 hours until dinnertime. And hey, I ended up getting some color—freckles, that is. :)

When I got to our table at dinner, Kelsey was mid-freak out. As it turns out, she was also out on the deck in the afternoon and saw a bird on the ship. A BIRD. We haven’t seen any birds in a week. She guessed it had flown to our ship when we passed land earlier, and stayed. It was flying against the window over and over trying to get out, but was failing miserably. A little boy ran over and picked the bird up with 2 hands! As his mother screamed at him from across the ship, he let it go and it flew away off the ship. THIS is why Kelsey was freaking out. We hadn’t been near land in 12 hours, and the bird was going to die! Just as she was telling us this story, we noticed a little black and white bird flying next to our ship out the window. It was the bird!!! For the rest of dinner, we watched the little bird fly close to the ship. It’s our baby! We hope it lives!

Sooo… recently we decided we wanted to wake up for sunrise. I emailed Patrick (my boyfriend) to see if he could look up sunrise times for me for the time zone I was in. What did I discover? I am not IN a real time zone. Apparently the only land that’s in my vertical range is Greenland, and they’re in a different time zone for some reason. It’s so weird! It seems like we’re in the twilight zone or something—it isn’t our time anywhere. Crazy. Maybe I just find that weird because I’m delirious and need more sleep. But still…weird! Anyway, we didn’t wake up for sunrise because we had no idea when. We’ll probably ask around to see if anyone knows. Then we can wake up and watch the rumored-to-be-gorgeous sunrise! Still losing an hour each night…