| Things I've been up to As of today, I have been on the ship exactly one month. Time seems to be passing fairly quickly (to me at least), which is good. Hopefully it will keep up. I haven't really taked much about stuff I've been doing here on the ship (besides playing music) yet, so here's some things I've been up to. But first, thanks to my bro Adam for sending me his old camera. There's some new pictures up on my website www.geocities.com/lassiterbrian Also, if for some reason you really have a burning desire to call me on the ship, the number is 800-722-5472 x32185 x5207. It should work most of the time--my roommate's fiance calls him just about every night. ---- Went out to a bar called the Hogpenny in Hamilton. There was a guy there that sang/played piano/played keytar (the 80's guitar/keyboard thing, if you remember that...). He had a great, pliable voice that seemed able to do any style. He played just about everything you'd expect to hear in a bar, except in a good way. It was pretty cool. I also met the MD (musical director) from the (Celebrity) Zenith, which docks with us on Tuesdays. His name is Jeremey, and he's a sax player from Melborne, Australia. He's pretty cool and personalble, and he's married to the production singer on his ship. Around 1am we went over to a club called Ozone, which is the main hang for cruise ship crew. It's a loud, crowded, techo-playing bar, and I only stayed for about 10 minutes before going back to the ship. Definitely not my kind of hang. On the other side of the club, however, there's another place called the Rock Room, where they have actual live music sometimes. Last week (maybe 3 weeks after my first visit) we got the bands from our ship and the Zenith and jammed for a few hours. Although we started with Work Song (a jazz tune), the rest of the tunes were funk or rock-oriented. A couple of the singers came up as well. Even though I couldn't really hear anything I was playing, it was a pretty fun night. The brass players were hurtin' the next day, though. ---- Thursday night is Karokee night in the crew bar. Usually how it goes is that half the people that go up can sing pretty well, and the other half are painful to sit through. The good half just happen to be from the entertainment department. Some guys from the band and the dancers sing, and it can be entertaining. Our MD seems to be quite a Backstreet Boys fan. But I can usually only take so much. (two guys that always seem to go up I call the quarter-tone duo... ouch). ---- One day after the dancers got in trouble a few times for noise voilations in the hallway (to some degree falsely accused, to some degree not) the Cruise Director called all the dancers out before rehearsal (while we were waiting in the band pit) and threatened to fire them. He said something about helping them pack or something... But since then there haven't really been any problems. I think some of the dancers just took a while to adjust, not to mention that you shouldn't call the security guy a "son of a bitch," even if you're joking. Ha. ---- My first 3 or 4 weeks I watched a ton of movies here, some of which really sucked. I think the worst was Punisher. I really don't know why I didn't just change the freaking channel. There's also some movies on the guest channels that repeat every week (along with classic TV shows like I Love Lucy and Dick VanDyke), so I've already seen some of them waaayyy too many times. Finding Nemo may be a good flick, but whenever I pass by that channel I immediately change it. ---- After our biweekly entertainment dept meeting a couple weeks ago the Cruise Director instituted the "Rich Cleason Happy Hour," meaning that drinks were on him from 11 to midnight. |