Hi Mom .. Bye Mom

Mom is simply the Cruise Queen. We both love her to pieces and admire her for geting out there and enjoying life. She is a member of a group of several hundred folks who regularly get on a cruise ship and enjoy a week together sailing and socializing and partying. George, their travel agent, gets killer deals on blocks of rooms and there are a couple of cruises per year with anywhere from 20 to 250 cruise group members aboard. Isn't that a party ? :)
This trip originated in Fort Lauderdal aboard the brand-new Celebrity "Solstice". While Robin and I tried to put it together, it was simply not feasible to get the funds and time off work together to go along on this trip, which was disappointing. But that was the only hard part.
Mom came in and we picked her up at the airport a couple of days prior to sailing. We had an absolutely wonderful visit, touring around Miami, heading down to the Bayside Marina, spending an afternoon at the zoo, going on an Everglades airboat ride and enjoying a movie or two at home. It was a pleasure to host her and the only real problem was that we dropped her off at the cruise terminal and could not follow her aboard :(
A week later we picked her up again, and to her credit she never once rubbed it .. just showed us pictures and told about her adventures along the way.

by maryfos Not that we were jealous .. oh no ...

Now...whoever thinks that making a 6:03 A.M. departure from the airport is a sane thing to do should call me. Actually, it was'nt that terrible a thing, just a short night's sleep to get up at 3:00A.M. and and the commute into Miami was quite easy without much traffic. The airport was not terribly busy at that time of the morning and we had good hugs and said goodbye and then mom was whisked away.
Thanks for coming, mom. Thanks for visiting and sharing and having a good time with us. Thanks for cruising and being an inspiration to us. You rock!

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During the last couple of weeks Robin and I have been fully engaged by this upcoming certifiation process. Our next step was to take and pass a written "Area Rating" test. From a pool of some 600 questions they will pull 60, not at random but designed to test a broad scope of knowledge in minute detail. This is different from any process I've been through before and the test is proctored so there can be no reference materials at hand (which is different from the actual operating environment where one depends or an abundance or resources close at hand to cover all the contingencies). A different philosophy and a new one here, as we are the first people to actually go completely through this process.
So...we study: Letters of Agreement, Military Operations and Procedures, Sector Operating Procedures and the details of Approach Plates, Standard Instrument Departures (SIDs) and Standard Terminal Arrival Routes (STARs). There are thousands of details and hundreds of procedures. It is a lot to digest and we are doing it all with self-study; no instructor or coach.
OK, enough about the job... Life in the Everglades is a kick! We have enjoyed being close to the water, even though it is filled with sawgrass and only 8 inches deep. The hunting birds are fascinating and we see Grackles and Egrets and Herons and Cormorants and Vultures and bright green Parroits and the ever-mooching Peacocks daily. The water is teeming with tiny fish and there are frogs croaking and singing in the night. Sitting outside with a cup of coffee in the morning is very, very cool and if you bring some bread you sill soon have 50 birds around you catching whatever you toss out well before it hits the ground.

And the sunsets ...