I have been thinking about luggage a lot these past 24 hours and let me explain why. First of all we had the comment in the blog the other day from a Platinum guest who asked in a very civil and polite way (civil and polite, my arse) about why we don’t take Platinum and Milestone luggage on the ships first and why it isn’t then sent to their cabins first? As I mentioned, we tag the bags by deck and that’s how they are currently brought onto the ships. But despite asking me with all the civility of a pissed off rattlesnake…….she has a point. And it’s a point I have since raised with the beards.

The other reason that I have been thinking about luggage is that we have had the worst cruise this 2011 European season for lost luggage with a total of 38 missing pieces that did not arrive in Barcelona as the guests expected. Since then we have recovered 11 pieces which still leaves 27 somewhere. They could be in Botswana, Birmingham, Baltimore or Bora sodding Bora…..but regardless there are some very unhappy guests here as you will read now.

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We have two new activities here on your Carnival Magic. They are open to all guests but obviously it’s the younger generation that seems to be enjoying them most. First we have video games in SportSquare where you can be a Dallas Cowboy or a Green Bay Picker or a New York Yankee or pretend you are Dwyane Wade and LeBron James except this time you win the championship. Yep, it’s a great place and the youth of the ship meet there to play these games and to see whose pants are the lowest.

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Billy Gates from Microsoft and whoever owns Dell computers (we shall call him Mr. Dell) are off my Christmas card list forever. I am not sure which one of them is to blame but let it be said on this day the 28th of June in the year 2011 that if either of them knocked on my Carnival Magic cabin door they would be greeted with my foot being imbedded in their arse followed closely by a monitor, hard drive and a keyboard still with the mouse attached. (more…)

My Facebook page is growing by the day and I am doing my best to keep on top of it, but I am not worried as soon help will be on the way. Soon, some of the other cruise directors will be getting Facebook pages. The beards have not decided who yet, but some will and you will be able to get in touch with them. Now how they use it will be up to them but it will mean that they will lose some of the time that they spend doing other things like have a life, rumpy pumpy and anything that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer in their underpants. (more…)

I wrote on Facebook the other day about how the noise flip flops make really makes my hemorrhoids flare up. So add to that finger wag that people do when they can’t be asked to come over to you and expect you to walk to them like a subservient dog. I saw that some others had listed cold callers as their most annoying thing yet surprising nobody mentioned noisy eaters. How can cold callers be more annoying than noisy eaters? You can slam down the phone on a cold caller and listen, to some beautiful silence. But are you allowed to stab a loud eater in the eye with a fork and tell them to shut up? No. You’re expected not to notice while they chomp away like a human blender.

Here are some other things that annoy me:

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Normally I start the blog thingy with a tale of attempted humour or of personal woe. But not today. Today we start with a tale of courage and the yet another reason to cruise and that’s because you get to meet people like Charlie Brogan. I met Charlie at the start of the cruise and spoke to him at the welcome aboard travel talk because of his smile. He has of those faces that always seem to be smiling and it was smiling again when I met him at our veterans meeting yesterday afternoon. My guess is that Charlie has been smiling since the day he was born on September 2, 1922, in a place called Muscatine, Iowa.

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There is a barbecue on the starboard side of the Dream class ships. It’s held on sea days and along with the new brilliant dining room lunch menu, it helps us manage the traffic on Lido deck. To be honest I haven’t really paid it much attention but I did today as Heidi, being Dutch, loves to eat outside. I have never understood the European fascination with eating al fresco. Flies can be a problem and you can’t see the TV. But as she is the boss my precious one-hour lunch break from shows and writing to you was spent taking photos with guests and eating barbecue food. We do a really nice job with the Lanai bbq I have to say. There are burgers and sliders (although to me they are the just different sizes of the same thing) and hot dogs and guacamole and salsa and Quincinearas and other Mexican food items all cooked on a barbecue by the chefs.

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Well that was the week that was and today I start a new week of blogging and Facebooking. Those last few days were tough as everyone said exactly how they felt as non-smokers and smokers took up arms to wage war against the other and I couldn’t help but think…….was I to blame? If I didn’t have the blog and the Facebook page would it have gotten so hostile? But then again, that’s the Internet in a nutshell, isn’t it? (more…)

Amongst the many hundreds if not thousands of comments I received yesterday
about new smoking rules and regulations I received this one. Here it is:

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I love cigars. I don’t drink any alcohol, I work hard and I am faithful to my wife. But I love cigars, they relax me and I enjoy being around the people who smoke cigars with me. My true life hero smoked cigars and they were the mark of Winston Churchill. He was rarely seen in without one. And let’s face it, the cigar smoking fraternity (think Sylvester Stallone, Jack Nicholson, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, Michael Jordan ) is pretty cool.

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