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Tuesday, October 4, 2005
Dept. of Kvetchery 
| | How's this for perverse.... Every time I click on a link, in any browser, here on the ship, it redirects me to a service provide page. AAARrg. Bad enough that's it's slower than dial-up too much of the time. Or off completely. Why make the "user experience" such a pain in the ass? |
Going to bat for the bird
| | So this is the "bat" that flew into the deck outside our cabin, and — so far — isn't flying out. Or anywhere. It's just... there. Sitting by a puddle on the deck. Is it baffled by the glass? Hurt? I don't know. |
| | Anyway, we can start by asking ourselves (that's you) what is it? |
| | We thought it was a bat. It flew like a bat. |
| | But it landed like a beanbag. Then parked in front of the door. In the dark. Fluttering. Kind of. |
| | Also scared the crap out of my sister, who's sharing the cabin, and wanted to get inside after it was clear that the deck was getting buzzed by bats. And one was in front of the door. And that it could get sucked into the room by the negative pressure inside the cabin (which is huge), leaving us with a bat problem to solve at 5am. She was already freaked enough from yesterday, when swimming with stingrays on a sandbar in Grand Cayman lost its charm rather quickly. (Didn't rev my jets either, frankly, though it was cool for the first ten minutes and forty stingrays or so. Whole 'nuther story there.) |
| | Anyway, it was clear after we got inside and turned the deck light on that this was a harmless bird, and we shifted from fear to caring. Well, actually, we went to sleep first, and hoped it would go away. But at dawn we began to care because, well, it was still there, looking lost and pathetic. |
| | [Later...] Just ran into the cruise director, who told us this sometimes happens, and that their policy is to capture the animal and turn it in to local officials at the next port of call. This one (where we're docked now) is Costa Maya. Or a set of stores built to service cruise ships on the coast called Costa Maya, near the actual (rather than the fake) town of... something with an M. I'll have to check. Anyway, I kinda doubt it's the kinda place with animal placement officers, but... whatever. It's nice that they care. Or that they're nice. |
| | [Later still...] It's gone now. Either it flew our coop, hopped under the partition to the next guest's deck, or the ship folks got it. |
| | So now I'm getting back to work. Which is what I'm doing today, while the touristas tour the trap shops in the fake town on shore. Later, when it's time to eat, we may sneak out of there and find a real town nearby. |
Birds and bats
| | Woke up at 5am this morning and saw white dots flying around in the darkness outside the cabin, with lightning flickering in the distance. |
| | So I walked out on the little deck outside the cabin, and found that the dots revealed as white birds. Sometimes they flew in formation, like a flock of geese. Other times they would scatter, only to regroup, moving in a flock that seemed to have a mind of its own, sometimes flying close to the boat and other times sliding far out to sea... yet always aligned with forward end of the ship (where my cabin is), and keeping up with the ship's 20-knot pace. The birds were all-white, smaller than seagulls, larger than terns, and with a constant wing motion, each flap moving from straight up to straight down and straight up again, in a beat so rapid that it was hard even to make out their wings' shape. |
| | At the same time the air was also filled with dozens of what appeared to be bats, chirping and flitting in all directions like moths in the ship's white lights. |
| | Then, suddenly, one got caught inside my cabin's little deck area — essentially a room open to the sea with a railing on the sea side. When I turned the light on, I saw it was a small brown bird. It didn't look like woods or garden bird, rather than a sea or shore bird. Was this one of the 'bats'? What was it doing here, at least eighty miles out to sea? It stood on the floor, a bit stunned. Then it hopped under the partition between my cabin's deck and the next one to the aft, and I went down to a lounge to work. That's where I am now. |
| | Connectivity is a little bit better: 109Kbps down and 24Kbps up. Ping times sometimes jump to a second or more, but usually hold to the half-second minimum one can expect from a satellite connection to the Net. Packet losses are zero. |
| | Still, my IMAP email accout doesn't work, though my POP account now does. I'm downloading about 1200 emails right now. Most of which, of course, are spams. |
| | [Later...] Went back to my cabin briefly, and the bird is still out there on our deck. Looks like a sparrow. What is it doing way out at sea? |
| | [Later still...] More in the next post above. |
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