Lido Shuffle

Interesting event on Tuesday: As we docked, a small brown critter decided to come up to the ship, hoping for asylum or something like that; a chase involving port and ship staff, along with hilarity, ensued.

My initial thought was that the critter was a weasel of some sort or maybe Rob Ford, former mayor of Toronto.  Further investigation identified the Canadian resident more specifically as a mink.  Which is a type of weasel, of the non-politician breed.  Anyway, we don’t know what happened to him/her, although the consensus was that it eventually stopped trying to get on the Voldemort and headed back into the woods.  Or to Toronto.  To do more mink-esque things.

On an unrelated note, Ms. Rivers sometimes has trouble pronouncing non-Anglo-Saxon words/names.  Case in point:  She was pronouncing “Goombah”, the Italian-American slang word for friend, as sounding like “Gum-ba”.  A more recent example was the pronunciation of “Lido” (as in the Lido deck of this ship) as “Lie-Dough”.  As a service, I played the Boz Scaggs song Lido Shuffle for her in order to make the point about proper pronunciation.  Now it’s important to note that she is SIGNIFICANTLY more cultured than I am…to the point of me sometimes being Beavis to her Daria…so in totality, this is about all she can ever hope to learn from me.  But at least it’s something.

Getting back to cruise notes, Wednesday, August 12^th was spent in Syndey, Cape Brenton Island, Nova Scotia.  Prior to this trip I had never heard of the place.  It strikes me as being kind of like the lessor achieving brother of Prince Edward Island.  Some of the views were very scenic…

…reminding me of what one would see in Maine.  We also visited a museum dedicated to Alexander Graham Bell.  Honestly, I didn’t know he was Canadian.  That previous sentence is probably the most American phrase I will utter during the entire trip.  The museum was small, but informative, and like most things Canadian, impeccably clean and the staff was very friendly.

Speaking of Canadians being kind and friendly, on Tuesday we stopped at a kind of tourist-y store where I proceeded to look for AA batteries (needed for the mouse I am using on this trip).  They only had AAA.  However, the store owner insisted on going back to her storeroom and scrounging up two slightly used AAs for me.  She would not take any money for them, but we settled on my making a 5 Canadian dollar donation to her cat fund (she told me she had 4 cats).  Reason #458 why I love Canada.

Special note about Canadian tour-guides in these here parts:  They seem almost genetically compelled to sing while guiding groups on a bus.  I am not joking.  I am also not complaining, as so far, I’ve heard far worse coming out of my own mouth, but it does seem kind of strange.  I wonder if they take request?  Maybe next time I can ask for “Fly By Night” by Rush (after all, we are in Canada…), although based on experience to date, they would likely insist on singing it in Gaelic. 

All things considered, Wednesday was a lighter day activity wise.  While on Tuesday we walked over 16,000 steps, Wednesday was half that total.  It’s all good though, as none of those steps on either day were for purposes of earning a living.    

Speaking of earning a living, part of what I want to do on the trip, inside of my head, is ponder my working future.  Do I want to retire sooner or wait longer?  The head and the heart aren’t all that misaligned on this topic, yet there is something in the larger equation of it all that I don’t understand.  A kind of “dark matter” that is influencing how I feel (just as dark matter in the universe influences other things), but yet I can’t quite understand it.  Understanding is a big deal to me.  How big of a deal?  Well let’s put it this way:  I greatly admire folks who possess true faith, as in the ability to believe in the absence of empirical evidence (which is why I find Anne Lamott’s books so compelling).  This is a gift I mostly lack.  At some point though, I will need to make a leap of faith when it comes to my working life.  It’s more a question of when than why or how.

Next stop? Halifax, Nova Scotia.