Cruise Day 2 (Jan 12) At Sea, somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico:

After sleeping in and having a late breakfast, we had lunch at Johnny Rockets. After lunch, we went up one deck to the miniature golf course. It was cold when we left Galveston, but by afternoon the next day, the temperature was quite pleasant. We all had a good time playing golf.

After golf, four of us climbed on the wall.

When Mom climbed the wall, several people were impressed. I then told them that she was a grandmother and they were really impressed.
Our final activity of the day was shuffleboard. Of course every activity began and ended with food.

January 11, 2009 Cruise - Day 0 and day 1

We went on a cruise departing Galveston, TX on Sunday, January 11, 2009 (Day 1) On Royal Caribbean Voyager of the Seas. Our group of 6 people consisted of Mark, John, Joseph, Jon Paul Anderson, Mom and me. We arrived in Houston the day before on Saturday (Day 0) after driving for 14 hours from St. Louis.

We had originally booked a room in Galveston for Saturday night, but the Hotel contacted us and told us that they still had 60% of the rooms occupied be FEMA workers and displaced residences, so only 40% of those with reservations would actually be able to get a room, so they recommended that we get another room. Mark and I booked rooms at the Super 8 next to I-45 in South Houston.

After Mark, John, and Jon Paul arrived, we were getting ready to go eat dinner and Mom casually asked if everyone had their passports. John said he forgot his. We of course thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. His passport was still in San Jose, with the cruise departing the next morning. After some investigation, we found the only solution that would work was to have Jimmy get John’s passport and take it to Continental Air Cargo window at San Francisco airport before 11pm and it could go out on the 12:30am flight and arrive in Houston on a direct flight at 6am. The cost was $78 but that was better than not going on the cruise. Fortunately, John talked to Jimmy and he took care of getting the passport to the airport and then John and I picked it up at the Houston airport early the next morning.

Once we got the passport problem resolved we went to a local BBQ place that was pretty good. We could tell the locals liked it because it looked like most of the police in the area ate their. The baked potato they served with the BBQ was huge and probably weighed 2 lbs before adding butter and sour cream.

After we got John’s passport, we ate the continental breakfast that the Super 8 had. It was not very good, so we really looked forward to the lunch on the ship. We attended Sacrament meeting at the Clear Lake 2nd Ward near the Johnson Space Center Southeast of Houston. We enjoyed the ward there.

This is Joseph and me with our backpacks on as we were leaving the hotel to go to church. Joseph looked like a missionary, but my hair was the wrong color.

This is John on the parking shuttle very happy to have a passport in hand. We kept church clothes on for boarding.

This is picture of the single men checking in. Dozens of people asked if we were coming from a wedding when they saw that we were all dressed up. There were a lot of older people on the ship and almost all of the older women thought Mark, John, Jon Paul, and Joseph were amazingly handsome and enjoyable to be around.

A photo of our welcome aboard photo.

Once on the ship, we had a really good lunch. After lunch we went to our rooms. This is Mom enjoying an ice cream cone after lunch in our room while she talked on the phone.

Dinner was a few hours later. It was really good too. The after dinner snacks were also good.

Christmas Decorations

In preparing for the Home School Christmas activity at our house, Mom put up more Christmas decorations.
Stockings are hung by the chimney with care, and a fire is lit to singe Santa's hair.

Many of the women coming to the home school Christmas activity a few days ago had heard about Mom’s nativity sets and had asked if she would have them available to see, so Mom set some of them up in displays. They look really good, so I thought I should take a few photos and post them.

I also shot close ups of several of the sets, but I did not want to post all of those here. I will include one clos up of one of my favorites:

Next to most of the nativity sets are signs that read "from Italy" or Germany, Peru, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, South Africa, Spain, Jerusalem, Holland, etc indicating where they came from.

This one is labeled "from Uncle Mark"

Christmas Tree

On Saturday, we got a Christmas tree. This first photo is Joseph holding the tree up on our deck. You would think it was cold the way he is holding it.

Once in the house, we put lights (400) and ornaments on it. Not all of the ornaments are on yet so it looks like we do not have enough on the lower portion of the tree.
This is what it looks like with the lights on in the room and using the flash on the camera.

This is what it looks like with the lights off and without the flash. The only light is from the 400 little lights on the tree.

I also took some close up shots without the flash of two of my favorite ornaments.

Mom got a new ornament this year of Captain Kirk and the Tribbles. This is photo of it.

When the button is pushed, tribbles fall from the overhead hatch and Captain Kirk speaks three different excerpts from the TV show. I recorded all three quotes, but the macro focusing ability of the camera does not seem to work in video mode.

Old Photos

I was going through computer files to delete old things that are no longer needed and found some old photos that were fun to look at. There were lots of them, but I thought I might share just a few that brought back some fun memories. The first photo is the family cruise that all of us went on in May 2000.

This is young Joseph outside in the rain.

Katie and Sheri with Nina at the house we rented while our home was being built. This is the same place where John had an altercation with a door while trying to startle Nina. Julie saved the day.

This is young Julie. If you look at the front part of the seat of the chair, you can see John's teeth marks.

Neil and Bret went fishing with Grandpa during the floods of 1993 and caught quite a few fish. Of course the "big" one got away. Joseph was not too sure about the fish.

Joseph wanted to be "cool" like his brothers. He also wanted to be tall like them. I don't know about the "cool" part, but he passed up his brothers in the tall catagory.

Our trip to Bryce Canyon. Julie wanted to climb every rock, but some of the tourists got pretty nervous. Katie, Sheri, Sarah, Joseph, Mom and I hiked on the well traveled part of the trails. The hike up from the bottom of the maze was invigorating.

There were lots of other old photos and I was tempted to put lots more but decided that I had better stop.

Warm Chocolate Melting Cake

When Mom and I went on our 30th anniversary cruise, were on the Carnival Valor. There were some aspects of our experience on Carnival that was not as enjoyable as our experiences on Royal Caribbean cruises. One of the areas that Carnival did a really good job on was the food, especially deserts. One of their best deserts was “Warm Chocolate Melting Cake”. It is an individually baked cake that has a hot center of chocolate fudge like sauce. I was able to find a website that had the recipe that Carnival uses. There were two different versions, so we needed to try them both. I think I am getting close to getting it exactly like we had it on the cruise. This photo shows what it looks like after my first two bites when I made it last week.

I tried it with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream. It was good that way too, except the ice cream cooled the hot chocolate center down.

Last week, Mom bought some Ghirardelli gormet baking chocolate. Last night I used the 60% Cacao dark bittersweet version and it came our really good. I did not get a photo of this version, but it was a darker brown and tasted even better than the version shown above. Mom also bought some 72% Cacao Ghirardelli gormet baking chocolate that I have not tried yet. I think I am getting close to getting the recipe perfected.

We are planning on making this one night while everyone is here for Christmas.

The Guitarist

Joseph has been playing the guitar he made. He practices several hours a day and is developing some pretty good skills, but he thinks it will still be a while before he is ready to do a concert or produce a CD. Here is Joseph playing.