Tell us what's happened to you recently (that's interesting)

They’re part Himalayan from the coloring. The Himalayan I have is very loving of people she trusts, buy very scared of people she doesn’t. Hair also becomes a problem as they get older with lots of knots. I’ve found getting her groomed with a lion cut twice a year to be best, and she really enjoys it as well. However it’s hard to find a groomer that grooms cats, especially difficult cats that don’t want to be groomed by a stranger.

If they’re ragdoll as well, that’s great. Ragdolls are docile and don’t mind being manhandled around. Great for kids.

My in-laws have a ragdoll that avoids us whenever we come visit. He’s pretty docile but runs away from our daughters as much as possible too. Might be a defective member of the breed. Poor thing is a bit cross-eyed also.

Ok, this is going to sound like shilling, but so be it. It is the most interesting thing that’s happened to me lately by far – and long.

I now work for a cruise company located in St. Louis, that famous seaside port. We do Caribbean cruises – theme cruises. We did six cruises in 2017 and have seven scheduled for 2018. I just got done working our 80s Cruise and it was an AMAZING amount of fun. I am still grinning when I think about it, and I was working on the ship – at least during the day. Most fun working EVER!

We had Cheap Trick, Belinda Carlisle, Tom Bailey (Thompson Twins), Colin Hay (Men at Work), The Romantics, Howard Jones, Morris Day and The Time, Men Without Hats, Information Society, Debbie Gibson, and Berlin with Terri Nunn. We also had a great 80s cover band, Jesse’s Girl, and another great cover band, Trial by Fire. We had a great stand-up comic in Alonzo Bodden. We had music going from 1 pm until far into the night.

Then when the night was almost over, it wasn’t. We had a great DJ spinning records in the Revelations Lounge until I guess people dropped from exhaustion. I was there until 3 am one night and there were still a good 50 people on the dance floor.

We also had the old MTV veejays Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter and Nina Blackwood hosting interviews with the bands and doing some other things. We ran game shows. We had giant Twister. We had 80s trivia contests. We had artist-led short excursions on the port stops. We showed 80s movies. We had a video game lounge with standup arcade machines like Pac-Man, Galaga, Centipede, Donkey Kong, and a vintage NES system for Super Mario, all free to play.

The artists were walking around on the ship, going to lunch, dinner, etc., posing for photos and talking with guests. I remember sitting at the poolside bar the second night on the cruise, just chatting with a fellow cruiser, and we were commenting on how much we enjoyed Tom Bailey’s show we had just seen and up walked Tom Bailey and we chatted him up! It was fun! When we stopped in Cozumel I decided to stop in a port side bar before re-boarding the ship before it sailed, and struck up a conversation with a guy who turned out to be in Information Society, Zeke. Totally cool guy completely into comic-books and Star Trek.

The hit of the cruise was Terri Nunn and Berlin. She electrified the audience. She was amazing. She even sang what she said was her favorite religious song ever as her last song before her encore, Highway to Hell. And then her encore was Jefferson Airplane’s Somebody to Love and she was a young Grace Slick when she belted it out. Just great. Everyone was buzzing about her. The next day people were still talking about her. “I’m having a great time but did you see Terri Nunn last night!?!” That kind of thing. We immediately began talks and were able to sign her up for next year’s cruise. She was not only good on the stage but also so kind in how she mixed with guests.

I’m still excited by the whole experience. It was so much fun. I’m going on vacation in a few weeks in Italy for a week, seeing Rome and Florence, and only touching the tip of the iceberg of things to see and experience there, and I know it will be great. It will be. But I can’t imagine it will top the sheer fun I had on this 80s cruise. Everyone walked around so happy. I was very proud to be a part of the company that made it happen.

Next cruise up for me is January on our Star Trek cruise. I expect that to be great fun also. But a different kind of fun.

(Sorry for the length of this. I try to be concise these days, but still excited by this a week and a half later!)

That’s awesome Mark. I always love reading stories like that.

Can you provide a link so I can look into these cruises? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

In a similar vein to Mark’s trip, there’s the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise each year featuring a ton of amazing metal acts doing live music all day long. One of our number went this year:

These “theme cruises” seem like a really awesome thing to me. Since I’m not so much for beaches, swimming/snorkeling, or tourist traps, if you were gonna somehow sucker me into a cruise at all, you’d need to leverage something like this.

Glad that you enjoyed the trip so much, @Mark_Asher, and I hope that means that you like work just as much!

If it was a normal cruise, I would have had to order the full alcoholic drink package or contemplate jumping off the boat around Cuba. Snorkeling in Haiti near Tortuga was cool though. Next year is Turks and Caicos, so should be a fun place to visit.

Here’s the parent page that shows our cruises. There are all kinds of other theme cruises available too. For example, Turner Classic Movies did a theme cruise six years running before discontinuing.

I do. I work with individual reservations and group stuff, and I enjoy the work. It really has been a fun experience. We’re a small company full of good people and we all work well together to get stuff done, and we get input into a lot of different things. And at the end of the working year we get to go on Caribbean cruises. It’s a nice reward for a year of good work.

Last year on our initial 80s cruise we were on Holland America cruise line and the cruise broke their record for alcohol consumption. The ship had to make an unscheduled stop to load up on beer. Yes, a 2000 passenger cruise ship had to make a beer run!

This is the best thing I’ve read all day, and since I doubt it will be topped this afternoon I hereby declare you today’s Winner of the Internet.

I’ve never taken a cruise, though I really dig the 80s theme you describe. But cruises kind of hit a weird part of my brain, I think about being stuck on a boat with no control of its destination or who I am onboard with, and it just sounds confining. I know lots of people dig this whole “hands off” aspect, my in-laws for one love cruises, so maybe I’m just busted. Still, yours sounds like the best of all cruise options I’ve read about.

It can be a bit confining, though these ships are very large and you can always find a quiet nook somewhere. And they do stop for the day at ports of call where you can walk off the ship and do a variety of things. On the 80s Cruise we had three sailing days and four days in port.

Normal cruises are pretty sedate. The 80s Cruise was very high energy. Another benefit of a theme cruise is you are there with like-minded people. You go on the Star Trek cruise because you’re a big fan of the show, and everyone on the cruise feels the same way. It’s easy to walk up and talk to people. You’re all part of the same tribe and you’re all happy because it’s a really fun week at sea.

I find this true at the bar in the casino as well. :)

His snout totally looks like a puppy. If you covered up most of the kitten you could be mistaken. He also has the, “I am the most innocent creature ever” expression going on :)

And they pay you for this shit?!?
Sounds to me like you have one of those increasingly rare jobs that a person could actually love.

Speaking of which, my job doesn’t pay well at all, but I stick with it because it’s the best job I’ve ever had (which I admit isn’t saying much). I’m a para transit bus driver for the handicapped and elderly. It can be difficult and challenging, and requires 10-hour shifts, but I’ve gotten to know some of the best people while doing my job. The handicapped people have consistently amazed me with their upbeat spirit about life, and how much they enjoy everything in spite of their limitations. By the end of every day, I’m exhausted, and yet made so much happier by being around them. It always takes a long time until they feel they can trust you, but once they open up, they are some of the most intelligent and witty people I’ve ever known. I consider many of them to be close friends, especially now that I’ve been doing this job for over 16 years.

That means a lot. I’ve learned that I don’t really need a lot to be happy but when you can find contentment in your job it is so meaningful. And I do need a job – not just for the money but to occupy my time and point me in some direction.

As to my job being fun, it is. I enjoy talking to our guests on the phone and the cruise aspect is very cool. I work on the ship in a sales office, but I get some free time. Most of the year I work in an office in a cube but it’s work I enjoy. Cruise time is special.

Water pipe burst that leads from inside house to outside flooding part of our basement. If that’s not bad enough, I have a very bad lung infection, am trying to get ready for my first pre-transplant surgery set for March 31, and I have to try to somehow disassemble a covered deck structure I’d built many years ago when I felt better. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get the screws out since it’s freezing out. Stuck in a catch-22 where if I get sicker then I won’t be able to have surgery, and things get very complicated.

If anyone has advice on how to remove deck screws in winter please tell me. I’m also afraid they will shear while removing because I had a few of the screws when I was installing that snapped in half because apparently they don’t make screws like they used to. Can only work for a few minutes at a time so will be on my computer a lot if anyone has advice.

The only cruises I have any interest in doing are the JoCo Cruise and the MaxFun cruise, though the latter was I think a one-time affair. But in practice there’s no chance I’m going to pay for flights to the US on top of the cruise tickets.

Don’t have any deck screw advice but I sure hope you feel well enough for the surgery.

Man, I hate wills. You take a sad situation, a death of a family member or close friend, and introduce redistribution of their possessions and you just get ugliness. Like divorce, I guess it’s impossible to keep it civil. I guess this all sounds needlessly coy but I didn’t want to bore everyone with my story, just kind of wish I could just step back and not be involved.