On Day 4, Harmony of the Seas was headed Costa Maya, and the Shinglebells had no plans to get off the ship!

Our port arrival time was 11 AM, which is pretty late. Originally, had we stuck to the planned itinerary of Day 2 Coco Cay, Day 3 At Sea, we would have still been sailing down from the Bahamas to Mexico. However, since we swapped Day 3 with Cozumel, we were already in Mexico! So we were just putt-putting along, waiting until time to dock.

Rachel and I ran three miles around the track on Deck 5. She's training for the NYC Half Marathon in March. After, we went to the gym - which was nearly empty! - and did some squats, lunges and abs. There were hardly any people in the gym that morning, so we had our choice of weights and no wait for machines.

We were about to leave the gym when we noticed that we were pulling into port! And what do you know - the Carnival Glory!!!

Just a week prior, the Carnival Glory had gotten into an accident in Cozumel, colliding with the Carnival Legend and barely escaping collision with the Oasis of the Seas. The Carnival Glory had the most damage to the dining room area of the ship. Check out this makeshift patch job. Looks like the welded on some sheet metal, but there's also still plastic on the angular parts, so I'm curious about what's going on in there.



Yikes! I wonder when they'll really be able to repair the damage.

This is a blast from the past.  My little sister will be graduating high school in just a few weeks, and we are in the process of planning her graduation party.  It will be totally unlike mine - late at night with a DJ (Scott Avery for those of you in the Clemson area), moon bounces, and blacklights.  However, it made me think of my graduation tea party, which was a sundress occasion in the afternoon with girls and their mothers, and how I wish I had documented it better.

Photography clearly wasn't my thing back then.  Not to mention, we were still getting everything ready when the first guests arrived.  Luckily, they were close friends of my mother's, so they just went to the kitchen and got to work!  I remember photographing things with my point-and-shoot Nikon digital camera because I didn't know where my dad's DSLR Canon was.  Finally, my dad emerged with his DSLR and took "detail" pictures.  I wish we would've taken more pictures... better pictures!

I created the invitations to appear like the tea cups from Magic Kingdom's Mad Tea Party.  This was my own idea, and they were very well-crafted.  Luckily, I still have one invitation today, so I was able to go back and take a few pictures with it.

To make the invitation, I found an image of a tea cup online, and printed that out to create a stencil.  I used textured scrapbook paper in pastel colors.  I printed out the information on the back of the teacup.  Then I cut the tea cup designs through the front color using an exacto knife (which now, in architecture school, is my best friend), gluing the printed piece to the back of the tea cup, filling the void.  So, to say that simply (or not?), instead of creating the squiggles with additive pieces of the secondary color, the squiggles are subtractive of the primary color.

I wish I would've taken pictures of the process, but here are my final invites: