What [was I] doing New Year's, New Year's Eve

It is officially a new year. Several entries back I declared an early beginning to my 2007, which was more accurately a needed early ending to my 2006. Now, everyone is in agreement, it is 2007.

2006 will not go on record in the archives of my mind as a particularly great year, all things weighed at the end. There were ups, but then there were downs like never before and there have not been ups enough yet to counteract that. I had a personal stock market crash in 2006, I guess you could say. Slowly, though, and with a few bumps here and there, my industrial average has been rising. My companies have had to diversify, there has been restructuring, and some of my more mundane tasks have been outsourced, but it looks like 2007 will be more than just a rebuilding year for the franchise.

I am aware that the above paragraph contains a mix of several different metaphors. Apparently I don’t believe in limiting myself to the confines of simplicity or clarity.

Anyway, tomorrow (the 9^th, who knows when I’ll be able to post this entry) will be our final U.S. port of call as we begin the World Cruise. We’ll head to South America, then Africa, then many ports eventually leading to China. After that, we head back around and we make our way through the Suez Canal, the Mediterranean, and back to Ft. Lauderdale where we began. I don’t know about you, but to me here at one a.m. sitting on the floor in my hallway, after a couple of Alfonso’s generous Jack and Cokes in the Observation Lounge while hanging out with our soon-to-depart guitarist Cesar, the whole thing sounds exhausting.

I have been at best a poor correspondent to many of you who’ve written me in the past several weeks, especially anyone who’s written me on MySpace. I find myself sometimes annoyed by MySpace because I go to check my email and then I learn that I have email in another location which I have to go check. Still, hearing from people is great, and I promise I’ll get better about writing back to people in a timely fashion. So… keep writing.

Recent things of note:

-There was a ship-held beach party in a nice safe little place on Roatan, Honduras… so I said, “let’s take a cab far away from there.” We went to the little town at the other end of the island and had a blast enjoying the local, third-world version of tourist hospitality.

-Most of the cast and the shoppies went cave tubing in Belize. I had never heard of this, so I will explain to those of you who had not. What you do is, you pay a guide about $45 (after haggling) and they put you ina van and drive you about 45 minutes to an hour into the middle of nowhere, into the rain forest/jungle/mountain area which is dotted with caves and cut through with a river that has some rapids. You get out of the van, are handed a large, durable innertube, and then you hike for about 25 minutes down a path through the jungle, across a fast-moving river while holding a rope (so the current doesn’t drag you off) and finally to a calm spot on the water near the opening of a cave. You hop on your tubes and the current carries you into the cave. You “keep left!” and “keep right,” avoiding eddys and harsher currents; you hold onto one another to stay together and wear lamps on your heads to (dimly, ineffectively) illuminate the darkest reaches of the cave. Once out into the sunlit world again, you drift back toward camp with an occasional small rapid to deal with. All said, it’s two or three of the best hours I’ve had since starting this crazy ship life.

-In Guatemala, several of us went out to lunch and nearly wound up adopting a local boy who sat down to lunch with us. No, we didn’t invite him, and no, we weren’t tempted to take him with us because he was “adorable” or anything. He just plopped down next the Meghan in the booth in the regrettable restaurant we’d all chosen and made himself at home. Pictures of that will be forthcoming…

I’ll be redoing this entry with pics and more succinct verbiage, but I wanted to be sure to get something up today before I left the states.

Happy New Year, by the way. I hope to hell it is. 2006 was a year of squandered promise here, and I hope to reclaim that potential in 2007.