Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 369

Diane has been “away” all day at a Forever “Pixels 2 Pages” event. In a normal year, she would have gone to a hotel and spent all day on her computer with her friends, learning about ways to use the software. This year, of course, she stayed home and spent all day on her computer with her friends, learning about ways to use the software – at least we were able to eat together!

This afternoon was the Toastmasters Area B2 Speech Contest. The Table Topics prompt was “what have you learned about yourself during the pandemic?” – unfortunately, the contest wasn’t recorded, so I don’t know exactly how I responded, but I won, so I’ll be competing at Division level next month. One of my competitors is the person who put together Diane’s event (and who’ll be hosting us for Zoom Seder next week) – it’s a small world!

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 368

I was less than surprised to get an email from Celebrity Cruises this morning telling me that they’d decided to use the Celebrity Millennium for Caribbean sailings this summer instead of waiting to see if the Canadian Government would open up their ports. And therefore, they were cancelling all Alaskan sailings for this year, including ours.

When Celebrity first announced that Canada was suspending port access for this year, we tried to postpone this trip to 2022 – none of us were ready to get onto a big ship yet – but they weren’t willing to make any changes then. Today’s note gave us three choices: postpone, take a credit, or get a refund. We told our travel agent to postpone, and she has already rebooked us to the cruise we wanted for 2022; by that time, sailing on a big ship should be significantly less worrisome.

We still have two trips for this year that haven’t been postponed yet – and Iceland has just reopened their borders to fully vaccinated people, so there’s a chance that that trip may really happen. But I’m not buying any airplane tickets yet!