Today was a sea day. Very nice and relaxing. 

We attended the Mariners Award Reception today.  Last time we received our Silver Medallion for 300 sea days, this time we watched other people receive their award.  It was very interesting.  We were told there were 900 4 star and 5 star mariners on the ship this cruise.  It looks like only 5 star mariners were invited to this reception and I estimated there were about 200 people there.  For a ship with 2100 guests that is a very high percentage of loyal customers. 

We saw the captain today and surprisingly he didn’t say one word to the group at the reception. I thought for sure he might say something in Dutch since most of the room was Dutch. Last reception they offered for anyone to take pictures with the captain but today he immediately walked out after all the presentations. That didn’t deter Nana as she really wanted a picture with our friends Laura and Wolfgang with the captain. Nana tracked the captain down and told Nana that he had a meeting but consented for the picture.  Who schedules a meeting 20 minutes after an important reception?

Nana was very intent on helping with bridge today. She worked with the setup crew and was there to help at the beginning. She was especially helping people with handicaps. A blind person showed up today and she rearranged the the room to maximize the light and the person brought their own cards that were braille. She helped with both the morning and afternoon sessions. 

A new feature is that you can order tea in the afternoon. And of course Nana loves tea, skones and other pastries. We invited Daro and Lynn over for tea. A lovely couple from San Diego. We are talked about our grandchildren. Lynn told us that my voice sounded like George Clooney. How exciting!

Tonight was dinner at the Pinnacle Grill.  We had dinner with Wolfgang and Laura.  I got a call from Bishop Bob whom we met during the first two weeks cruise and he was asking how we were. He was worried since I hadn’t sent my blog for the past two days. I will work to be more timely. He is now on the Queen Mary heading back to the US. We will have to do that sometime, it sounds like fun. 

I did more train work today. One thing about me is that I am always improve what I am working on. I currently have a main program but 5% of the program needs to be unique for each section and location of the track. This leaves 95% of the program common between all the programs. There are currently about 20 main programs. As I work on each section I develop improvements to the main program. The problem is that I then have to modify the other 19 programs to match. I decided I need to create a master program and this program would be added into each of the main programs at run time. That way I only need to change the master program once and the new improvements are available in all of the programs when they are run. I am having trouble getting it to work with JMRI so I reached out the discussion group for JMRI. The discussion group has been fantastic and hopefully someone there will suggest a fix that works. It will make updating programs so much easier.