Our Upcoming Cruise

Most of you know about this already, but I have had inquiries about the details of our upcoming 5th Anniversary Cruise.

We leave a week from tomorrow. I just booked all of our excursions. We are very, very excited. We are eating at the early seating--6:15. On our actual anniversary day (at sea--woohoo!) we are eating at 7:00 in the Normandie restaurant--the upcharge, reservations required restaurant.

Here is our itinerary:

Date	Port/City	Activity	Description
Sat, Oct 03	Barcelona, Spain			Depart 7:00 PM
Sun, Oct 04	At Sea
Mon, Oct 05	Nice (Villefranche), France	Tendered	Arrive 7:00 AM	Depart 8:00 PM
Tue, Oct 06	Florence, Italy	Docked	Arrive 7:00 AM	Depart 7:00 PM
Wed, Oct 07	Rome (Civitavecchia), Italy	Docked	Arrive 7:00 AM
Thu, Oct 08	Rome (Civitavecchia), Italy	Docked		Depart 7:00 PM
Fri, Oct 09	Naples/Capri, Italy	Docked	Arrive 7:00 AM	Depart 7:00 PM
Sat, Oct 10	At Sea
Sun, Oct 11	Athens (Piraeus), Greece	Docked	Arrive 7:00 AM	Depart 5:00 PM
Mon, Oct 12	Istanbul, Turkey	Docked	Arrive 2:00 PM
Tue, Oct 13	Istanbul, Turkey	Docked		Depart 5:00 PM
Wed, Oct 14	Mykonos, Greece	Tendered	Arrive 12:00 PM	Depart 8:00 PM
Thu, Oct 15	At Sea
Fri, Oct 16	Split, Croatia	Tendered	Arrive 7:00 AM	Depart 4:00 PM
Sat, Oct 17	Venice, Italy		Arrive 5:00 AM

Here are our excursions:

Nice & St. Paul-De-Vence -
Tuscan Countryside - San Gimignano & Volterra
Imperial Rome
Olive Oil Tasting & Scenic Drive
Sorrento & The Amalfi Drive
Ancient Corinth & Canal Cruise
Best Of Istanbul Without Lunch Over 2 Days
Best Of Split & Its Countryside

These are the tours' "official names." We are sailing on Celebrity--Summit is the name of our ship. We leave on 10/3/09. We are very, very excited. (Did I say that already? Well, we are!) We are staying 2 extra days in Venice. We fly home on 10/19. And get this...we leave Venice at approximately 2:00 in the afternoon, and we get to Chicago around 7:30 in the evening of the very same day! We will be so tired. But Josh is taking Tuesday off, too, so after we fight over who gets up with the dog, we should have a full day to recoup together. And unpack. I wonder if he knows he'll have to work a little bit, too.

recipe tester

I don't think that I've mentioned this here before, but I volunteered to be a recipe tester for the Cook's Country PBS cooking show. It's a spin off of America's Test Kitchen.

So I have a recipe to try and report on by this Thursday. Here's the thing--I can't share the recipe with you. It's against the rules. Not until the recipe airs on the show.

But I can tell you this, it's a beef recipe and I will be making it for date night tomorrow. The side dishes aren't particularly worthy of mention, and frankly neither is dessert. I'm relying on already made or boxed items for these.

Also on the cooking frontier, I watched an old Julia Child show on PBS yesterday and saw her make omelettes. For years I didn't think I could do this. She makes cooking look so easy. But you know what? It was! It was all about shaking the pan. A lot! We had omelettes for lunch yesterday, and thanks to a PM meeting, breakfast this morning.

Well I think that's all the news I have right now.

Kristen out

Back in the classroom again...

Well, not exactly--my student comes to me. I'm tutoring, or really teaching (since he's doing these classes through a home school program), a young brother from a neighboring congregation.

Patrick is really a lot of fun to work with. He's bright and kind and funny. He loves my Sonny dog and even wanted to be able to pet him while he read his history text. All in all, I think we hit it off well.

I should be getting my copies of his texts this weekend. I'm looking forward to actually being able to plan some lessons. I was kinda flying by the seat of my pants based on the work I could see that he had already done.

I'll keep you posted. We work on English and American History for 4 hours on Wed. afternoons. So far, so good.

Kristen out.