Feels Like the First Time

Back in the days when I was a supremely awkward 10 year old who still wore Winnie the Pooh overalls and considered butterfly clips and body glitter the height of fashion, my entire sixth grade class went to Massachusetts for a whale watch field trip. Not only did I have to suffer through a heinously boring dune buggy ride, a mandatory game of capture the flag, and watching the popular girls perform a choreographed routine to the song "Barbie Girl," they canceled the actual wale watch due to inclement weather. 11 years later, I have finally watched whales!

This week was our first Saturday off EVER, and most of the cast and crew went on a little field trip on a whale watching boat that left from the Boston Aquarium. I was sort of grumpy, because I had to drag my extremely exhausted butt out of bed at 8:30, and although that is two and half hours later than usual, I really wanted to sleep. I did take a nice little nap in the sunshine on the boat, however.

I'm not sure I'm totally sold on whale watching, as an experience. For a lot of it you just wait in the water for a whale. Kind of like the first time I went fishing in a boat and I found out you just sit and wait for fish and couldn't TALK and I wanted to stab myself with a fish hook. Except when the whales actually showed up it was a much bigger payoff than some dinky little sunfish. Humpback whales are HUGE!! And they spout! And fluke! And they came really close to the boat - so close you could see the barnacles. But even better than the humpbacks were the MINKES!!!! (pronounced minkeys). Minkes are miniature whales. They get kind of a bad rap because they are little so people think they're not that cool. But they are so CUTE and their pectoral fins are called mittens so we saw lots of MINKE MITTENS!!!! I may or may not have gotten really excited and started jumping up and down and clapping and yelling "MINKE MITTENS!" I was really popular on this boat. Not.

These past two days marked not only my first whale sighting, but also the first time I made coffee. Yes, I know, shameful. But in my defense 1. I don't drink coffee 2. I'm from Connecticut (that's my answer to all spoiled-princess-queries) and 3. the only coffee-bitch jobs I've had have been doing insanely complicated coffee runs that necessitated constructing towers out of cinnamon dolce lattes and reduced fat strawberry scones in order to carry anything. But as wardrobe mistress, my ancillary duty is to make the communal coffee. Thankfully there were instructions on the Mr. Coffee filter box. Unfortunately for the rest of the cast, who does drink coffee, it was probably really shitty. But whatevs, it was hot and caffeinated, so I think I can count that as a success.

Plus we went through more than 20 cups so it can't have been that bad.