Was fairly hungry at lunch, so ate everything quite happily. We may finally have cracked it with the food on board. Hopefully. Only took three months.

Woken by the noon announcement again. Apparently, according to one of the stewards, a lot of people are struggling with the time zones and sleeping late as a result. Not my steward, of course. He clocks off on time, which means an hour early when the clocks change, and to hell with his passengers. Others wait, which I think is a minimum level of service. If you’re being paid to make the beds, you should make the beds, shouldn’t you?

Now here’s a thing. Penguins use their guano to melt the ice and snow ready for nesting – essentially gritting the roads like we do, but using their own poo.

Recent observations:

Japan drives on the left, which is odd, because most of the countries that do that are ex-UK colonies and/or Commonwealth, which Japan has never been.

Hawaii has the Union Jack in the corner of its state flag, although no one knows why, because it has never been a UK colony.

Dear blue patch of rain over San Francisco. GO AWAY! I know they want rain – four year drought and all – but you had better be gone by the time I get there. Rain in Hawaii was bad enough. Don’t want it in SF and SD as well, thank you very much. We have generally had excellent weather during this trip – not many associate the Falkland Islands with sunburn – don’t spoil it now.

Dinner was very tasty but veeeeery slooooooow. It took 40 minutes for the hors d’oeuvres to arrive and the main course arrived at the one hour mark. I appreciate it was a gala dinner/formal (black and white) night, but that felt very slow indeed. We had a lovely chat, in the meantime though. The olds talked about radio shows for a while, until someone thought to include me, and then we discussed children’s television, and it transpires that Maggie and Keith’s son works on Waybuloo, which, luckily, I watch and love, so that went well!

UPDATE: BIG row. Huge. You may remember that, when I wrote about Cairns, I mentioned a shop called Wild Sugar by Sajeela, with a link to their lovely website full of amazingly beautiful dresses. Well, turns out that they don’t bother to read the delivery instructions you give them, and then, when the parcel is returned, because they wrote the wrong information on the label, instead of what you told them to write (twice), that’s YOUR fault. And if you ask them to courier it to you to make up for the ONE MONTH delay, they will issue you with a full refund instead. Despite you not having requested any refund. Dameon is so petulant, he would rather bankrupt his wife’s business than admit he made a mistake.

So, there you have it. Lovely dresses, but not worth the hassle. Don’t bother. You won’t get what you asked for, because they just write whatever they like on the parcel and then yell at you when it doesn’t reach the correct destination. So do not go to http://wildsugarbysajeela.com.au – Wild Sugar by Sajeela – you’ll only make yourselves miserable looking at dresses that will never come.

UPDATE: The refund they sent me is still “pending”. It takes time for a credit card refund to go through. His wife seemed more reasonable, and we were on the verge of resurrecting the whole transaction. But then, Sajeela said she would send me the dress, but I would have to pay again, because she can’t send out a dress without having a payment in hand. When I pointed out that it’s hardly my fault she has no payment in hand, maybe her husband should not have sent it back in the first place – because now I can’t get to it either, while it is pending (and I never requested a refund, remember) – she decided that I could not have the dress after all, because it is ‘damaged’, so I can sod off. Delightful people. I do hope karma pays them a visit soon.