April 20, The Second One

April 20, The First One.

Have you ever seen the movie Ground Hog Day? It is a story about an obnoxious weatherman who has to repeat the same day (Ground Hog Day) until he gets its right. We have our own version of Ground Hog Day when we will live through April 20 twice. In order for us to adjust our clocks from being 13 hours ahead to 6 hours behind New York Time and crossing over the International Date Line, we will repeat April 20.

The crew is having fun with this as well. In the movie, you knew it was the same day because the radio plays “ I Got You Babe” every day when the morning alarm went off. The crew was playing this song over our ships intercom.
Our Dean’s Memo which tell us our days schedule, now states April 20, the second one.

April 23

I just wanted to try and describe what things have been like on the ship more in depth. My parents may not like this, especially my grammy!

Time has become lucid for us and we no longer are preoccupied about what time it is or what we should be doing at any hour. Essentially from the time changes and the huge amount of work, many people have become nocturnal. There are four others with me in the computer lab at 4 am and many others spread around the ship.

We all simply sleep when we are tired because it is hard to sleep during regular sleep time. I have found for my papers that I need a large block of uninterrupted time to make any steady progress. So I stayed up the night before a reading day to get my research done and slept during the day.

I have never seen so many people up for breakfast when it opened. People are pulling all nighters to get the intense amount of work done for each class. We have lost so many hours since Japan that I cannot keep track. For me, it is just insanity to see everyone up and about so early and it makes me feel a lot closer to everyone too because we have no idea what our bodies are doing!

I am doing really well though. My school work is fine and I’m getting a good amount of sleep so don’t worry!!