may second the second

may 2nd is Sage's birthday. Toni teaches psychology and women's studies and Sage is her 11-year old daughter. Here's how cool it is to be a kid on a ship going around the world: first, if your birthday is may 2nd, 2007, you get to have your birthday twice. And, if that weren't cool enough, you get to have the Archbishop and Leah Tutu come to your birthday party. AND, they coming bearing gifts. For my part, it seemed kind of mind-boggling (forget even the whole part about traveling round the world at the age of 11!). For Sage's part, she was just running around happy as can be cutting cake (the most giant round birthday cake you've ever seen) for the Desmond & Leah Tutu and for all of us and for all the dining-hall crew.

here’s what wikipedia says about the international dateline:

The International Date Line (IDL), also known as just the Date Line, is an imaginary line on the surface of the Earth opposite the Prime Meridian which offsets the date as one travels east or west across it. Roughly along 180° longitude, with diversions to pass around some territories and island groups, it corresponds to the time zone boundary separating +12 and −12 hours GMT (UT1). Crossing the IDL travelling east results in a day or 24 hours being subtracted, and crossing west results in a day being added.

The first date-line problem occurred in association with the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan's expedition (1519–1522). The surviving crew returned to a Spanish stopover sure of the day of the week, as attested by various carefully maintained sailing logs. Nevertheless, those on land insisted the day was different. Although now readily understandable, this phenomenon caused great excitement at the time, to the extent that a special delegation was sent to the Pope to explain this temporal oddity to him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Date_Line

After today, instead of being ahead of the East Coast, we are now behind the East Coast. Yesterday, we were 15 hours ahead and now we are magically 9 hours behind. Too much math for me … I don’t get it.

Nor does my computer for that matter, which keeps reverting to May 3^rd, even though I keep changing the setting to May 2^nd. The desk computer is having a very hard time calculating due-dates as well.

I went to bed at 6:30 last night. I went to dinner about 6:15 and it was totally un-inspirational, so I went back to my cabin and laid down instead. I slept until 8:45 (pm) when I got up to change my clothes and get ready for real-sleep. And I slept until my alarm went off at 8:00 am this morning. Yipes. I was pretty drained.

Japan photos are up at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/-erin/sets/72157600170121524/ so I believe I'm all caught up now.

The weather outside is windy and cool, and so the seas are a bit rough again today. We've learned that the advantage of having the reserve shelves full is that the books stay much more secure. Despite the bookends, they've been sliding back and forth along the glass shelves today as the ship rocks. I'm going to miss my little library. I was talking about my real-job with some folks the other day and, when I said that UVA adds more than 60,000 books each year, I realized that is 6 times the number of books in the collection here. Each year at UVA, we add the size of this library more than 6 times over. That's kinda crazy, when you think about it. Don't anyone shoot me for asking this, but do we really need all those books????