Location: Almerimar, Spain
Imagine this: It’s your first day on Argo, and you’re excited to meet everyone. You come to realize that two other students on board have the same name as you. Naturally, each one of you is getting a new nickname. Someone suggests your nickname should be Wednesday because your last name is Adams. You instantly fall in love with the nickname because you think it’s really funny (and you can’t pass up the opportunity to have the coolest nickname on the boat).
Fast forward to today: It’s day 34 of passage and your first day as Skipper. You wake everyone up with the “Dance, With My Hands” remix and accidentally play four different versions that are only slightly different from each other. But it’s okay because everyone’s on board with the theme song. You don your skipper hat and get everyone on deck. At breakfast, one of your fellow companions notices that today is Wednesday. As soon as those words come out of his mouth, it’s too late; the gears have already started turning in your head. You realize the stars have aligned. So naturally, at breakfast announcements, you give the executive order that everyone is to address you as Overlord Wednesday.
If you’re thinking to yourself, “I would never do that. Only a true sociopath would abuse their power like that.” Then, I would encourage you to stop reading now. Because this may or may not have been what I did this morning…
Now, onto other things, I may or may not have done:
After breakfast clean-up, we all met in the salon for a seminar class called “History of Harambe,”… “History of Ahambre,” and “History of ALHAMBRA”! Naturally, that got a lot of laughs from the students. Fortunately for them, I am a benevolent overlord, so I laughed with them. Amanda gave us an incredible presentation on the history of Alhambra, as well as what we’ll be doing there tomorrow. Then, we jumped right into Leadership, which was taught today by Sienna and Gabby. Today’s lesson was on conflict vs harmony and why it’s important to have different opinions. (I ate chips during class, which was one of the highlights of my day because everyone had to address me by my proper title before I would share it with them.) We ended Leadership with an exercise where everyone was given a role to play while we pretended to raise our sails. Some people were noncompliant, others were troublemakers, and some people were supposed to be positive at all costs. We definitely got a lot of strange looks from the very nice (and probably sane) people who passed by.
Once free time started, we all scurried off to different places. Some people went thrift shopping, while others bought piping hot waffles to warm up. The most intriguing bunch of minions, I mean students, were the ones who went surfing and cold water plunging. I don’t know what force possessed them to do something so clinically insane, but I would like to think I played a role in it. Those of us who were less sadistic chose to finish our literature reviews for Oceanography.
I would like to take a short intermission at this time to reenact a moment between me and one of my instructors:
Wednesday: (*enthusiastically*) Hello, Will!
Will: *stops in his tracks, sighs in British*
*a long pause ensues*
Will: *sighs again*
*an even longer pause ensues*
Will: *begrudgingly turns to me, who has a wide smile stretching from ear to ear*
Will: Hello, Overlord Wednesday.
Thank you! Now, back to our regularly scheduled program:
A lot of us finished our lit reviews with less than an hour to spare. Before long, dinner was gophered up on deck, and I, the skipper, summoned the crew into the cockpit. Head chef Joe and his sous chefs, Caroline and Stich, did an excellent job at preparing tomato soup and grilled cheese for dinner, a very appreciated hot meal on a cold day, especially by those who jumped in the ocean. Tonight’s squeeze question was about sharing your earliest childhood memory. Mine was from my second Halloween. To close out the squeeze, I made everyone do the classic Addams Family da-da-da-da *snap* *snap*.
After dinner, I made the announcement inviting people to help me take funny pictures for the skipper blog. Everyone was on board with the idea, and we took what I believe are the best skipper blog photos ever to exist in the history of skipper blog photos. Teamwork makes the dream work. After that, some of us went to get crepes and spooky Halloween gelato at a nearby cafe before returning to Argo for some much-needed sleep.
Your benevolent ruler,
Overlord Wednesday Adams