Psst! For yesterday’s winner, you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of this post! ~DD

Well, I’ve finally arrived at the last days of the cruise. It was a 10-days, 9-nights cruise, and still I hated to see it end. Sasha White and I had a wonderful time. I managed to get some work done here and there. Nothing impressive. The best benefit for my muse was the chance to experience new things and take in some incredible sights.

For the more ambitious traveler, cruise ships offer non-stop entertainments. My favorite was the ice show, which I watched twice. It was spectacular, and I wasn’t even a little bit prejudiced by the fact that one of Sasha’s friends from back home was part of the cast! Most of my shots are blurs, like this one, because there’s so much movement. But the colors are lovely, aren’t they?

At the center, the guy holding the other skater aloft is Brad, Sasha’s friend, whose suggestion it was that we cruise on this ship.

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My cruise buddy, Sasha White, and I are posting pictures with a theme today—something that made us smile on our cruise. Hers has to do with towel pets and mine is watermelon art. And we’re both running contests for signed books and a gift from the islands. So be sure to hit her site today too!

Here’s what you have to do to win a copy of To Serve and Protect: 1) Send an email to me privately, listing what you think each of these 11 works of art represents AND 2) post a comment somewhere on my blog. That simple. Oh and here’s my email address: DD’s Email

The morning after we left the islands for our long trip back to Newark we had a treat lined up in The Promenade. Watermelons had been carved and served as the centerpieces for a buffet lunch. I couldn’t resist taking pictures of every one of them. Good luck and don’t stress about getting them absolutely correct! Guesses count!

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If you’d like to see what kept Sasha amused (me shopping, and shopping and shopping), head on over to her website too! Sasha White’s blog

The next island stop on our cruise was Labadee, Haiti. I didn’t know a thing about what to expect in Haiti except what everyone emailed me—it’s dangerous and dirty, don’t take the cabs because you’ll be robbed and killed. I actually was looking forward to that Haiti. I wanted to hit a voodoo shop. Wanted the third world pictures. Instead, I ended up in a place so pristine my mother would sit on the toilet seat. Labadee is privately owned by Royal Caribbean. So the experience is restful, peaceful and beautiful, but anything other than authentic.

Sasha was quite pleased. All she wanted to do was lie on the beach. I must have annoyed the crap out of her. I couldn’t just lie in the sun. We tipped a guy to set up our loungers, but I didn’t spend 10 minutes in mine. I swam, I wandered down the beach to the…ahem…shops. Like I needed to do more shopping, but I was BORED. However, the scenery was seriously gorgeous.

Here’s the dock where we arrived.

I tried to get a shot of this guy without being too obvious. I pretended to snap a pic of our monster boat, but he wouldn’t turn around. His abs weren’t a 6-pack, they had to be 12-freaking-pack!

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Yesterday’s winner will be named at the end of this posting! ~DD

Here’s hoping everyone spent Christmas day surrounded by family.

My parents and I descended on my daughter and her family. So we got to watch the 11-month-old unwrap gifts (translated: play with wrapping paper). The six-year-old is in Texas with her daddy, and we missed her, but got a chance to concentrate on the other baby’s first Christmas. Getting to Hot Springs was a little tricky though. With all the rain we’ve had, the roads leading to Arkadelphia were flooded. At Clear Lake (someone with a wicked sense of humor named it because it’s a murky swamp with alligators), I did try to see how far I could get, but when the water got 6-inches deep and I couldn’t see the edges of the road, I turned back and took a different route.

Our meal was great and very relaxed—something I will no doubt look back on with fondness because I’m back on my diet today. Turns out I only gained six pounds on the trip. I didn’t backslide that far!

But it was enough to keep me out of those “booty jeans” yesterday. 😥

Anyway, back to the cruise. A funny thing happened in St. Thomas. I forgot to take pictures of the town because I got caught up in a shopping frenzy. If you’ve never been there, it’s a mecca for jewelry. I caught the fever! I bought two sets (ring, earings, and pendant) of bright blue topaz and purple tanzanite and tons of semiprecious stone bracelets, which I gave away as Christmas gifts. So the photos that follow were taken after I’d finished most of my shopping.

Except these first two. When we debarked at the dock, these tourist taxis that sat a dozen people met us to take us into town. All of them were brightly colored and decorated. We didn’t ride with “The Muscle Man” but I had to snap a pic.

Here’s a view of St. Thomas from the dock.

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Just a quick detour before I get back to the cruise pics. I was browsing through Amazon yesterday and found this! I have a short story in this print collection Cleis is publishing, called “The Out-of-Towner”. It releases June 1, 2010.

Every woman has a girl crush — that physical and emotional fascination with another intriguing, provocative woman who inspires the thought, “What if?” Girl Crush answers that question with an inspiring range of erotic short stories about women acting on their desire and sometimes getting more than they bargained for. Teresa Lamai offers an erotic take on revenge in “Mirador,” when a woman has hate sex in a nightclub bathroom with the person her boyfriend is cheating on her with. In “Getting to Work,” David Erlewine writes about a hot young lawyer who has a lot of work to do to make a demanding, sex-craved partner happy. Writer and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel shows us the unexpected in “Great Lengths,” when an unrequited crush finally evolves into something more — and something less. In Girl Crush, what happens next is always a surprise, to straight women, bisexual women, and lesbians alike.

One more quick note: Sasha White posted pics from Labadee Island, Haiti. So be sure to head over to her blog!

On the afternoon of Day 3 of our cruise, we pulled into the port of San Juan, Puerto Rico. A really lovely place. And since it’s a U.S. territory—free cellphone minutes! Anyway, this pic is of a fortress on one side of the bay that I snapped as the ship pulled into port.

A view of the city. It’s a shame you can’t see the photos as I took them. Here they are very degraded by WordPress and small. Maybe I’ll load them into photobucket or Flickr and send you a link.

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I have tons of pictures and am having a terrible problem culling! So I thought I might do a chronological thing. But you won’t get 10 days of pics, promise.

Sasha White and I decided to add one extra day to the front and end of our trip so that we wouldn’t have to stress if a plane or boat arrived late. On the day of my flight to Newark, New Jersey, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep, so I left for the airport at 2:00 AM. I stopped in Malvern, Arkansas for breakfast at a Waffle House and joined the skater crowd of kids who all looked a little high. I was so early at the airport the airlines swapped me for an earlier flight, so I had time to kill before meeting Sasha at her gate in Newark.

We arrived at the Days Hotel in the early afternoon. The hotel was nice, but we knew we weren’t in a good part of town when we saw the tall chain link that surrounded the parking lot that was topped by strands of barbed wire. Add the armed guard in the guard shack at the entrance of the lot and you know we were glad we’d only be there one night.

Because we had so much extra time on our hands we road a shuttle from the hotel to the mall. We ended up sharing the ride with a woman who could have been the poster child for too much plastic surgery. And when she moved her hands and spoke, we realized she was probably a transgender person as well. Had to mention that because when I got back to the hotel, I passed another in the lobby, and rode the elevator with another. Must have been a convention. And you know me. I wanted so bad to ask one of them if I could see their new parts. I thought maybe they’d be like strangers you meet who are so proud of their new tattoos that they will pull up their shirts or push down the waistband of their pants and show them to you. But I refrained.

Anyway, the camera came out the following day.

It was freaking cold when we arrived at harbor. Royal Caribbean had a large heated, semi-permanent tent set up to process everyone through passports. Still the windchill was in the 20’s and I only brought a rain jacket. I was glad to finally get through this door.

Inside, I stood in line with 2800 other people waiting to process in.

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Be sure to check out the pics my friend Sasha White took of our Seattle trip. Pay special attention to my doppelganger!

Here’s the link: Sasha’s Blog