Your New England Home

 Something every one of us knows all too well. I remember watching Saturday cartoons with my brother, pissed off because he got the 'good' heat register on the floor, and I got the next one in line, which blew cold-ass air on my... well, my ass.




http://www.yankeemagazine.com/article/diy-home-3/old-house-repairs

...I only use my powers for good... uh, for me.

So, I disabled the anti-scald device in the plumbing system. Then I plugged the overflow of the tub in the master bathroom off of the Situation Room here at the Ant Farm, my home... after that, it was a matter or loading up on ice cubes and Bulleit bourbon and pouring a couple hunnit gallons of water hot enough to boil a lobster, and I had myself a good 90-min soak here as part of my last night at home.

 For reals, yo. That was a religious experience. My ass is reborn.
 Tomorrow it's all grub shopping and a 250mile drive down the rt 95 Highway to Hell between Boston and Brooklyn.

almost...

back to work tomorrow. Best vacation in a long time. More later after I get back on board.

All kinds of awesome stuff

I've been enjoying my impromptu "normal" vacation time. I threw in the air bunnies because I haven't taken my regularly-scheduled 2 weeks off in months and months. I haven't taken 2 weeks off in two consecutive rotations in a row in... 2 years? Something like that anyhow.

 So, yeah. In that time I installed after-market parts on my beloved truck (step 1 of 20: put on a bug shield), bought and used a breadmaker (fucking awesome), got blind stinking drunk with some of my best friends from Kindergarten (35 years ago!), vomited sushi (see the part about visiting friends from Kindergarten), Discussed John chapter 3 with my kid and how it relates to being a good and upright man, threw a copy of James Joyce's 'Dubliners' in the ocean (where it belongs, via a sewage plant, but who has the time?), shut off the 'check engine' light in my wife's car (breakthrough in understanding trouble codes!), and made moonshine in an evap made from a radiator. Also, apple pie moonshine is now a thing, and in 30 days, it might not taste like apple-scented formaldehyde.
All in all, pretty productive. And I've got another week left.

HOME

I made it. Couldn't resist the siren call of Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's "Hoh-nee, you betta com home dis week. I tired of tohking on de fone."

Light posting

not my photo. This was as close as a coworker could get his tugboat to the pier. 4000 hp was not enough to get through.

It's not that I'm feeling uninspired- we're getting slammed with cargo after cargo here at Hawsepiper's afloat global HQ/charity gynecology clinic. The most frequently uttered phrase these past 2 weeks has been "exactly where the fuck do they expect us to put this?" as we are at times not being given the opportunity to get rid of cargo before throwing more of it on top of or around the stuff we've already got on board. My bed is 5' in the air, so I'm not sleeping all that well, as we're at times sailing with a heavy list or insane forward trim to get the job done, and sleeping on a bed with a strong list on brings both messed up dreams and an increased chance of rolling out of the bunk.
 So it goes.

 Luckily for us, the recent cold snap froze our water supply, so we've been able to save time by not showering for a day or two back there, and then there was an ice plug in the gray water overboard discharge, so our poop tank overflowed, which smelled magical. At one point both of our main cargo pumps broke down simultaneously, too, so that happened.

 We've been dealing with the issues as they come up, and dealing well. We never had to turn down work, and duct tape, pressurized air and lots of hammering and cursing are keeping the oil moving.

    I finish on Tuesday. Maybe I can go home, maybe I'll go work somewhere else for a week first. Depends on how stupid I am.

You think you had a bad day?

OK, there's been some bitchery going on here, and things are actually not bad, despite my shitty mood, so here's something to remind everyone that it could always be worse out here.











Firefox is really being soggy and hard to light. I was planning on posting some pictures, but it's being buggy. Stay tuned.

Your Brazilian fix

It's 2am, I'm waiting for a dock to open up so we can load cargo, and it's been a while since I posted some of the lovely ladies of Brazil for you. Here you go. I swear this has absolutely NOTHING to do with a slight downtick in site traffic. Pinky swear.

'for what we are about to receive...'

So, we're at anchor, waiting a few more hours for a berth to open up at the local rent-a-tank oil terminal to take on a mid-sized cargo load. And there's snow coming. Maybe. The storm is less than a few hours away and still, none of the pointy heads can tell us exactly how much snow we're going to get here in the New Yawk area.

...so we're having trouble predicting the weather 6 hours in advance of a storm.

...and yet people keep telling me I'm an obstructionist because I am skeptical of claims to be able to predict global weather and temperature patterns for the next several centuries?

 Yeah, yeah, weather is not climate. Except when it's warm or bad weather. Then it is. Totally.

 You know what's the important take-away here for me? For the next 24 hours, 5 of my 10 cargo tanks will have hot oil in them, which means no shoveling necessary on that section of deck, so thanks to the giant Chinese conglomerate who's paying a million bucks or so for a months' worth of fuel for their ship.