busy

It's been a busy few days here at the HQ. I'll cue up some awesomeness at some point, but in the meanwhile, here's one of my favorite filler posts... a nice picture of Sofia Vergara eating a banana.

Liveblogging the stupid

edit:  once the CG got out of our hair, things went fine. Only took 6 hours longer than it should have. 


Well, this is happening now, so it might be a short post.

    It's blowing hard and raining here in NY harbor today. Sloppy weather.

 We loaded a modest 1000 tons of heavy fuel oil and 200 tons of diesel for a tanker to use as fuel. Spent last night hanging out at a lay berth waiting for the ship. They showed up on time, and we came alongside, made all fast. I woke up just as we were sending up lines. The weather is usual NY harbor springtime shitty. blowing good, tide opposite to the wind, and a decent swell from the fetch at the anchorage. Rotten working weather but nowhere near as bad as it gets at times.

 The ship dragged ass everywhere- getting the diesel hose connected, arguing over paperwork... the usual when we deal with eastern Europeans. Slow and grumpy. Mark 1 bunker transfer.

 A little lube oil tanker came alongside the other side of the ship. He only had a couple hundred gallons of lube oil to transfer, but the coast guard first wanted them to only transfer one product at a time, so I had to sit and warm my thumbs in my own exhaust, to so speak. I called my office, said what was up, and sat down with my book.

 20 minutes later, a VERY stressed out dispatcher called me, told me we had to break down, the coast guard wanted one guy at a time alongside the ship.

 Well, that's shitty, late to make that sort of call, as the wind and tide were now at loggerheads, and it would be safer for me to just sit and wait than to break down and come alongside a second time to the ship, when we're more likely to part lines and play bumper cars with two loaded tank vessels a second time.
    Sadly, I don't make policy. So the tanker disconnected my hose, the tug came alongside and made up, and yanked us off the ship to drift and make circles for an hour or so while a 60-foot runabout that weighs less than my drinking water tank on here does his thing. Then we get to come alongside again in this rotten weather and do it all over again.


     I've got the time to complain. This makes no sense to me. By far, the most dangerous evolution today for us is for the stressed out tug captains to maneuver alongside a tanker at anchor, while we're partially loaded, and the coast guard is making us do exactly this. Four times. Twice to come alongside while loaded, once to sail loaded, once to presumably sail empty. In heavy rain, a wind that is just shy of a gale, and with dark approaching now, certainly dark when we sail. Fuckers. Is this more or less safe than having us swinging on one side and a teeny lube tanker that might weigh all of 15 tons on the other?

 Well, mine is not to wonder why I guess. I really feel bad for the tug operators tonight. Beyond sending up some extra mooring lines and tending them faithfully, my M.O. shouldn't much change. Meanwhile I can HEAR the tug operators losing their hair from here.

 So it goes. I can't be more than annoyed, really. Of all the fucked up jobs I've done, this one is merely the most recent. If the Coast Guard wasn't involved, it'd be fine, but I guess they can't bat a thousand from the comfort of an office building.

Get thee to sea

First off, check this out.

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/census-more-americans-18-34-now-live-parents-spouse


(CNSNews.com) - Four decades ago, in the mid-1970s, young American adults--in the 18-to-34 age bracket--were far more likely to be married and living with a spouse than living in their parents’ home.
But that is no longer the case, according to a new study by the U.S. Census Bureau.
“There are now more young people living with their parents than in any other arrangement,” says the Census Bureau study.
“What is more,” says the study, “almost 9 in 10 young people who were living in their parents’ home a year ago are still living there today, making it the most stable living arrangement.”
The Number 1 living arrangement today for Americans in the 18-to-34 age bracket, according to the Census Bureau, is to reside without a spouse in their parents’ home.


      Lots of folks attribute that to many different issues- and many of them are likely correct. The economy, education (and lack thereof), evolution of the job market and competition for jobs with low-and-high skillset work being a globalized market for workers thanks to shitty enforcement and utterly retarded labor laws. I'm sure the answer is a laundry list of why Chad and Brittany are still living with Mommy or Daddy and their new stepmom/stepdad. 

...and that's part of the equation, too. Intact nuclear families are the most stable and successful, from start to finish. The numbers are absolutely ironclad, and also shrinking as they have been for 40 years or so. 


           Part of me feels that a lot of this is the chickens coming home to roost. I have plenty of friends from blue-collar backgrounds who are VERY successful tradesmen, generally making more money than anyone without a graduate degree in a STEM field could ever hope to make... that is, if they've avoided addiction, alcoholism (to a lesser extent) or being a teenage parent, which has been killing or hobbling a LOT of people where I grew up. 
  If a parent isn't strong enough to stop their child to go in the hole for a master's degree in Transgender Asian Dance Studies, I figure they either don't much like their kids, are a baby boomer and perhaps overly sanguine about the job market for bright young minds without marketable skills, or lack in credibility themselves. Either way, not my circus, not my monkeys. A child will try and stay in your home forever now, like a cat, but doesn't have the decency to die a few years after you get tired of caring for it. 


 I was late getting out. I moved back into my parents' house after grad school, while I was getting my shit together after transitioning from being a normal respectable citizen to being a commercial fisherman. I got out after a short time. I'll forever appreciate my parents' forbearance, and I was and am ashamed that I stayed there for almost a year.

 Life happens, and life changes happen. One of my brothers suffered a spinal injury years ago, and his life went in the toilet after. Lost everything, had to start all over, but without his health. He's my mom's full-time caregiver now although at first it was mostly the other way around. That sort of living situation makes sense in an awful, pragmatic way. 


 Now, my nephew is 18, and plans to go to college, but doesn't plan on going in the hole more than necessary. So he's working on one of my employer's tugboats here, almost a year after finishing high school, and mostly saving his money. He's leaning towards a career in medicine, but he's saving his money and working hard... for 2 weeks out of the month at a VERY healthy salary as an Ordinary Seaman on a tug. He bought a luxury European sedan last week, a car that I can't afford today, precisely because he could pay cash for it, as he has no kids, no mortgage and no student loans yet, and it should last him well past college. He'll likely not again be able to afford or justify spending that kind of money for another 20 years, if ever.  I'm jealous.
 I didn't even own a car at his age. I hadn't discovered tugboating, either, though. He's 18, lives with his parents when he's home, and is a solid citizen and hard worker. He's got that blend of humor, empathy and intelligence that you want in a family doctor. I hope he doesn't go career out here unless he decides it's a passion worth pursuing, but while his peers are working at Starbucks, movie theatres or smoking weed full-time and dicking off, he's hard at work, and should his own career choices prove unsatisfying, he'll have a back-up career path that can support a family. 
 Somehow I don't think that he'll be raiding the change jar on the counter at ma's house to go down to the Coinstar machine at the grocery store to buy a dime bag.  But then again, his parents drilled into him the need to work and be self-sufficient, to choose training in something that pays,  a true anodyne against what seems to be happening to all these lost Millennials.

Little boat update

I was able to put some time into the little boat while I was at home this past time. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife had a busy schedule, and my kid is still in school, so I was able to knock out the honey-do list in a few days, signed over one arm, one leg to Home Depot and get things shipshape and do the heavy lifting that often gets put off while I'm out getting baked on fuel fumes at work.

 I spent 30-45 minutes in the morning and again at night on the first week just filling nicks in the hull, priming, then wet sanding, etc etc until diminishing returns made me call 'good enough' and I painted the hull a semi-gloss black- the ultimate color for showing off dings, nicks, surface irregularities and lack of fairness. It came out respectable.

I set it outside in the sun to bake all day after the paint set. The black shows off the dust I was kicking up. 

  Between the wood, fiberglass, epoxy and paint, the hull is up to 6lbs now. At 4 1/2 feet, that's pretty light. I'll need at least 50lbs of ballast when the time comes to finish it.


 Over my second week home, I found time here and there to build the lower house, shape the curved front of the house up forward, and install a coaming in the hull so that the house will be removable (there will be a motorcycle battery under it) but snug enough to be waterproof the when set in place so I don't fill up the boat with any splashed water on deck.

The bowed front was made by joining the upper and lower frame up forward with 30 or so 1/4" sticks, then bondo'ing between them.

While I was gluing and screwing the lower house, I also mocked up a cardboard jig to shape the after deck raised platform that will cover the rudder compartment, and another one up forward in the bow. These were slow to come together, as I wasn't working off the plans, which don't quite capture the shape of the boat proper. I made them with a cutout piece of basswood ply and again with the 1/4" sticks glued down. I also had to reshape the cap rail over the fantail, as it was out of true- the boats back in the day had a complex bend to the sheer, and they're very elegant looking, and I wanted to do it justice, so I spend another day or two making dust by building up the cap rails and sanding them down again. 

 

Yes I am a big dork, thank you for noticing.

back to it

Sadly, no one will pay me to sit at home and do my own thing there, so I had to go back to work. Dove right in with a complex load and discharge combo right off the bat, so time is in short supply. Going to be a busy 36 hours.

 It was a great time home. We spent Easter right properly, for the most part, and I cooked a prime rib that was my new personal best. My wife looked askew at me for volunteering to cook Easter dinner, but prime rib requires a man's touch, IMHO. I did no disappoint.

 Anyhow, more later when I get a little more time.

Being an idiot saved my life!

Back before I was married and living in Margaritaville, back before I was dreaming of getting the hell out of the miserable low-class suburb I was squatting in to the west and and south outside of Boston, I was a commercial lobsterman, dirt poor, and sailed on an oil tanker in the wintertime. I lived with my two roommates, Johnny Sparks, an ironworker, and Spinach, a political hack at the time,  in a house we called 'The Pickle Jar.'   It was a pretty good life, but lonely at times, so I had a girlfriend and it was OK.
       My ex was a nice person. A professional, with a very healthy high-paying state job. I was in an honest-to-God stable, adult relationship. It was... pleasant, in the way that a businesses' foyer is pleasant, like a weekend outing sponsored by your employer is pleasant.
 Like golf is pleasant. That kind of pleasant. 

         My ex didn't like my friends. Oh, Johnny and Spinach she tolerated. My other friends, drinking buddies, not so much. She hated that I was a lobsterman with an underutilized STEM education, although I think she was attracted to my passion for the sea. Not that she shared it, but I don't think she had ever been exposed to someone who was professionally pursuing his lifelong dreams, and was actually good enough to make a living in doing so.

        I didn't know it, but I was unhappy. I'm not someone who can tolerate pleasant very long. I'd rather have challenge and struggle, and spectacular success or failure than mediocrity. And that's what my relationship was.

      One weekend my ex wanted to introduce me to one of her good friends, and so we went bowling, meeting at an alley close to her house, north of Boston. I took Spinach with me, because he was single too, and because he had more tolerance for pleasant than Johnny Sparks.

 Unsurprisingly enough, it was a pleasant night.
    We ended up going to a restaurant for drinks after. We piled into my ex's sedan, because my truck stank of bait, being a lobsterman's truck. After we had our drinks, my ex drove us back to my truck. I had to be up at 4:30 to go fishing, anyhow, and it was a 45 min drive home. Must have been about 9pm, and it was dark.

 And that's when I saw it. 

 *********************
Now, let me break scene here and remind you, if you missed the constant stream of dick and fart jokes here on this blog, that  I have the maturity of a 12-year old, and normally know enough to keep it under wraps in polite company. I'm serious, too. The guys I work with are friggin' saints for putting up with my monkey ass. I'm VERY well educated, very articulate, very crude, vulgar and can turn on and off the social graces at will, though sometimes it happens at random, too, which is what happened on the night I'm talking about.
*********************

   Now, my ex, being a pleasant but somewhat snobby, selfish person (the spoiled only child of a high-end business executive), stuck Spinach and I in the back seat of her sedan so she could chat with her friend. I was at my peak strength at this point in my life, and at my peak size, too, so it was a pretty miserable ride.
     We were passing through Peabody MA, one of Boston's northern suburbs (and an unknown to me. Being from the South Shore, the North Shore was to be distrusted and avoided). The businesses were still open, and I was looking out the window to see where the hell we were.

 And there it was. It didn't register for a couple of seconds.

Seriously. 

    That is an actual liquor store, located in the heart of Puritan Country, outside of Sodom, Boston, Massachusetts.

 ...I saw the sign, and I lost my shit. I'm talking, grabbed my buddy, then pointed and brayed like a donkey. I was laughing so hard at the unexpected humor that no noises were coming out of my mouth for lack of breath.  It took me until we got to my truck to stop giggling, and even then, after an exasperated and somewhat cold  goodnight from my ex, Spinach and I were still laughing about it.

  I failed to display the proper deference and gravitas with my ex and her friend, and that night was the beginning of the end for us. I heard about how embarrassed she was for quite a while. It was not pleasant.

 I still laugh when I see that picture. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife wouldn't get the imagery or the double-entendre without a full explanation, but she'd roll her eyes and chuckle, mostly at me acting like a child, but she's got a great sense of humor, and would never put me in sexile for irrational exuberance in front of her friends.

 At any rate, a year or so, I forget how long, after things wrapped up with my ex, I met my wife to be, and while the dick and fart jokes don't flow like wine when I'm home, out of respect for my wife, I'll sometimes get a giggle out of her at least.




Alternate Title: How Alcohol was both the problem and the solution!

Get the hell out my way

Did you know that the worst three airports in the US for delays are also the 3 airports that serve New York?

 I know this because the last time I got home on time I didn't have gray in my beard.

 3 hours and counting for my current weather-related delay. It stopped raining hours ago and the fog lifted shortly after breakfast. Now that we're approaching sunset, it's still fucked.

       God dammmit.