I'm not dead yet! (part 4 of 2)

One week to go here aboard HAWSEPIPER's HQ-In-Exile.

 It's pretty slow. I'm concerned about talking out of school about things that my employer might not want me to talk about, but the fact is that there's less ship traffic coming into New York, where I'm currently posted, and we're servicing that traffic, but between the seasonal lag (mid-summer is our slow season anyhow) and the state of things, I don't think I'm talking out of school when I say that it's pretty slow for us.

 There's work for all of us, though. We are getting cargoes to move, so that's a positive thing. It's not like we're growing cobwebs on the pumps.

   With the downtime, I should be hammering away at things I want to do, like learning CAD, designing things for my house and shop, and making plans, but I haven't really been doing much of that.  My house is a colonial design on in the inside (I mean, it's Florida. Outside, it's just a big concrete box, like a 3/4-McMansion), and Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife wanted me to put a barn door in to close off my master bathroom- it's at the end of a long hall in my bedroom behind a sitting area where we have  a couch, so it's already private IMO, but she wants it more private, so I at least got to design a barn door in a simple CAD program I already know how to use, Sketchup. It was actually pretty helpful in terms of being able to see the proportions and choose the right planks and such. So that sucked up a whole 90 minutes.

      Unfortunately, when we're not working, we're sitting at the company's mooring area at the lower end of Bay Ridge anchorage, and there's a donut hole shaped gap of cell coverage exactly in this spot. No bullshit, about 2 minutes out of every 5, and maybe 4 minutes out of every 5 during business hours, there is no usable cell signal. So working online doesn't happen.

 Well, small challenges. Anyhow, I could be being more productive, but what can you do? I'm ok. I've got a job, I have some free time now, so I can't complain. Maintenance on the temporary HQ is up to date, for sure, anyhow.

     The world beyond our hull is going mad, though. The whole mask kabuki theatre, people fighting, killing each other... if ever there was a time to be grateful that I chose a job removed from the horror that is other people, this is it.

  I have my opinions. They're probably what you think they are, and that's fine. I'm not ready to throw bricks at anyone who disagrees with me. I am going to do what I do. Keep my family safe, try to keep my job, and use economic, physical and class barriers to keep the mob away from my life as much as I can.

 Well, rumor is that there will be another Wu Flu refund, where the .gov is going to give back a teeny tiny percentage of the hundreds of thousands of dollars they've taken from me and mine and mostly wasted.

 Pretty sure I know what I'm going to buy to help do my part to stimulate the economy.

in case of in case of. And also because if I'm going to be accused of buying a penis substitute, I'm buying the John Holmes of pistols. 

Yeah, so I have to make flower boxes too for home while I'm there. And next week is Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's birthday, and I haven't been home for one of those in a few years, so we have to celebrate that too. Basically I'm living for the future this week.