I was actually ready to go back to work. (recipes included)

 It's always a bummer to see the end of my time off come. 

   I spent last night at the Weed Palace, the 0-star Brooklyn hotel where my company stuffs us to rub elbows with the finest discount prostitutes and low-rent shabby pimps, and angry loud people who insist on only using speakerphone on their Obamaphones.  The teeny tiny pillows offered to us who don't rent rooms in 4-hour blocks have the exact consistancy of partially cooked cauliflower. That's new. I know I have a big head, but a pillow should be larger than a decorative mini couch pillow, even for people with normal sized melons. 

  No blood or semen stains on the coverlet this time, so that was a bonus. 

       I allowed myself 7 hours of rest time, which gave me about 2 hours of sleep. At the Weed Palace, you choose from the side of the building that faces a VERY busy fire station with hourly call-outs, or a busy aboveground length of subway junction, where you get both the squealing of trains making a tight curve AND the clunks of train wheels changing tracks on a tight curve. I opted for the train, as I have a white noise generator on my phone and headphones that are so loud they leave my ears ringing. 

 So that was a fun night.  I will say that Brooklyn has the enormously positive feature that you can get food from anywhere in the world locally.  I had an early flight yesterday so I had arab food for lunch and takeout Korean barbecue for dinner.  Great stuff. I'm not kidding when I say it packed a punch, but I will say that the pigeons outside the windows backed off a solid 1/4 mile when I kicked on the bathroom fan. 

     This morning was the usual crew change rigmarole. Because New York is retarded, I have to pack bulky reusable grocery bags in my luggage from FL, as it's a felony to offer grocery store customers plastic bags. Or smiles, probably.  I also bought heavy, as I'm once again making a concerted effort to lose weight and last night's feasting was the last hurrah. I have about 12lbs of chicken and a 4lb picanha (a sirloin cap) in the deep freeze on board, so I loaded up on fresh vegetables, cases of water, 0salad, eggs and also a large quantity of diet soda, normally about a week's worth, but which will have to last me 4 weeks, as I am also in need of drinking more water and less caffeinated artificially sweetened beverages.  Normally I avoid too much water. Fish shit in it, you know. 

 I'm still having 2 slices of bacon with breakfast, healthy eating or not. I'd rather just die than give up bacon, especially at work. It's not always fun to be a sailor. At least I have bacon. 

         My time home? Amazing. The first week, I was pretty good. Mostly sober. Got some exercise, sun, but limited in what I could do with my shoulder being sore. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife took a fair bit of time off from work so we had a lot more days and nights together.  Second week was much better in terms of comfort, and so I swam a lot, went out a lot, and ate and drank to repletion (and beyond) a little too often.  We also threw a little barbecue over the weekend, and that, while small, was amazing fun. My brother and I were the only gringos there, and one of my wife's friends is a private bartender for events in Miami, so we had some amazing Brazilian-inspired drinks, I grilled picanha, chicken, Brazilian linguica, and the ladies, led by my wife, worked to cook rice, Farofa (If you don't know what farofa is, you are seriously missing out) as well as roasted yuca, and a Brazilian Vinaigrette salsa 

      Most of my guests being Brazilian, after dinner the drinking, swimming, and dancing went up a notch. It was very pleasant to watch, Brazilian women being what they are, but I held off from dancing until after my brother had gone home to wait for the meat sweats, and our bartender/dance instructor handed me a glass of whisky to wash down all the food and fruity drinks and I got out there and lumbered my way through what little samba I can manage. 

    I haven't woken up hung over in a while. It's been even longer since I woke up hung over and with sore legs. The ache in my knees wasn't there 20 years ago last time I did that, though. Thanks, aging. At any rate, I also had a raspy voice from laughing and talking so much. Not everyone made it home, as I didn't want to see anyone driving drunk, and so my somewhat decrepit ass put together a hangover cure breakfast to restore body and soul. Scrambled smoked eggs, bacon (of course!), expresso-ground coffee made as strong as possible, mimosas, fresh biscuits and roasted leftover yuca fried in butter. 

       One VERY cool thing about Brazilians is just how social they are. Cleaning a kitchen after a major event is also a social event. Everyone participates, and it makes things go faster. My wife being the Dona Do Casa (The lady of the house), she ran the show like a conductor and it went quickly. I went out to fish champagne corks and wire stops, a flipflop, and some lime slices out of the pool and reunite bikinis left to dry on the table with their owners. By noon we had the house to ourselves and had tidied up the remnants of the night before and retired to the couch to take root. 

     I included links to recipes and descriptions to those foods above, but I'll warn you that the farofa article is insane. I have never had fruit in farofa, and instead of corn, the Brazilians I know use green pigeon peas. For meat, it's usually finely chopped bacon, linguica, smoked shredded rib meat or the like. 

 So, yeah, I maybe waddled onto the plane when I flew up here for a couple of weeks of Freehab here at Hawsepiper's Afloat Global HQ/ Fat camp. Next time I'm home I'll have to take it easy if I want to be able to see my toes again.