Home alone and

 Time passes so fast, I've already been home for 6 days and it sure doesn't feel like it. Today's my first day with not a lot scheduled and Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife at work. We've been glued together at the hip since I got home. 

 The medical BS continues. Had more testing, still more to do in January when I come home next time, which should be definitive. Don't feel like writing about it while I don't know exactly what's up just yet. 

          But that's an issue for Future Me to deal with. Today Me has enough shit to do already. 

 With Christmas just 2 days away, I'm pretty excited to have the time at home, and after what has been a fairly shitty year, the holidays this year have been really pleasant. The house is decorated well, although I didn't do the yard this year, which is usually a fun time and something I put a fair bit of effort into. Too much happening, something had to give time-wise, so I didn't light the yard up as I normally do.  I pulled a rib roast out of the freezer today, so we'll be having prime rib for Christmas dinner. We're doing Christmas Brazilian style too, which means that on Christmas Eve there's church to go to then late night food and presents opened at midnight before bed some time in the early AM. Christmas day I'll be cooking  a full dinner and my  sister, one of my brothers and nephew will come over- the Florida portion of my nuclear family. I expect a good time. 

       

   Speaking of good times, yesterday we drove to Fort Lauderdale to have lunch with friend, coworker and Youtuber TimBatSea  whose channel is doing well.  Tim and I have been friends for a lot of years, and both of us being goofy ex-New England commercial fishermen with a taste for tropical living and latin women, we've never run out of laughs and things to talk about, but this was the first time we had time to meet up outside of work, and unsurprisingly we had a great time at lunch. Our respective ladies hit it off nicely too, so yeah, it was a good day. 

     I hope everyone else has a Merry Christmas too, wherever you are. 

 

Lead-Foot Ahmoud Delivers

So I am at JFK airport in NY, and it's time to go home. 

       I'm crew changing out a day early, as I have a minor diagnostic medical procedure tomorrow. It was my only chance for an appointment... and honestly this is something that has been hanging over my head for a while, and tomorrow was the only opening left this year. So I get an extra day at home this time, which is nice. 

       Thursday was *supposed* to be the day I left for Brazil, there to spend 3 weeks with Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's family all the while the good ladies of the fam spend my money and wait on me hand and foot in my new fuckin' house...

       Instead my wife's mom is dead, the house is less than half- finished and I have a lawyer about to commit lawfare on the builder of my house  because instead of building it, he stole much of the building materials and no shit, built a house for himself WITH MY MATERIALS. 

    Yeah, so I'm not bitter or anything. 

       In the meanwhile, though, I may have set a new record for door-to-door time between the company office in Brooklyn and JFK airport out on the edge of Long Island. 

    Mahmoud my driver, in his Toyota minivan, got me there like his ass was on fire and his hair was catching. I never heard a minivan roar before. We didn't drift or anything, but thr dude's mommobile car had some ass today. We did at least a half dozen hole shots, going from 0-60 at Wide Open Throttle, which was surprisingly sporty... and Mahmoud, a short, portly amd swarthy fella, was channeling Mario Frigging Andretti. 

       It was a great drive. 

    There was a shit ton of disorganized yelling latinos at the poor people's security line. People of all ages, loud, generally rude. Absolute chaos. Maybe the tides of humanity are going home prior to the next inauguration? 

         Eh, I can dream.   

  The Precheck line was a breeze. Maybe 45 seconds of delay max, vs. what looked like 45 mins for the hoi polloi. 

     I'm ready to go home. 

Di-Reckly in the feels

 

    Well, one week to go before I head home for Christmas. Tonight was my night to get up early (at oh-oh-forty five in fact) as we go on dog watches for the day to switch from days to nights, as B takes over the role of first among equals here on the HQ- the day guy generally calls more of the shots, since he has to answer the phone and emails, leaving him more in tune with The Office. 

    So I am on nights for my last week- not as much fun this time of year, where nights are cold and more often than not annoyingly windy. 

 But, my point here is that in a week I go home for Christmas, and I'm pretty excited and grateful for that. 

       Yesterday, I bunkered a Pure Car/Truck Carrier anchored up in NY harbor with her sister ship- the two vessels have some work for a bit moving cars from Mexico to New Jersey. 

 The crew? Filipino unlicensed, Ukrainian officers. 

 As sometimes happens, the crew has been working hard and VERY busy for the past week, and time at anchor, even with bunkering operations, represents a slower pace for them, a chance to relax a bit, especially for guys off watch.  This made them gregarious, and as we were about eye to eye for much of the operation, I spoke to them just as much as they spoke to me. 

         Their stories are not easy stories. These are guys who can't go home. All of them are working to support their extended families, paying in some cases for them to relocate, to find new homes, or to access the black and gray markets for purchasing necessities.   When their contracts are up, they fly to Romania or Germany, there to take a weekend off and start finding another ship. Most have been working relatively nonstop for 2 1/2 years, with a week or two at most between ships.  The chief engineer, a hearty old timer, one of those guys who speaks with great authority but obviously well-liked by his crew and enormously skilled, has family missing and assumed dead.  He isn't the only one. 

               One of those things that hits home. I feel for these guys. I absolutely, Thank God, can't relate. Still, it was good I think for them to talk to a foreigner who was sympathetic, and it was pretty obvious that the 3rd and 4th assistant engineer, young kids in their early 20's, had a father-figure thing going on with the chief. 

    I didn't get one of those 'there but for the grace of God' moments, but sure as hell I was deeply moved by what they shared, which wasn't much. I wasn't going to push either, to draw them out, as their lives are not good at the moment, but hopefully it did them  individually some kind of good to find a willing ear.  I can't empathize. I am blessed not to have shared experience, and I am extremely grateful for that. 

            Makes me even more grateful that in a week I'll be with my family. 

         

Halfway day

 Wedbesday was halfway day, the halfway point of the present hitch on the HQ for me.  I came in a week early to get some pre-holidays OT but that don't count. 

          Presently we're loaded and waiting on slack water in about 3 more hours to sail from the terminal where we gassed up the HQ. 

 Halfway day is usually my day to wash out my fart sack (linens) and bath towel and start planning things to do when I go home. That's about it. Nothing special. 

   It's been an average week, though windy and cold. I'm mostly writing because I am anxious as I wait to hear from folks in Brazil and time is dragging ass at the moment. 

      Today is the 2nd of 2 arbitration sessions between our lawyer, our engineer, and the builder of my house in Brazil, who it seems has defrauded the ever-loving shit out of us. There's an insane story there, but today, right now in fact,  is the last shot at settling things without a civil trial and a criminal complaint being issued for fraud.  

         Whatever.  I took it in the seat from this trashbag. I will accept his head on my mantle in trade if he doesn't have a Come To Jesus moment.  I made it clear that I was willing to look on this as a tax that I paid for being a gullible dumbfuck and walk away at anything more than x cents on the dollar, x being a lot less than I want but which could be resolved in a matter of weeks. 

 If not... well I already got fucked.  I am perfectly willing to aacept a Pyrrhic victory if the guy wants a battle of attrition or tries to run the clock down. 

     But I will leave Brazil in Brazil for now. I've still got shit to do here. 

True story

 Taxed from the International Maritime Meme Organization on instagram.   Worth checking out. 

Surrrrvey says....

  It's a bit of a bummer when 3rd party workers badmouth your coworkers and past shipmates, and you know they're in the right.  On one hand, there's the company rep. Nobody likes being thought of as being on Team Loser, and you want to defend the name; not because you're a company man so much as the tendency of splattered shit to get on your shoes from even a distance. 

        Oil tankers and oil barges use 3rd party surveyors to verify our numbers...  easier to give an example than to explain offhand, so...

       Incedentally, blogfriend BCE at Big Country Expat has a kid who's a cargo surveyor back home in FL. 

   Let's say an oil company has an order for 2,500 metric tons of fuel oil to bunker a ship (to fill their own fuel tanks to run their engines and generators, not to fill cargo tanks).  That's about 700,000 gallons, btb. Before we start loading, I drop a measuring tape into all my cargo tanks and write down the height of any liquid in my tanks, as measured from the oil surface to the rim of that tank's measuring port (called the ullage port). Every 1/8 inch of the tank height corresponds to a certain volume in thst tank. A specialized company calculates that officially before the vessel enters service- this is called 'strapping' the tanks, and a strapping company must be recognized officially as being impeccably honest.  The density and temperature of the liquid to go in the tank is measured before the transfer, as these things affect the mass of the oil consoderably, and oil is sold by mass, not volume. Yea, at your gas station too. A gallon sold is (supposed to be) a net gallon, and adjusted for temperature and density; a net gallon is corrected for density and temperature based on what that density would be if the temperature was 60 degrees, not a gross gallon, which is a unit of volume.  

 At any rate before we load, I calculate the volume of oil in my tanks, if any, and given the temperature and density of the oil to be loaded, I calculate what the height would be in each of my tanks if we loaded oil and corrected the volume for temperature and density. 

   So I now have my 'stops,' the target height I want the oil to be at in my tanks.  In the meanwhile. The owner of the oil hires a 3rd party cargo inspector to remeasure my tanks and sign to verify the numbers are correct. The surveyor also measures the volume in the tanks that contain the oil that I am to load.

        On completion of loading, the cargo surveyor will AGAIN measure the tanks ashore, and then he and I will together measure my cargo tanks for volume and temperature, witnessing each other input the figures in our computers. Our numbers must agree. If they do not, we have to seek out any discrepancies until they do.   The surveyor will do the exact same thing with the tanks ashore. There will always be a small difference between shore tank figures and my tank figures. There will be tiny errors in the calculated volume of the pipelines between the shore tank and the dock where my hoses connect, air bubbles can be in the pipelines, a little oil might be left in my cargo hoses (which hold about 3/4 ton each when full) etc etc.  Point being, I can't be given clearance to leave until our numbers between my tanks and the shoreside tanks agree very closely- and by very closely I mean within a few tons. Yes, our rounding errors are enough for you to drive your car for a year or more. 

      So that is a 3rd party cargo surveyor's role; to be an impartial verifier of the numbers.

   The oil company has a surveyor on loading up the HQ.

     The ship that ordered their fuel will have ANOTHER cargo surveyor usually from another company, to do the same process between my tanks and the ship's tanks. Sometimes there is no surveyor, in which case one of the ship's engineers will come aboard the HQ and he and I will remeasure the volumes together, before and after the transfer.

     Now, I wrote all that and threw in some of the process not to be pedantic but to illustrate that it is not a complex process but it IS a process. 

        And a cargo surveyor I know was bitching to my partner B that a tankerman on another oil barge, a guy we all know is an utter fucking retard and a shit magnet of a God-damned Jonah besides, who somehow the company loves, fucked the surveyor over and lied to him, creating not a crisis, but some serious ill will sufficient that the surveyor's employer now looks at all of us from my company with a jaundiced eye. And that shit is a bummer to me because most of my old fart coworkers are honest and good boy scouts... but this guy's such a fucking soup sandwich that he drove a superior into a full on psychotic break one time. Not even exaggerating a little. 

   Anyways I'm aware that I'm playing with fire, bad mouthing a co-worker online. I'm a wee bit protective of my company's rep because I really like money and they give it to me sometimes, and I really enjoy when they do so I'd like it to continue and increase. Amen. 

     I have the same surveyor coming to my next ship. At least he and I have a couple dozen good loads under our belts. have a good history working together. 

Post-Thanksgiving food and work

 Well now, Thanksgiving was pretty decent here on HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HW/ Center for practical Gule and Gluttony. 

    We were in between jobs during most of my watch yesterday, so I was able to cook a small turkey, along with making mashed brotatoes (spuds being my genetic birthright, I look upon them with love), stuffing, roasted carrots and green beans, gravy, cranberry sauce and pies.  As in plural pies. I made an apple crumb pie, and B, through a comms snafu, brought store bought pumpkin AND coconut cream pie. 

      All in all it was a great dinner, went together well, and as is tradition, the guy who cooks doesn't take part in cleaning, so that was nice. And now I shouldn't need to cook for the next 2 days, and Sunday will be turkey soup if I remember to boil the bones tomorrow night.  The timing worked out well. Our assist tug nosed up to us to move us to the next job about 45 minutes after I finished dessert, and I waddled out on deck to get the job started, and then it was back to work for us. 

             Altogether, this year was a bit disparate for the Florida branch of the B clan I think, which isn't how we like doing things, but so it goes some years.  Christmas I'll be home, and  I'll host for us, while my oldest brother will likely rinse and repeat with his massive get-togethers up in Boston. I'm pretty excited at the prospect of being home. My last scheduled Christmas home (I only get it off once every 3 years) got fucked up by bad weather, and I missed it. I'm thinking about trying my hand at a prime rib. My last one came out a little rare, which was AMAZING for me, but the rest of the fam are savages and like theirs medium.  For me, I like my cow just a few degrees off from still mooing. 

    I am grateful for many things, though I'm aware that this blog tends to be the toilet into which I crap out my negativity, and I may not appear a grateful person here... but I am, I think. If it weren't for that, the things that haven't gone right this past year, which were more numerous than on average, would be that much harder to tolerate. 

   The fiasco in Brazil comes to mind. We have a lawyer who appears to be thorough, and has taken the egregious nature of our case as something of an insult on the national reputation of Brazil, me being a dumb foreigner and all, and things are progressing. The local sheriff (a court officer there, I think, and who is somehow the investigative arm of both civil and criminal complainants, if I understand correctly) is now involved, and it is my hope to get the civil portion of the case moved to arbitration. There's a criminal aspect of well, of fraud, as my home builder has apparently spent money specifically presented to me as bills for administrative and municipal fees, licensing, permitting and tax... none of which got paid.  

   Whatever, I took it in the seat for sure, and maybe I'll get some of my money back, but I'm grateful that as much of a clusterfuck as this is, it isn't going to  threaten my household here in the US. Pisses me off, though.  To be honest, not having to dwell on this day in and day out has been kind of nice this past week.  Another thing to be grateful for. 

 So, 3 weeks to go before my Christmas break, and the weather is changing here now.  We had a gloriously temperate autumn, up until this past week, when the wind began to blow.    

         I still view working in NY/NJ through the lens of having grown up working outdoors around coastal Massachusetts. Though it's just 200 miles north, it might as well be further, considering how much more moderate the weather can be here in NY in comparison. 

     Boston has the US's most wind. True story. It has the highest average daily wind. 

   NY, though... the air is absolutely dead when it's warm out. I sweat my balls off in the stagnant hot air of summer. But, come November, the wind starts to blow here.  And son of a bitch if it doesn't stop blowing until May.  Shit gets tiresome after a while, the daily wind and the twice-a-week gales. 

    Anyhow, the wind brought the cold finally. I'm not even sure if they had a hard frost here yet, and here it is end of November... but it's coming this weekend and there's no more going outside without layers on already.  That time of year I guess. 

 On the upside, jacuzzi season is starting up back home. Shocking, I know, but I'm ok with being parboiled while upping my blood alcohol content for a couple of hours once or twice a week. 

 That's coming in 3 weeks too. 

    In the meanwhile, we loaded just 2 of our 10 cargo tanks last night while I was sleeping, and later today we'll give a couple hundred tons each of gogo juice  to some Frenchmen who're pulling into town. 

         

Captain Obvious Figures It Out

 Sigh. 

     Well, I'm back on board the HQ, and after a week of tugboating, it was good to be home. I got to catch up with Big E, and we went right to work in 2 days of heavy freezing rain and stiff gales, which was unpleasant, but as I was still riding the high of being back where I belong, I was in fair but wet spirits. A Bohunk-flavored chief engineer from a shitbox containership had an absolute shitfit at me in the middle of all the weather, and oddly enough his temper tantrum and screaming (it always boils down to foreign engineers lying and saying we gave them either 20 or 40 tons of oil less than is on the paperwork) just rolled off me same as the rain. I'm not normally one of those cool people who just sit calmly while being fussed at, which I admire.  Normally I go nuclear rather early on, which is a character flaw, and will speculate graphically about a person's mother upon being tut-tutted.  I ain't proud of that.  For whatever reason though, I stayed calm, standing there damply in 20lbs of foul weather gear with that annoying cold-weather snot-drip you get, which made the engineer more and more upset (my calmness. Not the snot drip). It was wonderful. Bro was incandescent.  After the job was done, even better, we got to go to a lay berth and have a day off. 

         So I'm all back to normal(ish) here for now. And that's a good thing, because all hell broke loose at the comstruction site of our house in Brazil. 

          So the Brazil house has been under renovation for 1 year now and it looks horrid. Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife and I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the builder... and out of the blue a few weeks ago the pool builder, a subcontractor, told a friend, a cousin of my wife, thst the builder stiffed him about 10k and the pool guy was about to swear out a complaint. This started a cascade effect, where we discovered that the builder has built himself a nice new farmouse out of town, and putting together the lack of progress at  my house against the substantial building materials manifest... yeah, the materials got used, but not on MY house.  Best guess is that I just got fucked for somewhere between 50-100k US. Oh, and apparently he lied about filing the engineering drawings with the city. There may be no engineering drawings. WTF? 

       Thankfully we are not without options. 

   Now, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife many years ago was the law clerk for a judge who is still in power today in the city where this is all happening. The law firm we have hired to go up the builder's ass? Owned by a cousin. The local Federal Police office is run by a colonel, who is also a cousin.  So the builder is about to have a bad week next week with civil and criminal referrals coming in. I might get some money back.  

      I spent last week kicking myself for not seeing the delays in construction for what they were.  I Dunning-Krugered myself. I assumed I was much too bright to get utterly suckered. 

   Well, I have moved past saying things about the builder's momma, and into my wife asking the city sherriff to go full Spaghetti Test in throwing civil and criminal charges at the guy. 

 The money's gone. And though I might get some of it back, I've got enough of a thick veiny pulsing hate boner for that trashbag that a pyrrhic victory will be 100% fine by me. 

  I hate that I can't make the guy pay.  But I can pay lawyers to lay the hate. 

   Anyhow, that was my week.  Oddly, now that we had our crisis, I'm feeling at peace. Ain't shit I can do, having paid a sucker tax. At least I have some answers now, and don't have to keep throwing money at the guy. We did our part and will now see if the guy pulls an auto da fe or what. 

One more and a wake up

 It sucks posting with my phone. I can type like a mad motherfucker on my laptop. 100 words a minute I think. Texting?  My thumbs are assholes and I don't use autocorrect because autocorrect doesn't like no-no words and onomatopoeia so I spend half my texting time correcting typos as it is. 

         Still, I have this watch, a nap and part of the next watch to go before I am relieved, at which point I will go to a hotel for the night, get some sleep and be up early to get groceries and head to the floating HQ, there to take up where left off  2 weeks ago. 

        I'm glad I did this. It's a good reminder of why I don't work on tugboats full-time. Oh, it's been cool, no complaints, but I like the HQ. My friends are there, I can sleep more than 4 hours at a time, and I'm good at the work. Really good at it, in fact. Being on here, I'm no longer good at simple tasks, some aspects of plain sailoring that simply require practice, and it's a little hard on the ego. Plus, the food... the guys on here eat like college students. I haven't had this much processed food since 1998. When the F did I become a healthy eater? I actually miss salad and vegetables. Lol. 

 

Passageway between two of the fuel tanks,  The deck plates are 2-3 feet up from the bilge and tank bottoms. This boat holds just few weeks worth of fuel, like 50,000 gals. 

         

One of the main engines. My enormous fucking head for scale. 

Middle of the engine room, looking aft. A generator in the foreground, starboard main engine in the background. The deck plates are elevated a couple of feet above the bilge, but we're only about 10' under water here at deck height.  

Daddy will be home tomorrow, baby. 

Can do

Lots of stuff happening.  My medical blitz 1.0 is done and I am pre-tested for the shit going on, plus new developments in the house in Brazil are really frosting my ass...  which is how I found myself mid-vacation going back to work. 

     But with the recent uptick in me finding things to complain about, I'm happy to report that I'm not sniffimg oil fumes for fun and profit. I'm on a tugboat for a week. In fact, I'm on my employer's  brandie-newiest tugboat, and she's a Cadillac. Granite countertops, stainless appliances, poured epoxy-coated decks and incredible soundproofing.  I'm chief cook and bottle washer for the week, lol.   It's the work they had, and I'm getting time and a half. I'm not complaining for sure. 

   I'm on the back watch, working 0000-0600 and also 1200-1800.   Tugboats generally work 6 hours on/6 off.   It's  awful but easy enough to go do for a week.   It makes me feel for these guys, though.  It's a little after 2am as I write and as we're between jobs I washed and wiped down and mopped the galley while watching a documentary on the battle of Iwo Jima. 

    These guys live well but the silence and being the only guy awake on board is wonderful.  Fire watch, basically, at least for another hour when we leave for the next job. 

         

    Seriously, while you may not know what a tugboat galley normally looks like, it normally doesn't look this good: 

  My room, while small, is also nice and I don't need to share. 

  

   So yeah, my first official act one the familiarity training was done, was to make dinner.   Not my choice, but pork chops, to which I put a rub and added baked potatoes, green beans and biscuits.  They were meh, to be honest.  I don't like pork chops.   I've got chicken breasts cued up for tonight. I *may* attempt a cordon bleu, if the giant ass fridge and freezers are found to contain ham and reasonably good cheeses.  We're headed for New Haven CT, later this morning.  I'll hopefully be asleep for half of the ride.  

Bad news

 I'm sorry to report that not only did my wife disrespect the Witch of November, but today, when we remember the loss of the EDMUND FITZGERALD, she made fun of the repetitive nature of Gordon Lightfoot's song while I was communing with the infinite in the kitchen while washing dishes. 

    This shall not stand. I have replaced her 0600 wake up call tomorrow with a replay of this song. 

 I pray we will recover as a couple from this 

Make them laugh

 So you'd think a gastroenterologist who cranks through colonoscopies has heard every nervous butt joke there is.  Being a sailor and a somewhat articulate person, I pride myself on being a bit of an artist with foul and off-color humor. So it was with great pride that I got a laugh out of the doctor, the nurse-anesthetist and the nurse when I got knocked out to take a spin on the Black Stallion yesterday. 

    They gave me propofol and something else I think, something to induce amnesia, as not only did I not feel anything, I don't rememeber feeling asleep or waking up, and was fully lucid on my lights being turned on as well. 

   My first words on waking were 'Is it already done?'  When I was told it was all done, I said "Wow, I don't remember anything at all. Reminds me of sleepovers at Michael Jackson's house when I was a kid." 

 I got a good laugh out of that one. I hope, and believe, that it was genuine. Hopefully it was  a novel enough riff on an old theme. 

   Anyhow, that was hurdle one here  on my week off.  Apparently I have the ass of a champion, as my bung was pristine, requiring no sanding and spackling to keep it silky smooth.  Sure my eyes are going, my joints ache, hair is falling out and I have tits now, but my Windward Passage is in its prime. 

 Today was a more serious appointment, and to be continued. More testing required. Still, I'm glad that's done. Bloodwork is next on Monday and back to work on Tuesday.  At some point I'll sit down for more than 30 minutes and actually have a nice time, but it's been butts to nuts with appointments and obligations thus far. 

A confluence of events

 Well, I'm home for a few days. Woke up in my bed and everything. 

       The homecoming was not what it could have been. In about 3 hours I have a colonoscopy scheduled, so yesterday, along with a serious lack of sleep (more on that) I also had to fast, and get home as well. 

          For some reason, although I had been standing a 1730-0530 watch for the past week, I never adjusted to the sleep schedule, and have been getting 5-6 hours sleep a day at best. So last night after getting home I got to take the pre-colonoscopy laxative and that whole uncomfortable process having been awake for somewhere around 36 hours.  My sense of humor did not survive intact. 

    Anyways, I'm up this morning still gurgling but oddly not very hungry, as I've been fasting for about 30 hours now. I'm glad I got my appointment scheduled for this morning. As I'm only home for 6 days, it's a bit of a bummer (no pun intended) that I have medical bs to handle for 2 of them. I've got other appointments tomorrow. 

    There's so much going on behind the scenes, things not relevant here, that tensions are high. In all that, it was so nice to just sit on the couch with my wife in between jogging trips to the can last night. 

    The state of the hole formerly known as The Hole, at my house in Brazil, is not what it could be. That's a big stressor, a cherry on top of a bullshit sundae. The Hole is now a poured column under the foundation to the annex at my house, now about a year behind on construction and about 100% over budget.  So that's happening. 

    Normally, when life stops using its' inside voice, going to work for me has been a chance to compartmentalize, to let me set aside those problems and get on with the business of sailoring... mariner...ing . and carry on. 

   I've been bitching here for a bit that my job is not what it was. That there is little enjoyment to it and no work-life balance in between... which is a tough complaint to parse, as... I mean, it's a job, it's not supposed to be fun and games, I'm there to do a task and generate value... but to do so sustainably in a way that allows for peak productivity, a paycheck isn't enough- I can make the same money ashore being unhappy, and have a shorter commute and the ability to actually hug my family on the daily. So why the fuck, in the name of St. Steven's blessed bunghole, am I there? 

 These are the things I am thinking about when I am constantly on the verge of shitting myself.  The turbo laxative is still doing it's thing I guess, though I seem to be about empty finally. 

 So, yeah, work is not a refuge. If it wasn't for my close friendship with B and Big E, I'd be moving on I believe. 

 I feel as though something's either about to give or about to change. I don't know how or why yet.  I cashed the last check for the side gig I did down here too, which was bittersweet. I thoroughly enjoyed being a paid scientist again, but sadly there isn't work for me to continue, the job being done.  That's something to think about too I suppose. 

    Well, let me get on the far side of today and regroup, let my ass rest. Literally. 6 hours sleep after a week of slowly accumulating sleep debt isn't nearly enough I think. 

I was up anyhow

 Last watch tonight. I head home in a few hours. 

         I was gratified to see Trump won. When one side offers nothing but stupid and insane ideas, they're going to eat shit eventually.  

         I got the news first from Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife who was absolutely giddy. So much so thst she sent me a 3am picture of her with no makeup and a t-shirt on, of all things.  She is not a t-shirt girl. 

     

     The picture was a not-so-subtle F-you to certain relatives who called her at 3am four years ago, waking her up to tell her that their guy won the election and who will now be getting this photo texted to them 10 times by accident, to ensure they're all up and sad. 

    I'll be home in about 16 hours to listen to who she was petty to.  Looking forward to it. 

Hold on to your nuts

     

     

For Peanut

Pop goes the mooring line and other fun games

 I have a watch off again, first one off in a few days, and welcome for the nonstop nature of things recently. Best of all, I did all the chores last time I had a watch off and it isn't yet time to play catch-up.  

   We're still plagued with third-party tugboats assisting us, boats chartered by my employer but not owned by my employer, who don't do what we do day in and day out, which can be a assache, or at least professionally, present an elevated necessity for vigilance and teamwork. 

      The other night, one of the companies that my employer hires regularly sent a new tugboat that doesn't normally do oil barge work inshore. This was a beast of an offshore tug with a big 'north sea bow,' an elevated bow and fo'c'sle, and two monstrous props that pushed a tug that is about twice the weight of our average-sized tugs, developing enormous torque... and inertia too. 

       I learned that the hard way when we sent the first mooring line up to a ship as we were trying to make fast to it, and as the tug drifted slowly as the line came tight, it just kept drifting, didn't slow a bit, and the line parted like a gunshot. Mooring lines will 'sing' as they approach their maximum strain. There will be thudding noises as the line tightens on the bits, and then a higher-pitched groan that says that the line is as tight as it prefers to be.  

       This time, the tug just drifted along slowly, the line came tight and started shrinking in diameter, and seeing what was up, I told the now bug-eyed deckhand 'call for a full stop, right now!' 

       Big tug, heavy tug, and, turns out, slow to respond to the gear clutch tug. Boom. Bye bye expensive synthetic hawser... and as a little eff you, the damn line parted right at the mooring cleat where we made it off, IOW about 80 feet from the end of the line, rendering the 200' line useless. Too small to use. 

    Well, it's a small but annoying thing, and it was just 4-5 minutes' work to drag another lije stored nearby and put it to work. 

       The line broke energetically- we use a low-stretch polymer line, because stretch=snapback when they do break, and snapback can easily cost you a knee or leg or dome you, and I have no interest in waking up 5 weeks later and 50 IQ points lower. 

         So it was a small thing, though one that doesn't happen normally.

    Cleaning the confetti up, the little yarns and strand ends that were dumped on deck, was annoying- the nonskid traps them until a windy day comes and deposits the plastic dust and fragments DIRECTLY in the eyes, over and over again.  It's deeply annoying. 

 Oh well, 1 week to go. 

  

Regular Watches

 The drama llama has apparently gone off to another field this week. 

        I got my wish. A couple of watches where it was just get up, eat, work, eat, shower, sleep, rinse repeat. 

           Getting shit on from upon a great height is like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer- it just feels so good when you stop.   Nobody died, nobody is in danger of dying, it's just me with a job to do. Put the oil in the hole, take the oil out of the hole and don't spill any. 

     As much as the work/life balance here on the HQ is now something that no longer exists, it was just nice to not be getting bad news for a couple of days. To that end, there hasn't been anything particularly notable happening here aboard, and that's great news, for however long it lasts.  I even have most of the watch off today, for values of 'watch off...' by which I caught up on the assorted logbooks, ordered supplies, changed the oil on one of the generators, restrung the anti-twoblock brake on one of the deck cranes (there's a 100-lb weight under the #1 hook on our crane- if something lifts the weight, the hydraulilcs to the wire drum cut off, so we can't jam the #1 hook into the crane head), changed out a dead light bulb on the Christmas Tree ( a large colorful alarm panel mounted about 20' in the air that lights up if a cargo tank is being overfilled), and cleaned up a couple of oil spots on deck.   Yup.   Good watch off. And it's only 0930!   

At the upper edges of Whelmed

 I'm still not overwhelmed. 

   Oh, I'm whelmed. I'm in reaching distance of overwhelmed now, I think, but I'm not sure. So far I haven't started knocking hats off heads when I am mildly vexed, so there's still time, but I am definitely eyeballing hats. 

     I got ONE watch free of existential dread after getting back to work. One. 

 On my second watch back, a phone call from my doctor. Not something I'm going to get into here but truly serious business. Alarming enough and scary on its' own, but following the nonstop bullshit of the past 6 weeks, I'm starting to feel... something. Oppressed?   

   Well, 'starting' is a lie. I'm kinda bummed out. Life and shit both happen, right?  

     It's the timing more than anything. The financial and legal mess that comes from construction in the 3rd world, a passel of dead loved ones, sick loved ones, struggling loved ones, wife's stressed and burning out at her job, I'm throwing money around like Jack Ashore... and a bunch of other whining complaints. 

 I'm not at wit's end. I'm not even overwhelmed... just... whelmed, Really, really whelmed. 

   I look at blogfriends who are dealing with real shit, serious life-limiting, life-threatening and life-altering things, and I feel silly for feeling like God has been pissing in my cornflakes of late.  I'm OK, truly. But I've never been a guy who tolerates a whole lot of OK. Feast or Famine is more my speed. 

       I am enormously grateful for friends and family, truly. While I was home I participated in an online drinking session with 4 of my childhood friends, a circle of constant companions present for almost my entire life. We video chatted and laughed and drank a little too much for 3-4 hours. It was healthy, it was relaxing. It was exactly what I needed.  

                     Along with that, I had a little time with my own blood family, while we were dealing with my sister's hospitalization and release, and I'm grateful for that too... and my wife, my second self, we didn't have enough time together, but we did have time together. 

 I got people. As is my habit, I don't got a lot of people, but the people I got are the best people. I need to remember that.   And even at work, I have Big E and B, two great friends, as close as brothers, and the mutual support there. 

    So, one more shit sandwich has been added to the platter, and the table is starting to groan. My writing here has been less about cool maritime stuff and more a gay-ass Dear Diary, which is not cool. I'll be OK. 

        Last night, when I was in a serious brown study, I had one of the most productive and professional ships' engineering crew I've ever worked with. The container ship "COLUMBO EXPRESS" deserves all the gambling and hookers (currency for sailors), for being so professional, efficient and easy to work with on a day when I was really feeling sorry for myself. They were on the ball, truly, setting a pace and performance that I have rarely seen equaled, especially in that the transfer was moderately complicated. 

 I wish they could all be like that. 

Lemons, lemonade

 OK, well, the larder is still stocked with shit sandwiches here at my house. 

 Oh, yeah, crew change was today. I am still at my house.   Hurricane Milton is coming to deliver clusterfucks and headaches for all the people in my area, you see. 

        I'm not cool with leaving my wife and kid to ride out the weather on their ownsome, so despite the fact that I have missed waaay too much work this past month, I had to stay here. Thankfully my employer is OK with taking care of family, despite the fact that I KNOW they had to do some major crew shuffling in my area last week even before I took myself out of the roster. 

        Me being, well, me, there wasn't much prepping that had to be done. Pull a few things out of storage, top up the inventory of things that are good to eat and drink if we lose power for a bit, etc etc. About the only thing that I was low on was Jamison, and cheap yet reasonably tasty whisky is essential for mental health. 

   So, yeah, I had so much shit to do around the house for maintenance in my scheduled time off, and my wife's work issues requiring my help, and my sister's hospitalization (she is doing well and starting recovery, and cooked us all an insane spaghetti and meatball dinner the other night with my nephew's help), this time off just sucked ass all up and down the block. And then I had to cancel my flight for crew change, only to have the rebooked flight get canceled and rebooked for Saturday rather than Friday. So I have yet another day I'm missing at work, which is a hit to the wallet I didn't want. 

    But you know... I've been running around like a cat trying to bury a turd under a marble floor, and this unplanned time off?   I'm done with my planned chores, and I have a couple of days off.  That's not a bad thing in most senses. I kind of need the break. I came home to rest and didn't get any after all. So maybe this isn't a bad thing. 

    I'm far enough south that if the hurricane sticks to the predicted path, we should be able to ride it out pretty well. 40-60kt winds, some gusts around 70. We'll probably lose power at some point but so be it. 

   I'm more concerned with the guys in the predicted path. The Tampa area looks to be in for a real fucking.  Guys like BCE, Borepatch, Beans and others are there. Gotta remember to say a prayer for them. 

 

The Beatings will continue until morale improves

 Holy shit, I'm getting my ass kicked. 

    I came home for some rest, simply because I wasn't getting better and recovering from the cold/flu bug I had with me for almost all of September. At home I can eat, drink, be merry and loaf... except none of that has happened. 

It's been shit sandwiches all the way down lately. I am feeling like I got a Kick Me sign taped to my back. 

      So, with the decline and death of my mother-in-law culminating in a near-ruinous trip to Brazil, coupled with the cold/flu that would not go away, I was feeling like the ant in the driveway when he sees a kid with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. 

      I don't talk about Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's job here because it's a very serious job and this is not a serious blog, but she's an Alzheimer's nurse, and specifically she's self-employed as a care manager for families dealing with a loved one in need of 24/7 care for Alzheimer's or end-stage dementia, who want their parent or spouse to live and die in their own home.  Her particular gifts are boundless empathy and insane organizational skills. Over the years she has attracted like-minded women who make up the care teams that she manages. 

     I'm very proud of her, and as I have said for the last 20 years, she's just as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside... unfortunately about 24 hours after I got home this time a medical crisis broke out that was both deeply upsetting and stressful, though thankfully that ended happily enough (for values of happy, anyhow), but which turned the week into a 100-hour workweek for her. This coming just 2 weeks after we buried her mother, the timing sucked, and my own complaint, that of having to impotently watch someone I love suffer, continued, which I personally find distressing. 

    But as I said, things resolved well- everyone lived this time and things even went back to the pre-funeral state, more or less, in our lives.    So a few days ago, after the first day of things going back to normal(ish) my wife calls me, and asks to go out for dinner and a glass or two of wine. 

         At the same time I get the check from dinner, which was good, and more importantly, relaxing for her, I get a call from my brother;  my sister's going out in an ambulance, looks like a heart attack or a stroke. So we got... 3 hours free between crises? Perhaps as many as 4.  

   So that was this past week. . My sister's story is her own, and happily here a few days later, things are improving.  But for me, I'm a bit cooked.  My sister's the kind of person who will apologize for inconveniencing everyone by getting sick.  Since I'm pretty sure she reads this occasionally, I'd feel terrible if she felt guilty that she got sick. 

    Still, I'm about ready for a day without something scaring the crap out of me, or something stressing the shit out of my wife and family here. 

  Oh. 

   

   Guess who's got a little sumpin sumpin coming overhead the day he's supposed to be going back to work? 

        I guess I need to be positive here. Yes, we're apparently going to get hit by a hurricane next week. But on the upside, I'm already home. At least I don't have to find a flight to rush here... 

Home!

 I'm home, all is well. 

 BRB

Almost the whole watch off

With just two days to go on this tour, I finally got a watch to myself. Most of one, anyhow., and even better, the annoying tasks that have to get done before my relief show up are all done too, so I got to have this time to myself. And really... to myself.  Partner B, who has Crohn's disease (now in remission) and hadn't taken a solid dump since the first Obama administration,  got hisself constipated, which is... well not humorous, but surprising... And painful apparently, as finally the floodgates opened and B went to bed as soon as his watch was over, on account of his backdoor looking like the cigarette lighter of a car when you hold it in for 5 minutes and don't let it pop back out. 

     So I have had the HQ to myself most of the night. We're at a lay berth, the real lay berth, where we go when we have more than a few hours between jobs, over by Brooklyn Bridge Park. 

    I'm not feeling sick, either. Oh, I'm a bit congested but I've improved greatly in the past 24 hours. It was nice to sit down to a meal tonight, and not have to eat it one handed while writing or typing with the other for once. All in all, things are better than they were a week ago for sure. And the prospect of going home is uplifting. 

 I got a call from a good friend, the first friend I made when I came to my present job, in fact. He's a rock solid dude, a damn fine tankerman too. He left my employer last year after almost 20 years here, after having been done brown by one of the shoreside staff, and his wife sadly being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and our insurance being fairly well shitty and cheap compared to Blue Cross/Blue Shield, which most other maritime companies offer, including the company he moved to, who are famously bad but pay OK and have great insurance which his wife needs...  anyhow, said friend got an offer he couldn't refuse from the highest-paying tug-and-barge company on the East Coast,  (who also have BC/BS).  So he's headed there for his last few years before retirement, which will also enable him to work shorter hitches and have more time and more money for his wife's care.  I'm really happy for him. And while I didn't need the temptation, he promised that he'd make me an offer to whoever recruited him, and fuck me that's tempting.  I don't like blind jumps, though. I don't want to go. Not yet, anyhow. It's not a good time to do laundry in public, but I appreciate the offer for a new job and a new company, but am hopeful that good things are coming. 

Still grinding

 Not much to report, really. We're working every day. I haven't had a watch off since I came aboard about 10 days ago,  not a whole one, anyhow. I had more than half my watch off, 3 days ago, which felt nice. 

 Healthwise, I feel better in terms of my energy level and focus. I am still 100% congested and I believe this is day 21 of me gorging on Dayquil. I can't take Nyquil at work on the off chance that something happens and I need to operate some heavy machinery. I mean, the entire HQ is heavy machinery, a young boy's fever dream of hydraulics, cranes, engines, pumps, piping to climb over, under and around, and ropes of every sort and color. The HQ, if I added a slide, was 7 year old me's dream playground. I guess we need a fireman's pole to get down into the forepeak now to round things out. 

 But yeah, my flat, absurdly high pitched and sadly nasal speaking voice is still worse than normal with my sinuses being full of what feels like cement. 

   It's the weekend, though, and tonight's watch, which was busy from 1730 to 0130 -we're underway to a lay berth where B, the lucky booger, gets to have a watch off when he wakes up, whereas I will get about 3 hours. Still, 3 hours free is nothing to lament, as it's as good as I can expect for now, and It's the end of the watch that will be free, which means I can probably wind down and relax and watch a show or something, maybe read my book.  All good things. 

 We're bucking the tide HARD tonight. I thought we were close to our lay berth in Newark, but we're only making 4 knots, lol. Still only halfway there. Looks like my break will be about 2 hours. Bummer. Better than 1 hour, though, and maybe we'll pick up speed when we leave the Kill Van Kull, which we're presently transiting, and which is a narrow tidal bore at Bergen Point where the Bayonne Bridge is. As the channel widens out after the bridge, perhaps we'll pick up a knot or more. 

           So with the prospect of two weeks at home, the honey-do list is forming up. The list this time is formidable. Lot of mindless labor in there. It's time for the annual pressure washing fest outside, which is a multi-day orgy of being damp for 8-10 hours while hunched over and trying not to get eye damage. This is along with some painting, water sealing, and the usual last minute additions that my wife can think of. 

 I dunno, I'm looking forward to it. I haven't been able to get into the zone around the house in a while. 

channeling Eeyore

    

      I don't like admitting weakness, but I'm  just not feeling it this month. 

          I have a cold or sinus infection that came in the wake of the flu I took with me to Brazil and back. It hit right as I was going back to work last week. 

     So, between hospital bills, funeral expenses and last minute international plane tickets, I had unexpected expenses somewhere north of $35,000 so far this month. Now, my salary is munificent compared to, say, what I was making when I got out of college, but it's a sailor's salary, and 35k is enough to really  take the lead out of my pencil, as it is to anyone. 

  

      The prospect of collecting OT for working overtime for a few weeks, not flying home and back to work, not eating and drinking and engaging in high living (by which I mean buying wood, power tools, paint and such) and putting my helmet on and my head down and starting to get out of the hole that just got dug for us,  well, that's just the start of smart decisons I'll need to make for the next little while. 

             This stupid cold of mine is disheartening, and it won't leave. I've been sick now for several weeks nonstop and I don't seem to be getting better. I'm not sleeping great, which I think is most of the problem. I'm simply run down. 

 So it's probably not the smartest decision I can make financially, but I'm going home next week for a few weeks of downtime. It's my scheduled time off anyhow, and I feel like a bag of smashed assholes,. I've got 9 watches to go, including tonight.    We're steady busy here on the HQ, pretty much doing somthing every watch, but the gap between the last job and this one  is about 8 hours, of which 4 are on my watch, so I get to sit at my desk and catch up on papers, write this post, and shortly, precook tonight's dinner, which is a low-effort meal-  4oz of steak, onions, peppers, pea pods and mushrooms and garlic pan-roasted and wrapped up in a big low-carb wheat tortilla. I throw a 50/50 blend of oyster sauce and hoisin sauce on top to church it up, and it's a decent meal. It'll build a turd for sure. 

        I figure some down time will help. I gotta get my ass up and moving when I get back, might as well rest while I can... and hopefully sometime in the next week this stupid fucking cold will let go. 

Still sick at work, and a visit to My Hole in Brazil

 I'm on my second watch now since returning to work. The flu that I left with last week when we flew to Brazil has come and gone, and in its' wake I caught a hell of a cold. Or maybe it's just a long bug, I dunno but either way it's been a miserable almost 2 weeks of being sick, and I'm not a sickly person normally. I'm pretty tired of feeling like ass. 

         Last night we were bunkering a small chemical tanker, and thankfully they were about the same size a the HQ, so when I was talking to the engineers and crew, they were only maybe 8 feet away so I didn't need to yell, as I have a hellacious sore throat as well and talking hurts. So I was grateful for that. Tonight promised to be busy but the Office People (Long may they complain, long may they Shit Light on the heads of the damned) changed all out plans and in a fortunate turn of events, the next move was pushed back to the 3am tide later tonight, technically tomorrow, at the tail end of my watch. 

        I wish I had felt better last night. the engineering crew on the chemical ship were cool guys and I apologized for not talking more. They were all Poles, and I have always found Polish engineers to be pleasant to work with. There's a reason why they're one of the better regarded castes of engineers I think, between work ethic, personality and skills.  Plus, I'm a huge Jan III Sobieski fanboi, so learning more about him from someone who grew up with a greater knowledge of his history makes me geek out. 

_____________________________

    Since I still feel like hammered shit, I will throw some pictures up from last week's trip to Brazil. Bear in mind that this is a poor city on a high plain in an arid area. It's not beautiful to any but the discerning eye, but it's a place I very much enjoy visiting, mostly for the people, enough so that I'm building a house there, which, last time I wrote about, was mostly a series of pillar foundation holes which the building crew were inordinately proud of, as I wrote in "Please Admire My Hole. "

Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I out for a walk

The Hole is now that building on the right. The tall walls around the yard are 15 feet for privacy and shade. 

The main house, as seen from what will eventually be a 40' pergola running from the main gate. 

The dining room, eventually. 

Part of the purpose of the new house was that it was going to be a place for my mother-in-law to live as well, along with her maid and a nurse. As such, with her gone,  there will have to be some repurposing done I think in order to breathe some life into the place.  Against her will, inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, with all the organizing, planning and help she has given between her mother's care and  coordinating reunions and events to reunite the whole family, has been more or less appointed matriarch-in-exile since she's in the middle of the 5 generations of family among the hundreds of them all and the one person everyone takes a holiday to visit when we're in town.  So it appears that my house, since I had planned to be able to feed 40-50 at a time from just the outdoor kitchen alone, will be a social hub when we're in town... and we're hoping to spend a month or more in town every year after we finish building it. 

    At any rate, it's a more pleasant thing to contemplate at the moment than how shitty I feel with this stupid cold. 

I'm home again, for the day

 Wow, crazy week.  I flew to Brazil on Tuesday, and flew home on Saturday, arriving just now, Sunday morning. My wife and son are dead asleep, as they couldn't sleep on the plane, and we never slept more than 4-5 hours a day the whole time we were in Brazil.  We buried my mother-in-law on Wednesday, and it was an all-day affair, 24 hours, a vigil from sundown on Tuesday to sundown on Wednesday. 

           How to explain? Brazilian funerals, at least the Indio ones, are emotionally exhausting, and cathartic as well, moreso than I've experienced here in the US.  Deeply moving, dignified, beautiful in a way ours are not, in that many more of the old world traditions are still upheld. The traditional diamond-shaped casket, the body completely covered in flowers except for the face and chest, and the whole casket with a gauzy piece of white lace to soften her features.  The interment was done in the family crypt, and she was laid to rest next to the bones of her great-grandmother, and above the bones of her husband, dead these many years. We watched as a mason bricked up and mortared the casket in place, where it will lie for 20 years before being opened and the casket discarded, when her bones will join the pile of bones from her great grandmother.  

 I'm spent. I feel like too little butter scraped over too much bread. I have so much to do and so little time before I have to fly out for work, and I'm jetlagged and having a post-stress reaction I guess. I spent the past 5 days doing my utmost to keep my family safe and supported, and my Brazilian family, all 300+ of them, were there with us the whole time. 

 I guess I will write about it more. I also got to see my new house under construction, hung out with the builder, who is married to one of my wife's cousin's aunts' I think, and got my wife hammered drunk along with another cousin when she struggled with processing everything, which actually turned unto a nice story.  The hangover I woke up with, along with the night I spent talking with her and letting her cry things out and laugh too, were worth the price. 

 Anyhow, I got her in bed about 30 minutes ago, and have hours of shit to do before I can rest yet. 

 What a ride it was. Some great moments, I have never been hugged and kissed and made to feel included this much, ever. The pain was awful, the heartache worse, but as that started giving way to the laughter and the stories and shared memories, I know we did it right, and by me, I mean my wife, who deserves her nap for sure. 

Pictures and some of the better stories to follow. 

Bereavement flight

 

 

  Of all the places I expected NOT to be at 0430 on a Monday, the airport in Newark NJ is certainly one of them. And yet here I am.

 

  My mother-in-law had been ill for several weeks, culminating in a systemic infection and a blockage in her one working kidney. Once I wired pretty much a car’s worth of money to the hospital in Brazil last week, they unblocked the kidney, but found a tumor in her bladder while they were headed uptown, so they removed that as well as the blockage.

  Given the language barrier, a certain hesitation to pin down the attending physician and question him, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I never felt like we really had a solid grasp of what was happening, despite arranging 24 hour care over and above the hospital care, which is a thing in Brazil.  Over the past few days, my MIL’s recovery waxed and waned, though in truth I assumed the infection was under control before they performed surgery on her.  Yesterday when I got up, she was talking about going home in a few days. She started vomiting around 10pm last night, and at midnight I got a text that she had vomited again and was on oxygen, and 10 minutes later, the shitty call that we all dread, after she passed away.

 

  I went through my parents’ deaths a few years ago, and it was painful, even though it was expected.  I knew my Mother-In-Law wasn’t doing well, but I tried buoying up Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, and trying to keep everyone optimistic, and at 8am our time she was going to talk to the hospital and decide whether or not to get a flight to Brazil, as her mom seemed to be rallying the past 2 days. 

 Ugh. I can see just as far through a brick wall as the next guy, but boy howdy I am kicking my own ass for it now.

 

  I got to say goodbye to both of my parents at the end, and it was still awful. My father cheated death so many times that one of my brothers and I both have a weird phobia about calls between around 9:30PM and 6:30AM, which is when we'd always get the notification.  So when the phone rang just a few minutes after midnight, and 10 minutes after my wife said her mom was vomiting and on oxygen, I knew;  of course I knew. Nobody calls with good news after midnight. 

 But my God, when I picked up my phone, the absolute wail of pain was something I’ll remember forever I think, even knowing what was happening. My wife does NOT cry. I have never heard her hysterical before, and if God is kind, I never will again. My heart is absolutely broken for her. In a crisis my wife is an absolute rock. Chokes me up right here, remembering it. 

  Turns out, it’s worse, much much worse, when it’s not you, but your spouse, who loses a parent.

             Like as not I’ll be going to Brazil tomorrow for a week or so. It's the least practical thing I could possibly do, and I absolutely have to.  In talking to my wife an hour ago, she's regained her composure and we talked about telling my kid about his grandmother in a few hours, as he was working overnight at his own job, and we didn't want to blindside him. He talked with his grandmother every other day and my idiot ass talked to him about 8pm last night, saying that he didn't need to worry so much, that she was holding her own. Ugh, he's going to get home 2 hours before my plane lands, and my wife will have to tell him without me there. 

   And why the fuck am I sharing all this? I'm sick myself. I have a flu-like bug, ironically enough. Started about 36 hours ago. Not  covid, turns out, as I checked, but I feel like hammered shit and the runny nose thing just came in as a little fuck you just for me a couple of hours ago. Awesome. 

   I dunno. I'm not myself here. Gotta get my shit together. 

 

First watch back

 I'm back on the HQ now, and those last 2 weeks flew by.    Stepped right in on my first watch to finish topping off a load, and presently I'm just waiting for slack tide for our tugboat to come and move us to a lay berth to wait out our next ship to arrive at a local anchorage. 

          Sunday was probably the most fun I had in my time off. With my kid out for the day, during the afternoon I loaded up a tub of beers, champagne, water and soda, and cued up some music and Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife and I spent the next 6-7 hours in the pool, getting thoroughly soused and crisping up nicely. Well, she did. I had to take hourly breaks to put on SPF 1-million so that I wouldn't burst into flames. 

             It was nice that such hair as I still have hadn't yet been shaved off, which I usually do the day before leaving for work, which leaves me looking more like Lester Lightbulb than Kojak, sadly. 

Insert obscure Boston humor here. 

        Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife tried wearing an American-style bikini (Brazilians preferring less material; think 2 postage stamps, an eyepatch and some shoestring) but found it much too constricting after a second glass of champagne  ("I no like this. Eet feels like I wear a burka or how you say in english, paraqueta? (Parachute))."   Still, while the bikini stayed on, it was nice to be able to get SFW pictures together for once. 

 

To the Brazilian sensibility, these are giant nana thunderpants

      All in all it was a day to put the stresses and mostly unhappy nature of of the events of the past few weeks out of our mind. And not being kids, spending most of the day drinking and swimming (with a 30 min break for wings and ribs, which we ate sitting side by side on the pool stairs), by 8pm she was passed out on the couch and I got to start to watch 'Fallout' which is about the most creative thing I've seen on TV in years. Utterly insane and enjoyable. I gave up by 10pm though, after rehydrating, and scooped her up and carried her upstairs, pretending not to notice that that was a LOT harder to do than it was 5 years ago, last time I tried it. 

       

       Monday I got to meet with a GI doctor to schedule a colonoscopy, which will be my first as a middle-aged guy.  I think I'm going to binge on taco bell and chinese food the night before, though. Why should I be the only one in the room having a miserable experience? So that'll be the next time I go home.    I scheduled it for the day after crew change, because why not? I can be hungry on the plane and drink the explosive nasty ass cleaner when I get home, get the shitty day out of the way. 

 

I'm still not dead

 It's the weekend now, and for Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I, that means we have a few days together. Between construction of the house in Brazil, an upcoming family wedding that we need to fly in for, and a sudden downturn in my mother-in-law's health, I'm throwing money in the air and it ain't coming back down. For this reason, there's more overtime in my future, and Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife is up to around 85-90 hours a week at her own job, so of all the things we are doing, relaxing isn't one of them.  We're really getting our asses kicked.

         The shit with my mother-in-law is still fluid- it's a long story but I can tell already there ain't no happy ending coming this time. The bitterness there is that part of building the new house was to put her in it, since I'm only planning on spending 4-5 weeks a year in the house, and frankly, we really nailed the design when it comes to building a tranquil and fun compound that is ideal for visiting and with everything right there, plus it has been rebuilt with age in mind- no stairs except into storage areas, and no trip hazards, because I already know from experience that my feet at night have radar, and are able to find EVERY obstruction eventually, so that I can fall over them.  That would be nice for my MIL, as she's blind.

       Well, it's mid-afternoon already, and we're doing our best here. I've been doting on Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife every chance I can and every moment together is one that we value. Last night, after cooking, I cracked open a serious bottle of wine that a friend carried back to us from the French countryside, and she drank off the bottle over the evening, pleasantly buzzed, while I consoled myself with a couple of glasses of Maker's Mark. Nothing exciting, and she was too tired to do what usually happens when she has a couple of glasses of wine- run out in the back yard naked and jump in the pool. I mean, I married a South American Indio woman. They spend half their lives naked, which is something I support entirely. But she was all demure and we spent the night on the couch just talking back and forth, mostly me letting her talk, letting out all the pressure from too much work, too much worry and a very ill mom 6,000 miles away. 

Romance-wise, it's been a fantastic 2 weeks. Relaxation-wise, not not at all.  There have been some great moments though. 

woops...

 I'm not dead. 

   I'm at home. 10 weeks at work was enough. 

 I've been home a week already. The days are flying by. 

    back to work next week. For another 10 I think. 

Another week down, another to go

 Hot damn, week 10 begins tomorrow here aboard  HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HQ/Dungeon of Dark Delights. 

       Last week? It definitely happened. And by It, I mean the last week.  It was neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, just a week of Rise and Grind, and other than the heat and humidity, not particularly notable. I'm in the right frame of mind for where I am, no signs of Channel Fever, where guys start getting buggy and need to go home.  As I mentioned in my last post, The Office (Long may they rule, long may they shit light on the heads of the damned) took away B and kept him for an extra week on The Loaner, the punishment barge that nobody will work on board for less than time-and-a-half. B got a massive payout for spending 3 weeks there, God bless and save him from black lung, ringworm, Athlete's Foot, Athlete's Ass, and Athlete's All the Skin Between Foot and Ass... anyhow, B comes home tomorrow, and my latest fill in guy, a new, quiet, competent and thoughtful dude who is a jewel amongst the runny steaming dog turds, when compared to all the other new hires that are infecting our ranks.  Seriously, I like the guy, he has his shit together, and once he gets some more experience under his belt, he'll be an asset, and even now he's already decent as a mariner. 

    So, despite having had a lot of fill in guys, this past week went well, better than expected, and best of all, it's past, and that means just one week to go. B is coming back tomorrow, which means it will be my turn to rotate to take over the night watch, and it being August now, I am happy for it, as I have been baking my balls off for the past 3 weeks. 

       Yesterday we had a surprise visit from the Scupper Police, very unexpected, as another one of them (there being only 3) just did a Health and Safety walkthrough last week when we had the Coast Guard aboard for tea and crumpets the annual inspection and associated clusterfucks.  

         I know all of the Scupper Police to a degree. Of the 3 of them, yesterdays inspector is someone I've worked with, if briefly, and the senior among them, and also a guy who's pretty passionate about improving living and working conditions amongst the crews.  It's funny because the first time I met him when I relieved him down in the Caribbean, I didn't care for him at the time. These days I enjoy talking to him, and of course his walkaround didn't bear any fruit- he's the type of guy who, if he sees something that isn't right, talks to you about it and helps you set it right if possible, which is something that I wish all Office People did. 

     At any rate, the Scupper Police came and went, and we did well. The cargoes we've been getting have been steady and occasionally complex, enough so that I have had to use my head more, which has been nice. 

         And a week from tomorrow, I'll be going home, and that's a fine thing.