New Post: Now with 77% less whining!

 The busyness continued for several more days, and then... silence. 

 I bunkered an American ship last night. Well, registered and crewed in America, which is about as good as it gets these days. Anyhow, it was nice to get to speak the lingua franca for once when calling back and forth to the ship during the course of the discharge.  And we got all fast and things shut down around 0230, which left me a couple of hours to myself, catch up on end-of-tour things. 

     And it IS the end of tour. I'm going home tomorrow, if God is good to me.  It's been a busy one, but things went much smoother than earlier in the winter, so I'm going home, if not rested, than in a better headspace, certainly. 

   Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife has some family coming to visit next week, so I'll have just one week to do whatever I want to do before having to be host.  Her cousin Boobzilla is coming with her family. 

     Boobzilla is rather curvy and shapely. Hence the nickname. She too, married an American from Boston, and praise God, he's a down to earth and normal dude, someone you can sit down with and have a drink and some laughs with. They have a lovely family, to be honest. Good people, which is why I'm not having a temper tantrum about sharing half of my precious free time. Between my wife, Boobzilla and her mom, who is also coming to visit, they'll be rattling away 12 to the dozen in foreign 90% of the time, which means the husband, my kid, me and their kids (who didn't learn Portagee for some reason) will be left to our own devices much of the time. My kid's dreading having to be chief translator, as of all the Brazilians and half-Brazilians, he is perfectly 100% bilingual, and nobody else is. My wife and Boobzilla both think in and speak English primarily, if endearingly imperfectly, but Boobzilla's mom is a monoglot, and they're all three of them accomplished gossipers. 

    But of course, I think I have mentioned before that my portagee has improved significantly,  which makes it more difficult to discuss me while I'm still in the room, as Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife's cousins and friends learned this past summer. when I caught enough of a conversation to realize that given my exotic coloring, there was a general interest in the particular color of my wedding tackle. Ye Olde  Pink Torpedo being something of a wonder, apparently for not being a more familiar shade of brown. The hilarity and embarrased laughter when they realized I knew what was being said made the whole thing funny. Brazilians are earthy people and love to laugh as a rule. 

    Anyhow, I'm headed home tomorrow, and it looks like it will be a nice time, which I need I think. While this wasn't a bad tour by any means, 'not bad' is not the same thing as a good time. I already told my wife I plan to drink beer in my underwear on the couch at least once. There will be scratching and belching involved.