It's not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

 Now I don't do much social media. I got out of Facebook after one of my nieces blew up at me online over a comment I made over the abortion issue about two years ago.  Now, I am pro-life without exception and without reservation. I'm even anti-death penalty, because nobody with an net worth over a certain amount ever gets to ride the lightning or take a hotshot in the antecubital. Until we have parity between rich and poor when it comes to putting the lights out on assholes, I'm for not giving the government power over life or death.  And this is not to say that I'm opposed to individuals doing what is needed to preserve life and property. Good fences make good neighbors, but as Vlad Tepes showed, Bad Neighbors can make  Good Fences. 

 But yeah, after damn near losing my niece, who I love, believe to be honestly wrong, and do not wish to lose, I deleted my facebook account. Social media is just social masturbation, a shitty substitute for having relationships with people.   I did keep Instagram, though, because it's mostly just pictures and video clips and the algorithm knows what you want. In my case, boobs, guns, and boats, and nothing else. 

     ... or it did. The coprophiliacs at Meta have realized that negative reactions create more clicks than positive. Somewhere along the way Instagram started steering me towards things I don't like, am not interested in, or don't tolerate and don't want. Around 6 months ago, I started seeing videos of people dying, LGBT issues, things for sale, or vapid retarded ugly and wealthy white people with weird colored hair saying the most foul, vile and absolutely stupid shit.  Less boobs, less guns, less boats. But when I did see those things, it was posts that were negative on the subject.  I am a boobs-positive person at my core. And to a lesser extent, I am a gun nut and boat nut too I guess. Either way, Instagram has become an exercese in Doom-Scrolling, where every interaction made me less and less happy. 

     I started saying things that were less polite about the things I was seeing. I started getting my comments deleted as a result. And that's fine. Life is hard enough without me getting my jollies being shitty to some stranger just because they were shitty first.  But it just kept getting worse. More and more egregious shit.  Within 2 minutes, while scrolling the gram doing my morning business  (I like to pump bilges on the seat of ease on waking up, start the day off positive), I would see somebody die or some 16 year old in a $200 shirt go on about why capitalism is bad. 

      I took it too far last month and used many of the new no-no words , any one of which trigger an instant automatic post removal. Using too many of them at once flags your account, turns out. Well, I got creative and used all of them at once (to be fair, on a morning where my morning poop was disappointing, it was raining and the first thing I saw was some fat hideous landwhale singing about how sexually stimulating her abortion was), and my account got deleted about an hour after I got the notice that my post was removed. 

   Well, that was a bummer.  But maybe I had it coming. And it was nice to have a few days where I wasn't doomscrolling and dealing with the overwhelming negativity. 

        2 weeks ago I started a new account on Instagram, and recontacted family. Keeping it light, not engaging in anything political, and going more or less boob-free, too. Nothing risque in the least.  Barely even PG, honest. Within 2 days I got a post saying my account has a 7-day ban for sharing my account with a service that farms likes and subscribers for you.  What the hell is even that? 

 Turns out, shallow terrible garbage people can share their account with foreign companies that bump up your subscribers using thousands of fake accounts so you look more popular. What kind of retarded guttermuppet trashbag even does that? I didn't know it was a thing. 

    Well, there's no way to say "hey, that's wrong, I didn't do that shit." so I took my ban, and a few days ago it passed. By then another dozen or so relatives and coworkers wanted to follow me. Great, now I could say yes. The algorithm can't feed you negative shit if you don't respond to anything, after all.  

 Except the next day, the ban came back for another week. Same reason. 

    I'm pretty sure I'm on a blacklist for thoughtcrime. 

   Well, jokes on them.  Turns out, by remembering to bring my reading glasses with me as soon as I get out of bed, I can read a quick page of whatever book I'm reading while on the Morning Seat.  I tend to read fiction almost exclusively, and I'm not into tragedies, so I'm back to being a big fucking ray of sunshine even before the caffeine hits.  Honest to God, I actually do feel a bit sunnier. I mean, I knew that social media is a cancer on the soul, but this is hard data here.  And when launching the Brown October of a morning, I am more apt to have a positive experience.     'Nuff said. 

Saturday and the Happy Banana

 Well, it's Saturday, God turned the heat on, and we're loaded deep here at the HQ. 

       Today was not looking like a good day. The first heat wave of the season is here in Satan's Anus 

 New York, and the weather is actually more moderate by far at my house in South FL. Sadly, I am not at my house in South FL, I'm here in Sodom New York. 

 The original plan was for back-to-back cargo discharges to two different ships, both getting a modest sup of heavy oil and diesel oil, which would take up my entire day, and given the volumes in question, requiring me to be out on deck broiling in the sun and stop-gauging the tanks for much of that time. 

       It's a funny thing about oil tank vessels. Electronic gauging systems are not that accurate. Not accurate enough, anyhow, in dealing with a high-value commodity like oil.  Oh, we're no paragons of accuracy in the trade, mind; nobody raises an eyebrow at a couple of barrels difference or a few tons here and there. What's 10 grand USD between friends, right?  Fun fact, after completely sucking the tanks dry when I was carrying gasoline or diesel 15 years ago when homeported in Philly,  we used to be able to fill up everyone's vehicles with leftover gasoline from the pipelines and sumps in the tanks. Just siphon it out with a whiz-bang pump (a Wilden pneumatic diaphragm pump).  This ended of course when some greedy shithead started filling up barrels in the back of his truck to take home, and got hisself pulled over carrying explosive hazmat in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge tunnel, which frowns upon things that go bang on their property.   I bet that guy is probably just getting off probation now,but for a time it was nice. Whoever happened to be at the dock that day got topped off. The oil left in the pump sumps in the tank and in the pipelines is either written off if it's not something that can be measured, or vacuumed out and removed forcibly by a tank cleaning barge if the next cargo going in that tank is not compatible with the one before.  You can ignore a barrel or two of diesel in 50,000 barrels of gasoline, but you can't ignore a barrel or two of gasoline in 50,000 barrels of diesel. In one case, the engine will run smoother. In the other, the engine will blow up, and has been known to blow ships in half in fact, when gasoline gets in to heavy fuel oil. burnt by the ship's engine. 

      So yeah, tank depth gauging is not accurate enough for what we need, and requires constant recalibration just to be a rough guide. We use multiple redundant systems to be sure we have what we want for oil, but all boils down to the Mark 1 Eyeball being the most accurate arbiter of volume. Every 1/8 inch in every tank has a corresponding volume associated with it, and as pipelines, internal framing, pumps and the shape of the hull vary, every tank has different values at a given height off the bottom. This is measured accurately enough that it's not unusual to find 1/4 or 1/2 inch difference of the total height of the tank itself, from bottom to top between port and starboard tanks next to each other. Tank vessels are built in blocks, and the blocks are assembled level, not plumb I think .I always was satisfied with a 1/8 inch plus or minus error in measurements for the few skiffs I've built, but model ships which tend to be about 4 feet long, of which I've built a few, they've got to be within a 1/16 where it doesn't matter and a 1/32 where it does. So I guess, when dealing with 300 feet of hull, a quarter or half inch of warp in the steel is what they have to deal with over long runs of welded material distorting. At any rate, hand measuring oil depth in the tank using a measuring tape with a weighted bob on it, or a sealed gauging gun (with a window for you to see the tape and  a hand crank to lift or drop it so you don't let vapors out) still means the eyes make the final measurement. 

           There are flowmeters that, when calibrated and adjusted for density of the oil, are now quite accurate. This was not the case in the past. In places in the world where fueling is a matter of lying, negotiating, bribing and fighting and the numbers don't matter as much as the skill of the parties involved in lying and negotiating, a not-super-accurate flowmeter isn't a big deal.  Here, we care, and accusing someone of being the scion of a long proud lineage of lying whores,  well, I will likely consider knocking such a man over and stomping on his head until it either changes shape or he apologizes politely with my size 12's testing the load bearing capacity of his temple. 

 So no, my employer did not see fit to outfit us with flowmeters and a criminal defense lawyer on retainer.  It would be nice, though, set up the job and sit in a cool cargo office and watch numbers tick by. But no, instead we hover over tanks, and with a gauging tape and bob, chase the surface of the oil down and shut the valves when we achieve the proper depth to take a certain volume out of that tank. Then repeat in other tanks, the volume being dictated by the total amount desired, and the tanks chosen based on keeping hull stress down (leaving some tanks full, some empty and some partially full puts strain on the keel. The hull will flex based on the weight of the oil in the tanks. We want a "Happy Banana" with the keel midships no more than a foot deeper in the water than the keel at the bow and stern. When empty, the keel is a "sad banana' with the bow and stern about 6 inches lower in the water than the midships. What we don't want is a VERY happy or sad banana, because then you break the keel. 

tough week and second thoughts about OT

 Everything's OK. 

   Well, everything's ok FOR ME. 

     I passed Halfway Day yesterday, so I'm on the downward slope of this tour already. Week 1 purely sucked with all the fill-in crew who were... how to put this diplomatically? Far too unskilled and unknowledgeable to be doing the job they are paid for, which consists of breath-having, heartbeat-having and being my backstop.  Week 2?   Like when you hit yourself with a hammer over and over, the best thing is the feeling when you stop. Week 2 was a pleasure because it was OK.  Big E is not my backstop. He's my equal. We're both capable of doing the same job, which means we have twice the minimum skillset on board. Good reset on my outlook. 

    And here we are. I have a spot lined up in Philadelphia/Baltimore when I get off here, so rather than going home I am going to get back to hitting myself with the hammer for profit before coming back to the HQ for another tour. 

    The house in Brazil is sucking up money like a $2 whore on dollar day. So it goes. 

        But seriously, this week around many of the blogs everyone's neck deep in the shit, and I'm not. I'm just fine.  Seriously.  

 Borepatch had some nasty skin cancer removed. 

BCE  continues with The Only Way Out Is Through. 

CedarQ had a mini-stroke. 

Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man, who is in the running for The World's Nicest Guy, had THREE kidney surgeries and has to frigging wait to heal before they give him back the on/off switch to his bladder. 

           And me? I'm OK.  A little bummed that I'm working 10 weeks straight away from home and then going home for just 2 weeks, but I mean, I ASKED to stay. Gotta get a mirror if I want to yell at the guy responsible. 

______________________________________

         When I pull a stunt like I am doing now, overstaying my time at work, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife will at times try to change my mind, or barring that, punish me in a mild way and remind me of my stupid decisions without creating a conflict over it. 

    After a serious talk last night where we talked about construction on the house in Brazil, the cost being borne (she's working 70-80 hours a week herself), and my need to pull a 10-weeker to throw some extra cash on the burn pile, she agreed that I made the right call but she still didn't like it. 

 Anyhow she sent me a picture this morning when she got up, one of those See What You're Missing Dummy pictures.

I'm gonna catch hell for posting her fresh out of bed without makeup. The cleavage thing, she doesn't care. She's a Brazilian indio;  getting clothes on them is like trying to baptize a cat. 

            Ugh. gonna be a long 10 weeks. 

A walk in Brooklyn

 The stars came in alignment and we've had 2 days' run ashore in Brooklyn around the Brooklyn Heights/Dumbo neighborhood. 

 The last two days I have gone ashore at 0630, to walk the Brooklyn piers, which they call Brooklyn Bridge Park, and then uphill through Dumbo, back to the Heights, and then downhill again to the Brooklyn piers and our lay berth. 5 miles. It's warming up here in the northeast, so I have been leaving early but not too early to get drinks at a couple of the stores along the way in the 2nd half of my walk. 

        When I was a kid, it was not unusual for us to walk a mile and a half to get a bottle of soda. As a teen we'd do a 5 mile circuit of my section of town, which passed by several convenience stores in the landward part before getting to the waterfront where there are no commercial businesses. 

 So it goes. Old habits I guess. These days I'm buying seltzer water on my walks to keep the blood pressure between the goalposts. I still take in way too much caffeine but I have limits. 

      Yesterday's walk was actually very pleasant. There were not many people out and I had moments to myself while I was around Brooklyn Bridge park. Just me and  some joggers going past. Mostly people younger than me, so likely these were upwardly mobile professionals trying to keep fit.

      I look down on the locals, for their choice to live in poverty conditions once they step outside their massively overpriced apartments. There's a shit ton of money in the area, but it's a massive dump on the streets.  The park, which is 95% concrete and steel with some pretty nice tree stands here and there that give you a momentary illusion of privacy... well, that's all they have.  I go a half mile west of my house, I have the Everglades, and the next paved road is 40-50 miles away.   Granted, immediately to my south and east is one of the most densely populated regions of the US, but leave me my illusions. 

   But yeah, after walking under the Brooklyn bridge I cross into Dumbo, which is White Brooklyn, and it still looks like a steaming turd, but there is slightly less dogshit and homeless to step over, which is pleasant. There's also the on and offramps around both the Brooklyn and Midtown bridges, so it's back to full cityscape and honking cars, but I can get a drink from one of the stores, and the stores are stores, not bodegas reselling obviously stolen merchandise. It's also a vaguely uphill part of the walk, and drops me at Brooklyn Heights or maybe downtown Brooklyn, I dunno. By then I'm back in the hellscape and I just march through and back towards the familiar neighborhood uphill from the lay berths. 

       The Last Store was a non-bodega bodega, a little latin-owned store with a deli-counter that is the last (or first) place to get a drink or hot food before you hit Brooklyn Bridge park and out lay berth. I liked the store- It was obviously family owned, and always spotless with wide aisles and open space, and smelled good, like familiar food smells, kinda homey. Place you could get a sandwich and bring it back to the HQ and not spend the next 3 hours with painful spicy diarrhea.    

        Recently, as arab-owned smoke shops move in, literally 3 to a block, and middle easterners buy out all the stores that are starting to struggle as the neighborhood starts to go to shit (I defy anyone to identify a smoke shop that does not destroy local property values), I came to value The Last Store more. In general I don't like bodegas- they're dirty, claustrophobic, and generally promote petty theft, as many or maybe most of them receive stolen goods taken by douchebag smurfs who steal from other stores on a professional basis. The Last Store wasn't like that. 

    I say 'wasn't' because I walked in there yesterday, there's middle eastern music playing, the deli menu overhead was painted over, and it smelled unclean. The 3 aisles had been increased to 5, with not enough room for me to walk without hitting shit with my shoulders. I'm fairly broadshouldered, but not exceptionally so... and of course, theress the disorganized, dusty stained packages of OTC meds, boner pills, weird foreign potato chips and all the other shit that I've come to identify as a likely mix of stolen and low class bullshit. 

   Still, with the low density of people, yesterday was a good day. Did me well I think, and I got back on board mildly sweaty but relaxed.      Today's walk on the same paths and roads had a LOT more people, which was a bummer, but  still more satisfying than they've been in a long while.  I think that after so many years of associating a daily walk with the same racetrack patters on a 300x50 foot deck perimeter, I have come to resent it. With opportunities to go ashore being so much less than they used to, the quality of life at my work has really gone to shit... and so days like yesterday and today, having an unusual and pleasant component, take on new meaning, perhaps more positive than they'd be otherwise to a guy who normally views interacting with locals here as punishment. 

That's better

 Big E came home yesterday. 

      It's hard to remember that I had free time this past weekend. Just a few days ago, but a couple of hard days really undoes the good ones, and I think being sleep-deprived along with nothing memorable happening last weekend probably has something to do with my poor recall of it. 

         So, I was right and also I was wrong. Dollar Tree Big E was very nice as I had thought. He was not, though, good at the job, which to be fair I wasn't holding out much hope for, as he was new to working on the ocean.  I mean, there were signs. I was up for about 6 hours during the 8 hours I had wanted to sleep on both Monday and Tuesday. I mean, pretty big sign right there, right?    I really tried to just let him work and figure things out, but for example, after 90 minutes of him unsuccessfully sending the end of a cargo hose ashore for the oil terminal's workers to connect to their dock pipe manifold after I had left him WRITTEN instructions ("When sending the low sulfur fuel oil hose ashore, put the sling for the crane's #1 hook 5 feet behind the hose flange, and put the #2 hook 15-20 feet behind the #1") in my night orders as he was new, I knew I wasn't going to be sleeping. In faact, the 2 page list of tips that we give out as part of familiarization training was completely ignored, which is why the 3-hour pumpoff that he was supposed to do that night... well I finished it the next day. 

           Us old guys, of course we're more efficient and fast. We know the vessels, we know the terminal, we know the terminal staff, we know. The new and younger guys we make allowances for. Or we're supposed to, at least. 

        I had told my company a couple of years ago that I wasn't willing to train new men, as I don't have the patience and I rely on the quiet, solitary part of my job to maintain some sort of inner harmony. At times I think that passing on what I know would be the right thing to do, regardless of what I'm feeling... but then I look at my paycheck and think "No."  The solitary quiet part is THE last thing that allows me to stay here I think. If getting up in the morning makes me want to stick a gun in my mouth, it's time to do something else. 

     I actually like teaching, but teaching on board a boat or barge means the trainee lives with you and sleeps in the spare bunk in my room too, waking when I wake, sleeping when I sleep, eating when I eat. 

  Dollar Tree Big E is a 30-something single guy.   Bachelors as shipmates always require behavior modification unless they've worked on oceangoing tugboats.  Tugboats are normally (in my experience and with my company) surprisingly clean and hygienic inside. Decks are swept twice a day, surfaces are wiped at least once a day minimum, and the galley would pass a board of health inspection easily. Going to sea also means everything is stowed, lashed, bolted or organized so as not to take to the air on a shitty day. The coffee in the coffee pot might lift off and fly up into the air when falling down the back of a wave,  but the coffeemaker is lag bolted to the counter and the pot has fiddles that keep it on the burner. There is no trash lying around.  One corollary to this  is that tugboaters can make good roommates.  Since the HQ is a manned barge, we have our quarters, a small but homey place, shabby and tidy (the HQ is about 3/4 through her service life and was never particularly luxe).  and, in the case of the HQ, organized and laid out for comfort, cleanliness and utility.  We spend more time here than we do in our real homes, after all. 

       Bachelors who don't come from oceangoing tugs... they're messy. I can't speak for other married men, but Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife makes it very clear that by her standards I am a mess-maker when I'm home. And I probably am. Every day at home is a celebration when you don't get many days at home.  As such I try not to be to keep the wa in my house when I'm home.  Bachelors, whether at home or at work, leave shit lying around, trip hazards on deck, crumbs everywhere. 

      And the bleach. Oh, fuck me the bleach. 

       Bleach is a real pandora's box on a boat.  So, we have 2 very separate water treatment systems. Gray water, and Black water. 

     Black water is our septic system. It JUST runs from the toilets to the tank. No sinks or showers run there. The black water tank is the shit tank. We call it the MSD, the Marine Sanitation Device, and it's a storage tank for poop, shit paper, bacteria and pee. Marine toilets have an electric macerator, a blender-like grinder that makes a crap frappe out of the toilet contents before it goes in the pipes. We add some aggressive bacteria to the tanks once every 2 weeks to help digest the solids and convert the ammonia in the pee to nitrate and nitrite, which are harmless and inoffensive.  The MSD has a chlorination station at the exit pipe that sterilizes anything that leaves the MSD. Now, the exiting cloudy water goes into our gray water tank. 

    The gray water tank is a large tank that collects the water from the sinks, washing machine and showers. It's not really a harmful water, just that it's got soap residue and food bits in it. 

    Thing is, the gray water tank, while not dependent on bacteria to keep it clean, does have bacteria in it, which we like because it keeps the food bits from collecting and clumping and clogging pipes. So we NEVER have non-septic safe cleaners and such on board, with the exception of bleach, which we use sparingly on paper towels to sterilize surfaces as needed. If, for example, my partner B, a retired navy corpsman, is going to remove a bunch of stitches from me at the galley table 10 minutes before dinner, or one of us gets the flu, bleach is mighty handy to have on hand. 

    Dollar Tree Big E discovered our bleach stash and decided to use it to clean things because he didn't like the smell of the septic-safe cleaners and the bubble-gum soap we use to clean the heads (it smells like woodsmoke and bubble gum and is not pleasant, but it works great). Thank Christ almighty I caught him.   Killing off the bacteria means that the MSD will fill up with shit until it bursts. The resultant shitsplosion ("GOD DAMMIT, CODE BROWN IN THE AFTER PEAK") paints our after peak void space, our underdeck storeroom where we keep spares, coats, suitcases, tools and supplies, and which also houses the MSD and gray water tanks. The after peak is 50' x 20' and runs the full depth from the deck to the keel. It's a big room, but a code brown has about a 50' kill radius, where the resultant crapnel (like shrapnel, but, you know, made of feces and TP bits) is airborne. Picture a paint grenade in a porta-potty. 

    Yeah, like a mother with a little kid who finds the draino bottle, I gently disengaged Dollar Tree Big E from the Clorox. 

    So, anyhow, long story short, about 1400 yesterday, a tugboat dropped Big E, the real Big E, off here.  He was about ready to keel over he was so beat.  I'm bitching about the week I spent without him, here, on home ground. Big E had the same personnel issues, on an unfamiliar oil barge that is utterly different in design and with the absolute WORST ergonomics in any galley at sea I've ever seen. Laid out for maximum discomfort AND all fill-in, inexperienced crew.  He passed out smiling at the galley table, shortly thereafter, sleeping 3 hours while I puttered about and came in and out while we were pumping off oil to a ship. He woke up to take the watch, finishing the last parts of the job we were doing, and I went to bed, where I slept 10 hours straight, waking this morning to find that I have 3 hours free to eat a breakfast sitting down and write a bit. 

 But now it's time to go back to work. 

BOHICA

 If you know what BOHICA means, you know what's coming. 

           So, when last I checked in, I had lost Big E, the World's Nicest Man, for the week here on the HQ. The guy they sent, call him Great Value Big E, was pleasant company and while it's not fair to judge someone new to bunkering based on my shipmates (big E being the least experienced here on the HQ,  with 15 years under his belt, and he's one of the bunker Old Guys like me. I guess I'm at 25 years as a tankerman PIC (Person In Charge), a fancy way of saying Certified Less Retarded Than Usual now. lol. Our talent pool on the HQ is DEEP). 

     So, yeah, Great Value Big E got ganked this morning. Ironically, he's been ganked away from me to work with Big E on the unit where he's been stuck.

   So I've gone from Certified Angus Big E, to Great Value Big E, and now I have a Brand New, still smells like the dining room at MITAGS (the big east coast training school for people who are too weird to have land jobs (I have been going there for almost 30 years) Dollar Tree Big E. 

    Dollar Tree Big E seems nice himself, but he has a grand total of I think 3 weeks experience as an East Coast bunker tankerman. 

    It's truly not fair to call him Dollar Tree Big E, either. He might be as good or better than me, who knows? I got Shit On from A Great Height  when I joined this company 15 years ago, because I was promoted after I think 3-4 weeks, having never worked on barges before prior to that. My past experience was far more complex than my first job here. The same might be true of the new guy. I just don't know, as we don't have any jobs this weekend. 

     At any rate, the new new guy seems nice too. I'm sure I made an AWESOME first impression with the poor guy, too. 

    I haven't slept much since I came aboard. Prudence dictates that I not say more than that.  With Great Value Big E, yesterday, I was up and down, as he has not yet cemented in all the policies and procedures that dictate our actions and decisions here. So every time the pump throttle changed, I woke up. So when an East Indian Pump Jockey (an engineer that micromanages our cargo pumping rate, calling for minute rate changes into his ship and preventing us from doing anything but masturbating the pump throttles) is causing us to be distracted from managing the workflow on our end, Great Value Big E doesn't yet know enough to firmly tell a Pump Jockey that we will be pumping at the lowest rate he calls out for, as we are not able to safely monitor the transfer exclusively from the vicinity of the cargo pumps... and this is not to suggest that rudeness or brusqueness is a job requirement. Diplomacy is something I am coming to value as anno domini sinks its' teeth in my ass.  It simply takes time and experience to know when to speak up and use a restraining means to rebalance the decision cycle. 

      So... yeah, I slept 6 hours this morning. I am switching watches, so I want to be able to sleep the night through tonight, which means not sleeping to my heart's content. When I woke up, about 30 seconds away from losing control of my bladder (I swear I could have half-filled one of those blue office water cooler jugs), blind from the daylight in the galley, staggering from an asleep foot, and in my drawers to boot, I think I said "sup, man" and then I started coughing for some reason, which made me fart and sounded like a shotgun went off, and then I was in the head, where I have a change of clothes I put on, after which I could go out in the galley and greet Dollar Tree Big E like a Christian. 

    Anyhow, by the time I woke up, he had been aboard for a while, and Great Value Big E had started his crew orientation for me (we have to do a walkthrough, safety briefing and familiarization training when new crew come aboard), so once I was appropriately caffeinated, we did the do, and the new guy went to nap in preparation for the night watch tonight. 

 And me? Once the rigamarole was done and the Blessed Sacred caffeine had done its' thing, I went for a walk, as we're lying to over by Brooklyn bridge. 

Stuck In

 Well now, I'm back at work, and this is watch #2. Watch #1 was busy with  nice block of free time in the last 4 hours so I got to eat a hot meal and sit down and read a little bit of "The Wine Dark Sea." one of the books at the tail end of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin series ("Master and Commander" being the most famous), which is my favorite book series, and at 21 volumes, one I've read through three times already. Even after 20 years and multiple reads, I can still find new subtle aspects of the story to enjoy, things I didn't catch the last few go-rounds. 

       Tonight is the opposite of last night- I have the first part of the night free, and the last 6 hours of watch will be busy. 

            This tour, the Office People, for reasons known but to them, ganked Big E off of here and put a fill-in as my 2nd man for a week. The 2nd man is a guy I only know by reputation, but he seems nice, and while he's not an experienced bunker tankerman, he's got the essentials down, and is a systemic learner. It's nice to see a guy with his notepad in hand, writing down details about everything and interested in learning for knowledge's sake. And he's polite and quiet, which is a massive relief to me. 

 Of course they lied to Big E and told him he was only shifting his dunnage for 2 days, so he's got a spare set of drawers and socks and his poopie suit, and that's about it for clothes. I suppose if they were honest and told him he was staying for a week, they might have to observe his displeasure at it so pretending it was not a planned thing made the whole thing less unpleasant (for them). 

            Still,I'm back in the mix, anyhow, and up to speed again. 

               I don't know if it made the news for regular people, but there was ANOTHER maritime incident the other day. A third-world flagged container ship in Charleston had a fuckup whereby the throttles jammed and the ship took off like a rocket while departing the port, moving too fast for tugboats to catch up to it, in fact. The pilot and officers decided to ride the ride and simply steer the big fuckin' beast out to sea. It's wake caused some mayhem and possibly a couple of injuries. A 1000+ foot ship moving at 15 knots in a little harbor will throw some lumpy ass water around. 

You can read about it HERE

           I have yet to hear any truly juicy conspiracy theories yet on this mundane sort of mishap but it sounds like it went about as well as it could. Now that regular douchebags are now marine engineering experts after the Key Bridge collapse, we should be getting a fine crop of unlikely scenarios cropping up.   Now, I'm not saying that this wasn't a case of a floating FEMA camp suffering EMP damage from a Jewish Space Laser after the Salvation Army secret invasion... but if this is indeed what happened, please remember that you heard it here first.   

At the tail end

It's been a hell of a time home the past two weeks. Busy, productive at times, but frustrating too. Some medical stuff interfered with my good time.  

       I have an old jacuzzi I bought for a song a couple of years ago. Thing still works like a champ, although it's indoor season here in South Florida now, and nobody wants to be in a hot jacuzzi when it's 96 degrees at 95% humidity... so it wasn't the most well-thought out idea to do a big construction project at this time of year, but I got a load of 2x10's and 5/4x6 pressure treated wood and built a multileveled set of stairs to the jacuzzi. It took me about a week of working 2-4 hours a day because I'm not a framer, and certainly not an expert, and while it came out well in the end, it sucked up a bunch of time, along with me dealing with some age-related health BS and related testing (I officially have arthritis, go me), there's been some downs along with all the ups... but thankfully there are more positives than negatives, between visiting with family, spending time with my own nuclear family, and some world-class swimming afternoons spent in the pool with a bucket of beers... well, lots of good, and like all good times at home, passing too fast. Tomorrow I pack my bags, and Tuesday I'm back on the plane, headed to NY and to work again.