Being Eastern European Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

 No, this isn't about world events, fitle notwithstanding. I mean it IS related though... 

       I finally got part of what I've been looking for, a job that wasn't fucked up. 

    Part of it went right, which is fhe first time in 20 days thst has happened. 

We loaded oil for 2 seperate ships the other day. The oil for first ship I pumped off myself, yesterday, and praise be, it went right and it went smooth.   Finally. 

     Tonight for part 2?   Naw, it's fucked up. Back to normal for what normal has been this tour.

          So tonight we run shorter 'dog' watches, where we cut them short to rotate our schedule. As I'm entering my final week aboard, it's my turn to take the back watch, 6pm to 6am.  

           Tonight's ship is an oil tanker, and the engineer kept calling for pump throttle changes, which is annoying and not normal but also not dangerous, so... so be it.  But then he kept calling for shut downs- not for emergencies but for whatever reason. After the 3rd time I refused to start back up until we had a heart-to-heart, where I noted that in our paperwork package he signed a document saying that he would provide a 10-minute early warning for non-emergency stops and starts.  Aside from safety issues related to that, I told him that my pumps would likely lose prime if we shut down while transferring the last 15% of he oil.  

 Less than 10 mins after our talk, he did it again, and sure enough, my pump lost prime, so now I have a foot of warm oil that will turn cold and solid in that tank, and will take a week or more to get rid of over the next few jobs, fucking with my volumes. 

       So, shit happens and safety first... we all want to keep the oil in the tanks, mine and his,  and while I'm positive this was just an anxious engineer's timidity and unprofessional behavior, I'm not going to bet my career on it. He says shut down, I shut down, and we can unfuck an inconvenience a lot easier than we can an accident.

   Here's the thing, though, and my point, finally. I don't think I have ever heard an Eastern European person apologize.  They're stereotypically very arrogant, at least in my trade. Not all, of course. But many. Most, even... and perhaps that's me. Cognitive bias, bigotry maybe, I dunno. And the language thing; when  speak without use article, modifier or preposition in English, it make sound asshole. 

  But typically when I ask for one of them to do something or not do something, the answer I get is that it is all my fault. 

 Tonight, for example, when I lost prime tonight , Ivan says 'This you problem, no my. You buy this pump. Is bad pump.' 

    I was good about not fussing at him... but not good enough.  My internal monologue was all, 'say nothing. Be professional. Anything you say will not help.' 

 So I said 'Well, you no can get more oil. This you problem, no mine, hoss.' 

 When annoyed, I like calling people 'hoss.'  I don't know when that started.  

 I'm glad I didn't yell, though, or swear.  The way things have been, if I started, I maybe wouldn't stop. Down deep I know it's not worth it. My recent distemper was here long before this trashbag came into my life and of all the pain in the balls people I've dealt with, this guy's merely the most recent. 

 Gotta stay positive. 

   Edit:   Now after the job is done and we are all.fast at a dock to wait for our next loading berth to open up, things are not as bleak.  

    I've been getting some really high quality tugboat deckhands helping us out at arrival and departure. Sadly, these kids are mostly working for 3rd party tugboat companies, but still it's good to see and good for the workplace culture I try to keep on here.  

 My outlook has just been so dark lately. It's beyond being in a brown study. I am downright down, after so many unsatisfying days... and so a bright, friendly and interested hard working Ordinary Seaman on board is a breath of.fresh air. 

     When we sailed away from the tub o' surly bohunks earlier, by the time we cast off the last line, the deckhand had cracked a joke and broken the tension.  An hour later, after we were all fast, I showed him a couple of tricks and good practices with marlinespike seamanship; using the 'handedness' of the lay of the line, stovepiping vs traditional making off of lines, how to ID the snapback and safe zones of any line under tension, just dumb little things thst will make him better and that were taught to my idiot ass long ago... and in doing that I could feel the tension headache slipping away. 

 Still, I'm glad my day's done... for values of done. I get 8 hours free than back at it.  Dog watch days can be long days. 

 

These are my clutching pearls

 I gotta stop uding this blog as my ombudsman/fainting couch/tear-stained dear diary.  Every post lately has been about who/what failed me this time and how I heroically saved the day/bore the burden with masculine stoicism. 

     To stop my bitching, it would be really, really nice if I could have a cargo that loaded and pumped off well, or a day at home where my day didn't end with existential dread or 'Fuck it, I'm too tired to care any more today.' 

    Nothing yet, but I'm trying to find that day. Sure wasn't yesterday and today my day was already ruined by 0435 when I walked into the galley to caffeinate, eat a handful of blood pressure meds and vitamins, and B says to me 'Fuck, man...' 

         Maybe tomorrow. Sorry for all the whining. 

   

Upping my game

 So this morning there's some training to do. 

        For assorted reasons, mostly legit, I have to do some supervisor training for booze and drug, as well as sexual harassment policy awareness.  This seems to be a once every year or two thing. 

  Drunks on boats are pretty common. Adding oil to the mix makes it a big no-no.   Drugs too. And with all the weed legalization going on, it's a huge issue. Guys pissing hot for weed during testing has massively increased in rate and it's still illegal AF for anyone working in transportstion.  

   Honestly that's a mixed bag. We've lost some good young guys with shitty impulse control over that, but we've also lost some absolute fucking idiots and scumbags, too, so I'm cool with testing. 

           The sexual harassment thing is a bit more academic for me. I'm fortunate to have never seen it in person, and I've worked with a few female mariners, most of whom were VERY competent... thst being said, I've also been aware of harassment towards women I HAVEN'T worked with but whom I know somewhat, and not even all that long ago, and it's ALWAYS been absolutely real and unjustifiable.  

     As I wrote above, though, it's a bit academic for me, and there's a story involved.

   About 10-12 years ago, we had a female tugboat deckhand who took the classes and got the endorsement from the Coast Guard to be raised to tankerman and start turning valves with us in the Retard Circus (the tankermen pool). 

    Thing is, this girl was a pretty and young latina, which shouldn't matter but matters. 

         Having no female tankermen at the time, a young and competent girl would be a real feather in my company's cap, so the powers thst be asked B and I to train her. 

 B said Fuck No, on the spot, his exact words being 'No, I'd like to stay married, thanks.' I said something along the lines of 'Yeah, my wife ain't having that. I need to stay married more than I need this job.'  

     What was cool about the issue was that the fleet manager absolutely understood. 

    Sure enough, she was trained elsewhere and later married her trainer. She was a good catch, he was smart to snatch her up. 

        There IS a difference between a tugboat and an oil barge. At times we're isolated and there's only 2 of us on board. At those times we have only each other for mutual support. 

      When I told Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife (who is NOT the jealous type) that we were asked and said no, she responded calmly, texting me a picture of a kitchen knife and the words 'Eu viu seu cortar sua pinto, voce e meu.' (I'll cut your dick off, you are mine). 

   Anyhow, I had already said no, and it's nice to know she was concerned.  

    Now I joke, and of course spending 2 hours watching videos is and answering dumb questions in a test at the end is brutal. You can't speed things up. I don't have attention issues, but my brain works fast. I either know something or I don't.  Making me wait 45 seconds between individual multiple-choice questions means 4-5 seconds of thinky, 40 seconds of no thinky. It's cancer. My mind doesn't work like that when I'm not engaged in drudgery... and this is drudgery. I'm not bragging. I read fast and think fast and not being able to have a reasonable pace is a millstone around my neck. It makes me resent the subject being considered, which is dead nuts opposite to what the goal is. 

       I work really diligently at not working with people. I get annoyed with everyone regardless of sex. I am not bigoted in my hate. So, admire me. 

   As for booze, yeah, I'm really into going home alive and with a job to come back to. If there's a booze-related issue aboard, there's already been a clusterfuck and I resent anyone bringing MORE clusterfucks aboard. We're brimming to the top already.  Making clear that booze and drugs aboard will result in them being thrown over the side while they're still in your corpse's pockets is a fairly simple but effective strategy. 

   Also, for legal reasons, that's a joke. 

 Also also, I don't like strangers aboard, which is an additional safety-enhancing strategy. 

 I had a junkie sternman when I was still a lobsterman.. this was maybe 2004?  Asshole fooled me, right up until him and his trashbag baby mama nodded off at home while giving their baby a bath and killed the poor little bastard.  Ever since, I've had no tolerance for shitheads. I think that's why my go-to emotion is anger when the issue pops up at work. Get fucked up on your own time, you know? 

 

    

A good job

 It took 14 days, but we finally had a cargo that came on smooth and pumped off smooth too. 

     It's been a bear this past tour. The whole no running water thing for 5 days, and on top of thst we've had daily small parcels of oil to move, and of those, more than 1/2 tested out as out of range for one chemical property or another, or the ship orders a blend of oil and then only takes part of it, and so the remainder sits in that tank and solidifies in the cold, giving us a list to one side or another, etc etc etc... anyhow there's been problems every single time. 

   Today, the ship was on time, the crew were nice, hard working and good communicators, and I even had nice deckhands from our tugboats when it was time to go.

        One good job in the books. I pray the momentum will keep it going. 

Water woes, revisited

 This time we went 5 days without running water.  We just got it back, now that it's above freezing, but who knows for how long?  Long enough for me to shower and do laundry, because the inside of the house smells like onions and hot dog water. 

 Don't even feel writing. I am, however, grateful for having a washed ass again. 

weather day

 

  A gust of wind just hit us hard enough to be felt from inside the house.

 

  It’s blowing a gale tonight here on HAWSEPIPER’s Afloat Global HQ/Center for Excellence in Creative Profanity.

 

  It’s been busy. Oil is not flowing like the proverbial wine. The oil is flowing like the urine stream of a middle aged man with prostate issues.

 

 (I don’t have prostate issues. No funny ideas, God, please).

 

  Big E, my partner on here and quite probably The World’s Nicest Man, has been about ready to burn the boats and go ham on the natives, as we’ve been getting oil that is not as advertized- that is to say, after blending on board the HQ, the oil is consistently not coming out according to receipe, which, turns out, is not the fault of the cooks (us). We look like assholes, but if instead of a nice broiler, you’re unknowingly putting a roadkill opossum into the cookpot, there’s not much you can do when your Coq Au Vin tastes like the shag carpet welcome mat in a gas station men’s room.

 

 

  Plus, the weather is... well it’s the Northeast. At Halloween it starts blowing, and it stops around May. Gales 3x a week. I’ve been getting rained on and snowed on and ice-pelleted on for all but one night since I got back aboard and that night I got shit on.

  Fucking seagull.

  No, I bitch, but under the 20lbs of foul weather gear, while staring down at a gauging tape in the cargo tanks, eyes streaming from the volitiles doing to eyes what onions do to eyes but with carcinogenic flavorings, there’s definitely a couple of things bubbling through my mind that are keeping the general misery of being cold wet and tired at bay. My recent very positive biopsy results being chief among them.

  Yeah, it hasn’t been great out, but I am starting to understand Billy D, my high-school English teacher and employer, the guy who bought the lobsterboat I grew up from the old timer who taught me to fish, and who consequently manipulated my schedule in high school so so we could go fishing in the afternoons twice a week after lunch.

 

  Whenever one of his crewmen bitched about the shitty weather in the fall and winter, Bill would always should the same thing. “IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY! THIS DAY WILL NEVER COME AGAIN!”

  Bill was a smart man. A good man too, in a way that the world no longer produces often. He passed on a few years ago, and he closed his obituary with those very words.

  As I age I understand him more. The days that suck are still better than the days spent looking at the grass grow from underneath.

  Looking back, I’m more impressed at the things Bill didn’t say. For example, during the fall semesters in college I worked for him on Saturdays, hauling lobster pots with him and one of his high school students, and I’d share my vast wealth of knowledges gained from my experience as a college biology student who traveled a whole 17 miles from where he was born to go to university.

  How the hell Bill didn’t tell me to be quiet and stop acting a fool 3-4 times a day I don’t know. But looking back I value his forebearance. Older, probably-should-be-wiser-by-now me

 is not sure I could have done the same. Nonetheless I eventually figured things out. Better late than never... and I still shoot my mouth off more than I should, but at least I have learned enouigh that at least SOME of what I say isn’t utter bullshit.

 

Lawsuit update

 It's been a bit since I wrote the events in Brazil, where Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I have been attempting to build a home in the city of her birth. 

    Construction has once again begun, as of this Monday, in a small way. We have a new builder, a project manager, an attorney, an architect and a pool builder. 

 Let me rewind:   

         We had to file suit, and a criminal complaint for fraud was also issued for the original builder of our home, who was tasked with taking an elderly house and expanding it and modernizing it, but who instead seems to have diverted about 90% of the money sent and spent it on... well on lots of things but not on our house. Such construction as WAS carried out was not properly permitted, and used substandard materials. 

     As an exqmple I paid to have the doors of the house constructed out of a beautiful Brazilian hardwood that resembles golden oak. What I got was a poorly fitted front door made out of the right material and about half the number of internal doors made, and these made out of cheap laminate flooring glued to fiberboard. Lol.  

 It's like that all the way. The area has a high water table, so the old foundation was supposed to be mortared over with a polymer mortar to prevent humidity, mold and water intrusion. 

 Nope, some cheap ass thinset, what I think is patching mortar, was used to coat the walls. 

    Anyhow, the local Xeriffe (Sheriff)'s office does the duty of a DA in Brazil apparently. And the criminal inquiry has been well underway, the builder served papers and deposed, etc etc. 

   I don't expect big things, this being Brazil, but I'm hopeful that details being egregious enough and my wife still having a decent footprint in the community will keep things square. 

          In the meanwhile, our architect let us knkw that he has a slight family connection with the builder, and his family had opinions, turns out, so he gracefully stepped down and a replacement took over once he gave a deposition with the sherriff. In addition, some of the subcontractors who also got fucked by the builder reached out and they and my wife and the attorney hashed out an agreement that would see their part of the construction finished so everyone could have at least a little paycheck while the lawsuit wends its' way through the system. I'm still paying twice for a lot of labor and materials, but what can I do? I'm fucked, I need to build goodwill and I'm 5,000 miles away. 

 Still, the demolition of shoddy work has begun, as has the permit process that I also paid for but never got. 

         So, the Tl;dr version is : in process. 

   Still, progress was made, and 4 days ago I was waiting for info on the flavor and stage of the cancer in my thyroid, today it's back to the routine at work, and for once, nothing to bitch about.  {Edit: the cancer I THOUGHT I had. I do like being wrong sometimes.}

Not bad. 

All the fuss, and why I've been so quiet.

  Well, holy o' dogshit, I got a nice phone call a little while ago. 

     So, for the past few months I've been having scans, ultrasounds and two different biopsies, and living with the thought that once it all got confirmed, I was going to be told this week that I have cancer. 

     Nope. Benign. 

   The first biopsy last month came back indeterminate, and the second, just last week, results were definitive. No cancer. 

 I'm a bit of a mess emotionally. Anyhow, that's why I haven't been writing as much on here. I was doing some contingency planning.    It's been a shitty couple of months having the question mark there, and also other things like the house construction shitshow in Brazil, and the lawsuit over same, etc etc... just hasn't been a lot of good luck overall. 

 I gotta buy a lottery ticket tomorrow though. I'm flying out bright and early headed back to work and into a storm. Hopefully I'll be on the ground before the weather hits. 

My PR Guy just ate his gun

 I'm home, I'm happy. 

        My gosh I slept the sleep of the righteous last night. Or something. Whatever, I slept awesome. 

     I know how the expression goes, but I emphatically don't want to Sleep Like a Baby. 

     I slept like a baby once, when I was 18, by which I mean I woke up wet and crying twice.   My first hangover. 

             Today is mostly playing catchup, as it always is. I slept late, waking up at 8am, and since I had been up for about 34 hours, I slept 10 hours. It was excellent. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife wasn't complaining, as she rarely indulges herself in sleeping late. 

     It's only like 2pm right now. I've been hitting the to-do list hard already. 

    I've written here before that my wife has relatives here and a lot of friends who are illegals. Politically she's about as subtle as a hammer to the nose, so with the immigration crackdown, there's some serious wailing and gnashing of teeth from her side of the social circle this week given the sheer number of pictures of her in a Trump shirt and with her MAGA hat on.   What can I say? I'm proud of her, but I also know to listen- she's lived under a military dictatorship, and at the end of that, she got to watch socialists rape and ruin her country, which I believe likely to be the wealthiest in the world in natural resources with perhaps the exception of oil, where they're merely in the top 5. 

   My wife is of the opinion that Pinochet was on to something. 

    She, and by extension me, are not on the ascendant this week in the social milieu. There's been a lot of phone calls with a lot of yelling. I don't know what they're saying, but they sound pretty soggy and hard to light. 

    The latest one just finished. I should go see who hates us now. 

Return to the old ways

 You know what I had for night lunch tonight? BLT's.   

 When is the last time you had a BLT? For me, like a year, 18 months I bet. 

  Holy shit I forgot how good those things are.  Now, I'm trying to be good lately, not overeat, but I had 2 for dinner (night lunch, whatever), and just had another one here coming up on 3am. 

 I was able to get ashore today by waking up early, so I stocked up on water and diet pepsi, and more importantly, portioned out 4 weeks worth of chicken and meat and ham, so I'll have a baggie with the right portion of my protein of the day for dinner next month. At some point either in the middle or the end of next tour, (hopefully the end) , I'll be pulled off the HQ and assigned somewhere, presumably somewhere awful that I hate, for the next 2 months while the HQ visits the shipyard for her 5 year beauty regime. 

The Proud Owner

 Well, I'm under a week to go and I'm pretty damn tired of being cold. Looking forward to not being here for sure, especially after 5 days with no running water. 

     We got the running water back Friday afternoon, and I immediately jumped in the shower. Despite getting a shower in on Wednesday at the company's office, I was in a high state of grease and grime, or at least it felt like it. Regardless I got a shower in, and did laundry. 

     I'm not a fan of toting around an unwashed ass for extended periods of time. It was nice to have a washed one again. As I'm on my last week, I'm working nights, and we've got something happening every day here, but with a block of free time also for every watch, which has been nice. 

     I was saying to Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife that every day is the same for the most part, minus the prospect of having water to do dishes and shower, and for the most part that's been true. If it weren't for the water issue, and it being butt-ass cold, I'd be in Groundhog Day mode. 

Camping out on the HQ

 Well, we lost running water aboard 24 hours ago. My schedule's all cattywampus as I'm going home in a week and it's my turn to work nights, sadly right in the middle of a cold spell that froze our water tank. 

    I'd filled up some cooking pots and water storage jugs, so we do have water in limited supply. The galley sink's taps have been replaced with a ketchup squeeze bottle, and we're cooking simplified meals thst don't require boiling water.  Also, we're a 10 minute walk to the office right now, so rather than toting around an unwashed ass the next few days, we can shower at the office at least for today, and I have baby wipes and can always heat up a quart of water for a birdbath when we're under way. 

         'I'll work on boats,' I said. 'It'll be fun' I said.

      

Winter ops

 With January here, the weather has been seasonably cold. Whether it's age, the mild fall, my living in Florida now, or the ridiculous amount of daily wind we've gotten, the cold bothers me a lot more than I remember it doing in the past.

       It's seasonably cold too. Not unreasonably so.  

          Like you might expect, winter ops require us to account for the cold.  We have electrical heating elements in our hydraulic tank, in the oil sumps of the engine blocks on our cargo pumps, even in our drinking water tank, which is slung under the house on the HQ. There is heat trace tape on the water drains from the house thst run to the gray and black water tanks underdeck, which also have heater elements in them to prevent freezing.

       They mostly work. Mostly. 

      Our potable water tank and the piping is insulated with a layer of rockwool with a waterproof cover... but the HQ is now 20 years old, and just 2 months away from an extensive shipyard period. We will soon take her out of service for about 10 weeks to see her into her 3rd and final decade of service. 

 But I digress... the 20-year old waterproofing of the water tank insulation has been phoning it in for the past 3 years. The insulation is very absorbant and VERY saturated, so our clean water is pretty much surrounded by ice, and there's a section on either side of the bulkhead connection for the water intake going to the house that can't be accessed and isn't insulated. Long story short, our water freezes up on really cold days.  A week and a half ago we went 2 1/2 days without running water. No washing dishes, no showering...   the inside of the house smelled like old hot dog water on the last day. It was unpleasant.  

      Now, the heating element in the water tank works well. Really, reallly well. Too well. It takes about 48 hours but once it's at temp, there is no cold water. Only scalding hot water that would cook a lobster. In fact, the water is warmer than the water in our water heater, which has an anti-scald thing. 

 Feast or famine.  The hot 'cold' water has allowed us to keep the taps on until it gets under 24 degrees or so for 12+ hours. In addition to this we point an electric heater at the bulkhead fitting where the water pipe enters the house, and let the taps drip to keep water moving, which is why we've only lost water twice this winter so far.

      On the upside, as we're not fans of poor hygeine, we live each day as though we won't have water the next, so it's always tidy inside and there's no temptation to go to bed without showering.  

       Using baby wipes for the morning ablutions isn't awesome, but neither is crapping in a 5-gallon bucket in the generator room. Peeing over the side is what it is, a pleasant experience except for the cold and the risk of a blowback or updraft from the wind. 

    Yesterday was halfway day. I go home in 2 weeks for 2 weeks.  By the time I come back it will be mid-February and the last tour of the true deep winter.    

The International Language

 

 

  In the American bunkering world, foreign mariners can be separated (wrongly) into three ethnic groups. Filipinos, Russians and Indians.

 

  Doesn’t matter what you are, you’re going in one of those groups. I guess Americans don't get in there, but I mean except for areas around Norfolk and San Diego, with their naval fleets, we see American ships like once a year, so our own people can be ignored here.

 

  Yeah, Filipinos, Russians and Indians.

 

 Norwegian? Russian.

 Ukrainian? Russian (Boy isn’t that a fun one, when some dipshit deckhand calls them that).

 Danish? Russian.

French? Russian. (CMA CGM, a French company, usually has a French chief engineer).

 

 Everyone else is a Filipino or an Indian.

 

  For the most part this is not a big problem. The Chinese ships don’t have anyone aboard who speaks English, so it’s not like they get insulted. One Chinese company hired a Chinese-American, a pharmacist in fact, to handle bunkering operations on their ships in NY, what with his language skills, high IQ and charm. Great guy. He is famous and beloved, because at the beginning of every bunker operation he gives the tankermen a box of cookies. Obviously he is treasured and valued, receiving for about $4 worth of cookies the admiration, cooperation and exquisite politeness than only a group of men deprived of many of life’s little joys available to their peers would give a man who gives them cookies when he doesn’t have to.

 

 

  last week I had an attentive young Ordianary Seaman aboard, a tugboater who has just gotten out of training, there to be the tug captain’s eyes and ears and talk us alongside the ship. Whoever trained the kid did it well, as he was one of the ones who ‘gets it’ from the get go- listening more and talking less, but aware that his job is to tell the captain everything that the captain needs to know that distance and parallax error makes hard to see, all the while incorporating my advice and observations while using his own understanding to get us in position for bunkering.

 

  As the kid was obviously interested and willing to learn, I got to talk to him along the way about the value of politeness, and respect and cooperation. He laughed but listened when I talked about being nice to the ship’s deck gang when they were taking our lines, knowing that if we piss them off enough, they’ll try to throw something at our heads, which is not difficult to do when you’re 40 feet up and almost directly overhead.

 

  I was also able to share a warning about cultural sensitivity- not calling every white guy a Russian when he might not be, and when he might be worried that his family is being killed by Russians back home, for example, or making jokes about Filipinos’ good yet heavily accented English when you only speak one fucking language yourself.

 

  I had actually met the kid the day before, when I bunkered one of the Orange Juice tankers that run between here and Brazil. I was talking with the Russ...er Eastern European engineer, and we switched into Portuguese, as we both learned it for the same reason- to talk to good-looking Brazilian women. Me, with Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, and the engineer with the local girls in Santos and Santa Catarina.

  Me, never passing up an opportunity to be both crude and humorous, on the kid’s asking me: What he hell langauge is that? Spanish? How’d you learn Spanish so good?”

  Me: “No, Portuguese. Ya’ gotta speak it if you wanna bang a Brazilian girl. This ship is homeported in Brazil.”

  The kid: “Oh, OK. Did you work for these guys before?”

  Me: “Naw, Brazil came to me. I met my wife here.” Light dawned on the kid then, as to why a random middle aged and very white tankerman could rattle away 12 to the dozen talking foreign.

  The engineer (Ukranian, turns out), smiling:” Yas, is good spik Porchuguses. . The girls is very nice, very pretty!”

            I mean, I'm living proof that even the laziest American can pick up a 2nd language if properly motivated. 

 

Interesting times and the Brazil house update

 This is a good time for me to be able to put my head down and keep my eyes in the boat, focus on the things within arms' reach.

     The world's gone pretty wild of late. I do wish I wasn't working NY harbor, this place being both awful to be in and also a target for trouble, but so it goes.  Barring TEOTWAWKI, I'm just trying to keep my blood pressure down. Taking care of the things within my own hull, and leaving the rest of the world to those more submerged in it. 

     So, the Brazil house we're building/rebuilding.   Here's a photo of the state of things as of 1/1/25:

         We've got a lawyer on the job, a new architectural engineer and have hired a stonemason. Some serious negligence was going on- the house being brick, and mortar with non-loadbearing walls made of cast hollow brick overcoated with mortar, and load-bearing walls with brick, rebar and concrete, we discovered that not only had the contractor NOT run electrical service to the house past the front gate at the street, he allowed the pool to be built without being plumbed, and the well to be dug without performing soil testing- we are VERY fortunate that the well didn't destabilize the soil in the yard, AND that the soil testing he didn't do, turns out to be adequate for bearing construction. Since no plans, permits or engineering drawings were submitted to city hallf, we have to deal with that, which the local sherriff says is manageable given that we're filing suit for it, and is a bit of a smoking gun, as I wired a shit ton of money for permitting and engineering seperately to fhe builder, which he obviously pocketed.

              There's more for sure; not worth dwelling on.  The architectural engineer did all the testing, new drawings and site plan, and an assessment of construction carried out, the cost of unfucking the mistakes, and a report summarizing everything for the lawyer. 

   We're in the 6 figures in US dollar terms of sheer loss. Might get some back. Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife and I agree that even if a lawsuit is a Pyrrhic victory, we're gonna pursue it.

     In the meanwhile, the stonemason is starting the unfucking, and working with the architect and electrician to wire the house and make it weathertight. After that construction will continue at a very slow pace.