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.