back again

After a solid two weeks at home, I have come back to work with the hope of more free time and the opportunity to get caught up on some rest. Yeah. It was that busy.
I spent the past two weeks preparing and pumping out paperwork related to having a family and taking care of them. Mostly a pain in the ass, but it's also mostly over. We also celebrated The Boy's sixth birthday. If you can imaging 20 5-year olds and 20+ screaming Brazilian mothers, you'll get an idea. The whole thing was done at a Chuck E. Cheese's, and, to their credit, they didn't bar us from returning- I guess that that noise level is normal, but damn, my hands were shaking on the ride home.
So, lots of stuff going on. The Boy is having some minor surgery before I return home next time, and Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife is planning a short vacation to Brazil- her first opportunity to see her family in NINE years. Yeah. Next time I return to work, she and The Boy will be taking a long-deserved voyage home.

Anything I can add after that last paragraph just pales in comparison, so I'll close with this. I am back to work, and I am ready to bust ass. More later.

it's all fun and games...

...until your boy barfs all over the interior of your beloved pickup truck.

Easter was great- wonderful to get together with my family. My oldest brother and his wife and kids were hosting- Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, meself, and The Boy made the hour-long drive up north, and awesomeness definitely ensued. This was the first time I've been able to attend a modestly-sized family get-together in a long time... a couple of years, anyhow.
The Boy managed to ignore the pain in his still-gimpy foot and snuck away several times to goof off on the kids' trampoline that my brother keeps in his back yard- I say sneak away because he would alternate some time on the trampoline with periodic visits to check in with us and also to grab some sort of pastry or other junk food on his way out. Now, while Mr. Sweet tooth is a very fussy eater, he was like an ant on a sugar pile yesterday. Grab, run, grab, run. I should have said something, but he was having a blast with the other kids in the family, so I kept mum.

Oops.

About 15 minutes after we get on the highway, heading home, the boy turns to Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and mutters something in their language. I always kind of hate this, because I am excluded- they speak too fast together for me to catch more than a word or two. Anyhow, my wife sort of sighs, and says something back to The Boy, who suddenly goes bug-eyed, and proceeds to barf up everything he's eaten in the last 10-14 days... and it's not just a petite gutful of boy-barf, no... he's doing the Linda Blair Projectile-style bazooka barf. How a smallish 5-year old could ingest a a cake, two turkeys, a 40-acre field's worth of potatoes, two fishermen still in their boat and a partridge in a pear tree is beyond me. I swear there are peas rolling around in my truck still, and he hasn't eaten a pea in 2 months.

Now, the epilogue- beware if you're squeamish. So, I pull off the highway at the next exit and find a dunkin' donuts. The Mrs and The Boy head in, arm-in-arm, for a cleanup. The boy has recovered his spirits, minus a certain distaste for the pukey pants he's now sporting. I leap out of my truck, run around it a few times uttering muffled 'oh, gross, goddam...' you know, handling the situation maturely.

Luckily, my lazy ass has left a treasure trove under the seats- a roll of paper towels, rubber gloves (unnecessary, but welcomed), and a bottle of armor-all. I proceed to spend the next five minutes tidying, patting myself on the back for having opted out of the carpeted floors on my truck in favor of rubber. So, after a few minutes, my truck now smells like puke and armor-all, and the floors are glossy and shiny. Scotch-guarding the cloth seats will happen early this week, I'll tell you that much.
My wife and now hollowed-out son return to the truck to find me airing her out, calmly reading my book- all is well. I get a pained look from the boy, when he gets into my truck and can't stand up on the slippery floors- he proceeds to slip and slide for 30 seconds on the freshly armor-all'ed decks before sitting head-first in his chair. I am tempted to seat-belt him in as-is, but he might just start speaking in tongues, after what came out of him shortly beforehand, and, being short one old priest and one young priest, I get him buckled in, look at my wife, who is wrinkling her nose and saying '...smells no goud in here, hohney.' (apparently she doesn't like armor-all), and we proceed home. After a few minutes on the road, with me getting vibes that The Boy is hugely embarassed, I start goofing with him, breaking the ice a little. After telling me that he wasn't interested in a piece of half-cooked bacon with a side of warm mayonnaise, he began smiling a little as I offered him increasingly interesting dishes. He laughed out loud, finally, at the mention of a slice of fatty ham that I could rub around under the 'fridge for him, if he wanted, and he lost it at a 'dish of poo-poo and ice water.' The baby talk for bodily wastes absolutely sends boys into hysterics. My classy wife in the meanwhile was sinking bodily into her seat, mortified, but, by the time we got home, The Boy was in tearing spirits again, wet drawers and all.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go find someone to burn my truck.

You would think that with limited time to spend at home, I would be a pro at efficiently running errands and knocking things off of the 'to do' list.
You'd be wrong. 28 days at work, and well into day 2 of my 14 days with the fam, and I realize that I am no less daunted by running errands than I was when I was working four months at sea, and two weeks at home.

How in the world you folks get your stuff done with only the hours after work and on weekends, I'll never know. I've got 2 weeks to work with, and I'm already 3 months behind.

Anyhow, The Boy is getting his cast cut off tomorrow. I'm praying that he's not going to come out of this with a gimp. He's got a mystery ailment relating to his Achilles' tendon. I figure that if a greek demigod could get taken down by a bum wheel, a 5-year old should have it looked at, and the poor little guy ends up with a cast and a serious mad on at yours truly. Anyow, I'm hoping he'll be good for Sunday. Got a big day with the family planned.

real pirates

It was bound to happen- an american ship was hijacked today. The Maersk Arizona was attacked off the coast of Somalia. Score one for the bad guys.

American companies have taken their share of hits through piracy of late, but their ships were flagged out to FOC states (Flag of Convenience), and this is, I believe, the first time in a long while that Americans have been affected.

Part of me wonders why we don't solve this in the way the Japanese merchant fleet does. The Japanese, mysteriously, don't have stowaways and don't encounter pirates... that we know about. It's an open secret that the Japanese take undesirables and tie their hands to their feet and pitch 'em over the side with a pocketful of scrap steel. Thus, supposedly, no one bothers the Japanese fleet. Ever.

Now, the truth is, I can't ever see myself killing someone simply because they want to sneak onto my ship and try for a better life. But then again, I'm not Japanese. Taking a life isn't something that I'd take lightly.

Anyhow, today's antics off of Somalia seem to have come to a stalemate. The crew took control of their ship, but the captain is a hostage, apparently. Not good. My question is 'how the hell did this happen?'

"Heave away, boys, Heave away!"

I has an ouchie today. My fault. I hit the gym pretty hard yesterday.

To those of you who know me in real life, you know that I laugh at gyms. I believe in building strength through hard work and outdoor activity. Also, you noticed that I've gotten to be a fatass along the way now that I'm not lobstering anymore. Back in January I started trying to eat better and go for walks and stuff when I could, and about 6 weeks ago I started lifting weights again. 6 weeks of lifting weights is longer than I've ever stuck with it. I've been blessed with a large build, and have worked outdoors for most of my life, so I'm plenty big and strong, but from humping lobster traps, I hunch, and from not getting cardiovascular exercise at all in the past 2 years, my weight went through the roof. As of yesterday, I've lost 15 pounds in 2 months, and my eating habits, while not excellent, have improved. Work in progress, and things are looking positive.

Today, although I am a bit sore, saw us having a very productive morning. We kicked ass doing some sailoring. Our goals today included changing out some hawsers on deck and reslinging some of the tow gear hanging off the bow of the barge.
This barge has one 'ship line' a medium-diameter, 8-strand hawser that is twice as heavy as any other on board. It's the same as the hawsers we used on my last ship, which was 10 times heavier than this barge. The principal difference here being that on a ship, there isn't a need to throw the eye splice of a hawser onto a dock bollard from a distance... there are line handlers who meet you at the dock to do that. On a barge, very often, lines have to be 'flipped' off of bitts and bollards from a distance, and thrown on from a distance as well, to stop the barge. This is fun, and also very hard (for me).
Well, a ship line is not for throwing, unless you're Gene, the barge captain here, who is 6-foot 5 and 270 lbs. Even myself, at 6-foot and 270+ pounds (can't wait until that + is gone!), throwing that line is unpleasant at best. So this morning, we changed out some lines, end-for-ended others, and moved that damn ship line into a position where it'll be heaved on with the assistance of a capstan. Hopefully, no more aching backs.

As you were, then.

"I so ronery..."

One of my former shipmates asked me if I had a difficult time taking this job as seriously as I did my last job, working on a much larger, more complex ship. My answer was, and has been and emphatic "No."

In a lot of ways, this job is a little scary for me. There isn't the manpower and mutual oversight that I grew used to. I am the watch. I don't have eyes in the sky and a watch partner to bird dog with me, to BS, to engage in debate over on-the-spot decisionmaking.
Why do I mention this? Today is my trial by fire. My first watch alone with this new company, with this new vessel.
I seriously miss automatic tank gauging. I realize that now. However approximate those reading might have been, manually measuring what's happening from on deck just doesn't give the same feeling of situational awareness that all mariners strive for.

Ah well. I was ready for this, anyhow. I'm comfortable with this sort of thing.

Non shipboard issues abound. I am happy to report that my wife, with the assistance of good friend Sir Spinach and one seriously primo lawyer, bested the miserable bitch who's been trying to bilk us out of money after claiming injuries relating to her totalling my wife's car back on September 11. I can write a little bit about the whole thing now, I guess, now that the legal aspect of things is over. Essentially, as some of you know, when my ship and I were getting our balls beat in by Hurricane Ike, my wife was involved in a fender-bender at a 4 way intersection. The other woman cut across my wife's car as they were both entering traffic. The woman claimed that my wife failed to yield, and, like a professional victim, she claimed all kinds of medical injuries except for false pregnancy, related to the accident, which occured at 15-mph or less combined speed. My wife's POS, which was worth about $2.75 at the time of the accident, was a total loss, naturally. Repairs to make it roadworthy would require a time machine and divine interviention.
Here's where it gets awesome: the other driver, who missed her calling as an interviewee at tornado/trailer park interactions, claimed that her car spun around 3 times, she was thrown all over the vehicle, and that my wife was going to leave the scene of the accident, but also, she was blacked out until the officer responding to the crash woker her up.
Unfortunately, our litigious society requires that any outlandish claims, when backed up by James Sokolov and company (you have to be from New England to get that one... sorry. It's our local lawyer mill), must be investigated, and thus we had threatening letters, numerous court appearances, and lots of stress. In the meanwhile, I was coming and going from home, my son is dealing with medical issues, we're dealing with the INS and my wife is standing in dead center dealing with the chaos.

Well, it's over. We came out on top, sort of. Still working on my son's health issues, but that's a work in progress, and goddam, kids are full of pestilence. Every week he's bringing some new bug in from Kindergarten. I don't know what the other parents are doing, but damn, keep your sick kids home!

OK, ranting done. Thanks.

a pirate looks at 40 (feet in the air, that is)

Self Portrait- me hanging from the forward mast on the barge, after changing out the light bulb for the anchor light at the top of the mast, some 40-odd feet in the air.


That crease between my eyes isn't getting any prettier. I walked into the backswing of someone winding up for a hockey slapshot when I was in high school. Oops.





Today is one of those days that sailors dread... something very important is happening at home, and I... am not at home. I have to sit on board and wait for a phone call to see how things turn out. Grrr...