Few more to go

 

 I'm down to my last few watches.  It's been fine. Nothing exciting to report. 

.

Oh, construction at home required us to pile the contents of the first floor in the great room, so nobody could use the front entrance to the house.  With the work now about finished, and furniture moved back, my wife spotted something in one of the flower wreath she keeps on the doors. 

 Momma bird has since returned and settled in. 

My wife enjoys having her there.  And, I mean, it's a mourning dove, fairly inoffensive as far as birds go. 

Happy St. Patrick's Day

 Well, I missed Irish Christmas this year and here I am sober as a judge, but God and Mary and Patrick be with you today. 

 ...and remember if you do have Irish ancestry, be a good ambassador for our people by carrying yourself with dignity on this feast day, like I am. 

Sunrise 2026

 I watched the sun rise this morning. 

 Man, I haven't done that in ages. 

 It wasn't a particularly nice one- the sun came up from behind a Fedex warehouse, and the light reflected across the mouth of the Gowanus canal, which I believe to still be the most polluted waterway in America. 

 Ah, New York. 

        Still, it was a good moment.  Even Brooklyn, the place the tube will go in when the world needs an enema, was peaceful at that moment. 

   The air barely smelled of the trash from the three processing stations within a mile of here, and the nearby streets don't yet smell of fermented dog piss as they do in the warm weather. 

 I can't hear the muslim call to prayer from here, which is nice. The nearest street-mounted speakers are up closer to the stadium where the Brooklyn Nets play, in the neighborhood where the Sharia Police drive around in NYPD cop cars with 'Muslim Community Patrol' on them. 

  Not even joking. 

So that's a blessing. I don't have to hear that. 

 Man, fuck this place. 

 My point, though, was that this was a pretty good moment for a place I look down upon from the relatively olympian height of someone from a civilized place. 

For values of good, anyhow.  

 You know, this post started out as me wanting to share a Moment of Zen, but it turned dark quick. I had planned on only mentioning that it seems tough some days to find a good, positive moment but the post sort of wrote itself. 

 Well, 12 more days and I can unass from here. 

Halfway day

 Well, it's halfway day today, where I am exactly half way through this tour aboard the HQ. 

 It's been uneventful. First week was pretty light, this past week was nonstop until today. 

 I was getting a bit frazzled there yesterday. Nothing's wrong, per se, but after 5 or 6 days of not being able to use the bathroom without the phone or VHF radio going off and someone needing something, it wears on you. Think on this: how much more difficult would it be to have a nice day if there is no ease to be found on the seat of ease? 

     Yesterday I was determined to eat my breakfast sitting down as the 2 days prior I had been eating all my meals standing and generally with one hand.  Well, yesterday I was gonna have 2 eggs, bacon, a piece of chicken sausage and some pico de gallo over flatbread and damned if I wasn't going to eat it with a knife and fork like a Christian, even if it meant forcing people to wait for me. 

 Turns out that wasn't necessary. The oil terminal we were loading at sent a young demotivated dockman who moved glacially, so I had time to cook AND eat while he was fussing with cargo hoses and valves on his dock. I immediately felt better after for having been able to sit and eat. 

 Yesterday was like that, though. Busy but with timely short breaks in the action. Very sustainable pace, and when it was done, it was done.  Around midnight B tied up the HQ for the night and here we are in Brooklyn the next day. 

      I have the watch off, oh frabjous day. I want nothing but to sit on my ass, which isn't gonna happen.  

 I need to go to the store and stock up on greenstuff, and I have a couple of hours of maintenance to do on deck, but I had my breakfast sitting down, and did nothing of value whatsoever for almost 2 hours. It was great. 

 Back to work. 

I'm not crying, I have a sniffle

 Well, one of the tile guys who was working on my house missed work last Wednesday as his daughter had been sick. He got sick himself over that weekend. 

 I got back to work on Friday, 2 days late, as a result of all the snow that hit NY. By the time I was aboard the HQ it was already 2 hours into my watch and I took over still in my street clothes, standing watch from about 1930 to 0530 Thursday. 

 By 2300 my  throat was itching and my nose was starting to run. I picked up the damn bug from the tile guy and his kid. 

  I already had a brutal cold/flu this past January. This seems unfair. 

        Thing is, this appears to be a garden-variety cold. Compared to the misery of the last one, I can handle this.  It's annoying, sure, but nowhere near as bad as my recent memories. 

 My wife and kid came down with it about 8 hours after I did. So they're not super happy either. 

    As for me, I'm moved in and at work. Funny that just 2 extra days off from my normal rotstion and I feel like I've been away for a lot longer. I find myself more calm and zen. 

 The weather has been moderate too, which helps a lot. 

hooky

 Well, I won't pretend to be sad that my flight back to work got cancelled since NY got a shockingly normal (for the 1980's and 1990's) amount of snow and shitty weather. 

 I was supposed to fly out tomorrow. It's such a shit show between the bad weather, and DHS being held hostage by that trashbag sodomite Schumer and his flying sacks of shit friends so Fast Finger Freddie and the TSA boys aren't getting paid to perform security kabuki, causing cancellations on their own prior to the weather being bad. 

      I'm finding life to be more rewarding by disengaging some from politics especially online... but this is some bullshit. 

 That being said, it may be bullshit, but regardless, the first flight to NY I can get is on Friday so I'm getting an impromptu extension to my vacation.  I am... not sad about this, though I also of course am not getting paid, either, maritime companies in general subscribing to St. Paul's  "He who will not work, nor shall he eat." to paraphrase. 

    It'd be cooler if my house wasn't a dump. Renovations are at peak impingement of my day-to-day, with no appliances in the kitchen, no furniture on the 1st floor, and my fridge in my garage, which doesn't sound bad but OTOH I cooked breakfast this morning on an ironing board in my bedroom and the toaster is on my nightstand. 

   I'm not a TV watcher, but I kinda wish I could watch my TV even so, but then again, I'd be sitting on a box to do so even if it was on the wall rather than behind a Jenga style stack of 3 sections of my couch stacked vertically about 10 feet tall. 

   I bitch, but it's starting to come back together. The floor guys arrive tomorrow for tiling and it's lovely outside here, cold for Florida, meaning 60's in the day and 50's at night so I have been enjoying the sun and the not sweating, but not as much as I enjoy the not freezing my balls off of being at work this time of year. 

       So, tomorrow, when normally I'd be on the plane at 6am, I'll be asleep in bed. This is better, and in a few days I'll be up north anyhow, with plenty of time to enjoy the brown dirty snow and wet, cold feet and wet,cold people. 

It has its moments

 I'm home, I'm warm, I'm sleeping better.

     All good.  Renovations at my house have started, which is disruptive. New kitchen countertops and new floors on most of my first floor meant that  after arriving home I had to disconnect the bathroom vanity's water connections, pull fhe vanity, the washer and dryer, the furniture, lamps and sundries and the refrigerator and stow them elsewhere. And then I could go to bed.  So we're camping out in my house for the next week. 

  Of course it wasn't withiut some hiccups. Oneof the shut off valves for the washing machine was leaking by, as was one of the ones for the laundry sink. No matter what I did I couldn't get them to not leak by, so we did without water overnight and I had to make a couple of trips to Home Depot because of course one was a friction fit and the other was threaded. 

    Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife had never heard a jackhammer before, so having one working 10 feet away behind some plastic sheeting to keep the dust down was a bit of a shock. Luckily we all have good earpro, being a house of shooters, so going about our business in the mostly-empty kitchen as best we can at 150dB is workable. 

 Anyhow, I have some family visiting Disney a couple of hours to the north so it's a great time to go say hi. 

 In the meanwhile we went to a waterfront bar laat night and had fried shrimp and mahi mahi and a couple of drinks, which is bad for the waistline but good for the soul. 

   It's good to not be at work even if I have to go in the living room to see what's in the fridge.