Counting down

I don't have channel fever, strangely enough. I guess I'm enough of a professional to be satisfied in counting down the diminishing days until I am reunited with my family. Even so, every new day is a little celebration. One more dent in the pile of reserve diet pepsi cans, empty spots in the pogie bait (food) locker, and, of course, the BOCOD, which passed yesterday.
Part of my satisfaction has come from arriving at a certain comfort zone- I now feel confident that I can do my job. I no longer get insulted when handed Letters of Protest by annoyed engineers, I can politely tell anonymous foreigners on the radio that no, I do not have their arcane form letter for this or that, and I can do what needs to be done, I think. We've certainly been busy- tomorrow is slated to be a stand-down day, where we have more than 12 hours off-hire. The last few days have seen us servicing an American ship (!), a Pure Car/Truck Carrier, to be precise, as well as a horrifically-ancient Oil/Bulk/Ore carrier and one of those ugly mega-scale cruise ships. It's been a busy couple of days. Today we've got an old tanker to bunker up; a middle-eastern owned & crewed ship; I am ambivalent- the people on such boats tend to be either wonderful warm human beings or complete slinkys (eg. they're useless for anything, but fun to throw down some stairs). So, we'll see. In the meanwhile, I've got a date with a grease gun today.