setting all aright

Well, I'm back on board. Goddamn, what a challenging few weeks!  It's been tough, not gonna lie, but everything appears to be moving in the right direction.
          As unlikely as it is, for the first time in our 8 years as shipmates, both B and I had to have unscheduled time off at the same time. We've literally never spent more than 3 weeks apart since the day we met. Unfortunately, this resulted in HAWSEPIPER's Afloat Global HQ being manned by... not us, for a week.  My relief is an experienced tankerman who works under my friend Big Chocolate, so he's rock solid. Nice guy, too. He's staying on another week with me, and I like what little I know about the guy. Great rep.

... the other guy? Well, I tried to be as polite as possible, but I might have referred to him as a 'fucking mongoloid' to my boss.
         I work over a lot, filling in on other guy's turf.   You try to work within their routine, not reorganize too much, and ensure that they come back to a workplace that is more or less the way they left it, if they left it in good shape.
        The fill in guy who left today was clean, and a cleaner. That's wholly positive. He also reorganized my office filing system, paperwork management system, and absolutely fucked with our deck layout for mooring- shifting things around, breaking shit, throwing away things etc. etc... nothing too bad, I mean, it was a matter of 4 hours and I had everything back to where I want it, and the house itself is minty fresh inside, which is rare for a fill-in guy to do a bang-up job cleaning. But there's also a line to cross where you're just shitting on the carpet when it comes to messing with the system by which we do the actual work that we get paid to do.

 So I had a bit of a mad on when I was getting things back to nicenice, and the fill-in guy was a big help. He hasn't seen the HQ being operated correctly, so I feel as though I ought to show him that I'm not Captain Shitshow of Turd Harbor. And I'm coming off a pretty intense time at home, so while there is still much I have to do by phone in terms of helping keep my wife on the path to recovery, I hopefully can enjoy some modestly-lower stress days later this week too.