grubbed up, tied up

After a busy week, we had a rare thing happen: shore access. With about 30 hours between jobs, I used up some goodwill and got our towing dispatcher to put us at a lay berth rather than sit out in the middle of the harbor on a mooring for the intervening period. 

    Shore access used to be a lot more common. These days we end up out in the middle of New York harbor or tucked in a corner somewhere in Port Elizabeth NJ. No shore access either way. 

    B and I used the time to go to BJ's and stock up on heavy crap- bulk stuff. A fortunate tide made it possible to get our haul onboard very easily, with just maybe 10' of lift- a good thing for a degenerate canned soda and energy drink junkie like me. So, as a thank you to B for driving us, while he was sleeping this morning, I went out and got him some fresh bagels. Of all the negatives to being in New York on any given day, the bagels and the pizza are pretty amazing. Being on a healthy eating kick again now that the holidays are over, I will be grumbling into my zucchini and salad, bagel-less, though. 

 Today is a day for maintenance, since we both have shore access AND have a little time. While it's lunch time now, we've had engineers coming and going, and I've been doing oil changes and running around with a grease gun all morning. At midnight tonight, we'll be headed out for another load. 

 I'm not sure what will happen in the short term with our workload- Christmas is over, and the unprecedented rush of container ship traffic last month has tailed off, but our workload is still pretty high. Our dance card has been pretty full, though not breakneck as it was last month. With the cold being not yet too cold, heating oil tanker traffic hasn't been unduly high yet, although we ourselves seem to be sending more oil up the Hudson river, upper state NY being a pretty damn cold place. 

Oh the homefront, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife caught Covid last week. She had a touch of a dry cough and lost her sense of taste, and that's it. She'll retest at the end of the week and see if she can go back to work. FL has a pretty decent system in place for advice on that sort of thing, although she had to arrive 90 minutes before the testing center opened in order to get a reasonable spot in line. We are fortunate, in that respect, as a friend recently lost his perfectly healthy 27-year old son, which has been a horror for the poor guy. I haven't taken the coof too seriously, myself, and only now has it sunk home that the random rare fatality in healthy younger people may be random, but not necessarily rare to us. 

 It still feels weird not having Facebook, although the peace is still nice. I made the right call, getting out of that.