Return to the HQ

 Well, my trip spent working over (meaning working during my scheduled time off) is now over, and I got the Barbie Dream home babysitting gig that I have been asking for, finally. Occasionally as needs must, opportunities come up for afloat staff to act in more of a caretaker role aboard tugs and barges, rather than a crewing role... oh, we're still crew, mind, but compared to, say, a mellow day on a bunker barge, a babysitting day means rest, time off, and work generally consists of Fire Watch (Am I on fire? No? Fire watch continues. and cooking and having idle time. 

       So, I have babysitting gig PTSD.  My company likes to offer be babysitting positions from time to time, then anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 days after I get aboard, woops, change in plans, you're going somewhere miserable and you'll be working with so-and-so, who is a super nice guy who screams himself to sleep and has bedbugs.  Yeah, I've been Charlie Fucking Brown and my company's dispatcher has been Lucy with the football a few times. Fool me 8 times, shame on you, fool me 9, etc etc. 

 Well, I got my 2 weeks of babysitting. And it was grand.  There was daily chores to be done, and something broke, every single day, and most of the tools were stolen off of there while the barge was sitting idle for a few months this past summer, so fixing the broke stuff required fabricobbling things and using tools wrong because I had to make do with what I had.  I'm actually pretty good at ghetto fixes, you know, redneck engineering, so that's OK. 

     The other night we had hard gales hit the northeast, and while flooding don't mean shit while you're on a boat, the wind gusting past 70 sure as hell does. Luckily we were sitting in a flooded drydock with lines out on both sides like a spider sitting in the middle of a web. 

...and that's how it is in the US coastal northeast from New York to the Canadian maritimes. One day in mid-November, the wind starts to blow, and after that it doesn't stop until frigging May. 

   I made it back to the HQ on Wednesday, and with the holidays here and so many crew positions unfilled and not being supplemented by guys working overtime (it's Christmas, nobody wants the overtime work and instead wants to be at home), we're very busy- I had to wait until Friday at 3am to sit down finally, with the current 3 hour block of free time I have tonight. 

    Anyhow, it's good to be back on the HQ. Babysitting was awesome, without a doubt, but the HQ is home, and I feel better here. The noises are annoying, not strange at all, which is the opposite to the babysitting barge I was on, which had a nice water hammer effect going on in the heads, causing a gunshot-like sound everytime someone flushed the toilet. There was no peeing over the side, either, as there was an office building with a LOT of windows looking down on us, and I don't want to deal with the paparazzi while I'm trying to fill the ocean back up. 

          I bought a whole chicken for Christmas. I made turkey for Thanksgiving, so Christmas dinner we're just roasting a chicken and making good fixins. From the look of things we have a cargo set up for the day that will keep us focused on work. 

 This is week 7 for me. I'm getting too old for staying away from home this long, lol. It's not as easy as it once was. 

   Still, it's fine and good to be back on my home away from home.