Centered

 Well, damn, I feel a lot better. 

      I've been trying to articulate why it is that I've had constipation of the soul for the past few weeks after a particularly trying tour on the HQ over the holidays... and I still can't quite explain it, except that I note that I feel fine now. Back to what I laughingly call normal. 

             My job was making me look bad and making me feel incompetent, through no fault of my own and my ego wasn't having it. I'm a pretty fart smeller, I can make things better even when the job isn't going to go right. I can make it go less wrong. 

    Oh the hubris. We had bad oil. Nobody gives a shit in the office. Why the fuck should I?  Sure I look like an incompetent, along with all the other retards in this circus who have to hump this difficult to pump oil to suckers  the charterer's customers. 

   Anyhow, couple of days off meant that I had a couple of days to cook, clean, and lose myself in some tankerman Arts N' Crafts projects- organize some storage lockers, stack boxes of supplies, test the coolant's specific gravity in the gens and cargo pumps, have a suck at the bottom of the hydraulic tank sumps and look for metal filings, water or other contaminants... I even got to lube all the zerks on board early this month. Wintertime is hell on the machinery.  Plus, with the new year, there's dumb shit that we sometimes don't give much thought to, like swapping out the batteries on the life ring emergency lights, and the water-activated lights on our gumby suits, the survival suits we have to wear if we want to survive going in the water. I'd be a bit put out if I got woken up from a dead sleep and told that we had to ditch, only to find that the Here I am light on my Jolly Green (the suit is red, the bag it comes in is green, signaling that the suit is size Fatass) isn't working.  

 So, yeah, the HQ's stocked up and later today we've got a small batch of cargo fixed for a car carrier who's coming in late tonight.  

     To go back to what I was bitching about earlier, I was pretty stressed in Jan. Shit going wrong in Brazil at our house under construction, work/life balance getting a bit fucked, etc etc. We all have things bothering us.  Sometimes I feel like I have too low of a bar set where I start to get stressed.  Still, I had a particularly relaxing time home that soothed the burn and coming back to work has been startlingly enough, a return to normalcy for values of normal, anyhow. 

    

     While I was home we spent some time in Miami- I had to get a Brazilian CPF, their equivalent of a social security number, and so having knocked that out at the consul, and anticipating that it might be a classic Brazilian Government interaction (turning a 5 minute process into a 2 day affair), I reserved a hotel room, so we had the rest of the day to ourselves, and so among other things, we wandered around the market around pier 5 and had a blast, day drinking and playing tourist. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I sucked down a bunch of mojitos and ate local seafood, and after, the feeling of decompression was palpable to me, as my stress levels ratcheted down. My wife got hit on by a Cuban bartender, but only once, and was feeling a little down as a result. But she ate an ice cream cone and attracted a bit of an audience in the process, to which I later pointed out, her being oblivious, and she turned as red as her blouse. Anyhow, ego restored.  I'm kind of used to it. 

 

      I was already a lot better by the time I came back to work, and now my liver is resting comfortably too, as it got a bit of a workout at home. 

Unfortunately, it's not all sunshine and roses outside of my little sphere of influence. Blog buddy BCE learned recently that his Mrs. has breast cancer. This is at the tail end of a nightmare year where he had to leave home to try to gain custody of his grandchild out of state against a startlingly corrupt DCS system which meant heroic efforts that affected his mental health and damn near bankrupted him. Guys' a machine, and a good egg to boot, another reformed Masshole like me, too,  and his wife getting cancer of the cans is a real fuck you from above, IMO.  Now, BCE has reason to be stressed. I feel like a cunt crying that my job is hard lately, waah.  I mean, couple of months, I turn 50. We're not kids anymore, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I. The trials of old age are coming, of course they are. I hope i can keep my shit together as well as some of the people I have met when they come. I wonder at it, at me. I hope I conduct myself as well as the people I've met who have real stress to deal with.