Maintenance

 Yesterday was Halfway Day for me here on the HQ. 2 weeks down, 2 to go.  The first week was pretty busy, while last week wasn't so much, but had an unusually high amount of planned moves for us which were later changed or deleted.  One thing that I don't think the office drones care about is that scheduling a move for us and then moving the time or cancelling it later eats into our productivity heavily, as our daily and periodic tasks like maintenance and even our free time (when we have it) is all built around the almighty move schedule, and our free time, which is when we do things like go ashore to buy groceries or do maintenance, exercise, cook and eat, handle logistics and administrative tasks, etc.... when there is a move planned, we are constrained and plan accordingly. It's neither smart (or legal) to walk off deck during a cargo operation to fiddle with the parts ordering system and tackle the supply list. 

      So, when we have moves planned, and then the plan is eliminated, we lose massive amounts of productivity. You can't tackle a 4-hour task 3 hours before a move, and frankly, given the liberal interpretation of 'schedule' that our tugboaters  have, it's not unusual for a tugboat to crash into us at an inappropriate speed 2 hours earlier than expected because  we didn't answer the radio, not being in the house at tie time, andthe tug captain likes to take his morning shit at 0700, and we were supposed to be docking at 0700, which will not do and so we're going to leave early and struggle and look like assholes tying up with wind and tide against us and no dockman to catch lines because they expected us at 0700... and you get the idea. 

     THE PLAN is sacred to me, personally. I really like sticking to The Plan, whenever possible, and don't like changing The Plan on a whim or without good fucking reason. And in expressing my frustration with The Plan changing more often than normal this past week, I am not being fully fair to the office drones. They do what they do based on the quality of the information received. But that doesn't change that for some reason last week the planning was not anything close to accurate, ever. And that's unusual. And it's fine, really. Things get done, one way or another. Perhaps not to my taste, but I am a small cog in a big wheel, and in the scheme of things, I am but one more mushroom, if you know the expression. 

      So, anyways, for some reason yesterday and today we've been sitting at pole position in our lay berth (not the one with shore access, one of the other ones, but with a good cell signal, which is NOT something taken for granted), counting down the hours for upcoming jobs that keep changing and being pushed back. The engineering department has taken advantage of our being just a short boat ride from the office, and has been tinkering with my more troublesome generator, one that has never really been reliable or smooth running (It shakes so much when running that we call it Michael J. Fox instead of  "#1 Gen", which is unkind).  So, while we're unable to tackle bigger jobs, little tasks are getting knocked out of the park the past 2 days, which is not to be despised at all.  It's a rainy week this week, with *something* predicted pretty much every day, so between that and the insane amount of pollen in the air this week, the whole HQ is a startling dusty yellow where the rain evaporates off. 

         Today, after breakfast, which I am about to cook, I am doing the annual oil changes in our two right angle drives, the transmissions that connect the main cargo engines (big diesels) to the 15' screw pumps mounted in the cargo sump shafts that run vertically from the deck to the keel, connecting our underdeck pipelines to the above deck piping. After that, I may break out the stencil kit and do some tankerman arts and crafts if the weather is kind and nothing pops up last minute for work. If the office is kind to us, I will be able to eat lunch sitting down.