channeling Eeyore

    

      I don't like admitting weakness, but I'm  just not feeling it this month. 

          I have a cold or sinus infection that came in the wake of the flu I took with me to Brazil and back. It hit right as I was going back to work last week. 

     So, between hospital bills, funeral expenses and last minute international plane tickets, I had unexpected expenses somewhere north of $35,000 so far this month. Now, my salary is munificent compared to, say, what I was making when I got out of college, but it's a sailor's salary, and 35k is enough to really  take the lead out of my pencil, as it is to anyone. 

  

      The prospect of collecting OT for working overtime for a few weeks, not flying home and back to work, not eating and drinking and engaging in high living (by which I mean buying wood, power tools, paint and such) and putting my helmet on and my head down and starting to get out of the hole that just got dug for us,  well, that's just the start of smart decisons I'll need to make for the next little while. 

             This stupid cold of mine is disheartening, and it won't leave. I've been sick now for several weeks nonstop and I don't seem to be getting better. I'm not sleeping great, which I think is most of the problem. I'm simply run down. 

 So it's probably not the smartest decision I can make financially, but I'm going home next week for a few weeks of downtime. It's my scheduled time off anyhow, and I feel like a bag of smashed assholes,. I've got 9 watches to go, including tonight.    We're steady busy here on the HQ, pretty much doing somthing every watch, but the gap between the last job and this one  is about 8 hours, of which 4 are on my watch, so I get to sit at my desk and catch up on papers, write this post, and shortly, precook tonight's dinner, which is a low-effort meal-  4oz of steak, onions, peppers, pea pods and mushrooms and garlic pan-roasted and wrapped up in a big low-carb wheat tortilla. I throw a 50/50 blend of oyster sauce and hoisin sauce on top to church it up, and it's a decent meal. It'll build a turd for sure. 

        I figure some down time will help. I gotta get my ass up and moving when I get back, might as well rest while I can... and hopefully sometime in the next week this stupid fucking cold will let go. 

Still sick at work, and a visit to My Hole in Brazil

 I'm on my second watch now since returning to work. The flu that I left with last week when we flew to Brazil has come and gone, and in its' wake I caught a hell of a cold. Or maybe it's just a long bug, I dunno but either way it's been a miserable almost 2 weeks of being sick, and I'm not a sickly person normally. I'm pretty tired of feeling like ass. 

         Last night we were bunkering a small chemical tanker, and thankfully they were about the same size a the HQ, so when I was talking to the engineers and crew, they were only maybe 8 feet away so I didn't need to yell, as I have a hellacious sore throat as well and talking hurts. So I was grateful for that. Tonight promised to be busy but the Office People (Long may they complain, long may they Shit Light on the heads of the damned) changed all out plans and in a fortunate turn of events, the next move was pushed back to the 3am tide later tonight, technically tomorrow, at the tail end of my watch. 

        I wish I had felt better last night. the engineering crew on the chemical ship were cool guys and I apologized for not talking more. They were all Poles, and I have always found Polish engineers to be pleasant to work with. There's a reason why they're one of the better regarded castes of engineers I think, between work ethic, personality and skills.  Plus, I'm a huge Jan III Sobieski fanboi, so learning more about him from someone who grew up with a greater knowledge of his history makes me geek out. 

_____________________________

    Since I still feel like hammered shit, I will throw some pictures up from last week's trip to Brazil. Bear in mind that this is a poor city on a high plain in an arid area. It's not beautiful to any but the discerning eye, but it's a place I very much enjoy visiting, mostly for the people, enough so that I'm building a house there, which, last time I wrote about, was mostly a series of pillar foundation holes which the building crew were inordinately proud of, as I wrote in "Please Admire My Hole. "

Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I out for a walk

The Hole is now that building on the right. The tall walls around the yard are 15 feet for privacy and shade. 

The main house, as seen from what will eventually be a 40' pergola running from the main gate. 

The dining room, eventually. 

Part of the purpose of the new house was that it was going to be a place for my mother-in-law to live as well, along with her maid and a nurse. As such, with her gone,  there will have to be some repurposing done I think in order to breathe some life into the place.  Against her will, inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, with all the organizing, planning and help she has given between her mother's care and  coordinating reunions and events to reunite the whole family, has been more or less appointed matriarch-in-exile since she's in the middle of the 5 generations of family among the hundreds of them all and the one person everyone takes a holiday to visit when we're in town.  So it appears that my house, since I had planned to be able to feed 40-50 at a time from just the outdoor kitchen alone, will be a social hub when we're in town... and we're hoping to spend a month or more in town every year after we finish building it. 

    At any rate, it's a more pleasant thing to contemplate at the moment than how shitty I feel with this stupid cold. 

I'm home again, for the day

 Wow, crazy week.  I flew to Brazil on Tuesday, and flew home on Saturday, arriving just now, Sunday morning. My wife and son are dead asleep, as they couldn't sleep on the plane, and we never slept more than 4-5 hours a day the whole time we were in Brazil.  We buried my mother-in-law on Wednesday, and it was an all-day affair, 24 hours, a vigil from sundown on Tuesday to sundown on Wednesday. 

           How to explain? Brazilian funerals, at least the Indio ones, are emotionally exhausting, and cathartic as well, moreso than I've experienced here in the US.  Deeply moving, dignified, beautiful in a way ours are not, in that many more of the old world traditions are still upheld. The traditional diamond-shaped casket, the body completely covered in flowers except for the face and chest, and the whole casket with a gauzy piece of white lace to soften her features.  The interment was done in the family crypt, and she was laid to rest next to the bones of her great-grandmother, and above the bones of her husband, dead these many years. We watched as a mason bricked up and mortared the casket in place, where it will lie for 20 years before being opened and the casket discarded, when her bones will join the pile of bones from her great grandmother.  

 I'm spent. I feel like too little butter scraped over too much bread. I have so much to do and so little time before I have to fly out for work, and I'm jetlagged and having a post-stress reaction I guess. I spent the past 5 days doing my utmost to keep my family safe and supported, and my Brazilian family, all 300+ of them, were there with us the whole time. 

 I guess I will write about it more. I also got to see my new house under construction, hung out with the builder, who is married to one of my wife's cousin's aunts' I think, and got my wife hammered drunk along with another cousin when she struggled with processing everything, which actually turned unto a nice story.  The hangover I woke up with, along with the night I spent talking with her and letting her cry things out and laugh too, were worth the price. 

 Anyhow, I got her in bed about 30 minutes ago, and have hours of shit to do before I can rest yet. 

 What a ride it was. Some great moments, I have never been hugged and kissed and made to feel included this much, ever. The pain was awful, the heartache worse, but as that started giving way to the laughter and the stories and shared memories, I know we did it right, and by me, I mean my wife, who deserves her nap for sure. 

Pictures and some of the better stories to follow. 

Bereavement flight

 

 

  Of all the places I expected NOT to be at 0430 on a Monday, the airport in Newark NJ is certainly one of them. And yet here I am.

 

  My mother-in-law had been ill for several weeks, culminating in a systemic infection and a blockage in her one working kidney. Once I wired pretty much a car’s worth of money to the hospital in Brazil last week, they unblocked the kidney, but found a tumor in her bladder while they were headed uptown, so they removed that as well as the blockage.

  Given the language barrier, a certain hesitation to pin down the attending physician and question him, Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I never felt like we really had a solid grasp of what was happening, despite arranging 24 hour care over and above the hospital care, which is a thing in Brazil.  Over the past few days, my MIL’s recovery waxed and waned, though in truth I assumed the infection was under control before they performed surgery on her.  Yesterday when I got up, she was talking about going home in a few days. She started vomiting around 10pm last night, and at midnight I got a text that she had vomited again and was on oxygen, and 10 minutes later, the shitty call that we all dread, after she passed away.

 

  I went through my parents’ deaths a few years ago, and it was painful, even though it was expected.  I knew my Mother-In-Law wasn’t doing well, but I tried buoying up Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife, and trying to keep everyone optimistic, and at 8am our time she was going to talk to the hospital and decide whether or not to get a flight to Brazil, as her mom seemed to be rallying the past 2 days. 

 Ugh. I can see just as far through a brick wall as the next guy, but boy howdy I am kicking my own ass for it now.

 

  I got to say goodbye to both of my parents at the end, and it was still awful. My father cheated death so many times that one of my brothers and I both have a weird phobia about calls between around 9:30PM and 6:30AM, which is when we'd always get the notification.  So when the phone rang just a few minutes after midnight, and 10 minutes after my wife said her mom was vomiting and on oxygen, I knew;  of course I knew. Nobody calls with good news after midnight. 

 But my God, when I picked up my phone, the absolute wail of pain was something I’ll remember forever I think, even knowing what was happening. My wife does NOT cry. I have never heard her hysterical before, and if God is kind, I never will again. My heart is absolutely broken for her. In a crisis my wife is an absolute rock. Chokes me up right here, remembering it. 

  Turns out, it’s worse, much much worse, when it’s not you, but your spouse, who loses a parent.

             Like as not I’ll be going to Brazil tomorrow for a week or so. It's the least practical thing I could possibly do, and I absolutely have to.  In talking to my wife an hour ago, she's regained her composure and we talked about telling my kid about his grandmother in a few hours, as he was working overnight at his own job, and we didn't want to blindside him. He talked with his grandmother every other day and my idiot ass talked to him about 8pm last night, saying that he didn't need to worry so much, that she was holding her own. Ugh, he's going to get home 2 hours before my plane lands, and my wife will have to tell him without me there. 

   And why the fuck am I sharing all this? I'm sick myself. I have a flu-like bug, ironically enough. Started about 36 hours ago. Not  covid, turns out, as I checked, but I feel like hammered shit and the runny nose thing just came in as a little fuck you just for me a couple of hours ago. Awesome. 

   I dunno. I'm not myself here. Gotta get my shit together. 

 

First watch back

 I'm back on the HQ now, and those last 2 weeks flew by.    Stepped right in on my first watch to finish topping off a load, and presently I'm just waiting for slack tide for our tugboat to come and move us to a lay berth to wait out our next ship to arrive at a local anchorage. 

          Sunday was probably the most fun I had in my time off. With my kid out for the day, during the afternoon I loaded up a tub of beers, champagne, water and soda, and cued up some music and Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife and I spent the next 6-7 hours in the pool, getting thoroughly soused and crisping up nicely. Well, she did. I had to take hourly breaks to put on SPF 1-million so that I wouldn't burst into flames. 

             It was nice that such hair as I still have hadn't yet been shaved off, which I usually do the day before leaving for work, which leaves me looking more like Lester Lightbulb than Kojak, sadly. 

Insert obscure Boston humor here. 

        Inappropriately Hot Foreign wife tried wearing an American-style bikini (Brazilians preferring less material; think 2 postage stamps, an eyepatch and some shoestring) but found it much too constricting after a second glass of champagne  ("I no like this. Eet feels like I wear a burka or how you say in english, paraqueta? (Parachute))."   Still, while the bikini stayed on, it was nice to be able to get SFW pictures together for once. 

 

To the Brazilian sensibility, these are giant nana thunderpants

      All in all it was a day to put the stresses and mostly unhappy nature of of the events of the past few weeks out of our mind. And not being kids, spending most of the day drinking and swimming (with a 30 min break for wings and ribs, which we ate sitting side by side on the pool stairs), by 8pm she was passed out on the couch and I got to start to watch 'Fallout' which is about the most creative thing I've seen on TV in years. Utterly insane and enjoyable. I gave up by 10pm though, after rehydrating, and scooped her up and carried her upstairs, pretending not to notice that that was a LOT harder to do than it was 5 years ago, last time I tried it. 

       

       Monday I got to meet with a GI doctor to schedule a colonoscopy, which will be my first as a middle-aged guy.  I think I'm going to binge on taco bell and chinese food the night before, though. Why should I be the only one in the room having a miserable experience? So that'll be the next time I go home.    I scheduled it for the day after crew change, because why not? I can be hungry on the plane and drink the explosive nasty ass cleaner when I get home, get the shitty day out of the way. 

 

I'm still not dead

 It's the weekend now, and for Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I, that means we have a few days together. Between construction of the house in Brazil, an upcoming family wedding that we need to fly in for, and a sudden downturn in my mother-in-law's health, I'm throwing money in the air and it ain't coming back down. For this reason, there's more overtime in my future, and Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife is up to around 85-90 hours a week at her own job, so of all the things we are doing, relaxing isn't one of them.  We're really getting our asses kicked.

         The shit with my mother-in-law is still fluid- it's a long story but I can tell already there ain't no happy ending coming this time. The bitterness there is that part of building the new house was to put her in it, since I'm only planning on spending 4-5 weeks a year in the house, and frankly, we really nailed the design when it comes to building a tranquil and fun compound that is ideal for visiting and with everything right there, plus it has been rebuilt with age in mind- no stairs except into storage areas, and no trip hazards, because I already know from experience that my feet at night have radar, and are able to find EVERY obstruction eventually, so that I can fall over them.  That would be nice for my MIL, as she's blind.

       Well, it's mid-afternoon already, and we're doing our best here. I've been doting on Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife every chance I can and every moment together is one that we value. Last night, after cooking, I cracked open a serious bottle of wine that a friend carried back to us from the French countryside, and she drank off the bottle over the evening, pleasantly buzzed, while I consoled myself with a couple of glasses of Maker's Mark. Nothing exciting, and she was too tired to do what usually happens when she has a couple of glasses of wine- run out in the back yard naked and jump in the pool. I mean, I married a South American Indio woman. They spend half their lives naked, which is something I support entirely. But she was all demure and we spent the night on the couch just talking back and forth, mostly me letting her talk, letting out all the pressure from too much work, too much worry and a very ill mom 6,000 miles away. 

Romance-wise, it's been a fantastic 2 weeks. Relaxation-wise, not not at all.  There have been some great moments though. 

woops...

 I'm not dead. 

   I'm at home. 10 weeks at work was enough. 

 I've been home a week already. The days are flying by. 

    back to work next week. For another 10 I think.