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Glad to be here!

Important things that happened after I was paid off and discharged from my ship

1) $50 for drinks. Seriously? two draft beers and two classes of Jamison on the rocks?
2) A seriously uneventful series of flights. I had stank breath from 1), though.
3). My sister and brother pick me up from the airport. Hilarity ensues. I am talked out of peeing on the tire of the car parked too close to my sis'.
4) 1am. Home, shower, etc.
5). Big, big hug from the boy when he wakes up. Reminder to self: teach The Boy to knock before opening door.
6). Drive 2 hours in snow to union hall. Note to self: Next time, call ahead when the weather is bad.
7). Drive 2 more hours in snow, heading home Note to Self: Curse wife roundly for buying a portable DVD player for The Boy. Also, skid madly the entire way, 'cus back of truck is empty, and it's not a 4x4.
8). Buy 1,000 lbs of sand, place in bed of truck. Curse everyone else who is skidding around and driving like a dink at 3mph.
9). Stop at grocery store, buy New Year's Eve Junk food, then liquor store, for New Year's Eve junk for me. Laugh at the boy's first confusing experience with a snowdrift. Acknowledge that I am a bad person for telling him to 'go climb that hill with the snow on it. Run. Run fast!
9a). Scoop powdery snow out of boy's jacket, hair and such. Giggle at his wary expression. Seriously, you shoud have seen him. He barrelled into that 5' snowdrift like a meteorite through a cornfield.
10). Wistfully stare at brown bag containing liquid fun, while sitting in traffic behind soccer mom skidding out in 2wd-mode Explorer. Eyeball "4x4" sticker on tail of same and call down God's wrath on said driver. Back off to avoid blast radius of fire/brimstone. OK. Maybe when she gets home she'll get it. I call in the strike, but it's up to the Big Guy to deliver the ordinance.

11). Slip and fall in own doorway. Acknowledge poetic justice when boy dumps one 5-year-old sized armload of snow on crotchal area.

12. Four words. Thank You, God. Broadband!

packing up

Well, I'm taking a fast break from cleaning my room up and packing my stuff. Tomorrow I'll be coming home, if everything goes as planned.

Here's a little something something to tide you over:

******************************
The Lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Tennyson, Ulysses

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all a yous out there, especially to any a yiz who hafta be away from yer loved ones this season.

So far, by 0900 local time, it's shaping up to be a nice day. Presents at noon along with a big lunch, and movies thereafter.


SOMEBODY GET THE CAPTAIN A SANTA HAT NEXT YEAR, OK?




We get presents too out here!




















OK, this isn't really where we're anchored but you get the drift. Nice to have a quiet Christmas day. We've got a real nice and social bunch of guys on board, so I'm sure it will go by quickly.












The smarm in me would like to point a finger at the privates of everyone in the US who killed their savings forever in the hope that their kids will overlook the fact that they're not being paid attention to 364 days a year.

For the rest of us, and especially to my family, I say Merry Christmas, and sorry about the cuss words on here. I'll be home soon to celebrate, too, so dinna fash yourselves. And if someone (read: Dad) were to have a wee drop o' the craythur on hand, that'd be nice too. See ya soon!

Well now, we're still hanging on the hook, waiting for something to happen. A Damn passive Christmas Eve morning, all things considered. We spent last night humping a big-ass load of food and supplies on board from a supply boat that came alongside after dinnertime. Busy night, but we got our Christmas goodies for sure. Spirits were high, which really made the time go by. This ship has no stores crane, so we have to hug and lug all the boxes and parcels down to the stern of the ship from the midships cranes. For whatever reason, there was a lot of joking and everyone worked well together. We bucket-brigaded a dozen frozen turkeys and 20-lb. pork shoulders early on, so it's turkey/ham and fixins for yours truly tomorrow, something which I wholeheartedly approve of..

In the six years that I've worked for this company, this will be my 5th Christmas aboard. This has been my decision to make, as it's more important to me that I not spend my summers out here in the Gulf, where I would be at risk for heatstroke daily, but the only way for me to be able to do that is to work over the holidays, which is a damn shame, but there it is.
Anyhow, there's a chance that I'll be home for New Years, which would be nice. I could give a fuck about the New Year celebration, really. I just want to be with my family, and do mundane stuff like see how my church was decorated this year before everything gets stowed again. Little stuff, you know? And some not so little, too.

My stepson emigrated here from Brazil at the end of summer. In the past six months he's had to learn English, which he is rapidly picking up, and he has been telling me over the phone, in shocked disbelief about how cold Massachusetts gets. I remember the first day the temperature dipped under 75 degrees on labor day weekend. He was chilly. My wife is no help there, as she is also freezing. The two of them have become complete homebodies since Thanksgiving, and this past week especially, as they got a solid foot of snow. Now, thankfully, neither of them has been sledding yet. Imagine that? I am hopefully going to be able to get them both bruised and frostbitten in the name of the best damn free entertainment that New England has to offer.
Although I grew up in a coastal semi-suburban community, I have spent enough time wandering the earth in my pre-sailing days to develop a rural New Englander's taste towards the out-of-doors. My wife grew up in a metropolitan tropical city; she'd rather be in heels somewhere indoors, but myself, I'll take the woods and waters. My stepson is going to get a good heathy dose of that lifestyle. In the semi-seclusion of my ship, I return home to find so much of that canned-entertainment lifestyle leaves me feeling unclean. I wonder how my stepson will see it when he's my age?

still grrr...

Yeah, so I was pretty much correct, it was a sloppy ride most of the way down south from NY to the Galveston bar. We had calm seas for one day and one night, though, which was nice. Coming out of NY we experienced some phantom swells, where the sea is glassy calm, yet the ship rolled like a turd in a toilet tank. I got some video of that, which I'll post when I get home next week or so.
So, crossing the gulf, we had a couple of hours of thoroughly rotten confused seas, where the motion of the ship was so... peculiar, that it's hard to describe. The seas were confused, which means that we were corkscrewing, first off, which is never nice, but we were also falling into holes in the water, these odd troughs on the front side of breaking seas, which made the whole motion completely jerky. Let me tell you, there was some nausea on board! A bunch of hardened bastards like us. I heaved up my pre-watch diet pepsi and apple after 15 minutes on the bridge, but, as happens to me on the rare occasion when I do get sick, about 45 minutes later, I'm suddenly ravenous and feeling fine.
SO I guess you could say I spent a long watch mostly hungry, trying to stand upright. We took a few good deep rolls, but as soon as I got off watch it settled right down, so I got a good night's sleep out of the deal.

Anyhow, We're in the Houston area, performing the necessary to keep on truckin.' The skipper told me today that my relief has been found, and that I'll be on my way home hopefully early next week, dependant on our schedule. The implications of this are a subject worthy of its' own entry, so I'll be off.

grrr... and brrr, too.

Well, I'm writing today off as a loss. Just one of those shitty days where everything I touch turns to crap. Tomorrow's a new day.
Had a very quiet watch this morning on the 12-to-4, which was a good thing, as the freezing rain/sleet mix was fairly unpleasant. You ever have one of those days where nothing works out exactly as you wanted?

Ah well. Salt therapy is in order. We left Philly just a short time ago, and are heading to Texas, 5 days away. Supposed to be a little sloppy most of the ride, which is about average for this time of year. I'll be happy to have 5 days to lose myself in work, anyhow.

MY RANT

While I was attempting to sleep this morning, with the goal of getting up early to run to the bank before watch, I was awakened repeatedly. First off, some scumbag ripped off my wife's fairly impressive CD collection out of her car. This is insightful, because she is religious about locking her doors and turning the alarm on, and last night she forgot to do both as she juggled one sleeping 5-year old and the gigantic purse she carries that I could use for a hammock.
So, someone is trying the doors at the hemidemisemi townhouse complex where I live. Further incentive to finish classes and upgrade my license to 3rd mate-unlimited tonnage so I can buy a damn house next year.
So, in dealing with that, I accidentally shut off my alarm, so I didn't get to the bank, which means that my next truck payment will now be late, because the fuckheads at our next dock won't allow sailors off of their ships. Fucking Texas and Louisiana. The lower and middle-management in the refiners there are characterized as big people with small hearts for a reason.

So, anyhow, another F-You to Bank of America, who can't figure out that I closed one of my checking accounts 4 months ago and switched to their Online Banking on my new account. They messed up my last 2 truck payments, even though they are both my bank and the financers of my truck, so Not only are they responsible for annoying me endlessly, they're also going to make an extra $50 this month for having sworn up and down that they fixed the problem, and then never fixing the problem. Grrr.
Goddamn monolithic banks. I'm debating going 100% online with one of the small digital banks, see if they're better.

Oh, and lastly, The People's republic of Massachusetts just billed me for $900 for having 'corrected' my return for a few years ago, claiming that my expenses from commercial fishing for that year don't qualify as commercial fishing income. So, I had to call and fix that... which I did, I think. In the meanwhile, I could really feel my temples pounding, and my face was way bright red. Kinda scary, really. I've started counting calories, and when 2 weeks are up, I'll see what I can do about getting on a program.

So, sorry for sharing my woes. I feel better, though. See, this is the challenge of working on a coastwise ship! Balancing all of this, between my wife now feeling insecure about where we live, keeping bills paid, and trying to correct problems that require face-time with increasingly-sparse opportunities to run errands.

Now, when I do get my license upgraded and can take the job above my own, I'll have a dilemma. I can take a bigger-money job on a container ship sailing foreign, or I can stay local on a tanker, maybe even one of these ones if I don't talk myself out of a job first. The way we're going, though, it'll be easier to get off the ship and run errands in other countries. Hmmm.

Ah well, I hope the refiners at my next dock all get Palmetto Bugs in their houses. Have you ever seen one of those things? Holy shit. I am SO glad that the largest bug where I live is the garden spider.


Anyhow, I'm done now. Sorry for the yelling. Really, the more I work out here, the more I see the advantages, too, even with the drawbacks. Taking the Geographic cure still has a lot of appeal for me.

Glory! Fame!

So I am standing at the pilot boarding ladder this afternoon, as we're pulling out of the Kills, waiting for the two docking masters who were getting off of the ship and onto a waiting tug. The first guy goes down the ladder, but the second guy stops, looks at the three of us on deck at the top of the ladder, and says "So is one of you guys Paul the Blogger?"

So I says "Yup, that's me." Clever, I am.

"I read your blog all the time. I like it a lot."

Me: scuffing boot on deck in aw, shucks fashion. "Thanks. I'm trying to tone it down so my company will stop getting pissed off at me."

"Yeah, I can tell. I liked it better the old way."

Sigh. So did I. I explain very briefly that I like my job, and that I have a family to support. I explain thusly:
"I like to make people laugh, but it ain't worth gettin' m'self shitcanned for telling sea stories!"