This time we went 5 days without running water.  We just got it back, now that it's above freezing, but who knows for how long?  Long enough for me to shower and do laundry, because the inside of the house smells like onions and hot dog water. 

 Don't even feel writing. I am, however, grateful for having a washed ass again. 

  A gust of wind just hit us hard enough to be felt from inside the house.

  It’s blowing a gale tonight here on HAWSEPIPER’s Afloat Global HQ/Center for Excellence in Creative Profanity.

  It’s been busy. Oil is not flowing like the proverbial wine. The oil is flowing like the urine stream of a middle aged man with prostate issues.

 (I don’t have prostate issues. No funny ideas, God, please).

  Big E, my partner on here and quite probably The World’s Nicest Man, has been about ready to burn the boats and go ham on the natives, as we’ve been getting oil that is not as advertized- that is to say, after blending on board the HQ, the oil is consistently not coming out according to receipe, which, turns out, is not the fault of the cooks (us). We look like assholes, but if instead of a nice broiler, you’re unknowingly putting a roadkill opossum into the cookpot, there’s not much you can do when your Coq Au Vin tastes like the shag carpet welcome mat in a gas station men’s room.

  Plus, the weather is... well it’s the Northeast. At Halloween it starts blowing, and it stops around May. Gales 3x a week. I’ve been getting rained on and snowed on and ice-pelleted on for all but one night since I got back aboard and that night I got shit on.

  Fucking seagull.

  No, I bitch, but under the 20lbs of foul weather gear, while staring down at a gauging tape in the cargo tanks, eyes streaming from the volitiles doing to eyes what onions do to eyes but with carcinogenic flavorings, there’s definitely a couple of things bubbling through my mind that are keeping the general misery of being cold wet and tired at bay. My recent very positive biopsy results being chief among them.

  Yeah, it hasn’t been great out, but I am starting to understand Billy D, my high-school English teacher and employer, the guy who bought the lobsterboat I grew up from the old timer who taught me to fish, and who consequently manipulated my schedule in high school so so we could go fishing in the afternoons twice a week after lunch.

  Whenever one of his crewmen bitched about the shitty weather in the fall and winter, Bill would always should the same thing. “IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY! THIS DAY WILL NEVER COME AGAIN!”

  Bill was a smart man. A good man too, in a way that the world no longer produces often. He passed on a few years ago, and he closed his obituary with those very words.

  As I age I understand him more. The days that suck are still better than the days spent looking at the grass grow from underneath.

  Looking back, I’m more impressed at the things Bill didn’t say. For example, during the fall semesters in college I worked for him on Saturdays, hauling lobster pots with him and one of his high school students, and I’d share my vast wealth of knowledges gained from my experience as a college biology student who traveled a whole 17 miles from where he was born to go to university.

  How the hell Bill didn’t tell me to be quiet and stop acting a fool 3-4 times a day I don’t know. But looking back I value his forebearance. Older, probably-should-be-wiser-by-now me

 is not sure I could have done the same. Nonetheless I eventually figured things out. Better late than never... and I still shoot my mouth off more than I should, but at least I have learned enouigh that at least SOME of what I say isn’t utter bullshit.

 It's been a bit since I wrote the events in Brazil, where Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife and I have been attempting to build a home in the city of her birth. 

    Construction has once again begun, as of this Monday, in a small way. We have a new builder, a project manager, an attorney, an architect and a pool builder. 

 Let me rewind:   

         We had to file suit, and a criminal complaint for fraud was also issued for the original builder of our home, who was tasked with taking an elderly house and expanding it and modernizing it, but who instead seems to have diverted about 90% of the money sent and spent it on... well on lots of things but not on our house. Such construction as WAS carried out was not properly permitted, and used substandard materials. 

     As an exqmple I paid to have the doors of the house constructed out of a beautiful Brazilian hardwood that resembles golden oak. What I got was a poorly fitted front door made out of the right material and about half the number of internal doors made, and these made out of cheap laminate flooring glued to fiberboard. Lol.  

 It's like that all the way. The area has a high water table, so the old foundation was supposed to be mortared over with a polymer mortar to prevent humidity, mold and water intrusion. 

 Nope, some cheap ass thinset, what I think is patching mortar, was used to coat the walls. 

    Anyhow, the local Xeriffe (Sheriff)'s office does the duty of a DA in Brazil apparently. And the criminal inquiry has been well underway, the builder served papers and deposed, etc etc. 

   I don't expect big things, this being Brazil, but I'm hopeful that details being egregious enough and my wife still having a decent footprint in the community will keep things square. 

          In the meanwhile, our architect let us knkw that he has a slight family connection with the builder, and his family had opinions, turns out, so he gracefully stepped down and a replacement took over once he gave a deposition with the sherriff. In addition, some of the subcontractors who also got fucked by the builder reached out and they and my wife and the attorney hashed out an agreement that would see their part of the construction finished so everyone could have at least a little paycheck while the lawsuit wends its' way through the system. I'm still paying twice for a lot of labor and materials, but what can I do? I'm fucked, I need to build goodwill and I'm 5,000 miles away. 

 Still, the demolition of shoddy work has begun, as has the permit process that I also paid for but never got. 

         So, the Tl;dr version is : in process. 

   Still, progress was made, and 4 days ago I was waiting for info on the flavor and stage of the cancer in my thyroid, today it's back to the routine at work, and for once, nothing to bitch about.  {Edit: the cancer I THOUGHT I had. I do like being wrong sometimes.}

Not bad. 

  Well, holy o' dogshit, I got a nice phone call a little while ago. 

     So, for the past few months I've been having scans, ultrasounds and two different biopsies, and living with the thought that once it all got confirmed, I was going to be told this week that I have cancer. 

     Nope. Benign. 

   The first biopsy last month came back indeterminate, and the second, just last week, results were definitive. No cancer. 

 I'm a bit of a mess emotionally. Anyhow, that's why I haven't been writing as much on here. I was doing some contingency planning.    It's been a shitty couple of months having the question mark there, and also other things like the house construction shitshow in Brazil, and the lawsuit over same, etc etc... just hasn't been a lot of good luck overall. 

 I gotta buy a lottery ticket tomorrow though. I'm flying out bright and early headed back to work and into a storm. Hopefully I'll be on the ground before the weather hits. 

 I'm home, I'm happy. 

        My gosh I slept the sleep of the righteous last night. Or something. Whatever, I slept awesome. 

     I know how the expression goes, but I emphatically don't want to Sleep Like a Baby. 

     I slept like a baby once, when I was 18, by which I mean I woke up wet and crying twice.   My first hangover. 

             Today is mostly playing catchup, as it always is. I slept late, waking up at 8am, and since I had been up for about 34 hours, I slept 10 hours. It was excellent. Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife wasn't complaining, as she rarely indulges herself in sleeping late. 

     It's only like 2pm right now. I've been hitting the to-do list hard already. 

    I've written here before that my wife has relatives here and a lot of friends who are illegals. Politically she's about as subtle as a hammer to the nose, so with the immigration crackdown, there's some serious wailing and gnashing of teeth from her side of the social circle this week given the sheer number of pictures of her in a Trump shirt and with her MAGA hat on.   What can I say? I'm proud of her, but I also know to listen- she's lived under a military dictatorship, and at the end of that, she got to watch socialists rape and ruin her country, which I believe likely to be the wealthiest in the world in natural resources with perhaps the exception of oil, where they're merely in the top 5. 

   My wife is of the opinion that Pinochet was on to something. 

    She, and by extension me, are not on the ascendant this week in the social milieu. There's been a lot of phone calls with a lot of yelling. I don't know what they're saying, but they sound pretty soggy and hard to light. 

    The latest one just finished. I should go see who hates us now. 

 You know what I had for night lunch tonight? BLT's.   

 When is the last time you had a BLT? For me, like a year, 18 months I bet. 

  Holy shit I forgot how good those things are.  Now, I'm trying to be good lately, not overeat, but I had 2 for dinner (night lunch, whatever), and just had another one here coming up on 3am. 

 I was able to get ashore today by waking up early, so I stocked up on water and diet pepsi, and more importantly, portioned out 4 weeks worth of chicken and meat and ham, so I'll have a baggie with the right portion of my protein of the day for dinner next month. At some point either in the middle or the end of next tour, (hopefully the end) , I'll be pulled off the HQ and assigned somewhere, presumably somewhere awful that I hate, for the next 2 months while the HQ visits the shipyard for her 5 year beauty regime. 

 Well, I'm under a week to go and I'm pretty damn tired of being cold. Looking forward to not being here for sure, especially after 5 days with no running water. 

     We got the running water back Friday afternoon, and I immediately jumped in the shower. Despite getting a shower in on Wednesday at the company's office, I was in a high state of grease and grime, or at least it felt like it. Regardless I got a shower in, and did laundry. 

     I'm not a fan of toting around an unwashed ass for extended periods of time. It was nice to have a washed one again. As I'm on my last week, I'm working nights, and we've got something happening every day here, but with a block of free time also for every watch, which has been nice. 

     I was saying to Inappropriately Hot Foreign Wife that every day is the same for the most part, minus the prospect of having water to do dishes and shower, and for the most part that's been true. If it weren't for the water issue, and it being butt-ass cold, I'd be in Groundhog Day mode.