Long day yesterday…

I did 4 school visits, as a puppet, interacting with the MC for the whole 45 minute programme. So I had my arm up in the air for 3 whole hours. Very tiring.

Then After dinner I started work with loading water, we had 20 water trucks arrive, and so finished around 1.30am the next morning.

This morning I was up at 7am for music practice before the Sunday service, playing bass again… This is the second time this week I’ve played bass, and the second time ever I’ve performed with it. I feel so bad at it, I have no technique at all, and can “hear” in my head what the bassline should do, riffs, changes, and so on, but lack the practice and skill to play them yet… I need to find a “learn to play bass” book and spend a few hours practicing.

It’s kinda fun though!

Hallo blog.

Here are some photos of my bathroom. The first is of after the plumbers started their invasion.

The thing on top of the toilet seat is a leather welding glove., in case you wondered.

The reason there is a toilet brush with a red ribbon on is because I helped the accommodation department with a video one time, and they gave me this as a present.

The light is hanging off the wall, yes. And the wooden fitting is all broken too.

This photo shows more clearly (perhaps) the underside of the sink.

lovely, eh?

Happily, now the sink has been repaired… with cement and heavy duty black scupper paint.

It looks like this:

[][5]
Quite amazing, is it not?

For those observant readers (or photospotters), you may have noticed that the wall behind the sink is now white, not that rather ugly blue. If you noticed this, congratulations, take 10 points. I dont know where you can take them from, but I’m sure there is somewhere.

Anyway. The bathroom is currently being repainted, by yours truly and my new cabin-mate,
colleague, and friend Tomas, from Mexico. We’re going to try and make it look quite appealing, but currently it just looks white.

So. That’s all about the bathroom. Current news? Well…

I’m reading “Slaughterhouse 5” by Kurt Vonnegut. Now that is a strange book. Very interesting, witty, clever, rude in places, but thought-provoking. I have a friend in the Engine Room who recommended it. He loves Vonnegut, and I have another friend who works in AV (Audio-Visual for programmes, etc) who also enjoys his works. I’m still in two minds about it. Very clever… I like some of his ways of working with language, and with stories.

I was just phoned 11 seconds ago and asked to play drums for music tomorrow with some others.

It’s dinner time, I’m going to go get some food…

[5]: http://blog.madprof.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/sink-20under.jpg

One of the things I’ve done in my ‘spare’ time is re-write the Waterman job description.

Here’s the old one, which doesn’t really say much:

Here’s my proposed replacement, which I think explains better what we actually do. There are two watermen at any point, one of whom is training the other.

[][1]The crowds on the quayside on Sunday. It was like that *ALL* day! Very
busy.

[1]: http://blog.madprof.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/crowd.jpg

[][1]Deckie outing today. A really nice beach/hotel resort. Most spent most of the time in the pool, actually. I dozed in the sun. Nice lunch.

Got back to the ship, noticed the water hose had half fallen off the deck into the water (YUK!)

So I’ve had to go and rinse it out and start de-contaminating it. blah. Sea water here is revolting, around the port area.

[1]: http://blog.madprof.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/reading.jpg

I think I may have mentioned I’m quite busy, and a bit tired. Here is a summary of my week, so far.

Tuesday 23 January 2007:

07:30-07:55 – breakfast.
08:00-08:55 – Associate director’s devotion, and community announcments
09:00-15:30 – final transferring of water, sounding tanks etc to prepare ship stability for sailing.
16:00-17:00 – stand-by for mooring stations
17:00-18:30 – mooring stations, leaving the port, preparing the anchor, and dinner squeezed in while others were on anchor watch.
18:30-19:00 – Dutch dance “dress rehearsal” to check dance quality for the programmes
organiser
19:30-20:30 – “Port report”, community meeting to see what happened in Manilla, exchange news, stories, etc.
20:30-22:00 – Lying awake in bed with the light off.
22:05-23:45 – Sleep is a lost cause. Drinking coffee, chatting on yahoo, and getting dressed and ready for sea-watch
23:45-…

Wednesday 24 January 2007:

…-04:20 – Sea watch on the bridge. Training 2 new helmsmen while supervising lookouts, keeping watch, steering the ship, etc.
04:30-05:00 – Getting ready for bed, I still have no bathroom, and so have to use one down by the engine room.
05:00-07:00 – Sleep (2 hours)
07:00-07:30 – Breakfast
07:30-08:45 – Bible Study groups
08:45-11:30 – Lifeboat Drills. More about this later.
11:30-11:45 – Grabbing an apple for lunch, showering, and getting dressed for sea-watch 11:45-16:20 – Sea watch on the bridge. Continued training of one of the new helmsmen, while
keeping lookout, etc.
16:20-17:30 – Sitting in the mess, eating carrots, waiting for dinner.
17:30-18:00 – Dinner.
18:00-18:20 – Preparing for bed.
18:20-23:00 – Sleep (4 and a half hours)
23:00-23:45 – Preparing for sea-watch, drinking coffee, etc.
23:45-…

Thursday 25 January 2007:

-…04:20 – Sea watch on the bridge, you know the story.
04:30-05:00 – Getting ready for bed.
05:00-07:30 – Sleep (2 and a half hours)
07:30-07:55 – Breakfast
08:00-08:45 – Teaching session on Galatians.
08:45-10:30 – Mooring stations, arriving in Cebu. Most experienced people just left, and we have a new deck officer who doesn’t speak English perfectly yet (although he knows everything completely in Korean).
10:30-11:30 – Soundings, getting water checked out, and filling log books.
11:30-12:00 – Lunch.
12:00-13:30 – Check emails, write new Job Description for watermen, prepare other jobs, find out whats happening with the water this port.
13:30-14:30 – Help with packing down the lifeboats, and settling down to wait for the first water truck to arrive.
14:30-15:30 – Find out that the water trucks (about 20 of them) will arrive at 19:00 tonight, so decide to write a few emails then sleep til 17:30 for dinner…
15:30 – Now.

So. We’ll be loading water from 19:00 or so until midnight or around then. Probably later. 200 tons. It’s free, though, which is nice.

Dear Steven Covey – Thanks buddy! Sectoring my time is really helping me be efficient (and facetious – right now.)

About the lifeboat drills, I’ve just been reassigned, I found out at breakfast, to coxswain of life-boat 1. Very cool. Very nice lifeboat. But I’ve not actually been in boat 1 in the water before. Nor have I ever been coxswain before, outside of the training a few months ago, in a totally calm harbour, after all the theory and going through all the procedures with everyone about 10 times.

Today, we had a man-overboard drill, so not only do we decide to use boat 1 (the smallest fasted lifeboat), but also a man-overboard, which is more complicated. AND, for man-overboard we don’t use the normal crew of boat 1 (not that I’d ever worked with most of them on the boat before anyway), but all of the other much more experienced coxswains are the crew!

So I had to assign them to various jobs (bowman, sternman, ladderman, starting the engine, etc, tricing-in lines, and so on), then have pretty much of the whole of ALL the lifeboat crews of ALL the boats watching me and standing around getting slightly in the way, and doing stuff ONLY when I told them to, rather than when they saw it needing doing (which in a way is good, I guess???), then we went to the water, I was at the helm, with as well as the normal man over board rescue stuff, a photographer and video-cameraman in the boat to get extra footage for projects, in calm (but nevertheless ocean) waves, picking up the man-overboard-dummy, and bringing back along-side to be picked up, with all the other coxswains giving lots of helpful advice (ahem.) for this lifeboat I’d never been in before.

Anyway. It wasn’t a complete disaster. At least it was a drill, not for real. I learned a lot. I’m more humble now than before, I think. I hope. The captain, chief mate, and second mate all said well done to me, for my first drill as coxswain. (in reality, I “ran over” the dummy, because I turned the tiller wrong way into the wind, with the motor still going a bit too late), a boat-hook broke (not my fault), the exhaust pipe fell off (also not my fault), I had to come in along side twice (my first time in this boat, with a motor (also first time in ages), first time at the helm of a lifeboat while at sea, with currents and waves and all that too, so no surprise, but a bit embarressing with all the crews watching me, and all the experienced coxswains giving “advice”, two passengers taking photos and videos and all, a nurse worrying about the health of the man-overboard dummy, and the man-overboard dummy, who just grinned at me the whole time in a most disturbing way.

So yeah. That added to the fun of the day.

Anyway, I’m going to sleep now, or at least rest. Start work again at 18:00.

Goodnight.

There was a small leak in my bathroom ceiling about 2 months ago.

I wrote a request form for the plumbers to come and have a look. They came a week ago, pulled the ceiling apart, ripped out some pipes, splashed water everywhere, left pipes pouring out for about 3 days, dropped a pipe through the sink and smashed a hole big enough for my arm to go through!

There is a step-ladder in my shower, welding rods in my sink (whats left of it) and dirt everywhere, and it still drips from the ceiling over the toilet.

They also pulled the light out of the wall, smashing the wood of the fixture, and I’m currently waiting with great interest to see what happens next!

Now the most cool thing in the whole epic is as follows:

That bathroom has needed re-painting for about 6 months. The floor is quite bad. So I was going to repaint it, getting ideas, browsing “dynamic interior design for incredibly small bathrooms” at bookstores, and so on.

The day I was going to paint it, I got distracted by work and stuff, and so didn’t manage to start.
That day, the plumbers came and smashed the whole place up! If God hadn’t distracted me and kept me from going ahead, it would all have been in vain! God is nice like that.

Yesterday was my first day as duty fireman. Once every few weeks I’ll spend a day on duty running the firestation. We had a control team page at 8pm – the laundry girls saw steam coming from one of the machines doing a 95 degree wash, and thought it was smoke! It was quite dramatic. On Christmas Day, I got paged about 20 times… insane! About the 18th time I phoned info, and asked if I could get a prize. We were loading water; the quayside is weird here, and the officers wanted to ask about water several times. Also the shipping agent wanted photocopies of receipts, and the purser…

Today was kind of a strange day. I taught puppets this morning to all the port volunteers. Now they’re all shouting, ‘Hello Daniel!’ every time they see me. Then I played guitar for deck devotions, did my soundings and water rounds (quickly), then fixed the director’s cabin door. Then I replaced a broken porthole with one of the carpenters, and then took a valve apart in the engine room, and put it back together again, stopping it leaking. All random jobs. It’s not a “normal” day for watermen; it’s kind of weird, but it’s because all our normal jobs were done already. The monthly ones in dry-dock, there are no bags needing to go up or down, and no-one has lost any keys recently.

This port is quite stressful for me. Strange loading, and Stephane has moved to another job. So I’m training/leading Tomas, the new waterman. Because it’s a strange port there is no way I can give him routine jobs (like loading water) to do every day for a bit, and I couldn’t do the random jobs today with him as he was out with a team!

So, still in drydock mode. But here is a blog update I wanted to write about 2 months ago, but never got around to. I’m really tired, so this may not be as interesting as I kind of imagined it originally.

During the leadership training thing I did a few months ago, we had a day doing work at a school, making their football pitch ready. Filling in holes and such. So I spent a few hours carrying buckets of dirt and filling holes. Nice day, didn’t have to think too much. Another guy was there, who was making the buckets of dirt ready for carrying, scraping it out of the big piles of dirt dumped on the stands.

Anyway. I thanked him slightly ironically for the dirt he gave me one time, and he said something like, “Only the best for our customers” or something like that. Anyway, so we developed a whole routine about the dirt, talking about the moisture content, worms, and so on. We formed our own company:

DARN: Dirt And Rain eNterprises.

While walking back and forth so many times I slowly developed one stage at a time our mission statement, basically stating our belief and trust in giving dry dirt, so as to allow the rain to add the correct moisture levels, without the burdensome weight of pre-added moisture:

“We believe in a holistic customer-empowering service effectiveness paradigm which utilises the undeniable precepts of positive precipitation to innovativly implement a beneficial weight/content transportation ratio. “

Kind of rolls off the tongue, I think.

[][1]One of our frequent jobs as watermen is greasing various deck equipment.

Our grease gun (device for putting grease inside deck equipment) is moderately dead. It’s horrible. We don’t have grease cartridges, but have to fill it by sticking the end in a bucket of grease and pulling the spring back. Kind of like re-loading a cross-bow, just messier.

[1]: http://blog.madprof.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/ilovegrease.jpg