Hey Guys, I'm on a Boat.... with crappy internet!

Hi all,

Once again, I am on a boat. This time I am in the Gulf of Thailand though! And this boat is super swanky, so I have some swanky pictures to share. Unfortunately, I can't share them because the internet here is more  that a bit lame compared to other places and I don't have access to the Google Drive, which somehow matters even though the pictures are right here on my very own computer!!

As you might guess from the fact I know it doesn't work, I had originally planned a much different post  with less of the words a more of the pictures. Sadly, it is not to be. I was very upset about this for a while yesterday but I think I am mostly over it now. After some reflection, I realized that being crabby although I have the ability to send thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of bits of information hurtling into the ether and into the computers of my friends and family was a bit prima donna-ish of me and I should be thankful for what I have.

What I have is, at present:

• Limited, but functional internet. I can read things on Feedly, which is what I am using since Google Reader announced that it would soon be an ex-RSS feed service. I can look at webpages which do not have inappropriate content, but I can't download or stream anything. In most cases, any pages which have streamed content are blocked lest I should be tempted to try it.  Google chat is alive and well.
• A two-man cabin to myself. I think its appropriate to call it a two-man cabin because, since I am using it it is a one-woman cabin. This way I have a bathroom to use, because the other ones are multiple occupancy and set up for dudes. No one will tell me whether this means that they only have urinals or not. My cabin is pretty nice, much nicer than the other boat. I have a sofa and a desk for instance.
• Fresh cut-up fruit and veggies 24-7!! This has confirmed my suspicion that I would eat a lot more fruits and vegetables if they were less work and followed me around constantly. I don't know if this will have application to my onshore life or not.
• Unbelievably delicious goat cheese. I am pretty much using this as my protein source because I am tired of beef. Again, being tired of beef is perhaps a luxury that may people in the world would like to have, so my lot is not that terrible. 
• A small but very high-functioning gym. It has a treadmill, a rowing machine, an elliptical trainer, and a bike for cardio + a pretty good weightlifting setup. There are also some random things like jump ropes, stretch cords, and balancing toys, so there is a good variety.
• Pretty good coworkers with whom I am mostly getting along pretty well.

That is a pretty good list of things to be grateful for, so I shouldn't be put completely out of sorts by a few technological inconveniences. 

I've been here since last Wednesday so I've had a chance to fall into a pattern of sorts. I usually wake up around 5, have a quick wet-my-hair-down-so-its-not-going-everywhere shower, then grab a cup of coffee and go into the client (my company) office to check out what happened while I was asleep. Then I go up to the bridge and check my work e-mail on the computer we have set up which has access to our company network. 

That takes until about 7:30 because I am about 12hrs off from normal so I'm looking at a whole day's worth of e-mails and also because the computer upstairs is run by hamsters which have to change each individual pixel by hand every time something new needs to be displayed. Then I have breakfast and get a little work done. Usually this involved going back up to ye olde hamster-driven computer to wait for some files to download onto a thumb drive so I can work on my regular computer. 

At 10am, we have the daily management meeting where all the people who are responsible for things give a report on how those responsibilities are going. This includes people like the captain, the head robot dude, the various engineers, the head cook etc. This takes about 10 minutes, maybe 15 on a very busy day. Most of the time is taken up with making variations on running jokes.

Then, I go back to doing work until 11:30 when the people from my company have a call-in meeting with the project manager onshore. He is a talker, so even if we have nothing to tell him because we just spoke with him 10 minutes earlier it takes half an hour. This meeting is followed by lunchtime, perhaps to the detriment of my feelings about this meeting.

The afternoons are pretty quiet, there are usually 1-2 engineering questions which are raised and I work on the things that I downloaded from my work files in the morning. The onshore manager calls five or 15 more times and I dig up various files and measure various things to answer his questions. Around 5pm I send off another round of e-mails and close up most of my shop for the day. I workout from 5-6 or 6:30 depending on whether it is a lifting day or not, then I eat dinner, read, and fall asleep at like 8:30. 

Sometimes if something is happening in the middle of the night I get woken up, but this has only happened twice out of the week I've been here, so not that much.

It sounds sort of boring written out like that, but actually it goes by pretty fast. I am monitoring the growth of some bacterial samples, so I have to take pictures of those a couple of times a day, plus there is usually some camaraderie going on. The sense of humor on the boat is very... abrasive. Everyone has some sort of nickname, usually derogatory, but not always, and people are constantly making up things and trying to convince other people that they are true. I have one person convinced that my hair and eyebrows are actually very high quality wigs which I paste on every morning, for instance.

I think I am going to do another post on another day about all of the silly things people are trying to convince other people are true and all of the weird personality quirks I have noticed, which will probably be more interesting to read than this train schedule of a post. I'll also tell you about my bacterial samples and how I earned my nickname!