Charlie’s Blog

We had to change our cell-phone provider about 6 weeks ago. As a result we also ended up getting new Blackberries. So what do I think of the new one?

Well, the screen has a higher resolution than the old one, it seems to be a little faster for browsing, oh, and it has a 3 megapixel camera (complete with flash) built in.

The down side? well, two things really both to do with the USB charging connection. First, it has a USB plug that is completely different from every other USB device I own (whatever happened to the ‘Universal’ part of USB?) and second, the USB port is in such a position that you have to take it out of it’s case to charge it, which seems a bit daft.

It’s been over a month since my last update and a HUGE amount has happened in that time.

First off, yes, the Toisa Perseus has been de-mobilized and handed back to Sealion. The project ended (well, it was cut short eventually!) and we managed to get a good deal of the preparation for the demobilization done in parallel with the project de-mob. That meant that the vessel de-mob that was originally scheduled for 10 days was completed in eight days. After the demobilization, I spent a few days in Norway at the Dusavik base, sorting out some stuff and putting together a list of things that need done to the VLS in preparation for it to be re-mobilized on another vessel.

Then it was back home to Colorado. Dazzle picked me up at the airport, and when we got home, we found that one of the dogs had ate the sofa…

The last few days have been so cold that it’s been all we could do just to get the chores done. We’ve been working in relay so that we can keep warm!

It was our tenth anniversary on Monday. I had a surprise gift for Dazzle but, with me being me, of course it didn’t actually arrive until today. Still, Dazzle did seem to be really happy with it!

The local Art center had a new exhibition open last night called ‘Take Your Best Shot’. There were a number of categories, and Dazzle and I each had a total of 12 entries.

Abbey feeling down

‘Abbey feeling down’ won 2nd prize in the ‘People and Portraits’ category.

Orchid

‘Orchid’ won 3rd prize in the ‘Abstract and Macro’ category.

My first prizes! Cool.

It’s been a long time since I posted a blog entry, so there’s a lot to catch up on.

Well, during my last leave we got a huge amount of work done on the ranch. Even so, there were still some things that we had wanted to get done that had to be postponed. Anyway, the major things were getting my work benches and tools sorted out in the barn, then getting some lambing pens built inside the main area of the barn. That necessitated a big clear-out, moving a lot of stuff into the hay barn while construction was on-going, then moving it all back in again after-wards.

We also got the washer plumbed up in the well-pump house, with only one gusher, but the least said about that the better! “There’s a limit to what can go wrong with a bit of home plumbing”, as we keep saying. In line with fitting the washer we also plumbed in a small electric water heater, and while we were at it we got the old UK tumble drier going too.

We did some work dividing off a bit of the animal pen to give the dogs a bit more room to roam, as we also managed to cut down a bit on the number of livestock we had. No more angora goats, now we just have sheep and dairy goats. We have added some angora rabbits though.

On the last two days of my leave we put up two trailer loads of hay. On the second run, while I was loading the hay, I turned wrong and pulled something in my leg. Absolute agony. Luckily the farmer arrived just at that time and he and one of his farm hands finished loading the trailer for me. When I got back to the ranch I’m afraid I had to sit on a bale and watch Dazzle unload. Chauvinism at its best! The leg is better now, but still quite colourful with the bruising.

Then I was on my travels again, back to Europe. First to the UK where I had a day in the office to discuss some control system issues for the Perseus’ replacement. Then straight from the office in the evening for a flight over to Norway before joining the Perseus for my third ‘last trip’. This one does seem likely to be the last. We still have the on-going project to complete, but there is definitely a light at the end of the tunnel. Lots of planning for the demobilisation, but until the project is officially complete we’re straining at the leash before starting all out disconnections.

I do keep joking that we can’t start the demob until the 13th of November, as the 12th is the last of my ‘contract days’ so I’ll be on to day-rate after then!

Well, I haven’t commented much on this years Formula 1 championship for a while, not since my comments on the Brawn teams early success. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been a lot to comment about, there has.

The little matter of Lewis Hamilton getting caught out on fibbing to the Stewards, frankly a little omission of no great consequence that seemed to be blown out of proportion to the actual even. Then there was the power struggle between FOTA (the teams ‘union’ Formula One Constructors Association) and FIA (the sports governing body) over the subject of cost capping.

No sooner had that died down then we had Felipe Massa’s unfortunate accident which, had it happened only a couple of years ago would have been fatal, has merely sidelined him for the rest of the season. Word of 7 time champion Michael Schumacher returning to Ferrari to fill-in for Massa soon fell by the wayside due to Michael’s earlier motorcycle injury.

The next scandal to hit the sport were the allegations that during last years Singapore GP, the Renault team boss conspired with their engineering director to force their second driver to deliberately crash his car at such a time and place that it would benefit their number one driver to the extent that he would go on to win the race. The boss and engineering director have been sacked for then team and banned by the FIA. The rest of the team, who likely knew nothing about the arrangement, have been given a suspended ban.

During all this, the Brawn team mostly sustained their good form, with Jenson Button winning six of the first seven races. A great deal of column inches has been devoted in the British press to the subject of Jensen ‘choking under pressure’ or ‘going off the boil’, both of which are overstating things somewhat. He may have had a dip in form compared to the start of the season, but he has only failed to score points in ONE race so far this season. And that was only a result of being taken out at the start of the race as the innocent party in a collision between two rookie drivers. He has benefited during the drop in his form, from the fact that the other race wins have been split between five different drivers.

Positive highlights this year, so far;

Mark Webber getting his first race victory (now the record holder for the most races before his first win at 131!);

The Force India-Mercedes team getting a superb second place, on merit, for their first ever Formula 1 points. Then showing that it wasn’t a flash-in-pan by getting a fourth place in the next race, without Fisichella, their star driver

Vijay Mallay, owner of Force India, showing that there is still some integrity left in the sport by allowing (without any financial benfit) Giancarlo Fisichella to got to Ferrari as it “had been a dream of Fisichella’s for a long time”

The fact that, with four races left, it is still mathematically possible (however unlikely) that any one of four drivers to win the championship. Realistically, the only driver that does have a chance of catching Jensen is his team mate, veteran Brazillian, Rubens Barrichello. I’ve got a soft spot for Barrichello, he seems to be a genuinely nice guy, he scored the short lived Stewart GP team’s  first championship points, and he spent a good deal of his career being somewhat stifled as Ferrari’s second driver to Michael Schumacher. I wouldn’t be totally crushed if Rubinho managed to pip Jensen to the title!

Whatever the outcome of this season, it’s looking like there are to be a number of new teams joining formula 1 next year, including the return of a Malaysian backed Team Lotus. Now wouldn’t it be good to see Lotus back at the top of the time sheets?

As I suspected in my last entry, this will not be my last trip on the Perseus. The current project has been seriously hampered by bad weather (something that’s unlikely to improve at this time of year in the North Sea) and we still have a number of things to get done before the demobilization. The usual rumor mill has been churning at full speed and the latest good one is that, soon, if not immediately, after we demobilize the VLS from the Perseus it is to be mobilized on one of our other ships..
As the old Chinese curse says: ‘may you live in interesting times’

I’ve been back on the boat for over a week now and to be honest the trip is dragging already. We’ve been plagued by bad weather which is hampering operations quite a bit. That is going to have a knock-on effect, not only on this project’s schedule, but also the de-mobilization of the Perseus which is supposed to follow straight on the heels of these works.

Along with all the operational things, we’re still getting questions and queries, about not only the imminent de-mob, but also still a few on the ‘Pacific’ and her new systems.

A lot of the guys are getting a little ‘antsy’ as they know that this could be their last trip on ‘Perseus’, but still have no idea what the immediate future holds for them work-wise. We do know that the company’s stated intention is to utilize the personnel as and where required, then to get them back together again as the ‘Pacific’ moves towards it’s commissioning phase. There is likely to be a gap of at least six months between ‘Perseus’ and ‘Pacific’ but no real indication of how and where the guys (including myself!) are to be used. Even if they do disperse us in the short term, the likelihood of getting all of us back together again for the ‘Pacific’ seems like a bit of a vain hope to me. People may get temporary assignments that they like, in which case they may not want to leave them to come back for the ‘Pacific’, or they may get assignments that they hate, and decide to move on somewhere else completely.

Needless to say, the rumor mill has been in full grind with stories of the ODIM winch (a big piece of equipment that we had on the Perseus a year or so ago) being mobilised on one of our other ships, our own VLS being mobilised on another chartered vessel in the fleet, and I have heard that there is ‘definite’ work for the VLS on a.n.other ship in the Asia-Pacific region for 2011. That still doesn’t help us in the short term.

All in all, with things being such a drag here, I’m already trying to figure out what all jobs I need to do a home during my next leave! hahah

Yup, it’s almost the end of another leave and I have to ask myself, where the heck did it go??? Almost five weeks since I left the boat last and do I have anything to show for it?

well, this time the answer is YES actually, quite a lot in fact!

Most importantly I am now officially  a legal permanent resident of the United States. That in itself is a big deal (well, it is to my wife and I!)
The Green card interview, last friday, went well, and my passport was stamped with the temporary I-551 visa (the stamp equivalent- good for 1 year) and I should get the proper card in the mail within the next 3 weeks or so. The stamp in the passport means the same as the card though, so I can travel without any issues before I actually get the card. Apparently, when I’m in the US, I’m supposed the carry the card with me at all times!
Its funny, as the I-551 stamp is so much less impressive than any of the visa’s I’ve had, its hard to believe that it is so much more important!
The interview itself was almost an anti climax. Myself, Melisa and our attorney, were together in the room with the interviewer, who went over the YES/NO questions on my application… and that was more or less it. I did pick up on something that the interviewer said early on (which Melisa and the attorney both missed) which lead me to believe that she had already reviewed our case and decided that everything was okay unless we said anything really stupid during the interview. She photocopied a lot for my passport US entry stamps and she was going to check that I hadn’t out stayed my welcome on any of them, but the computer system was hung up, so after waiting a few minutes with nothing working, she announced that she’d just take my word for it. We then even digressed into the entomology of her surname, which I told her I knew was Norwegian for sunday as I’d worked a lot in Norway. She said that she knew that although there were no Norwegians, that she knew of, in her family tree.
She asked when I was likely to be leaving the US next, and when I said within the next 2 weeks, she gave me the covering letter to get the I-551 stamp before I left the building. She was quite amused with my “african” passport and all its nigerian visas as she said that they have to be particularly vigilant with applications from Nigerian nationals as there is such a high proportion of fraud from them.
All in all the process was a lot less intimidating than I expected (and nothing like the film ‘green card’) but then, as our attorney said, rarely has she had such a genuine and well prepared case.

So green card adventures aside, we had a lot of other goings on this leave. Melisa made a lot of preserves and jams, which meant that i had to build new shelves in the well pump house to store them all, I also got our old British washing machine plumbed up in there so that she can wash the ranch stuff when she is on the ranch.

We built new planter beds to start growing some veggies and other produce, and we also built new composting bins to start composting some of the waste produced on the ranch into useful… well, compost, I guess!

We’ve had a bit of coming and goings on the livestock front, to the extent that we are currently down to 25 head of goats/sheep which I think is the lowest we’ve been for quite a while.

The final thing for the leave was the annual Property Owners Association Meeting which was held today. We went, we had our say, we contributed, we feel fulfilled (not!) Okay, so it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. Let’s just leave it at that! hahaha

Did I get any painting done??? Did I bu&&£r!

It’s been 10 days since my last up date and this isn’t really a proper one, that’ll have to wait til later. The big thing today (which was the big thing this leave) was the trip to Denver to the USCIS offices for the final interview for my Green Card. Everything went very well, almost anticlimactic to be honest, and although it will be at least two weeks, probably four before I get the actual card through the mail, they did stamp my passport with a 1 year visa that serves the same purpose as the green card. So I am now an official legal permanent resident of USA. Minimum of three years before I can apply for citizenship though!

Today has been a bit of a bust. Started off well but then rapidly deteriorated. First we found out that due to a change of interpretation, the big refund we were expecting from HMRC is now only going to be a little refund. And I’m the lucky one there, the rest of my colleagues won’t be getting anything at all.

I then went to work on putting up some shelves in the well pump house. Part of my goal for the day was to get them done, then finish off the planter boxes for the garden so I could have a ‘day off’ tomorrow. Anyway, that plan came a cropper after Dazzle started her conversations with American Express about getting my account transferred from American Express (UK) to American Express (US). Anyhoo, all came tumbling down when American Express (US) said that there was something wrong with my credit history in that it didn’t  meet their ‘Criteria’ despite my having had an American Express account since 1985, a Platinum card for at least 15 of those years, and a ‘flawless’ (to use their own expression) history with them. So after being denied a transfer, we checked my credit score on-line and could find bugger all wrong with it, so god only knows what their criteria actually is. So, for the time being we’re ’stuck’ with my UK Platinum card.

What with all the phone calls and checking on things it sort of cut into both, my time, and Dazzle’s, so I ended up having to do the chores and not getting the shelves finished and not even getting the planter boxes started. So, instead of my plan of trying a bit of watercolor painting tomorrow, I’ll be finishing off today’s jobs.