Long, long time since I posted last.
Since my last post, I’ve had two trips offshore. The first was on-board the “Skandi Neptune” in the Gulf of Mexico. There I was working with the “PVLS”, essentially a clone of the main piece of equipment that we had on-board the Perseus. Although physically similar, there were enough differences in the control system to make it a good learning experience for me… I kept wondering how would could incorporate the improved points of it into the system that we had on the Perseus. That system, in the mean time, was being worked on in Dusavik in preparation for it going onto another vessel.
The second trip, which I’m heading towards the end of now, is on-board the “Skandi Seven”. On here I have been reunited with ‘my’ VLS, which has now been renamed “PVLS02”. Something of an irony really, as the ‘P’ is supposed to stand for ‘Portable’ and PVLS02 is now on it’s fourth vessel, whereas, PVLS has only ever been on the one vessel. I somehow feel we’ve been downgraded a bit!
I have been asked to be interviewed for a position on the “Seven Pacific”. I’m not sure how I feel about it. Before, when there was little word of the work on the “Skandi Seven”, it would have been a logical move. Now, I feel that there is little to gain from it and potentially a lot to lose. Even if I do interview, I don’t have to take it or even make up my mind immediately.
As I said earlier in this blog entry, I’m heading towards the end of my current trip. I’m due off in three days in fact. However, Eyjafjallajokull may have different plans for me. The Icelandic volcano’s eruption has played havoc with European air travel for four days now, and at the moment – to quote Icelandic geologist Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson: “It’s the magma mixing with the water that creates the explosivity. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.”, This coupled with the fact that weather experts say wind patterns mean the cloud is not likely to move far until later in the week, means that Wednesday’s crew-change could be in doubt.

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!

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.

Okay, I seemed to spend most of this afternoon designing new business cards for the Better Half and myself. I did it online at officedepot.com, and all seemed to be fairly straight forward though a little time consuming. I say “seemed” as the problem didn’t really manifest itself until the order confirmation stage. It appears that, as we wanted cards that had printing on the back as well as the front, our order had to be in multiples of 500 rather than 250. Of course, it didn’t adjust the number of units when it automatically changed our order and price without telling us. So our order ended up as 4 boxes of 500, instead of the 4 boxes of 250 that we thought we had ordered. When we eventually (after three phone calls to customer support) got to the root of the problem, it became apparent that if we reduced our order to 2 boxes of 500, the unit cost of each box was so much higher we were as well leaving it at the 4 boxes.

I hope we like these business cards, as we’re going to be using them for decades!

It’s been a long time since I had a proper posting, so here goes….
The last real posting was in January. I was still on leave then and since then, I’ve had a short trip off-shore and am now ‘back on the ranch’.
Before I left I had to have two teeth extracted which wasn’t fun.
It was a short trip for two reasons, I was late getting back to the boat, and I was early coming off the boat!
The crew change had been brought forward by three days at short notice, so that I didn’t have enough time to make it to Nigeria before the boat sailed. That meant I had to join a week later when the boat reached Angola. I’d only been on the boat a few days when I got word of my first appointment for my Green Card, the Biometrics appointment. The appointment was for the 12th of February, which was the day that I was supposed to get off the boat. So, instead of having to postpone the appointment, my boss agreed that I should get off the boat a week early to make it. (there is an advantage for the company in me having my Green Card too!)
So, my normal four week trip ended up only being two weeks, though it seems that so much went on in that two weeks to make it a full trip!
Several things were up when I arrived on the boat in Angola. Communications were down, as there is some local transmission in Luanda that interferes with the frequency that our satellite uses, so we had to temporarily change to a set of frequencies that had been reserved for another of our ships. Our main air compressors electric motor had burned out, so we had to investigate a temporary replacement and how to get our one repaired. After about four days we finnally located a compressor that we could rent locally, but fixing the motor on our one would have meant getting it sent back to Europe which would take as much red tape as to make it not worth doing at the moment, at least until the ship herself goes back to Europe.
One of the computers in our system had failed and we were quoted a ridiculous price for a replacement, including a surcharge of $80, to ‘down grade’ the operating system from ‘Vista Business’ to ‘XP Pro’. We decided just o order components and build a new unit ourselves!
During the trip, the ship-board computer server had a major hard-drive failure, so that a lot of stuff was lost and a lot of stuff corrupted. The IT department managed to do a forced restore from before the failure, sot that we ended up only losing a few days worth of data, which wasn’t too bad.
So, at he moment, I’m back at home for what I guess will be a five week leave. Lots to do, and of course, on Thursday I have to go up to Denver for my Biometrics, from what I understand that’s just a case of being finger printed and having mug-shots taken.
I will have at least one other appointment which will be an ‘interview’. I don’t know how long away that will be, and I’m don’t know how much longer after that before I actually get the Green Card. But at least the process is progressing.

Happy New Year to Everyone.

Since my last blog entry, I’ve finished my trip (obviously!) I returned to Scotland to have Christmas with my family. They did know that I was coming, but what they didn’t know was that Dazzle was coming too. It was something that we had planned as a surprise for a long time.

We had a great time at Christmas, including a lovely family dinner at my sisters on Christmas Day. We managed to visit with a few of our old friends and then, for the New Year, we went into Aberdeen for a few days. We wen to the New Year dance that was being held in he hotel we were staying in. We even managed to visit our favorite Italian Restaurant.

Then on the 2nd we traveled back to Colorado. We’ve managed to get a few things done here too, including submitting my green card application. Big step!

Dazzle sent me a link to a website that had impressed her as it had a ‘Flash’ introduction. She’d asked if I could do something similar for some of our web pages. I remembered that the ‘Flash’ authoring software used to be produced by a company called Macromedia, but when I tried to find their web-site I was automatically re-directed to Adobe’s website. Checking out the Adobe site and the prices of the products, (especially their grasp of how to fleece UK customers:- Flagship product sold for $2500 in the US and £2350 in the UK, at today’s exchange rate that’s a mark-up of 92%!) I concluded that as Flash cost $700, that it would be some time the other side of never, before we had a flash intro to our web site. However, not being the sort to give up easily I ‘googled’ to try to find an alternative. I came up with an Australian product called ‘SWiSHmax’. I don’t know the full capabilities of either Flash or SWiSHmax, but the latter seems to do enough for my limited needs at the moment. Not only is it available as a free 15 day trial, but the registration fee for the full version is only $100, so I may actually be tempted to get it. Anyway, I’ve done a very simple intro for Alba Ranch here: Alba Ranch And a slightly more complex intro for the Wellness Center here: Wellness Center I’m now trying to work on another couple, before my trial period expires.. (grippit Scotsman to the last!)

It’s been a wee while since my last entry. I’ve been on the ship for about 10 days now and the only thing noteworthy (apart of course from the constant rumour mill that has a permanent state of rumbling) is the long awaited ‘Performance Related Pay Review’. It’s amazing how the imminent arrival of a simple letter can raise expectations and the actual arrival raise so many conspiracy theories. The first point I guess is that the letters were supposed to have been sent out on the 1st of July. They arrived on peoples doorsteps on the 7th July (7/7/07????) prompting the speculation that this was a deliberate ploy so that the recipients would have two days to calm down before harassing the personnel department / line managers on the Monday morning! I have to say that my own cynical view is that the HR department have pulled a master-stroke in the ‘divide and conquer’ route. Many of the personnel (largely those attached with the diving side of operations) received a union related pay raise of 25% in November then another 5% in April (with two more 5% hikes to come before our next anticipated review) while we were all told that we had to wait until the official review date of July 1st. Then in the intervening time, due to a large migration of personnel, the company implemented a review of the ROV staff in May, while yet again, the rest of us had to wait till July. Our pay review, when it arrived, was not as great as the ROV personnels, never mind the diving side. To be honest I don’t begrudge the scale that the ROV personnel received, as traditionally they have always lagged behind our rates for similar positions. However, from the technical point of view, Dive Technicians and our Technicians have similar roles and responsibilities and I would say that our work is more intensively technical. But, of course, the company only paid lip service to the union agreement by implementing the new pay-scale only on ‘day-rate’ personnel of the fewest disciplines and departments they could get away with. So they have successfully splintered the workforce, destroying any unity between the groups while giving each unit the minimum amount to temporarily placate them and stop the potential exodus to the competition. Hats off to you.