Charlie’s Blog

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.

Yesterday, my better half posted one of my newer paintings on our Etsy store. She then mentioned it in a couple of her Yahoo groups and tweeted about it on Twitter. So, in less than 24 hours it’s had 141 views and been marked twice as a favourite. That’s almost 30% more views than my next most view painting which has been on Etsy for months!

It’s been a busy night so far. We’re dealing the the end of a riser installation, which has necessitated changing from Tandem tensioners to lower tensioner only, to upper tensioner only, back to lower tensioner only and then on to the abandonment and recovery winch.  Keeps people on their toes with the multiple procedures that have to be gone through with each change over.

I started the trip on night-shift, then changed to day shift for what would have been the ‘second’ half of my trip. Then, with my trip being extended, I had to change back on to nights, where I thought I’d be for the remainder of the trip. However, my colleague is crew changing a week early, so now, I’m going to have to change back on to day shift again. My body-clock is seriously messed up!

While we’ve been operational with our ‘day job’ we’ve also had to do a lot of preparation and paper-work regarding the de-mobilization of all our equipment from the Toisa Perseus, an event that seems to be approaching with increasing rapidity. I guess it’s a sign of the times when I compare the preparation and documentation that we now have to have in place, to when we last de-mobilized the equipment from a vessel (that WAS 11 years ago!) In them days, we just got up in the morning and did it using a big slice of common sense for safety matters. So far, for this impending de-mob, we’ve probably accumulated 10 times the man hours in planning than we expended on the entire de-mob last time. Along with all that of course, we’re still having to deal with questions and queries for the replacement ship, Seven Pacific.

On a much lighter note, Dazzle listed a ‘Fiber Grab Bag‘ (a small selection of different fibers for people to try) on our etsy store yesterday. She posted about it in her ‘twitter’ account (as did I) and mentioned it on a couple of her Yahoo groups. Within 24 hours it had accumulated over 170 views, making it our most viewed item ever… She’s tried a new listing with the same technique so we’ll see if it will generate the same number of views!

Dazzle thought we should be twittering, so now we are!

Dazzle’s Tweets

Chaz’s Tweets

bktz2cyweh

Well, I’m still on the boat in Norway.

We’ve had a bit of a hectic time. First part of the trip was installing some flowlines that had been loaded into the below deck carousels while I was on leave, then we’ve had a mobilization for a new project. That involved a reel drive system on deck, something that we are used to in general, but the specific unit is not the one we normally have. SO we’ve had to get used to a whole new set of operational ‘quirks’. Some aspects of this system are better than our usual one, but some are worse. If we could combine the best from both we’d have an almost ideal system!

While I’ve been away Dazzle got notification of the appointment for my green card interview in Denver. It’s in the middle of August. That would have been in the middle of my next trip offshore. So I spoke to my boss and with that in mind, and the fact that the ‘reinstatement’ of the Perseus is looming for the end of August/beginning of September and that my usual ‘back-to-back is now in the office running with a lot of the organisation of the reinstatement works, we’ve rearranged my schedule a bit. So this week I’ve gone from being in single figures, to only being halfway through my trip.

I’m going to be doing a 6 week trip this time, then having 4 weeks off and then back for another six weeks. Heavy workload, but hopefully lots of extra days by the end of the year. The same day as she received the appointment letter, Dazzle also got a summons for jury duty on the 27th July. That would have been the day before I was due to leave with the old schedule, which would have made things difficult for her if it carried on and I was gone, so that’s now going to be during my leave too.

Feeling a bit apprehensive about the green card appointment, but excited as well.

Wow, it’s the middle of June already, where has the year gone? Not only that but it’s almost a month since my last blog.. So what have I been up to??

Well, I was on my way back to Colorado when I last posted. It was another short leave, not as short as the one before but still not even three weeks. We got a fair bit done around the ranch, we sold a few critters, including Izzy the last of our llamas, so we’re now llamaless. The Blossom Art show has been and gone, though I did get a chance to pop into the Fremont Art Center before everything was taken down to have a look at all the exhibits. June had been when the planned ‘Fusion’ exhibition was to be for local fiber artists, one that Dazzle had been looking forward too. But it had been canceled and in it’s place they are having a “Strut your Stuff” exhibition. We were going to pass on it, but at the last minute we found out that there was still space available so Dazzle and I got a ‘double’ section to display our creations. The opening seemed to be fairly well attended and there was even a reporter from the local paper on hand who decided that shed like to interview Dazzle and I for the paper. This link is a transcript of the article that appeared the following Monday. The opening night of the exhibit was my last night at home, so we had a good evening there, followed by a meal in one of the local hostelries.

One of the reasons behind my my short leave this time was that, as my L1 visa was due to expire at the end of the month, I had to return to London and visit the US embassy there and have it renewed. It’s always a bit of a tedious effort, with a great deal of waiting involved though in the past I’ve always been fortunate enough to get through the experience quicker than a lot of my colleagues have. I have to be particularly careful as any issues with my visa could end up having long term implications for getting my green-card.
Anyway, along the route, I found myself having to explain to one of the embassy staff the differences between US and UK domestic wiring. Not, as he repeatedly pointed out, that this was part of the interview, just a problem with a light fitting that he had at home! The interview when it came was simple enough:

Embassy: You work for Subsea7

Me: Yes

Embassy: How long have you worked for them?

Me: 19 years

Embassy: You’re renewing your visa?

Me: Yes

Embassy: Okay, your visa’s renewed, it’ll be sent out to you in a few days.

So that was me done. I had expected to have to spend an extra day in London, as the crew change wasn’t scheduled until the Wednesday, but the ship was going to be in early, so at the crack of dawn the following morning, I was off on my travels again. Hard to believe, but if you want to be in Stavanger before noon, you can’t fly there direct from Heathrow. I had to fly first to Copenhagen in Denmark before getting a connecting flight to Norway.

Anyway, I’m now back on the ship and my first week is in, only another three to go!