Monday 27 October 2008

Driftwood

Boy, am I ready to be outta here or what?! Over a week, and we're still here, alongside in Singapore. The days we spent in dry-dock were actually pretty cool! What with the ship getting a complete fresh coat of paint on the outside.And then there was the floating. And since this was a floating dry-dock, all they need to do, really, is fill up the walls with water, and it starts sinking, ship and everything included! Which was a pretty cool deal, except, it is really really slow :|. But yeah, at the end of it when they went checking around the boat for leaks (No kidding! They really do that!) they found none, so I suppose that was a good thing :P. But the engines were both still practically in pieces, so we ended up getting towed over to a dock close by.Now I'm wishing we'd never left dry-dock :|. The last few days have honestly been complete madness :-<. At least I managed to go into town a few times, when I wasn't too busy feeling dead, or sorry for myself :P.Even found one of these awesome 500 Gig portable 2.5" hard disks! No more deleting other stuff to make space for fresh photos! Which, seeing how I've managed to shoot past 11 thousand clicks on this cam, is happening quite often now on my 120 Gig portable :(.

Currently: knackered
Listening to: Snow Patrol feat. Martha Wainwright - Set the fire to the third bar

Monday 20 October 2008

Fish out of water!

With the number of people sitting/ standing/ walking around you in any given airport, you might be surprised at exactly how little attention any of these people are giving others. Or not, I suppose. But it does set me back just a little bit.Not all bad though. 'Cos when I'm done struggling to keep the paroxysms of laughter (welling up in almost tsunami-like waves, thanks to random bits of High Fidelity) absolutely silent and restricted to a quiet, uncontrollable shuddering, I look up to see no shocked or otherwise perplexed faces :P.

The aforementioned pearl of wisdom was gained while waiting at the over-crowded terminal for my 12 hour leg from Frankfurt to Singapore. And as is shockingly often the case with Lufthansa, there was no in-seat entertainment. A middle seat and a neighbour spilling out of his seat pretty much rounded up the misery :|.Finished off with the book though! And now I'm left with only the next GRRM unread, so I suppose I'll get around to it sometime. The night in Singapore before heading out the the boat was nice. We headed down-town for dinner, and came across these festively lit streets.
And starting Saturday it was a headlong plunge into madness!! We landed up on the boat which was already dry in a floating dock. Quite a bewildering and utterly confusing state of affairs. At least for the first day or so. By now some sort of method has appeared to it. Hopefully though, we'll be done with it soon enough, and I'll get some awesome photos of the boat as it gets floated again :).
Currently: dry
Listening to: Corinne Bailey Rae - Like a star

Wednesday 15 October 2008

Rocks

It feels like things are beginning to fall back into place. Sort of. Like broken things, falling into crooked places. Not quite right for what's trying to fit in, but okay enough. Good enough for right now. (I'm back to feeling like writing just for the heck of it. Ordinarily there'd be something, anything.. the tiniest thing, and I'd happily go on and on about it... but there isn't even that.)

It's not often that I get to feel this. Like I'm some place where I'm actually not dying to get out of, not even a little bit. What is that? Couldn't be saying a whole lot of good things about the rest of my life, could it? I've spent the longest time cooped up in a hotel room since, like, two years back. And this finally feels right. :-<

I'm sort of stuck into listening to songs on repeat these days. It'll be one song for a half dozen times, or maybe a couple of hours. Then another. Right now it's Corinne Bailey Rae's Like a Star. And for some reason, the one thing I cannot get out of my head is her husband's death :(.

And that of course sets me thinking about all the people I knew who've died. There's an awful lot, actually. Not necessarily like people I knew too well and all. But still. I don't seem to remember that many people I personally know being born. As in, you know, you hear about people being born, but you never see them most of the time. At least I hardly ever do. They exist, so to speak, just outside my sphere of awareness. And of course, all the bunch of people I do know, well, I just don't think I know that many people I was aware of when they were born. But dead people? Loads :(. Nevermind.

I'm not trying to be depressing or anything here. It's just a thought. I'm not even particularly bothered or anything. There are just these flashes of conversations every now and then. Words that seem to hang in the air. That may or may not have actually been spoken at any point. But suddenly I'll be in the middle of a massive panic attack over them. It's quite inconvenient, really.

I've never actually walked out of the airport at Singapore. I've walked into it. Walked through it from end to end several times over, I reckon. Just never stepped out through the doors. Are there doors? I can't remember. Don't know whether to look forward to it or not. Wouldn't mind going to Singapore I suppose. But the boat's in the middle of a dry dock, which is usually a bit of a mess. After that though, we are supposed to be heading for Angola. Which is another mess. For a multitude of reasons that I'd rather not get into till I have to. But there's supposed to be a port call in Durban on the way.

Hmm. Much as I was given to groaning over how the Trident never left Australia, I think I'd gotten a bit used to the whole thing. Okay, so moving office is a completely different thing. Or not, whatever. Point is, I should really start packing, but I really really don't feel like it. :-< Bummer.

Currently: stalling
Listening to: Corinne Bailey Rae - Like a star

Monday 13 October 2008

A trip long overdue

This has turned out to be the longest of my recent trips to Norway. And last weekend, finally, I decided to tag along with a couple of others to go see bits of Oslo. I suppose I should admit here that somehow or other I've never managed to garner much regard for Oslo as a destination :|. That has nothing to do with prior experience though. The one time I did take the trouble of going, around Christmas '05, it was pretty nice, all lit up and snow-white and what not. It's just that given the choice between a nice sleep-in on Saturday (or Sunday) morning and a trip to Oslo, I'd pick the sleep-in ten times out of ten :P.But, early Saturday afternoon, having already slept-in all morning, and with clear blue skies, things looked quite optimistic! And then we ran into Elvis :P. There seemed to be some sort of free food fair as well. Though most of the stuff was getting over my the time we got there :(.
For most of the rest of the evening it was just a matter of heading for whatever seemed somewhat interesting. Which inevitable led us to the waterfront. And the Akershus Fortress. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the main entrance :P. Yeah, well, we weren't really looking that hard anyway :).
Dinner helped dissipate the niggling feeling that I was slowly but surely losing the tips of my fingers and ears and nose to the suddenly chilly evening! (On a side note, most of the food here's the kind that'll keep even the mildly diet-conscious constantly on their toes. No wonder every gym in sight (and there's a fair few even in quiet, sparsely populated Asker) seems full almost all the time! Which almost makes you walk just a little bit slower while passing in front of the bunch vigorously working out behind the glass wall, with your massive take-away pizza box :D.)
I should really get on with these photos! I'm beginning to get just plain lazy now :|. Oh!! My old laptop's all fixed and working! Unfortunately I'm back to grumbling about how slow it is :|.

Currently: munching pizza :D
Listening to: Jackson Browne - Somebody's baby

Thursday 9 October 2008

Running to stand still

Shit has a way of recycling itself. And I'm getting better at typing (without looking at the keyboard that is :D). So while I've been busy trying to figure out how not to be suicidal, my laptop decided to throw some tantrums again.

This time, the motherboard lasted a good two years before some sort of power circuitry breathed its last, and the darned thing refused to detect AC power :|. Consequently, while it was running fine on the battery, it refused to charge, so sooner or later it was going to die. For good measure, the stupid thing kept insisting that it would last upwards of 3,000 hours on battery :|.

Long story short, after bitching high and low for a bit I'm currently the custodian of a second hand job that my hard disk has been transplanted into. Said job being so ancient that my already quite old lappy seems like a bloody supercomputer in comparison :-<. And just to make things interesting, it's got a Norwegian keyboard. Took me a while to realise that it had come mapped to a regular keyboard. Turns out I can finally type most things without actually looking at the keyboard, so I just left it at that.

In the mean time I'm getting horrifying flashbacks of my first standard in school during the days at the course :((. Just so you know that was like my worst year at school. Out of the entire 13 years!! There were times when I seriously thought the bloody thing would never be over!! That I'd grow old and feeble and still have my class teacher screeching at me to 'paaaay attttentionnnnn'!!! [shudder]

Right. So in the mean time, the good thing I did was to finally start off on High Fidelity. And I like it already :). Have I mentioned this? Turns out I'm not actually going back to Australia at all!! Crew change next week will be in Singapore, in the midst of dry-dock. And then we sail for Africa! Not as cool as that might sound, but I'll just let the supposed coolness rest in peace on this sphere for a bit before I have to puncture it with the horrors of real experiences....

Feeling: mildly deranged
Listening to: David Gray - This year's love

Sunday 5 October 2008

Finders losers

I guess I've gotten used to the room. And I was just about getting used to the new people. But end of the week signals the end of a course. Seeing how there was a bunch of courses running at the same time over the last week, and how the world of seismic tends to be the small kind, you always end up meeting several faces you either already know, or names you've heard over and over again. Right, so as I said, I was getting used to all that. And now that's over :|. Then again, there's yet another course next week... This is beginning to feel like a bit of a bad idea, trying to get through the whole lot in one go :-<.
-- A lingering wispy thread of stale smoke hangs in the air, amidst the almost tangible fumes of last night's alcohol. Memories slowly unravel themselves from the woozy hurting knot somewhere behind the eyes. As if to mock you, the morning is bright, all clear blue skies and crispy fall colours. By early afternoon it's all back to sodden dead leaves on the side walk, low lying clouds stretching from horizon to horizon, pouring rain.
--

The new Coldplay album is unfortunate. As a matter of fact, I was getting that vibe from the start, so I took my own sweet time to get around to it. But doesn't sound like the ageing, so to speak, has done any good either. Maybe if you leave it in a deep dark pit for about a million years.... It is distressing to see the mighty fall.

Currently: glad that the sun seems to be back up
Listening to: Eels - It's a motherfucker