DID

My weekend involved a drag queen outfit and a football game...
at least it was on two different nights...
:P

GO ALS GO!!!

Last night was the Grey Cup... and what looked like a one sided game for the first half turned into the roughest ride the Saskatchewan's greenies ever had :P

Duval escaped eternal shame by exactly zero second...

For those of you who haven't watch the game first of all, shame on you! you've missed the luckiest turn over of sports history! With 5 seconds left to the game, losing by 2 points, the Als go for a field goal... and miss!!!! aaaaaaaaaaarg the agony!!! it's the end!!!!

errr...

wait...

flags? ...

wtf?! the Roughriders had too many players on the field?!?!!!

penalty! the Als get a second chance at that field goal, with 0:00 on the counter... and this time make it happen!!!!

There is one man is green that lost his job, his self esteem and his will to live last night.... too many players??? in a football game?!?! how the f*** do you make that mistake?!?!
but, hey... thanx man! the Grey Cup is coming to Montreal and will be parading on Ste-Catherine street Wednesday thanx to you, whoever you are! :D

Pics are in

Gaga was awesome!!!
Even if the show was an hour late and that the costume changes were a bit long (projections just don't cut it to keep the energy level up), the show was memorable!
Speechless is one of the best songs I've heard in a long time... Bad Romance has a good-jump-up-and-down beat to it... Just Dance is hilarious... the scenery was busy and eclectic... the props slightly schizophrenic.... the choreographies lively and her dancers seriously scrumptious...

We went dressed as different Gaga personalities... others had had the same idea, but none of them were as flamboyant as we were!
ok... maybe that one girl in her no-pants Gaga outfit that had even less pants than our own Jas, and the group that had the white spiked vampire masks from Bad Romance deserve mentions.. but we were still the best! :P

A bunch of different people asked to take pictures with us... always a good sign :D

anyway, pics of the evening are in the album section ;)

Pre-fame Gaga, no-pants Gaga, me Gaga, purple Gaga, Ziggy Gaga ;)

whatchoo looking at? ;)

Countdown to Gaga!

Tomorrow I'm dressing up and going to see the Gaga queen!!!!
Managed to get 4 tickets on the (general admission) ground floor I have friends in high places :P and we're gonna go c.r.a.z.y.!!!!
pics will follow, but in the meantime this'll give ya an idea of what I'll look like in 24h ;)

New York

The state... not the city... is where I'm going today...
hopefully this road trip on I-87 will turn out better than the last one 2 years ago...
or I will have to start calling this road the highway to hell :S

we'll see we'll see...

551 @ Lowney

My upgraded condo is signed!!!
I am now on the 5th floor, with two walls of windows, and a direct access to this :

this is the view I'll have from my living room windows!

"my" terrasse on the lower roof 5th floor level will have Asian inspired garden, sauna and hot tub

that's the "urban cabin" on the higher roof 10th floor, complete with fireplace, BBQs, kitchen,
pool table and a cinema room with giant screen

also on the roof, swimming pool with THE view of downtown Montreal
add to that a 4 seasons training pool with current and a gym on the ground floor

this is my new place, same layout as the other one, but a bit bigger, more windows and the biggest patio available directly on the terrasse!! with two steps to get on it which is always cool from a visual/design point of view :P

And the coolest thing is that this condo is unique! All the other models have redundancy in the building, but not this one. The units below are smaller with only one wall of windows; the units above are much bigger, with smaller patio and a price tag that would make your hair fall off!

Count on me to end up with the exclusive unit... ;)

I'm a girl again! :)

Since I had an afternoon to spend in St.John's before going home, I went for a walk on Water street... guess what I found... an Aveda salon!

So I went in and asked if they had time for a manicure... and they did :)

So I'm slowly turning into a girl again... the muddy scum that stained my hands for the past 3 weeks is history and I now have sparkly fingernails. YAY!

:)

in other news...

I'm in St.John's today
got off the rig this morning
will be in Montreal tomorrow at 7am
let's get this party started!

:)

♪ Adios en vaya con dios ♪

Thanx to the limited choice of tv channels on the rig and to my co-workers' strange taste in music, I now have a goddamn country song stuck in my head... 3 days of CMT country music channel, the only music channel available on the rig :S non-stop in the control van will do that to ya...

so all together now :

♪ I got my toes in the water, ass in the sand
Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand
Life is good today. Life is good today. ♪

♪ Adios en vaya con dios
A long way from GA
Hey boss dome a favor and pass me the Jaeger
And I’ll grab my guitar and play ♪

could somebody call an exorcist please? it's an emergency...

TBA

When summer fog let out... winter wind and waves pick up...

Add to that day-flights only, so from 8am to 1pm, choppers have to be back in town at sundown and it's a 3h flight and only 2 choppers available to carry people when we're lucky!

means...

I
am
never
leaving
this
place
:(
ever!

my flight today doesn't have a departure time... if all the other flights like 5 of them that couldn't go yesterday and the day before come back to town before 1pm, then I might leave today... if not it might be tomorrow... or not...

E-I-E-I-O

There's a guy on board that's called Joe MacDonald... and they keep calling his name on the PA...

so every time they say Joe MacDonald call control, the voices in my head sing ♪ had a farm ♪ over the end of the message

:P

Time's relativity

These last few days are d.r.a.g.g.i.n.g.!!! it's not even funny!

I guess it has a lot to do with the fun ratio on board... when I get here the crew is at about 95% good... but as time passes and crew changes happen, that ratio slowly drops to about 20% when it's finally my time to leave.

That makes the beginning of my hitch fly by and the last week or so drag on forever even though I got lucky again this time and the worst possible scenario has been avoided, plus I only had to suffer the other major annoyance for a couple of days... but these were painful days which I am still mentally recovering from!

There is hope of a change though, when we go back to work for Husky we're working for Suncor aka Petro-Canada at the moment there should be changes in the schedules... I cross my fingers I'll get the lucky number and enjoy the job for the whole 21 days instead of only 2/3 of it.

I guess I'm just not a people person after all... though I prefer to say that I'm just very picky about who I consider to be "people" :P

hurray for me!

I launched.. and more importantly recovered... MAG 148 the rov that goes in/out of the moonpool without getting it stuck!!!! My first try and I nailed it!!!

this rov is tricky i.e. a pain in the a** to recover, because it goes up on guide wires. When we reach the height of the rig those wires become steel posts... and the guides on the rov tend like every other time to get stuck, as in jammed good, wont go up or down and we have to slide a weight on them to act as a hammer hoping they will go free at some point :S

Two tons of equipment, 2 inches of play is what it comes to...

and I didn't jam it! woohoo! XD

and it's looking good for Thursday weather wise... but unless the chopper gets here at 8am instead of noon, I will have to spend the night in St.John's the last flight on Thursday is at 1pm... and come home Friday morning ; first flight for Montreal is at 5:45am :P

4 leaf clovers anyone?

With the way we recovered the ROV this morning, we'll need a couple of lucky charms to survive the afternoon... *sigh*


:P

fact of life

when the wind blows so hard you suddenly walk 4 times faster holding on to your hard hat that went flying 2 times already today

when it's snowing, and piles of it accumulate everywhere

when the sun sets at 3:30pm

when the temperature is around -8°c but the wind factor brings it to about -8000°c

when all this happens on November 12th...

you know you're offshore in the North Atlantic.. aka the armpit of the world weather wise

remembering

on this day where we're suppose to remember the dearly departed... I'll just rant about mom nature who goofed big time on this one!

People should have a life span according to their greatness

awesome people would live forever

monsters, jerks, liars and other psychos would die before they can do harm

one day I will rule the universe and make things right

one flew over the cuckoo's rig

we came out this morning, innocently thinking we'd just keep on pecking at things on 172...
the night shift guys had other news... 2 re-terms!!! cue dramatic music here

the chinese fingers click here to see what it is on both systems have been banged up pretty bad and need to be replaced..

to do that we have to "unplug" the tether and its 500 connections on the sub, take the old CF out, put a new one on and these guys are designed to do the exact opposite i.e. not slip but grab on so they take the weight instead of the tether... very nice, until you try to remove one!, and replug everything.. hoping we didn't break any fibers optic or caused new faults...

we're halfway through the first one.. broke one fiber %&@$#!* and are now trying to find the source of a ground fault that magically appeared when we reconnected the wires :P

at least we're not in a rush... nobody's waiting on us to do something urgent...

let's break into song!

♪ He's a maniac, maniac! that's for sure
when he's making us clean all the walls and floors

He's a maniac, maniac! when he's offshore
a psychotic like I've never seen before! ♪

today hump day... I've cracked.. ma brain no good anymore byebye

store store, scrub scrub, rince rince, repeat...

It is a bad thing to have slobs and OCDs on opposite shifts...
unless you're on the slob shift.. which I'm not...

raining on my parade

it's onemillion degrees below zero outside

it's fivehundredthousand degrees below zero inside

the wind blows at 80km/h (for real!)

it's snowing, icing and raining at the same time, coming from above, the sides and below with winds like that it's like being in a snow globe, minus the pretty scenery

the sub is in the water for as long as the storm will blow so for about 4 days :S

there are no heaters in the control vans but we have air conditioning though, how useful!

I've been racking my brain for the past 2 hours, trying to make sense of the auto-patch and its labeling I think I'm done though, all 32 channels (X2) are now ID'ed properly.. until someone comes along and changes it all :S

the rig is swinging happily on massive waves

did I mention that it's a million degrees below zero? somebody shoot me please :(

blackout

when all the lights go out on a rig at night... and all goes black and quiet... well, it's eerie...

and when they don't come back up after 5 minutes and you only have emergency lights on and a page on the PA systems tells you to stand by... and everybody gets dressed and come out of the accommodations to talk in the hallways.. well it gets down right creepy and kinda scary...

that was last night...

arr

this week just flew by!

we're at a new location.. got 30 hours of anchors going down... that sounds like an 18 wheelers running in pot holes on the ceiling of our rooms.. but make it a 50 000 wheelers.. walls shaking, stuff falling down, beds rumbling... fun stuff, no sleep

mag 172 got its first dive and 2-3-4 and 5th.. things keep tripping out because all the kinks haven't been ironed out since there was no time for test dives before real dives were needed :P
it's getting better though.. one alarm at a time :)

551

I got a call on the rig today...

Unit 551 has been set free by the person who reserved it...

guess who's getting it now....