Made it this far!

I just realized that Wednesday was my one year anniversary of working offshore! So I found an orange cake to match my ho-so-fashionable coveralls and jacket! 8)

A year ago I was on the Atlantic Osprey, facing 17m waves, listening to stuff banging around and wondering if it was the norm out there :P

The year has gone by waaaay too fast! Something about splitting your time in two makes it go at lightning speed. Good news is, I wouldn't have it any other way I'd rather die than do the whole 9 to 5 bit though I wouldn't mind crunching all the offshore time from January to May and then take the summer off :P
3 months off, 3 months on sounds better than 3 weeks on 3 weeks off... .... especially if you can do the 3 months on somewhere around the Equator hehehe...

try it without gps...

I've been navigating the crazy, narrow, winding streets of St.John's in both a minivan and a massive pickup truck. I wanted to find a way to convey what this means.. and while browsing google map it kinda jumped off the screen.. :P

...so here's downtown Montreal... and here's downtown St.John's

click on the pics for clearer/bigger image :P

and please note that this map does not display the many one ways and the elevations (everything is slanted, from mole hill to ski jumps angles) that are found all over downtown St.John's :P

Mystery solved... somebody took a regular city's map, crumpled it and turned that into St.John's layout!
:P

All hail the iphone!!!

I've been tackling the streets of St.John's for the past 2 days yes I now have one of the company cars to scoot around! ... driving around here is a serious challenge for any outsider... it has something to do with the absence of straight, flat roads. Everything either :
a)twists
b)turns
c)goes up
d) goes down
e)all of the above

And this morning I learned another tip... don't follow signs for the TransCanada Highway! They will not lead you to it, but will make you follow it two streets below, where you get traffic, street lights and speed limit of 50km/h!! :S I wasted 20 minutes following signs, before yelling screw this and opening my phone fitted with GPS

So, with maps not showing the ups and down, signs getting you away from where you're trying to go and streets changing names 3 times along the way and Google Map forgets to mention this! :0 the only option for expats like me is.... the wonderful, beautiful, reliable IPHONE!!!! or a GPS My "around me" application has been showing me the way all day! How to get on the highway, where to find lunch, how to get to the hotel from a co-worker's place that I just dropped off...

♡♡♡♡ I LOVE MY PHONE!!!!!!!! ♡♡♡♡

:)

un-be-lie-va-ble!

I found one thing St.John's has over everywhere I've been before except maybe Ottawa...

You can close your eyes and cross the street anywhere corner or not without getting hit by a car or yelled at by the driver!
I was waiting to cross, when two guys just passed me and kept walking... and all the cars stopped!!! I mean they really s.t.o.p.p.e.d.!!! and did so BEFORE getting within hitting distance!!!
In Montreal those guys would have been pancaked! O_o

I was just standing there, my mouth open, thinking out loud "you can do that?! people will stop?! wow!" :P

make the most of it they say :)

I may have reached total decadence...
considering that I should be offshore, in a freezing, alcohol-free environment, but that I'm on standby in a hotel downtown St.John's instead.. and that I just called room service to order a martini...
hum... maybe not so much total decadence as total laziness :P

It can never be simple

I was all pumped up at the idea of going back to the rig.. I was on 6-6 nights, would be working with the people I get along best with.. no changing schedule halfway, no not knowing what's going on.. all good and fluffy...

So, of course, it had to fuck up

When I got to the airport hotel, I was told the guy I'm releiving on the rig had been there earlier in the day huh?! and that he had canceled the reservation... Since I've been at this hotel regularly they just rebooked me for the night.

Once in the room, I checked my email.. to find out that I was supposed to go at the hotel downtown instead, cause the rig was down manning and I would be on standby, maybe going on the Osprey, maybe going to the shop... so I canceled the room, took a cab downtown and called the rig.

Somebody realized the lifeboats were planned with people weighting 75kg... a lot less than the average rig worker! so until they figure out what to do with this, they've sent about 20 people home.. and since I was coming today, they sent my opposite home a day early and I'm staying in St.John's.

So I'm going to the office tomorrow, and I have no idea what's gonna happen next. All my gear is on the rig so it will have to be sent in town if I'm going to work in the shop... but one thing is sure, my night shift is now history since one of the day guys will have to go on nights now and won't want to change back when if I get there >:(

not happy...

Saturday night reflection

Sometimes I wonder...
Am I leading a straight life in a lopsided world,
or do I have an askew perception in a straight world?

wouhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...

Saw Jeff Dunham yesterday...

HMG!!!! I've never laughed so hard for so long in one single show!!! The guy is insane!!! And we had the best places of all! 6th row center!!! There was a giant screen for the poor people sitting in the bleachers, but we were up close for the real deal! :P The show was 2 hours, felt like 5 minutes! no lull, no breaks, all the material kept on the same level of hilarious for the whole show!

Walter, the grumpy old fart, had one of my favorite quote of the show... talking about the wii fit...
"Is your wii white? and it corrects everything you do? I have one of those... it's a wii-ife" :P

I found parts of the show already online... visual sucks, but you can at least hear the text :P
you can find other bits easy enough by searching Jeff Dunham Ottawa :)

One impressive part... at the end he brought out Bubba J; he didn't have new material for him, but did a patchwork of his usual skip.. until he realized people in the crowd were calling the words before he did! He was speechless for 10 seconds and then just built on it, improvising as he went!

and here's a condensed version of Peanut's sketch, that was presented on Letterman a while ago:

holy crap...

... I wish I could keep this calm when speaking of the pile of s*** that is Rush Limbaugh... not that I speak of him often... I prefer to deny his existence as much as I can

Following that moron's and Pat Robertson's declarations on the Port-au-Prince earthquake/catastrophe, MSNBC news anchor Keith Olbermann gave this reply... he just made a fan...

But seriously... do these people have no shame?! deal with the devil?!?! what is this??? 1676?!?! can somebody PLEASE take the mics and cameras away from these moronic inbred haters!!! >:(

PC gone bad

When people are trying too much to be politically correct they end up being more offensive.. to my ears anyway...

I was in a pub and a bunch of guys were talking loudly :s about mixed race relationship... to avoid having to specify race or color because hoooo it's so not pc, one guy started saying that he'd dated a "non-Quebecoise" only once... WFT?! and to make it clear, the woman he was referring too was born and raised here
Maybe it's just me, but people who are born here, and live here, well, they are Quebecois and Canadian! The fact that they are a different color or that their ancestors or parents came from somewhere else doesn't change that fact one bit!

idiots...

Rig workers' alphabet

I told you here about Jim Payne and Fergus O'Byrne, who came to the rig to sing for us...

There was this song that I really like even if, yes, it IS a banjo you're hearing! so I decided to add pictures and youtube it :)

So, here it is, the Rig Workers' Alphabet, some pics are mine, some belongs to friends and Google Image provided the rest... :D

double click to see it bigger, without my background image messing up the visual :P

Mamma Mia!

That's how I spent last evening.. singing to Abba, admiring white spandex and platform shoes, along with 5000 other crazy people, who were also singing :) It's quite something when the actors end their song and the crowd keeps on going :P

The movie was a good adaptation of the musical.. but a bunch of hot guys in wetsuit will always be better live hehehe

That was fuuun!!! XD

Avatar

Just came back from seeing it in 3D... I am floored!!!

It's been ages since a movie mesmerized me like that! Beautiful, magical, from start to finish. The whole story line wasn't even necessary, the f**** military just made me want to jump in the screen and destroy them!!! So evil, but so close to reality... I don't like that :S
I would have been content with a 3h Nat Geo on the life of the Na'Vi... They are so sexy!!! 12ft tall, pointy ears, lion eyes... *sigh*

And Pandora, their planet.. it's like being underwater but in a jungle.. all the bio luminescent that make the ocean so wonderful is there... all over... even on the Na'Vi themselves... plants that react like coral, seeds that are like jellyfish... animals reminiscent of dinosaurs, fish and mammals... all mixed together.

Now... how do I get cryogenized until 2154 so I can go on Pandora and become one of them?

Go see it!!! Everyday!!! On the biggest screen you can find and in 3D!!!!

♪wow♪

Borrowed from Jas...

A mashup of the Billboard top 25 pop hits of 2009... awesome job Mr Earworm!!! :)

If you don't swing to it check your pulse, you must be dead!

36h

I'M HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOME!!!!!!!!!!!!! XD

My chopper flight was canceled after a day of waiting on 31st I was ho-so pissed!
Flight was canceled again on the 1st goddamn pilots were too hangover from the night before >:(

And I finally left the rig at 9am on the 2nd!

So my first day of 2010 started at 4:40pm (3pm Mtl time), worked until 6am, got on the chopper at 9am, waited at St.john's airport for my St.John's-Halifax-Mtl flight at 2:30pm.. there was a major snow storm in Halifax and many flights were canceled basically all flights that were coming from Halifax and back were grounded in Nova Scotia, but not mine!!! It was delayed by an hour though.
When we reach Halifax where I was suppose to get off the plane and transfer to one for Mtl we circled for 10 minutes, but the runway was snowed in, no way to land, so we carried on to Toronto!

In TO, that's where the fun really began... in the plane they said "people who were going to Halifax, when you get off the plane, go to gate 120 they'll tell you what to do". But when I got out the plane, a little lady was waiting for us and said "all luggage will be taken out, so you have to go get them first and we'll have a booth set up by the carousel to tell you where to go next".

Of course there was no booth by the carousel, so I went to ask at the "luggage trouble" counter, they told me to go on the 3rd floor at the Air Canada ticket counter.

Got there, waited in line, 15min later a guy told the line up that the Halifax people needed to go to the ground floor where a booth was set to sort things out (by then it was known that people wanting to go to Halifax were getting a hotel room and a rebook for a flight the next day).

Downstairs the line up was a mile long and not moving at all for the next 20 minutes... since I wanted to go to Mtl, not Halifax, and didn't need a goddamn hotel room, I eventually got pissed off of waiting pointlessly and left that line up to go back to the ticket counter where the line up had almost disappeared when everybody went to the ground floor :P.
Some guy in an Air Canada suit tried to tell me I was to go downstairs for my rebook, but he eventually coward away under my glacial stare I had been up for 29h by then and wasn't in the mood to take any bull**** from anyone.

After more wait and some magic tweaks from an awesome AC employee, I finally got a place on the 5pm flight to Mtl, even though it was now 7pm... all those flight delays finally played in my favor! I ran through security well not REALLY ran.. I'm not that crazy! and made it to the boarding counter... at gate 120 ... seriously...
Of course, boarding had not started yet... things were delayed some more...

The plane finally left TO at 8:30pm... got in Mtl an hour later... got my suitcase... found my car that my parents had left for me at the airport earlier that day and made it to Alex's party/dinner just in time for his classic coffee!

I was somewhat zombie-like by then, so I went home around midnight, unpacked my stuff, talked a bit with my family that had just arrived from a family party and went to bed at 3am... 36h after the beginning of a most definitely complicated day!

But what matters is... I made it to the last party of the Holidays!!! woohoo!!! XD