Sailor Dad

I’ve not been here for a few days, because there’s: 1) Nothing that I can find interesting enough to mention or 2) Anything I can actually discuss due to security considerations. Because I wasn’t paying attention to the schedule yesterday I missed the fact that we rolled the clocks back again tonight and so I am up an hour early for my watch. Since it’s the middle of the night here, I hopped onto the internet to try and catch up with things that are happening in San Diego, mostly through my Twitter and Facebook accounts. I noticed that my Facebook account had an unusually large number of photo albums and when I clicked through to check it I realized that Posterous, the website I do most if not all of my status updates and blog posts, screwed up royally in posting the 40 pictures I posted from Oahu to Facebook no less than 6 times. The worst part of it all is that not one album is complete. So now, the next time I get to shore and grab some internet, I’m going to have to set aside time and fix one album and delete the rest.

It might seem like something trivial to complain and post about, but my only real link to the internet is through email. When screw-ups like this happen it shows that I have little to no control over the things that I want to share on the internet with my friends. And after it ends up looking like crap, it’s a little disappointing. I guess if that’s all I really have to complain about, I’m doing alright.

It’s been just over two weeks since I left home for deployment and it doesn’t yet feel like I’m on deployment. It seems more like a shorter underway period where we return after 3-4 weeks and it’s not that big of a deal. Instead I don’t think it will hit until we get further west. I guess the only way to make the time pass is to go through each day as it happens. Hopefully the stops we make for port visits punctuate the time so that it makes the overall trip seem to pass faster.

One problem with stopping our journey briefly to visit ports makes in that I lose my thoughts and can come up with very little because the day to day ‘adventure’ isn’t all that exciting to most people. And while I can’t discuss our next location, I am looking forward to the next stop especially.

I don’t where to begin. I had the 7am-12pm watch this morning. On Sundays, instead of serving a normal lunch at 11:30am like normally, they serve brunch at 10:30am. Now to most people brunch sounds like a great idea. Except onboard naval vessels. Here, brunch consists of the crappy leftovers from breakfast and one additional new item that was added for ‘lunch’. Needless to say, it was yet again a crappy meal.

Lately, I’ve been trying my best to keep my distance from the jackasses around me, but it doesn’t seem to be working. I’ve turned over my position within the division and basically I’m standing watch and hanging out. Apart from the fact that I’m thousands of miles away from my family and friends, I’m trying to enjoy this deployment to the best of my abilities. And the less interaction with the morons who can’t seem to ever try to get anything right the better for my blood pressure.

I think I’ve ranted enough. A little release is good, but too much contributes to raising the bitching level. And it always seems to be about the same thing.

So I found out yesterday that I was going to have to start standing watch more frequently. It dawned on me today that it was real and how bad it was going to suck to do so. So I’ve been in a bad mood all day, mostly because my new schedule for the next 3 days will consist of me eating, standing watch and sleeping. There won’t be any time left in the day for anything else. I wasn’t even going to bother posting anything today, but I felt the need to since if I can keep the rhythm going, I’ll be able to post once a day throughout the entire deployment.

But now I’m cutting into my sleep time which starting today has become very precious. Good Night!

While import, the typical amount of email I receive is minimal. Most things are put out at the morning quarters and emails are reserved for a broader audience. Since I’ve been underway, that amount has almost tripled. It seems like people have less to do and more information that they feel is necessary for everyone to read. When I get the chance, I check my email about 3-4 times a day. I don’t have the liberty of having my own computer; rather I have to share the computer in my office with about 10 other people. Each time I check my email, there is no less than 10-15 new messages. If I am lucky there is a new one from my wife or there’s something from the outside world (which means updates from twitter, usually). Most of the time though, it’s useless items regarding the schedule or meetings or something else that I either don’t need to see or didn’t need to be sent through the email.

As long as the internet connection is going strong and I get emails in small or large amounts from the outside world, my day is brightened a little and my trip goes that much quicker.

So now that we’ve been through three time zones, I’ve already started to lose my situational awareness of the time in San Diego. When I sat down today to send out emails and update my Twitter (@SailorDad) I realized that while I had just eaten dinner and preparing for the next day, everyone in San Diego was still out and about in their day. It’s been a while since I had to think about what time it was back home in San Diego in comparison to where I am currently. Once we get further east, we’ll lose an entire day by skipping ahead a day thanks to the International Date Line. Of course that means that we have to pay back the day we skipped by repeating a day on the way home. The real pain is when I’m on the other side of the world and trying to call home to talk to my family without waking them up in the middle of the night. Of course it also requires planning to call at the right time and not have been drinking for a few hours before picking up the phone and drunk dialing the wife. I can tell you from experience and witnessing others doing it, it is not appreciated.

Today was a busy day, but that didn’t make the time go by any faster than usual. Normally when I’m busy the time passes so quickly I end up wondering what happened to the day. Today the day ended and I ask why it didn’t end sooner. Heh. Had some meetings in the morning and watch in the afternoon that was interrupted by some training exercises. Now that everything is done, I want to get some sleep, but can’t justify going to bed so early in the evening. I’m hoping that there’s a good movie on tv that I can catch before heading to bed.

Last night we had some connectivity issues that delayed the emails that I send to Posterous to post to my Twitter and Blogs, as well as the emails that I send home to my family. This morning it looked like everything was sent out, and this evening it seems that we have a better connection than we did when we left home. Hopefully that was the last time we have problems sending and receiving emails, but I think that might be asking too much.

I remember my first deployment, when there was only one email address for the ship and every email that was sent to that address had to have the intended person’s name in the subject line. Once the email was downloaded over an old school modem (read 28.8k) into the computer, some guy had to sort the emails and forward them out to the people they were sent to on a different computer. That guy was me. I once logged nearly six straight hours in front of that computer downloading a huge backlog of emails over a connection that I believe cost the government about $8 per minute. Of course I shouldn’t complain, most people remember deployments before that when there were no computers or phones and had to rely on postal mail to hear from friends and family.

Today’s entry was a little longer than usual. Partially because I skipped the one from yesterday and partially because I had something of interest to post this time around. You don’t realize what you’re missing until you’re miles out to sea and you’re isolated from the rest of the world. I’m trying to focus on the immediate future, and not be bothered with that ever so faint light at the end of the tunnel signaling the end of deployment.

Typically, Sundays are considered ‘holiday routine’ on the ship when we’re underway. Of course some people add to that by saying, “It’s holiday for some, routine for others.” That all depends on your job for the most part, but the scheduling is lighter than most days. Then there was today. I had the early (or late, depending on your point of view) this morning from 2am – 7am. Then there was small arms training scheduled for most of the day, for which I was scheduled to attend. After I had my chance to show how rusty I am with a 9MM, I had some lunch and went to grab a few hours of sleep. Then I got back up for dinner, mostly because I had a meeting scheduled for 6pm tonight. That was training for the senior personnel to hold training on their junior personnel as directed by the bosses of the bosses. If you haven’t seen Office Space, then my day to day experience sometimes mimics that movie.

Here I am now, waiting to go back on watch until the wee hours of the morning. At least I get to sleep in tomorrow morning for a little while.

So far, this deployment seems like it might be the easiest in my experience. Of course it could be the bright side of it that I’m seeing, but anything is possible. In any case, deployment always brings about some level of stress. Being on the ocean though has different sources of stress than say a deployment on the ground in a foreign country. Typically we’re not getting shot at while we’re floating around out here, but at the same time, there is an isolation that I think might be different that being on the ground say in Iraq or Afghanistan. I can’t say for certain, because I have only heard about those places and not experienced any of that for myself. Not to mention the whole other side of deployment, the ones you leave behind while you go off on some cruise.

My wife has been with me for every single deployment I have gone on while in the Navy. She’s endured the missed paydays of the first deployment because of a paperwork error. She somehow survived my fourth deployment after giving birth to our daughter just a month after I left home. She’s now going through what might be the hardest deployment to date, since my son was born 6 months ago and my daughter is almost more of a handful now than before when she was a baby. I don’t know how she does it, and for that she is and will always be the best wife in the world. There are many things that make her the best wife to me, but putting up with my job and its crazy schedules is what really takes it all.