back from the cruise

Looks like everyone else has been busy - took me a while to catch up. ;)

The cruise was pretty good. We had calm seas and blue skies for the whole thing. I didn't feel sick at all. (Granted I was on drugs...but even with drugs I usually feel a bit woozy). We had three objectives - to deploy a piece of monitoring equipment that'll stay down for about 3 months, to do a net tow for some planktonic critters for one of the other scientists that didn't go on the cruise, and to try and collect some data on an interesting wedge of low-temperature water jutting out from the coast into the Gulf Stream. Everything went well. We probably should've done more with the weird water feature, but we had to get back to port by a certain time. Oh well, I still have a ton of data to process.

The fishing wasn't so good on this trip, unfortunately. Usually they catch something good to eat for one of the dinners, but alas not this trip. Not really spectacular for big sea life either. We saw some dolphins, and some of the others saw sea turtles. That was about it. I took a couple sunset pictures with my newly-fixed camera. Figured I had to start somewhere. ;)

The main downside, at least for me personally, is that they decided to do the sampling in 4-hour shifts. I would've preferred an 8-hour shift (that is, midnight to 8am), instead of two 4-hours (midnight to 4am, 8am to noon) and unfortunately I got up late for my second shift and the person alternating with me had to do two sets of samples that should've been mine. She didn't seem to mind, though.

That's the thing about cruises too, especially if it's with people who don't go on them very often and/or are students. People want to do lots of work. ;) We're on there to work, so we want to be put to work and get lots of sampling done. People will happily take over each other's jobs, so you'd think it'd be easy to shirk your own responsibilities onto someone else ... except of course that nobody wants to. It's an interesting mindset, especially compared to the way most employees (corporate America especially, I would guess) think about their jobs.

Probably the most relaxed cruise I've ever been on (not counting the 18 hour cruise where I was sick for the first 14 hours)(and the remaining 4 hours was where the boat was heading back to port), was one to Puerto Rico where I was only working maybe 4 hours a day. This was a 3-week cruise, and the chief scientist had somewhere gotten it into his head that he didn't want to develop a reputation for overworking people - so he overcompensated in the other direction instead, leaving us with very little to do for most of the time. This would've been great if I'd taken up writing at that point in my life, but I hadn't. So, stuck on a boat in the middle of the Sargasso Sea, surrounded by nothing but the most beautiful deep blue water I've ever seen ... no Internet, no TV, and I'd already read everything of even remote interest in the small library of paperbacks ... I was bored out of my mind. :p I spent a lot of time hogging the computer that we used for emails (we dialed in to a satellite twice a day to upload/download things), and wrote extremely lengthy tomes to people.

Anyway, for the cruise I just got off of, I didn't have time to get bored. It was only 2 days long. I'm built for long cruises, as it takes me around 14 hours to get used to the sea. Then I fall into a habit of work, eat, sleep, until the rhythm works out and I can start working in other things. At my current job, 3 days is about the longest cruise that they do, so most of the time it's not really worth screwing up my system for. Except for the rare occasion when they're inclined to take me along. ;)

Unfortunately I didn't do anything writing-related while I was there. I did read my Discover magazine from cover-to-cover, and there was an interesting article in there about autism. I've been fascinated by that for a few months now, pretty much since my sister accused me of being autistic. (I'm not, as far as I can tell.) Basically, it seems that for autistic people, there isn't a layer of "conscious" on top of "subconscious"; for them, the subconscious IS the conscious. That just boggles my mind. I keep trying to imagine what it would be like to have every single subconscious perception input be in my conscious awareness at all times - and that would just be insane. I mean ... considering how much perceptional stuff I am already aware that I filter out, just to keep myself functional ... *shakes head in disbelief*

So anyway, still nothing to report on the writing front. I had planned to work out some details on Stranger on a Bus (my Labor Day novel), but never quite got around to it. Then the cruise ended because it was short. (oops)

For some reason, Taint (the third novel in the queue for my Fortress Launne series) is insisting that I write it not only next (second), but also Right Now (as opposed to in November as I've been planning). Even though I'm not sure I can accurately do that until after I've written Amulet I. But maybe I should give it a go, just to see what happens. It's April Fools month and technically I'm signed up to it, even though I have yet to do anything other than lurk.