GoMnomnom: The Role of Weather

Weather is important out here. There's no shade and there's no ground. If the wind is blowing, it blows for miles across the water, unimpeded by any of the tiny structures we've built out here. With the exception of a few clouds, the sun shines straight onto the deck, punishing the deck crew for twelve hours straight. The line of sight that extends out to the horizon gives you an appreciation for the rain, too. Storm fronts aren't monolithic lines moving across the horizon, but masses of clouds that may or may not feel like delivering their precious cargo where you are. I haven't yet tired—and I hope I never do—of the novelty of standing on a dry, sunny deck and spotting columns of rain a few miles away.

There's always some kind of weather, and it's usually bad. What might normally be a clear day can easily cause heat stroke for deck workers. A brief rain might be nice, but the humidity sticks around for hours. If the weather picks up for a strong storm system or an actual hurricane, then we have to drop the job, pick up our anchors, and head somewhere safe until we can come back a few days later. Even then, we spend a few days with constant rocking from the waves while one unsecured item after another swings, falls, or just collapses from the motion. Recently, one of our flags got wrapped around an antenna, then whipped back and ripped it off. Everything out here is fragile in some way, and if you listen, it will tell you how by finding the most surprising, unlikely way to break.

Welders have to wear heavy jackets and handle welding torches to cut metal along precise specifications, regardless of weather or sea state. Crane operators and deck foremen have to make sure that when they're picking up a load, it won't swing with the rest of the barge and into something valuable (like, say, an expensive, massive crane).  When the waves pick up, just about everything gets wet, regardless of what level it's on or how quickly it tries to get off deck. When there are waves with rain, everything gets wet.

Out here, there just isn't anything to moderate weather; no earth storing heat, no trees absorbing heat or breezes. Just little people on big boats tryin' to hang on.

* * *

Sorry for the politi-spam last week. I try to keep it light, but sometime it doesn't work. I don't apologize for that; I do apologize for the stuff I wrote not being very entertaining. I try to stay positive and entertaining here, but some day's that's just harder than others.

I have a bunch of tumblrs that I follow, well, after I counted and I got to twenty-two, I finally broke down so that I could comment/reblog so many of the great/awesome things I've been seeing over there until no one cares about tumblr anymore and I vanishes like MyCase...or whatever that thing was that isn't anymore.

I'm feening to game, but man...I didn't bring any Magic cards except for the ones for my Phyrexian Jalapeno Paupers, which don't make very good decks, seeing as how I picked them for badness. I'm dying to play Fluxx. I'm dying to play a Nomic. Even part of me wants to run a Battletech campaign. I am hard-up, folks! I mean, I've been getting around to hating VVVVVV a little less, and I "beat" Cogs (in that I got a credit sequence, which, for a casual player like me is the equivalent of winning every Series of the Stanely Super-Cup World-Bowl-ton), but Crayon Physics Deluxe blows compared to the demo where they don't expect you to do anything but ball-in-the-cup and And Yet It Moves is just weird enough to keep me playing, which I can't begrudge, as I think that's the same quality that gets me second dates.

On a slightly less first world problem level, I noticed that—no, wait. same level—I've used some tags, but I've only used them once. It seems wasteful not to reuse these tags. Below is an image of my tag cloud. Pick one from the bottom you'd like to see me write about and I'll tackle it in Tag Week, which will run from the 19th to the 22nd. (Or if the image is too small, just check the bar on the far right of the page)