friday the 13th.

I'm back out on the DB16, after a lovely break. I went back to Santa Barbara for a visit, and to mail some packages I'd left when I moved. It was good to be back, good to be in a place so beautiful again. Chris and I went for a good hike on Sunday. On the way back down from an amazing vista, I kept slipping and sliding on the scree on the path. I was laughing at myself, and remembering how Molly Zins loved to tease me about my clumsiness. Chris bet me that I couldn't get back to the car (about a mile downhill) without slipping fewer than 10 times. Needless to say, I nearly lost the bet (in reality, I did lose, but he was good enough to pretend he didn't hear me slide a few times). My old roomies threw a bbq for me and per usual at those gatherings, I drank a bit too much plum wine, and had a blast. It was great to see everyone, good to ease back into some old routines, like coffee at Red's, and Sunday breakfast + LA times at the Cajun Kitchen (which, it was pointed out, was kind of silly, considering where I now live!).

I spent the rest of the break at the bunkhouse, working in the office. I went out on a quick one-day job at a paper mill, a place which smells worse than your most horrific nightmare (though, I suppose I've never really smelled anything in my dreams?), a bit like rancid sulphur. We were subcontracted by an inland diving company just down the road from our office, because they sometimes dive in the bubbling, smelly pulp pond at the plant. We were hired to crawl a little ROV down one of the pipes that connects the pulp pond to the extraction reservoir, to look for an obstruction in that pipe. They backflushed the pipe though, and then the obstruction was gone. Not soon enough though, we were at that plant, inhaling that putrid smell for around 7 hours. The scent burned its memory into my nostrils too, and the ghost of sulfur dioxide haunted me for hours afterward. Blech.

But now back to work offshore for a few weeks. This job is supposed to be finishing up pretty soon, so I'm hoping to stay out til the end, hopefully a few more weeks before heading back to the beach. It's good to be back out here, and back to work. We aren't doing too many dives with the ROV, but I feel comfortable out here, where I don't have to make too many decisions, and the days are simple and mostly pretty easy.

We're working on one of the last jackets, and today, instead of using a cutting apparatus like we have been... DYNO-MITE! They decided to blow up the jacket legs instead. It was pretty cool.