This week we seem to be struggling with heavy weather. As I drove into work this morning it was raining so hard that my car wasn't only trying to hydroplane in the ruts of the road, it was just trying to hydroplane everywhere. It seemed like the gods were just pouring never ending buckets of water over my car, the wipers couldn't keep up. Add to that, there's a never ending stream of large vehicles that seem all too willing to pass you and hold a position so that their wash is directly hitting your windshield. 100 miles away, the In-Law's house was getting battered. At that time of morning, both of the fur-babies should have been warm, dry, and snoozing comfortably with MIL & FIL, if not with R himself, despite the windows rattling in 70mph winds and driving rain. Sleep well, my sweethearts. I mentally pulled blankets over my sleepers and sent kisses winging their way up the road in the opposite direction and focused on driving.
We're also plagued, luckily, with an overabundance of work. R remains swamped, and the To-Do list is hopping. Everyone in town who seems to know him seems to know which boats he's working with, and who's waiting for what. Meanwhile, we actually have a contract at my regular job, with a short lead time, and the vessel is basically being designed in tandem with it being modeled. Which is hard on me, and yet par for the course. I try to keep a margin between when things must be done and when things are done, because for all the trying, I always end up just barely meeting deadline. I've lost my margin early on, so this week I went into balls-to-the-wall mode to try and regain some margin--because all I know about the near future for my project is how much I don't know about it. It means no home life; I'm only there to sleep.
So as I worked late last night at one shipyard, duking it out with a recalcitrant model, I reflected that 100 miles away--down the same damn highway--my husband was at another shipyard, duking it out with an electrical system. Our to-do lists are formidable, and we're scrambling to knock things off, although one of us has things to model, and the other of us has things to wire. Our situations are similar--one of us is waiting on parts, one of us is waiting on drawings. And the response to that is similar--you do everything you can on everything else, even if it's more difficult to do it without the stuff you're waiting on, and get everything organized to do the rest of your job as quickly as possible when your stuff comes in. Our deadlines are similar, homing in on mid-December, whether it has to do with crab biology, or economic and manhours factors. Our work ethics are similar--get up, go to work, work work work work work work work work, find food, work work work work work work work work, drive home hoping you don't fall asleep before you get there, drop clothes on the floor, and crash.
He called last night, as I was working on a piece of bilge plating, to update me on the firing of a main engine. I snickered when he said he was only stopping for 10 minutes to hit the grocery store up for food. I was nibbling on my own dinner--the only meal I was going to get for the day.
Innocent bystanders don't seem to get it. "Why do you agree to this? This is insane. You don't REALLY need to do this, do you? How can you keep this up?" Industry regulars say: "Hurry the F up." It's a hard industry, and if you're not doing everything you can to make your customers (or employers) happy, you're not going to get the next contract. At least, when I talk to my husband, it is a relief to talk to someone who understands. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, lead times getting longer, bosses and captains wanting things earlier, planning the project out to go as smoothly as possible, prioritizing your to-do's to keep everyone else around you able to move forward on their own to-do's. Different, but very much the same.
That Thanksgiving and Christmas are looming, is merely background noise and background guilt. When I get a moment to think about it, which is rare, the should-be's start. I should be going home. I should be getting my shopping done. I should be helping with food, with cleaning, with, with, with. He likely thinks he should be spending time with me (he informed me today maybe if I packed really warm clothes I could help him this weekend). Mostly, we don't have time to think about anything other than work.
Inexorably, the clock is ticking. I just hope we're making progress fast enough.
