Thursday (TIA)

The other night Amber and I were watching the Leonardo DiCaprio movie Blood Diamond, the one where he has that ridiculous Australian sounding accent. There's a scene in the movie where he's chatting it up with the bartender at the beach bar he obviously frequents. Then, from across the bar, he sees a pretty little white girl she gives him the eyes with a come and get me smile. After some chatting, first friendly then hostile, there comes a point where he turns to his bartender friend and says 'TIA right bru?' and the bartender responds 'That's right, TIA' as if that explains everything. The girl innocently falls for the bait, asking Leonardo what TIA means, to which he responds 'This is Africa'. The transaction in this scene implies that TIA is a common saying to explain the lack of rules in that area of Africa. Seeing the parallel to our situation, Amber and I have been running around yelling 'TIA BITCHES, TIA' (for 'this is Alaska') at every moment of every stupid or ridiculous thing we do ever since watching that moving. Because it seems like we have no rules working on the boat. We throw things everywhere, go wherever we want, and goof off in just about every possible situation. This blog post is dedicated to that, to those shenanigans.

 Let me make a story composed mostly of photos for you.

Even though we never really wake up knowing what the day holds we try to do a few things to keep some sort of consistency in our days. Usually we try to start it out with a smoothie,

but after that who knows what is really going to happen. We take it as it comes, but pretty generally it starts out with moving some shit.

Sometimes we get to move cool things though, like a car,

 and other times we're just manhandling totes.

In between all the heavy lifting, there's always a little goofing off.

The flying forks being one of the main sources of entertainment during herring season.

If we aren't buying fish or playing the tote shuffle there is always some random task lying around for us to throw ourselves at.

Like climb up the mast to grease the blocks,

or there is always painting to be done. 

Sometimes things go wrong though, and we have shovel off the ton of dirt that fell into the ONE open spot on deck,

or climb back to topmast again because the blocks need re-greasing.

Lot's of jokes between mishaps. 

Followed up by forklift fun, rain or shine.

Because the weather can be quite crap.

And then maybe some exploring if we're feeling adventurous,

because Gordon always needs to go for a walk and we always need to stretch our legs.

Then, after a hard days work,

because sometimes we have to work late,

we lay down to gather ourselves for a second, just in case something random happens.

Like a seaplane coming to drop the new plant manager off.

But it's all worth it when we live in a place like this,

see things like this, 

and sleep in a world like this.

Alaska is a good place.

Be happy,

Beacon