Last I wrote I mentioned the fact that perhaps I moved so far out here to get away from everyone that cared about me or that I cared about.  I was never really good at the Oregon Trail game growing up (not that I actually played it for very long either), but if my memory is write the game presented the West as a wild frontier full of opportunity or something like that.  Staying East of the Mississippi, wherever the game would start wasn’t an option at all.  I wonder why.

Would the Pre-Worn Path not be an equally interesting game to try and stay alive in?  While purchasing supplies at outposts might not be the highlight like it is on the Oregonian counterpart, I’m confident that life in New England, the South, or even the Mid West would have presented its own unique set of challenges.  Maybe the to-be settlers aren’t actually looking for adventure, gold, freedom, or anything else that the Oregon Trail offers, but instead are just really bad at living where they currently are.  For all we know they could be fed up with politics, economics, or city life because it just hasn’t worked out well for them.  Heading out on the Oregon Trail is really the most feasible escape plan from all that, which makes me wonder even more what the game would have been like if there was an option to not actually go on the trail.

Maybe it’s too much to fit two games on the same floppy disk or something like that.  I wonder if the lives of the people that made it all the way to where ever they were going (was it even Oregon?) was all that they hoped it would be.  Did they ever think about the friends, family, and others they left back before setting out?  My guess is probably not, or at least not seriously.  Given the lackluster communication channels (aka writing letters to be carried buy a guy on a horse) it seemed unlikely that someone moving out weest would ever hear from anyone again.  I guess they never have to worry about declining a party invitation.

Good night moon.

My holiday spirit was severely lacking this year, probably due in part to the high environmental contrast.  As an example, at RPI I’d be surrounded by holiday decorations (even if I had to put them up myself last year) in the Student Government Suite,  there would be ample holiday music to play, and since I was on the northeast it would be both cold and snowy (or at least appearing like it might snow).  This year the extent of my holiday decorations included a 3? foot pre-lit tree in the corner of my apartment that I was too lazy to plug in most nights.  At work I displayed my circuitry tree as well which impressed everyone, but that was about it.  There was no holiday music except when my iTunes accidentally started playing the free Holiday Sampler they gave out a few years ago and the weather out here was no where close to feeling like winter.  It actually was just starting to feel like fall, with brisk mornings and leaves coming down.  But yes, I mustered up the energy required to fly home and spend some time with my family for the holidays.

My parents briefed me in advanced that I wouldn’t be getting much at all for Christmas, and I was OK with that because I really don’t need much stuff.  It’s also a pain to travel with things, and I like to keep my apartment pretty void of stuff.  Let me think, notable gifts family this year include sunglasses (expensive ones that I don’t need), a GPS (returned to store), a camera for my Google TV (which logitech / Google have failed to release drivers for ), and some pants.  My brother got me a DNA testing kit thingy, which I look forward to reporting back on in a few years.

One of the things I dislike about the holidays is that things have broken down into lists.  At least for me, people usually don’t like to risk being wrong so they avoid trying to guess what I might like / enjoy.  While I can appreciate a logical and conservative gift-giving stance, it’s not as exciting to be the recipient because you’ve essentially written your own prescription for the pharmacist to fill and give right back to you.  Personally, I’m also of the mindset that if I want / need something I’m just going to go out acquire it, so populating a list of things “I’d like to have but can’t” produces items that are nearly impossible to find (and often programming related, like modules of code).

On one of my flights back out to California, perhaps the one after my holidays at home, it occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons I ended up out here taking the job that I did was to get away from everyone who cares about me and those I care about.  That ended up being a pretty depressing plane ride while I pondered that, but I’m curious if on some subconscious level I was itching to get in an environment where I could more completely focus on work.

As an example, normal people my age  would be doing something on a Friday night like watching TV, hanging out with other people, etc.  Even if Friday isn’t your thing, there is some probability that over a weekend you’ll physically interact with someone classified as a “friend” in some way shape or form.  I, on the other hand, will likely spend my weekend working on a variety of programming projects and that will generally be the end of it.  I’ve never been really good at having fun, and being far away from most people who enjoy fun makes it easier for me to avoid those awkward situations.

The plus side of this is, like I said, that I could spend all weekend submerged in Concerto or working on work-related stuff without feeling like I’m really disappointing anyone.  If I forget about dinner there’s no one to complain about being hungry, I’ll survive and make it up as I go.  The downside of all this comes when I’m not feeling motivated to work at all so I stare at the empty screen or pretend to watch something on TV.  Going places and doing things would require me to motivate myself, in turn evaluating the value of said experience, which is always really low if I’m the only participant.  Any depressed / neglected mood I find myself in is only likely to be amplified by the emptiness of mutually occupiable furniture.

Good night moon.

I’ve also just deleted the majority of an earlier draft of this post, which would be summarized by one character: Scrooge.  I’m don’t want to be opposed to the holidays and the spirit of the season, but maybe I’m caught up in this over-commercialization of the whole thing.  I don’t need a particularly reason to get someone a present, and this season is putting unnecessary pressure on me to figure something out.  As an example, lets say I know I will be getting a gift from person A.  Coupling that knowledge with my desire to not look like an idiot, I need to have a gift on hand ready to reciprocate when the time comes.  If the gift that I’d really like to get person A isn’t available for whatever reason for a few months I’m in a bind, I don’t want to appear to be shirking my responsibility when in fact I have a completely genuine idea at the ready, it just cannot be acquired at the current time.  It would be much easier if I could be like hey, here is a happy 3rd of February gift and surprise someone.  Everyone sets expectations for the season, as with any expectations the higher you set them the easier they are to miss.

Today I was in the store buying some holiday greeting cards.  It was a fairly depressing experience.  I have a handful, literally… a number you can count on one hand… of people I have a strong reason to send holiday greetings cards.  Unfortunately, the store doesn’t sell any good cards in handful sizes.  All the cards that come in 5 packs or smaller are stupid pictures of cartoon snowmen made of fat ovals (opposed to pretty snowmen made of circles) or some modern art angel atrocity with what appears to be a multi-colored dance floor background.  These are not the type of casual greetings I would like to send people.  All the good cards are grouped in the 12+ range where you get a pack of 12 or something cards for a few dollars which means I’m left with like (12 – handful) of holiday cards with no purpose.  I have considered addressing them to coworkers, but 50% of them are Jewish I believe and nothing says Merry Christmas like a card to someone who doesn’t celebrate the holidays.  I’ve considered sending them to people who’s addresses I have but then they’d likely ask a) why does Brian have my address and b) what does he want that he’s sending a Christmas card to me for.  I think I might just mail them to myself over the course of the next few days, or maybe to strangers.  Don’t get me started on the abundance of holiday wrapping paper I have, and by abundance I mean 1 40 foot roll that I needed to use like 4 feet from.

Perhaps I’ll send a card to my dishwasher, I always enjoy falling asleep to the sound of it doing it’s thing.  I’m actually not sure if I enjoy the specific sound of the dishwasher, or if I enjoy the sound of something as a deviation from the constant silence around this place.  I’m sure it’s not something specific to the West Coast, but I feel that out here there is a lot more silence.  I talk much less than I did back when I was at RPI and hanging out with people, and some days I spend a small amount of time talking out loud to myself just to make sure my voice still works (those are usually the days that work consists only of saying “Good Morning” in the morning and then “Have a nice night” as I leave).  I’ve considered falling asleep with the television on, but it’s in another room and has no purpose for being on.  The dishwasher has a reason for being on so I don’t feel it’s a waste to use it like I would the television at night (not that there is a limit to the amount of television, but there is this thing called the electric bill).

Weekends are usually the most extreme, when my interactions with other people in person are solely limited to ordering at fast food restaurants.  I made friends with the folks at KFC one night, unfortunately the next week they changed shifts and I never saw them again.  KFC also took lettuce off their menu so I stopped patronizing them.  Now I look forward to Wendy’s.

Good night moon.

During college I could very easily dedicate blocks of time to task X or project Y, like just about everyone one.  You allocate yourself an hour to work on this homework, or an afternoon to focus on this project, or even just a few minutes to go through your email and catch up on stuff.  When I was at RPI I was “on-call” for a variety of servers that could send me text messages reporting outages/ downtime, but I never had to completely drop everything and run to the Union more than a few times a year.  It was good exercise at the time.  Every now and then I’d get an urgent looking email from a student or someone else out there needing something from me and I could decide to respond or ignore it for a bit, usually something I’d determine based on how involved my response would be.

When I’m working I don’t feel like I have the luxury to ignore things to give myself time to “wrap things up” with whatever I’m working on.  This leads to a process scheduling implementation that looks a bit like a preemptive priority scheduling system.  This is great for those high priority things that come in I need to address, but stinks for the low priority projects which are often the most interesting and personally rewarding.

As an example, I’ve been writing a piece of Python code that would have probably taken me at most an afternoon if it was just me, Ruby, and my computer.  Perhaps a can of coke in their as well.  So far it’s been 2 weeks and it’s maybe 80% done because I can’t seem to work on it for longer than 5-10 minutes before something comes up.  Ok, that was a bit of an understatement.  I usually have less preemptions  from 8am – 10:30am, but I’m not the most creative at my programming during this hour (readas: I have motivational difficulties most mornings).  I’m also usually done being preempted at 5pm, but at that point I’m fairly upset that I’ve produced 10 lines of good code over the last N 5 minute breaks.

I’ve yet to figure out any good tricks to context switching more effectively.  If I leave all my Chrome tabs open in another window I can usually pick right back up where I left off on the internet, but my shell tabs don’t have the same mental resilience.  Perhaps I need to work on a better mental process scheduling algorithm, but a lot of them rely on the ability to estimate the time required to  complete a task and when I’m programming that’s directly correlated to how motivated / inspired I’m feeling which isn’t easily quantized.  More thought required, that’s for sure.

Good night moon.

I think it’s fairly depressing if the best thing about any night is the fact that one is not fighting, a lyric I’ve borrowed from Secondhand Serenade’s Fall For You.  Unfortunately some nights that seems like the only thing that you can consistently take stock in.  It doesn’t get better to realize that the fact that a dispute is not occurring is actually a result of no (or minimal) interaction at all.

Sledding seems like a very good way of picturing it.  While you’re sledding you’re always going downhill.  You can stop yourself or slow down, but anytime you are in the act of sledding you are moving in a downward motion.  Perhaps I could have been a bit broader and expanded that analogy to any activity influenced mainly my gravity, but the point is that if almost always feels like there is just one direction of travel.  At the end of your sledding experience you get off, grab the sled, and walk (in my case run) back up again to repeat the process.

I remember when I was younger and of a more commonly accepted sledding age, I would often pause for a while when I had completed my decent not really looking forward to the trip back up.  It would have been so cool if there was a conveyor belt to reset me to the top without having to get up and walk all the way up again, but that may be what makes the experience enjoyable; you have to work for it.  The ease of travel is also worth noting, it’s significantly easier to travel down the snowy hill than it is to walk up it, and the further you walk the further down and more enjoyable the trip there will be.

There’s a bit of a trick involved in figuring out how high up to walk if you hill that seems “impossible” to climb to the top to every time.  In my neighborhood this was the street that went up a hill, it was fairly long and boring to walk all the way to the top, and the higher you went the higher the probability was that you’d have trouble making all the way down (the road curved a bit).  Optimally, most people identified and used the longest possible path that minimized additional work (walking up, steering, slowing down, etc) while descending; you have to balance that additional work required with the thrill provided by the additional segment.

The one downside to this system is that sledding is fun usually, and that’s not really what I’m trying to convey at all.  It would be better if the walk up was fun, and the sledding part was unpleasant but you had lots of trouble stopping when you started.  I don’t think there’s anything actually wrong with fighting from time to time, I think it can be a useful conflict resolution tool to approach issues parties are often guarded on, or to quickly air out some dirty laundry that might take weeks to dry on the line outside.

Personally, I have a high tolerance for repetitive unpleasant interactions but I don’t think most people react that way.  I don’t usually think “this is unpleasant, I don’t want to do this” but I try to focus on it as a learning experience to figure out how something can be avoided or improved in the future, however distant or unlikely that future it.  People also say the darn-est things when they’re fighting, at which point I  LOL (actually out loud) , often when something that’s intended to be highly offensive at me.  This reaction probably started as a reuse of some nervous laughter, but I’ve adapted it into a way of adding a spool full of sugar to help the medicine go down.  This might be worth trying sometime if you haven’t, think of most experiences in life as medicine as medicine and don’t forget to add a spoonful of sugar if you can’t otherwise swallow it.

Goodnight moon.

No more talk of rain for now though.  I spent most of this weekend thinking to myself about motivation and the purpose of life or something like that.  I don’t really like thinking about the purpose of life at all, but it was “one of those weekends” where I didn’t have anything pressing to do and I found myself wandering in my own thoughts a bit too far.  Among other conclusions I’ve reached, I think that everyone would be best served by deciding their own purpose for their life, but you need to be careful not to try and define that as an explanation for your existence or something really even connected to being alive.  Again, I’m wandering down the wrong path here.  Let’s course correct.

I’m having very broad trouble with motivation these days, characterized by staying up watching “classic” movies until 1-2am, sleeping the day away, and spending too much time surfing the internet (aka reddit).  These are all good in moderation, but I really had no good reason to watch The Transporter 3.  It ends the same way as the first two.  It occurred to me that college, and studying at university in general, serves as a really good underlying motivation for doing things… grades help too.  No one goes to college for the sake of going to college, meaning you don’t go there as your end goal.  You want to experience academics or social life or something else… and then when you’re done with that experience after a few years you build on that and move on to life.  College, and the broader educational field beforehand, offer a very very clear feedback system.  If you do well you get an A, if you don’t do well you get an F.  You’re often evaluated on a weekly basis, which I think is a great control for motivation.  If you receive quantitatively poor feedback, aka a poor grade, you know that you need to work either harder or better (or both) for next time.  You can also count on that next time being around to try.

In le workplace I haven’t found that to be the case very much.  Once a week I sit down with my manager and she reminds me that I’m doing a good job and should keep doing what I’m doing.  As much as it’s nice to hear that I’m doing a good job and stuff, that’s not the most motivating way to supply me with a status update.  To me, keep doing what you’re doing, implies that I shouldn’t seek to improve or optimize whatever it is that I’m currently doing and that I should keep performing the tasks as I have been.  Every once in a while we chat (or I think) about improving / optimizing things and there are some small scale things I can do here or there… little patches and tweaks perhaps, but the broader improvements I’d be interested in making require me to stop doing what I’m doing and probably require an OK from someone N rungs up the ladder from me.

On my outside-of-work projects I find myself similarly positioned.  I know that it’s not a question of writing the code of rmaking something that technically functions quite well, I don’t have the skill or competencies to make it look decent or worthwhile to interact with.  If there were plenty of interface-neutral problems to solve I’d be all over them, but unfortunately lots of my exciting ideas are heavy in the fields that I’m less experienced in.  I guess I could turn this around and say that I should use this as an opportunity to learn / practice some of this…. maybe I will…. ok I’ll be honest I probably won’t.

I will try to be as vague and obtuse as possible for this next part.  If you’re usually off-put by my complex analogies I suggest you wait until you’re… well maybe you just shouldn’t.  Dedicating you full brainpower to it may not be a good investment of your time.

As much as I had hoped the day that I desired to never come would come it seems that it’s surprise arrival has caught me a bit off guard.  I’ve been constantly reassured that what I long ago convinced myself was most likely to occur was the least likely outcome and I made the mistake of buying into that illusionist mindset.  Perhaps this all falls back on some fundamental desire to have a fortune of my youth be something more than a terribly short term solution to mask a long term problem.  I was too easily conned given my lack of knowledge of exponential functions at the time.  I won’t blame myself for being so easily deceived though, I was what, younger than a (years) bakers dozen  at the time.  Perhaps I haven’t come that far after all.

Good night moon.

Sure, I’m in a significantly larger living space compared to a tent.  I’m not living out of a backpack, nor do I have to sweep out the dirt / pine needles that might get tracked in on a regular basis, but I think if you take away some the details things are actually quite the same.  Camping was always an experience where I’d leave my friends behind for a weekend and for all extensive purposes be off the grid.  I’d go away for a weekend, my friends would presumably continue on doing whatever it was that they planned to do, and I would show up back at school on Monday morning and pretend to be up to speed on things.  See, most of my friends had dropped out of Boy Scouts in Middle School and I never really considered myself close friends with many people in the scout troop.  I didn’t mind being around any of them, but aside from saying “hi” in the hallway I didn’t really hang out or interact with them outside of scouting much.  While I don’t think any of my friends have dropped out of the “go to California plan” (because no such plan has ever existed) it does feel very similar, I’m out here mostly alone (I say mostly because, like in scouts, I did managed to have one or two folks I was friendly with that accompanied me) and most of the folks I’ve been friendly with are back east carrying on life as usual.

An outpost may be a better way to describe my slightly longer term arrangement out here.  I was probably “camping” during the first two weeks while I was living out of my suitcase but now that I’ve got some simple pieces of furniture I’m slightly more invested, not in the financial sense (I mean technically yes, but I don’t really care), but in the physical sense that I have a few items out here now.  I could probably load my existence into a truck in an hour or so if I needed to abandon the outpost and quickly relocate.  My possessions are really limited to things I need to survive without too much discomfort on a day to day basis.  I’ve got a chair to sit in when I want to watch TV, a few small pieces of artwork on the wall so my eyes can focus on something that isn’t a computer screen all day, and just enough lights so it doesn’t have to be dark all the time in here.  For some reason my fairly minimal setup at college really didn’t present this way to me, maybe that’s because I knew the defined start and end dates associated with things and could predefine my engagement as such.

Back in the day cowboys, missionaries, frontiersfolk (gotta be gender neutral), and others that setup outpost would write home to fill in their relatives and loved ones on the latest and greatest news and discoveries.  This feels a bit like my weekly phone call with my parents on Sunday, where my dad lets me know that I’m looking good / healthy and my mom asks what the past week has been like. I don’t usually have anything particularly exciting to say, but I’ve always avoided any status reports that could come off as depressing / negative.  It’s been a while since I’ve read letters home from folks that moved out west early on, but I suspect many of the painted similar pictures either to reinforce optimism, try and encourage others to join them, or even just to not appear to have made what can appear, at times, to be a mistake in the whole process.

Professionally I think I’m also on some sort of frontier as well, at least from the groups I hail from.  Many of my peers find themselves working / living well withing a day’s drive of RPI and probably the same could be true about where they’ve grown up.  I’m out here in “Silicon Valley” which is suppose to embody the bleeding edge of technology and innovation given the companies that call the area home.  I think the wide spread adoption of the internet has greatly reduced this feeling associated with geographic locations; you can just as easily visit a website built out here as I can, but I get to see the billboards recruiting for the latest tech startup or using catchy technology slogans to try and promote products.  Personally I enjoy Microsoft’s “Virtualization alone does not a cloud solution make” billboard.

I don’t know if I look forward to the Sunday drive home from being camping all weekend, when it was thoroughly relaxing to just take a shower and eat some food that I didn’t have to cook, or if I should be looking to a future where I start to scale up this outpost into something a bit more sustainable.  Either way, I’ve already put the fire out for tonight (because if you sleep with a fire still going your tent could catch on fire and you never ever want that to happen) so I should get going to bed.

Good night moon.

The larger problem is actually because I like things small.  I’ve never been good at planning my personal life years in advance, I get by on a day to day basis using fairly structure routines and I change quite gradually most of the time.  Luckily, for the first twenty-something years of my life this was very easy because a next logical step was always available.  Graduating middle school led directly to going to college.  I finished my BS and an MS was a fairly logical next thing to do.  A PhD seemed like it was a step that I, or my life, wouldn’t be well suited for given the flavor of academia these days so I went out and got a job.  Now what do I do?

If my job was working at McDonalds as a floor mopping technician, I would probably aspire to work a register or cook and someday become a shift leader, manager, etc.  That all of course assumes you really enjoy McDonalds, who doesn’t really.  Unfortunately I’m not mopping floors at my local McDonalds.  I’m 2.5K miles across the country working at a substantially larger company that’s has much higher barriers to entry, I’m also not mopping floors.  I’m not really sure what I want to do next, and that’s really demotivating.

This isn’t just work related though, well maybe it is.  I write code because it’s personally satisfying.  I’m personally satisfied when I see others using / interacting / expanding on something I’ve done.  It makes me almost want to smile when I see someone use something I’ve worked on.  There are also cases, perhaps what I’d consider more academic exercises, in which I program just for myself.  A few days ago at work I came up with what I thought was a really elegant piece of Python code.  No one may ever see it, I might be the only person to use it ever but whatever, it’s cool to me.  Looking back, I’ve done a lot of programming work over the past 5 years or so under the premise that doing this work would lead me to getting a good job.  I don’t doubt that it may be a strongly correlating factor in the past, but I have trouble linking this continued external work with an increased potentials for professional opportunity.

I’m intentionally dodging the broader subject debating the merits of most things I do in life that I’ve convinced myself bolster professional opportunity.  It’s depressing when I think that all those collared shirts were for nothing.

I think a lot of people probably define many of their goals in their social/family space and can look forward to those kind of events.  People save up for vacation or look forward to the weekend relaxing / going out with friends or hanging out with people in general.  Some people look for love, some get married, and then of course there are those who have kids (those are 3  independent events in my mind).  If I were writing Brian’s todo list it probably wouldn’t include many things that look like that.  I don’t have this pressing desire to “unwind” after a “long day” at the “office”.  Going places and doing things has never really been my forte, I’ll occasionally go someplace and do some stuff but rarely because I have a pressing urge to.

Perhaps the best strategy I have is to keep thinking about what’s next so I can figure it out.  I also might be tapping out right now because it’s late and I’m getting tired.  There’s gotta be a fairly reasonable and logical next step I want to work towards, I’ll just have to be careful to balance the time spent thinking with the time spent doing.  Someone famous once said that you can’t always tell if you’re going in the right direction to get somewhere, but you’re certainly not going to get there if you just sit there.

Good night moon.

For most students, the end of August marks the end of summer vacation.  Sometimes that 2-3 month break is exciting, and other times it’s a very boring experience.  Either way, you probably weren’t in school going through the usual motions.  This is no longer the case now that I’m out of school.  As simple a thought as it sounds, I’m very accustomed to shifting gears every few months from project to project as the seasons changed.  It was predictable, I could look forward to it, and it’s no longer the case.

During my time at RPI I found that I had 4 work cycles: Summer vacation (aka open source broad value RCOS work), fall semester (deploy and build new things for RPI), winter break (experimental things / break from coding), and spring semester (fix all the bugs and make things stable).  Now that I have this 9-5 job (well, technically my critical hours are 8-4, but I usually risk it and delay a bit) that’s no longer the case.  The end of August is coming and there’s no dramatic, or even subtle, shift in my work in the pipeline.  I don’t know if this is what actually bothers me, or it’s the fact that I can’t shift my work if I wanted to.  I mean technically there are these business quarters that are suppose to be important for something, but the only weight they carry to me is on paper.  As far as I know, no one rallies around them because event X is coming up and we’ll all be moving back to campus or something.  They are just dates.

Now that I have left RPI I feel very much like an outsider.  Being on the other side of the country doesn’t help one bit with that feeling either, because my social interactions with relevant parties as nearly non-existent.  I guess I thought work would keep me too busy to notice, but that’s not the case at all.  I whole heartily enjoyed where I was at RPI and what I did.  Professionally: I could hack my way through any academics you could throw at me, but more importantly I had a fair amount of experience and expertise so I could tackle just about any problem thrown at me.  The same side of that coin also made me a resource for others, people would collaborate with me, ask me questions, and generally make me feel of some value.  Socially it took me something like 4.x years to finally start to open up around folks and come off as a nearly friendly (or so I’ve been told) person.

Such is not the case in my new job.  Sure, I feel valuable when I complete units of work but I’m not sure if there is anything that I’ve done that is specific to Brian.  Anything that’s expected of me isn’t specific to me as a person, it could just as easily be passed to someone else on my team.  Perhaps the largest contrast has been from going from the guy who answers questions to being the guy who has to ask really stupid ones.  It’s not a pleasant feeling at all, especially when it’s very easy to to ask really stupid questions to really really smart people.

As I see folks moving back and gearing up for another semester my mind starts launching into projects, ideas, conversations, and input that I, as an alumni, and no longer in any place to give.  Biting my tongue really isn’t fun, but I know it’s part of this process.  That doesn’t mean I like the process at all.  Part of me envies those that have managed to drag it out as much as possible, or found ways to get a taste of it every now and then by staying in touch and visiting.  Not really an option for me.

I hate to extend the ship metaphor, but often I feel as if the ship is leaving port without me this time and I’m stuck on the docks.  I’m left staring at you through some silly looking glass, wondering how much time will pass until we cross paths again.  The optimist in me has a particularly hard time convincing me the probability of that even is high.

Good night moon.

After ye’ early ventures our small crew started to pick up some momentum.  We were aiming to set sail for open water, into uncharted territory in hopes of even greater treasure.  Avast, we couldn’t do it along with such a small crew, so I figured I could help the Captain and Chief Mate out by recruiting some of the drunkards that frequented the tavern.  Sure, they might not be the best sailors in the land, but they seemed to be a hearty bunch of fellows that had an idea what was going on.  I figured instead of outright telling them to join it would be less work for me if they wanted to join on their own, so I posed some quite open ended questions to some quite open minded folks and before you knew it the crew had doubled or tripled in size.  It was surprisingly easy getting people to join the crew by letting them take part in the planning for our venture into uncharted waters.  To be quite frank, we could use any cartographer we could find trying to help chart our course.

Sure, we had our scuffles.  One of note to this day was during one of the initial recruitment sessions (you know, where potential pirates come and right their name in the Crew Log) the Chief Mate argued strongly for a sailor he’d known who was convinced that the knots tied in our Chip Log weren’t measured correctly.  Having tied them myself (and being fairly accurate with my measurement skills) I called his bluff but we let him aboard anyways.  It seemed that having one mutiny-prone fellow would help keep morale from getting too high at times, wouldn’t want the crew to be overly optimistic of anything.  I had to sleep with one eye open from that day on, but paying extra attention to things seemed to work well (and I could live with being a bit tired).

We set sail and made our way from port to port, borrowing what we could and looting what we couldn’t.  Anything we couldn’t use we used to barter (aka sell) at the next port we landed at.  Lucky we had one crew member who could sell just about anything, another one that could fix just about anything, and a few well skilled at putting junk together and making it look like silver.  Turns out that’s all the people really want these days, as long as it looks good and works fine the details and composition of it don’t matter to much at all.

We picked up a few treasure maps along the way and secure some small chests, we were starting to do quite well for ourselves, collection a sizable chest and gathering much needed spices and oils to look to sail to new foreign ports.  Unfortunately, like every great pirate sailing from port to port, the Royal Navy, specially one Rear admiral, seemed to take personal offense to our plunders and plots of conquest.  He set out to shut down ports before we arrived, preventing both us and the “friendly” merchants from doing any business.  Luckily for us, the merchants found other ways to exchanged their goods for our services; turns out they don’t like paying the queen’s tax much either.

This all culminated in a meeting with the Admiral of the Fleet actually, who took us by surprised as we docked in the Port of Tyne to do business.  In retrospect, we should have expected company in the Navy’s backyard.  After putting up a noteworthy fight with the Rear admiral, his commander came in to negotiate peace with us.  I was glad that we were finally meeting face to face to discuss our issues, it’s much harder to sleep with the sound of cannon fire raining in than one might think.  We sharpened our swords and headed to the meet, expecting an ambush of sorts.  Turns out the Admiral of the Fleet is a bit too laissez faire for something like that.  Instead, he conceited that the taxes they were making at the port were never going to balance the destruction we could (and already had!) caused, and we agreed to split our differences and continue on with our voyage.  I suspect the Admiral of the Fleet was loosing faith in his Rear Admiral after he failed to eliminate us several times.  It certainly helped having the tax-dodging merchants on our side too!

Early on as my time as Second Mate, back when we were still recruiting the crew,  the Captain had pulled me aside and said that should he fall to Davy Jones’ Locker I should take the wheel and stand in his place.  Knowing I had large pirate boots that I might need to fill some day I tried to stay as well informed as possible, learning as much as I could from my fellow pirates and practicing the whole navigating a large ship thing when I got a chance.  I suspected I may never be fully ready to take over, but let’s face it I don’t think any captain really is.

We continued on our conquest, but it was becoming clear that the Captain’s time at the helm was nearing it’s end.  He’d been cheating death for a few years now, and a permanent return to shore seemed eminent.  It seemed my time to take the wheel was fast approaching, but luckily the battles were winding down as the Rear admiral obeyed his orders to stand down.