It's been a while.

So. It's been a while, blog.

9 months ago our son was born, and he kind of took priority over writing.  I'm sure you understand.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that once again, the brummie will soon be at sea! This time with Mrs. Brummie, and Baby Cumbrian.  I don't know if Becky will object to being Mrs. Brummie, as she's actually from Yorkshire, but whatever.

So we're heading out to the Logos Hope again for 3 months.

Becky and I were on board for 3 months just over 2 years ago, helping with the A/V and Events teams after the 6 months dry-dock in Subic Bay.  This time, the ship has just come out of several months in dry-dock again, this time having the generators replaced.

I'll be working with the A/V team again, doing training and helping getting everything back on track and working again.  We've bought some new equipment, as most of what's there now is from the original install 6+ years ago, and is in need of some serious overhaulage.

During the Subic Bay drydock 2 years ago, none of the A/V gear was packed away properly, which is part of why everything is in such bad condition now.  At least now, since then, it's become part of A/V culture to do a serious pack down at the start of every dry-dock.  All of the lights on the truss get plastic bagged, all of the lighting dimmers get unplugged and tagged out, the desks get bagged and covered, etc.

In some ways, I'm extremely excited about going back again.  For the last couple of years I've ended up doing more and more I.T. work here, making and maintaining websites for transform.om.org, fr.om.org, omnivision.om.org, omnitube.org, and video.om.org, as well as a few internal projects (including stuff-management and streetsign).  It's kind of interesting, some days, but also pretty frustrating too.  I feel I'm more of a creative ideas person, rather than a server-maintenance guy, so the initial creation of websites or programming projects is kind of fun, the on-going maintenanace and bug-fixing drives me to despair (not to mention having to work in PHP with Wordpress...).

I love the ship's work, I love doing events (especially the school visits and other kids events and actual theatre type events), and am quite excited about not having to do I.T. stuff here for a while.

It's really strange to think that when we get back from the Logos Hope in 3 months time, it'll be 10 years since I started this blog, when I first went to Doulos for 3 months....

Anyway, time for dinner, and I need to go play with our son.  I'll try and post something a lot more regularly this time.  Writing is theraputic, and I suspect I'm going to need it...