One Day Underway and Back

It was miserable coming in on a Sunday while my husband is at home with me. The command made us come in Sunday morning the 7th at regular working hours to make sure all the pre-underway stuff got done on time. At least it was a long Fourth of July weekend we were coming off of. Our division twiddled our thumbs most of the day... but I kept myself busy, employed and sane by doing a through cleaning of the Sonar 1 Equipment Room... cleaning up residue paint splatters off the floor with the tip of my knife for the first couple hours, then going through our tool cabinet again (like I did last year when I organized and labeled it days after checking in). I was prompted to do it because we had some of the open purchase items I ordered come in... and they needed to be put away... and one thing led to another. Also took care of the computer desk table, drawers and shelves. After dinner I spent a few long hours catching up with friends and family on my phone on the aft missile deck. Needed to charge my dying phone before I called my Darling in the evening, so I still kept busy by shining the brass fire valve in our passageway. Senior Chief came by, and after asking why I was working at 2100, he said he wanted me to charge my phone all the time. :)

Our underway time on Monday, July 8, wasn't too early. I didn't have a Sea & Anchor station, so I spent my time printing out the technical manual to our underwater comms set. I watched our sonar demonstration going out to sea, and when they set the underway watch, I was in the first section and only had a half-hour before I was relieved for lunch. It bit back after our scenario for a couple hours after taps... we had the last watch in the wee hours.

The 9th was strange... went straight into Sea & Anchor, and I spent it finishing printing out pertinent pages from the same tech doc as before. Then I re-organized our safe (I'm the security petty officer for my division), shined more brass in our passageway, and didn't really notice much difference between S&A and the workday. After lunch there was an intensive berthing cleaners ship-wide. My main contribution was bugging the BMs for TP and brownie paper towels, and wiping up the residue of the flooding from the night before in my isle, and finally getting over 20 TPs and 6 brownies from the BMs. And I kept busy the rest of the workday... replaced the paper in our depth indicator, then changed out a very complicated lamp in a piece of equipment in Combat. Lots of screws! Finished up just as we were being let go!

The 10th was a regular day in port... quarters, sweepers (back aft for me), went through my email and deleted a lot of extraneous stuff, then I fixed the cover of one of our first classes. And after shining brass in the dome cage and lunch... there wasn't much going on. Next day we were going out through the weekend.