After leaving the ship two week early with the Early Detachment team, we are spending the first 96 hours the ship is in homeport on duty so the guys and gals who didn't leave early can have a unfettered, duty-free weekend.
This isn't so bad as all we are doing is standing watch and sleeping. I'm substituting some sleep for Minecraft but the effect is still the same.
Shutdown Reactor Operators are on 4 and 8s—meaning you have watch for four hours and then free time for eight hours to eat, sleep, play video games, upload posts to Blogger, etc.
The ship was supposed to have the entire weekend's meals catered by various companies like Pizza Hut and Chik-Fil-A but so far we have only gotten pizza once. The rest of the meals have been teriyaki meatballs with questions expiration dates, frozen bagged subs which are often rancid, and a very special Easter meal that might have been prepared sometime last week.
I imagine this was dreamed up by the same people who thought it would be a historical moment to make us do two PRTs on a nine-month deployment. Maybe it was the same people who thought we'd help out the Bush's food budget by artificially inflating out own with nasty green steaks, lobster tail, and giant prawns...all of which no one really liked to eat.
All in all this was worth going home two weeks early.
Have a Happy Easter!
