Throwback Thursday

Since my life is super boring right now, I'll continue to entertain with flashbacks to a much more interesting time.

So, we lived on a boat.  (cue stupid rap song)

Our boat was SPECIAL.  It was HUGE.  And it was full of interesting things, like a disco ballroom, asbestos, and Croatian shipyard workers who would drink on the job and throw beer cans into the unfinished spaces between the walls.  Most notably, the ship did not actually sail anywhere the entire time we lived on it (and for those LH alumni reading this, NO I do not count the time we sailed 300 yards to dry dock as actual sailing).

We were living on said boat during the time that it was being rebuilt from a cruise ship/ferry boat into a mobile book fair/international goodwill/missionary boat.  Chris was working on the IT team, building the computer network from scratch (the ship was built in the 70s so there was no IT infrastructure other than phones) and I was splitting my time between office managing and teaching the kids of team members who also came to live in Croatia during the rebuild phase.

Most of the boat looked like this on the inside:

This pic is posting sideways for some reason.  The tubing on the left was the exposed ceiling.

Believe it or not, that was our staff "lounge."  Where we held all our meetings, got together for game nights, and had church.  Oh, and we ate there too.  Notice the open ceiling?  Sometimes during lunch, there would be construction going on in one of the upper decks, which would make the ceiling shake.  When that would happen, "stuff" would fall out of the ceiling.  Into our food.  So you can imagine why I answered "maybe" when the OB asked me if I had been exposed to lead, asbestos, or other potential toxins during my pregnancy with Rory.  :)

Most (but not all of) the ship looked as torn up as all that.  Some of it had, like, walls and stuff!  One of those places was Deck 8, which was the top "inside" deck of the ship.  Deck 9 was the actual top of the ship (in other words, Deck 8's roof was what we called Deck 9).  This was our cabin:

See the chair in the foreground?  I dubbed that the "dirty chair" and made anyone who came in our cabin with their work clothes on sit there, instead of on my pretty damask bedspread I shlepped all the way from GA.

Just to the right of the bed, was the other wall of the cabin.  That was it!  We had a tiny bathroom too.

To the right of the toilet was the shower.  When I say "to the right" I mean that the shower head was literally right next to the toilet.  So you could pretty much sit on the toilet while you showered.  For that matter, you could pretty much sit on the toilet, shower, and brush your teeth at the same time.  How convenient!

A note about showering on the ship.  To conserve energy someone on the engine room crew would turn off the boiler before going to bed every night.  Then, whoever was on fire rounds the next morning was supposed  to turn the boiler back on, so that the hot water heaters would start warming water again.  So guess what happened if the fire rounds dude/dudette slept in?  Yep, no hot water in the morning for you!  Most people were doing dirty jobs, so that didn't matter much because they wouldn't want a shower until that night anyway.  For the "lucky" few like me who did white collar work, there was many a morning when the hot water wasn't on yet when it was time to get ready for the day.

We were the only married couple on Deck 8 for a while.  Which was fine and dandy until the summer in Croatia arrived and we discovered that

Deck 8 + no air conditioning + windows that don't open + 8 inch steel plate above our ceiling = SAUNA.

All the rest of the tenants (single boys) on the hall would just open up their cabin doors, put a fan in the doorway, and then sleep in their underwear.  Chris was all for doing the same, but it would have been a little awkward for me, haha.