This blog was not intended to be so sporadic, but I will address the reason for this overdue post later.
We finished running (analyzing) samples on my third job about 2 weeks ago. After working a full 12 hour shift babysitting the retarded robot with cat naps in between samples, we packed up the instruments, emptied the buckets and prepared the trailer to move to Houston for a few days. We have a lab in Houston and needed a secure place to park the trailer and a shop with tools we could use to perform a few modifications. The most exciting new feature, a second rooftop air conditioner!! It is so hot down here that often around 5 o’clock each afternoon the machines get extra finicky because of the heat. With our 2 AC’s we hope to remain cool as cucumbers. This post is mainly about my experiences the past 10 days in Houston/New Orleans. The New Orleans days will be added in tomorrows post.
Houston is a disgusting, overly freewayed example of urban sprawl and the boom and bust of the oilfield culture that permeates Texas. I could never get offered enough money or career advancement to EVER live there. Good to know I suppose. We arrived there on a Thursday afternoon, talked shop with some folks at the lab and then I ate and went to sleep. I don’t mind working nights at all, but the transition between sleeping during the day or during the night is always rough. After working on the trailer all day Friday we spend Saturday at a crawfish boil in Spring. I had never eaten crawfish before this, which shocked many of my companions. They are delicious! A crawfish boil is performed by dumping a bunch of crawfish, potatoes, corn, garlic, mushrooms, onions and sausage with Cajun spices into a giant vat of boiling water. The crawfish are alive (just like lobsters) and they turn red when they are done. To eat them you pull off the head and eat the tail. Some folks “suck the head” to get out the juices found there. I did once, just to say I did, but overall I found the eating to be much more my style than the sucking. Sunday was spent relaxing and Monday was spent doing more trailer work and talking to the IT department to get my computer working. Success!
Monday afternoon/evening we went to meet my coworker’s college friend for dinner and beer at a pub located in a shopping center near the lab. While eating our truck was broken into and robbed. They took everything of my coworker’s except his work laptop, and everything of mine except my clothes. For him this included: personal computer, mp3 players, camera, headlamp, and many other pieces of gear and clothing. For me it included: my iPod, camera, headlamp, phone charger, glasses, library books and, most importantly, MY JOURNAL. I would gladly give the thieves my electronics if they would only return my journal. We called the police who arrived promptly, only to inform us that this happens often in the area we were in and that we would probably never see our possessions again. We tried the next day to search dumpsters in the area, hoping they would have thrown away items that could not be pawned. No luck, we weren’t able to locate any outside trash cans at all! A moment here to lament the loss of my journal: It was journal number 5. I started journaling freshman year of high school and since then I have filled 4 and ½ college ruled notebooks, front and back, with my thoughts, poems and big life events. The one that was stolen covered the time period from just after college graduation till now, about 2 years exactly. It contained my falling in love with I__ and my “breakup” with H____. It had poems and letters from various people tucked into its back pages that I will never get again. It had my still in progress list of 100 books I feel everyone should read which I was in the process of annotating. Losing it was like losing a friend. So it goes.
Getting robbed sucks. The worst part about it is knowing that the things you value the most are the things that a thief will just throw away, a good back pack, library books, a journal, headlamps, glasses. I guess I learned to always take the irreplaceable things inside with me all the time. That is the reason I haven’t updated this sooner. There have been tons of experiences, but no computer to blog with. Now that I’m back on site and back in the trailer I will start updating more regularly. Tomorrow or a few days from then: New Orleans.
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