Land of Many Lands

A land of diesel fumes and gas flares
Cactus and longhorns
Beauty as unexpected as the occasional liberal
Live Oaks in the east 
Limestone mesas to the west
Big guns and bigger egos encompassing vast stretches of mesquite
Droughts so consuming they leave cactus gasping for water,
until they drown in the next monsoon
Wildflowers blooming under border patrol trucks
Derricks rise and fall beside vast roadways nearing extinction
Swim through humidity
Gasp in heat

    Texas 2012

(In) Memories

I

On the night I learned he had died I collapsed in grief; later opened the bottle of Malbec Brad brought from Argentina; turned 20 the next day.

Each birthday since, preceded by the day of his death.

I am a quarter century old. He is five years dead.

Inspired: my own world explorations began with Malbec at the source.

II

Fleeting memories stay with me:

When I was 8 you gave me a guitar; Muggy summer visits spent catching fireflies in Mason jars while you sang of sealing wax and other fancy stuff

Distance swimming in a great lake; I learned to snorkel with guppies on sandbars inspired by tall tales of sea urchins and shifting tides. Years later, snorkeling in a tropical ocean I saw my first sea urchin and was instantly transported backwards in time.

III

Grief is isolating even when it is necessary; grief is isolating

Memories inspire
even when they are painful

memory is sweet
no matter how fleeting

memory is sweet

Argentina: Visitas Uno y Dos

I spend the last three weeks of September, 2011 in Mendoza, Argentina. The well we were supposed to be working on hit an unexpected and thick igneous intrusion so most of the job was spent visiting some of Mendoza's 2,000 wineries. We also managed a day trip up to Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas at 22,841 feet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aconcagua) September is spring in Argentina and the parque was mostly still covered in snow. We did manage to hike about a 1/4 -1/2 mile and scramble up onto a large rock for great views of this majestic mountain. Not to mention that I collected some andesite from the Andes to smuggle home for my rock collection.

The Andes overwhelmed me absolutely. As you look west from Mendoza they crown the horizon, as tall as the Rockies appear, but with intermittent volcanoes like the Cascades. Subduction leads to orogeny folks. On the Argentina side the Andes are bare, at least in Mendoza Province. This is a geologist's dream, nothing in the way of the rocks! As we drove up to Aconcagua I was constantly overwhelmed, each time it seemed that the mountains could not possibly get bigger, we would round a bend and there would be a new breathtaking range of peaks. The foothills of the Andes put the mountains I have known to shame.

Coming to Argentina was my first experience traveling outside of the U.S. I don't really speak Spanish, a few years in high school and a year in college taught me just enough to get myself into trouble. I was so nervous getting off the plane, but of course trying extra hard not so show that on the outside, after all I was there for work, I needed to be professional. I was relieved to meet up with my coworkers, one of whom spoke fluent Spanish and acted as our translator. As the nerves subsided I began to take in the people and the culture. No spicy food, dinner at 10 or 11 pm, and the clubs were everyone danced till the sun came up. Oh the feeling of stumbling from the dark to find the sun already risen! Argentina stole my heart so quickly I hardly noticed it had happened at all.

Besos Secreto (Argentina Uno)
I could kiss you forever
Until my lips were blue with bruises
Until I could not find my breath and did not want to
Until Orion was no longer upside down
Only to find myself unsatisfied; longing for more
Porque mi alma conoci tu alma al instante

I dreamt of your touch
And woke with only a memory
Sticky ice cream
Sweet laughter

Tuvimos un momento bonita


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


I am back in Argentina. In theory I was supposed to pick up 900 samples in Buenos Aires and then bring them down to our lab here in Neuquen and organize and supervise as they were run. In practice the permission to access the samples (which are the property of YPF, the government run petroleum company) never materialized. Typical and awesome as I got to spend nearly a week being a tourista in Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires is easily the biggest city that I've ever been in, 13 million people. At first I was a little nervous about exploring by myself, but since it is such a big city it was easy to blend into all the people. My very dear friend had studied abroad here and sent me a wonderful long distance tour guide email. With her suggestions for places to visit I started each day by taking a taxi to one of these locations. I visited MALBA, the amazing art museum and saw a Frida Kahlo painting and many other inspiring works of art. This was my first visit to a major metropolitan art museum and I was not disappointed. All of the artists there are latin american and I noticed that so many of the paintings, sculptures and photographs contained a theme of revolution, or suppression or celebrated the working class and the oppressed. Additionally many pieces seemed to be odes to the color of life and the beauty of women. That day seemed to be a day for art, as I left the museum I wandered into the Palermo neighborhood and into a fair in a square there. I ended up buying two pieces of art at this fair, one by a man who was clearly enamored with revolution and portrayed this with wonderful comic style drawings, the other by a woman who was just as much of a romantic as myself. They both spoke enough english that combined with my poor spanish we had wonderful, inspiring conversations. The conversations were as awesome as the art.

The thing about travelling alone is that it is both freeing and isolating. You have the freedom to do whatever you want, your schedule is your own. But you eat every meal alone and without mastery of a language making friends is daunting. I really wanted to go to a disco in BA, but I was too nervous to go by myself. I got my dance on instead at La Bomba del Tiemp, a drumming concert held in a venue that was little more than an empty lot between two buildings with grafitied walls. It was fantastic; the performance becoming a  giant dance party as the sun went down and the beer lines got longer.

There was so much to see everywhere I looked in BA. I definitely walked miles and miles through that city, each day easily spending at least 4 hours just walking, wandering. There are so many little plazas and parks and neighborhoods. Even though I was always aware that I was in the center of a huge metropolis I also felt at times like I was in a town smaller than K__________. There were so many street fairs and hidden alleys that were lined with painted walls. Perhaps vibrant is the best adjective. I would love to return to Buenos Aires with a friend and explore even more.

Now I am Neuquen. There is a huge oil boom here and the town is growing, although at an Argentine pace. Less people speak english here, which is good as it is forcing me to really try and use my spanish, although I still get so tongue tied and nervous at times.

Peace out!

Pinky

The Job Where Everything Went Wrong

Turns out that in addition to being willing and able to work 12 hour shifts for weeks at a time without a day off, have the oddest sleeping schedule(s) or lack thereof, and understand Texan, this job also requires patience. Lots and lots and lots of patience.

There have been quite a few changes occurring in the wellsite department these last 2 months. The manager of wellsite operations left the company for another position and three of our lead geoscience hands left for other positions, two within the company and one for another company. After just under five months in this position I am now considered a lead hand. I am fairly certain this is due mostly to the fact that I am good at my job, and in small part to the fact that there are now 3 ½ of us that they feel confident sending on jobs with totally new people. The most exciting change that has occurred is that after several months of trying to get my dear friend and thesis research partner an interview with the company, the new manager of wellsite operations hired her over the phone on my recommendation. A compliment I am sure! She started work last week and I am so excited to have her here, as well as to have another girl in the department.

A few weeks ago I got sent back down to ….Texas, surprise, surprise! Since starting this job April 20 I have now spent 78 days in Texas. 78 days more than I ever anticipated spending here! This time I was sent down on my first job as lead hand, with a completely new guy. In the way that so many things come full circle we were sent back to Lantern Rig 12, the rig that I spent my first two Texas jobs on, my first two jobs period. If I never see another piece of the Eagleford Shale it will be far too soon!

The Eagleford is a hot oil and gas play in Texas right now. Google it if you are interested. One company man said that in a few years the entire formation will look like swiss cheese, holes poked into it everywhere. Drive east of San Antonio and/or south of Austin and it’s hard not to see a rig every few miles. Although, west Texas still takes the cake for pump jacks and rigs for miles. While driving to Ozona a few jobs ago my coworker and I gave up counting the rigs, they were so prolific that we couldn’t remember if we’d counted the ones we were passing when they were on the horizon. It seems that the Eagleford might already be getting a bit overplayed, or perhaps in this industry companies are always second guessing each other and trying to get the jump on one another. Anyway, the Eaglford is below the Austin Chalk in the stratigraphic column and the last two wells I have been on have been focusing on the bottom of the chalk and/or the top of the Eagleford. The “Chalkleford” as one roughneck put it. This means slower drilling. Ideally once the driller has “landed the curve” ie finished drilling the curve and “kicked off” ie started the lateral (horizontal) section of the well they will have the bit rotating and be drilling anywhere from 40-100ft an hour, the ROP (rate of penetration). But to stay on the dividing line between two formations requires them to drill quite a bit slower. This has meant that on the last two wells they alternate between sliding and rotating. Sliding means the bit is not rotating and they are basically forcing it through the rock, much slower than it would move were it rotating. In a way this is good for us, as it means a manageable amount of samples to clean and prep in a shift, but it also means that the well takes nearly double the amount of time to complete.

See how much I’m learning?!

Here is what I have learned pertaining directly to my job. The most important part of this job is being able to trouble shoot the SRA machine. This is a nightmare, especially since we are not really given any formal training on it; all troubleshooting skills are acquired in high stress situations. Something breaks and then you have to fix it. This is even harder because these machines are like the retarded child of R2D2 and Frankenstein; they contain (to name the most frequent problems) an FID, IR cells and an autosampler which loads crucibles. Also the software can at times (read: 98.7% of the time) feel like it was written by an overly ambitious 12 year old computer nerd with a crush on excel. It gets better. This was originally a lab machine and we put it into a pelican case, strap it down in our “mobile laboratory” (cargo trailer) and drive it all over God’s brown Texas. Once we reach our location, usually after driving down several miles of dirt roads followed by a rig road with at least 3 cattle guards made from old drilling pipe, we take the machine out of its case, hook it up to Helium, Hydrogen and CO2 free air, turn it on and hope it works. It usually doesn’t. Sometimes it can be something as simple as the FID response reading way too high, this is a relatively simple fix. Sometimes it is a voltage problem, a sometimes simple fix. Sometimes the FID won’t ignite, a gas flow problem usually the result of a leak. Sometimes it is the autosampler which simply won’t calibrate and load the crucible onto the pedestal. And sometimes nothing is going your way and you don’t even know where to begin. Such was this last job.

The new guy I was training is 47. He spent the last 7 years as the manager of a company which sold bathtubs. My old manager hired him right before he left. I’m on the fence about whether or not they should require people in the geosciences department to have technical degrees. On one hand most of what we do is fairly common sense. On the other hand there is definitely something to be said for having gotten a B.S., it changes your way of approaching and solving problems. Taking lab classes teaches you discipline and (can’t believe I’m beginning to think this is a good thing!) adherence to methodology. A passing interest in minerals and rock collecting in no way makes you a geologist! Well this new guy (referred to as NG from now on) thought he knew it all. He started off on the wrong foot by comparing me to his 21 year old daughter and as far as I’m concerned things continued to slide downhill from there. I had often worried that when it was time for me to train someone they wouldn’t respect me because I was a woman. This was made worse by NG because he is also 20 years older than me. It is hard to tell someone that much older than you what to do, especially when they already have a patronizing attitude. He simply didn’t listen to me. I remember when I had first started and I was working on this exact same rig. I cleaned samples like a madman because I knew that my coworker was setting up the complicated stuff and sending data reports twice a day. If I was told to do something I did it right away and generally worked my butt off. NG showed up over an hour late for his shift twice. We were living on site, literally 5 steps from our lab trailer. He didn’t do the simple things that I showed him, at times doubling the amount of work I had on an already overly stressful job. And he continued to patronize me all the while passively refusing to do the things that he needed to do. He complained about his sleep schedule when he was working days, a huge DON’T, in my opinion. And in general he just complained about things like missing his family, not having a routine like he used to; things that everyone deals with on their first job, but that most of us are smart enough not to vocalize. I digress. I believe you get the point.

This particular lab trailer had been outfitted with a generator on the tongue before I came down. Instead of buying a new generator we had been forced to retrofit a generator from an RV circa 1985. It was limping along when I got down there. Between jobs we took it into San Antonio to have it repaired. $1200 and an extra day later we were “good to go.” That extra day meant that we showed up on site late and were backlogged 50 samples. This is another OBM (oil based mud) job which means that cleaning samples takes about 20-30 minutes per sample. On this job we had two SRA machines and two XRDs, in theory this was to make our lives easier as we would be able to run twice the amount of samples in the same amount of time. Once we arrived on site we got all the equipment out and hooked up and then I told NG to start cleaning samples and I started trying to calibrate the SRA machines. From that moment on it seemed nothing would go right. One machine would work for a while, then the other one would do something crazy. Then I would get that one working and the other one would do something crazy. Our boss was online with me till about 1 am trying to help me figure it all out and by shift change the next morning neither machine was working. A few days later our boss flew down and spent 2 days repairing one machine and basically rebuilding the other one. When he left everything was running smoothly…for about 8 hrs. Small things started to go wrong, I was able to fix them. Then, on a night when I had just gotten everything up and running smoothly, the generator died precisely at midnight.

I’ll admit, I spent about five minutes swearing before trying to figure out what to do. We have battery backup in the trailer, but with two machines running I knew I had at best 6 hours at worst 2. I decided to play the girl card. I walked over to the company man’s trailer and told him my generator had died and asked if he had anyone who could look at it and maybe fix it. The first thing he asked was whether it had fuel. Guess that’s what I get for playing the girl card! Plus it took him three repeats before I understood what he was saying, the combination of a Texas and oilfield accent! The motorman came over, looked at it for a bit and then told me he thought it was probably dead, as it wouldn’t even turn over. Plan B. Call the boss. They tell me to rent a generator. It’s now about 1 am. I try several companies but none of them have small generators available, they have sent most of them to the east coast to help with hurricane Irene relief. I finally locate one but they won’t be able to get it to me until 8 am. I cross my fingers and hope that the batteries last. When the trailer is running on battery backup everything that is not absolutely essential to the machines running gets turned off, this means the AC is the first thing to get switched off. Even at night in Texas it is steamy and the trailer heated up quickly. I spent that long shift alternating between sweating it out for a while in the trailer and then feeling like I was freezing, sitting quietly in the dark in our living trailer. At about 5:30 a.m. the batteries began to give me the low battery warning. I quickly shut everything down and waited in the living trailer for the generator to get there. At 8:30 the generator arrived, we hooked it up and I went to bed.

The one other major inconvenience on this job was running out of standard. Standard is a little vial of crushed up rock. It has known values and we use it to calibrate the SRA machine. Every ten samples we run a crucible of standard through as a test. If the values come out within acceptable parameters the sequence keeps running, if they don’t we abort the rest of the sequence and then recalibrate. The night the generator died I had just used my last bit of standard calibrating both machines and loading the checks every ten samples in two 40 sample sequences. Having to power everything down when the batteries ran out meant that I would have to recalibrate, something I wouldn’t be able to do until more standard arrived. We received our standard at 6 p.m. that night. As I tried to recalibrate both machines neither one of them would work. Finally, at my wits end I turned one machine off and the other one magically started working. The next 48 hours everything ran smoothly. We had a break for about 36 hours as they had started losing circulation in the hole and weren’t really drilling, meaning we didn’t have any new samples to clean and run. They started drilling again as the sequence containing all our reruns and all the samples till that point was running. Finally! Something goes our way.

I got relieved on this job. I__ and I found a new house last time I was home and I had been given and promised a few days off at the beginning of the month to move. The guy who relieved me had only been on a few geoscience jobs and this was his first time ever being in charge. I was definitely nervous leaving him and NG together, but also nearing the end of my rope with this particular job. It seemed absolutely nothing had gone right. With only about 800 feet left to drill I crossed my fingers that the two of them would have smooth sailing and finish the job with no more major problems. As I sat in the airport waiting for my delayed flight I received a call from NG. It seemed that the one machine which had been running smoothly had been giving them error messages all night. I tried to troubleshoot over the phone, but I still don’t know if they ever got it running. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “so it goes.”

Peace out.

Pinky

Coffee and Cigarettes

Apparently I am not so great at being a blogger. I am constantly taking mental notes on the things that happen in my daily life and thinking "I could write a post about that" or "I should mention that in a post." But then I get 30 core chips and spend the rest of my shift giving myself a bruise on my hand grinding them up in the mortar and pestle. Or I get back to the hotel and find that all of the great ideas I had during the 45 minute drive have flown away at the site of my bed. More commonly, I sit down in the "lab" trailer to write something, and find myself with writers block. Perhaps it is caused by the nearly constant high pitched whine of the XRD, or the every 9 minutes, 6 second spurts of the air compressor turning on. It turns out the only thing I have actually written in the last month or so was a reading list for a co-worker, and even that was hard to force out.

Since my last post I have been on 2 more jobs and currently am living on site for the first time. In addition I have been home for 5 days in the last 3 months, none of them consecutively and was just in my closest college friends' wedding. This was considered my vacation, but if you've ever been in a big wedding you know that it is more stress than vacation!

I have continued to learn a ton. On my last 2 jobs before this one the client was taking core samples. This means that they were doing core runs. What this entails is drilling with a coring bit which takes core of, typically, about 3 inches in diameter. Usually core runs are done in sections of 90 feet. And in order to perform a core run the drilling bit is switched for the coring bit and the core hand takes over the driller's job for the duration of the core run. Once the run is completed the pipe is tripped out with the core and the core is then chopped into 3 foot sections. The core comes out of the ground in an aluminum tube and is capped on each end of the three foot sections with a rubber cap which is sealed using duct tape. For our analysis we take  chips off the end of the cores and grind them up to run through the machines. This is nice because instead of showing a range of 30 or 60 feet the way cuttings do, the chips pinpoint the values at an exact depth. It's not nice because they are a little harder to crush up and more tends to go wrong during a coring run than during normal drill ahead operations. On a job in Oklahoma this is exactly what happened. Everything was going smoothly, and very quickly until they got ready to start coring. Then, everything that could go wrong did. The hole started collapsing, then the began to lose circulation, so they changed the mud mixture and started adding diesel to it. Then during the first of 5 scheduled core runs of 90 feet they broke off after 7 feet. This well continued in much the same fashion. A lot of waiting, for very little. I read Anna Karenina in about 2 days.

Now, my first experience living on site. I have to say, I pretty much hate it. This well is also going very slowly, right now they are running intermediate casing, which means several days of sitting and waiting. To top it off, my coworker on this job is so awkward and boring and messy! He hasn't done a single dish since I've been here! (5 days and counting!) I may not do my dishes right away at home, but in a small trailer with a small shared space I do them immediately. This is the first time that I have actively disliked my coworker. Even on other jobs when they may have been someone I did not see eye to eye with politically or religiously, I have always found common ground and grown to genuinely like and enjoy each person I have previously worked with. Not so on this job! I realize now how important it is, especially when living with someone, to have someone you can talk with and enjoy passing time with.

So I have been passing the last few days writing, finally. Perhaps it is the ultimate boredom of being stuck out here in central Texas with no one to talk to. But the block is slowly melting away. Literally as it is 105+ everyday!

Peace out!

Pinky

Culture Shock 101: New Orleans: The Big Easy/The Dirty, Dirty

Friday afternoon, after asking our boss if we could do something fun over the long Memorial Day weekend we took off for New Orleans! My coworker grew up on the West Bank so we got to stay with his family and I got to experience the city with someone who knows it! I honestly never thought that I would ever go to New Orleans, as I told people all weekend it is the farthest south I have ever been. I’ve driven around the western half of the country quite a bit. Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, California and South Dakota are places I’ve passed through, if not the destination themselves, at some time in the past 6 years of my life. What I noticed on all of those journeys is that some states blend into each other and if not for the Welcome sign you would not know that you had entered another state. (Western Montana and Eastern Idaho on I-90) Some state borders appear to be arbitrary lines drawn on a map by politicians. (Eastern Wyoming and Western South Dakota) Some borders are defined by topography or large geographical features. (Southern Washington and Northern Oregon are split by the majestic Columbia River) As we drove east from Houston on I-10 I wondered what the border between Louisiana and Texas would be like. I’d heard that Louisiana was often referred to as the swamplands, and I had not seen any evidence of swamplands in Texas. Sure enough, the border between these two states is in an actual swamp, and the change in climate and scenery only gets more defined from there.

Long stretches of I-10 are actually a suspended highway over swampy areas. And this spring the swamps are more like lakes due to the flooding of the Mississippi and the spillways which have been opened. For a fun and informative look at the spillway situation check out: http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/05/08/michael-bays-scenario/. We crossed the Atchafalaya River and saw it surging near the top of the levees and surrounded by a lake with trees partially submerged, according to the GPS we were driving over dry ground, according to our eyes it was a definite lake! Outside of New Orleans, is the Bonnet Carre Spillway. When opened this spillway lets floodwaters into Lake Pontchartrain. We drove over this spillway and the gates were wide open. Water was surging into Lake Pontchartrain! You could whitewater raft on it, literally. It was quite the site to see the muddy floodwaters gushing into the blue waters of the lake. An historic site that I got to witness!

Once we arrived in New Orleans on Friday night we attended Greek Fest followed by a trip to a local gay bar to meet some of my coworker’s friends. My drink (whiskey ginger ale) was all whiskey with a dash of ginger. After buying 2 of them my tab was only 7 dollars and I was drunk. I went outside to answer I__’s phone call and naturally left my drink inside. When I came back in everyone laughed and told me I should have taken my drink with me, because, news to me, it’s ok to just drink all the time anytime, anywhere in New Orleans. In Washington and Colorado where I’ve done most of my bar drinking it is absolutely not ok to bring your drink outside unless there is a designated, fenced patio. And it is also not ok to smoke inside. In New Orleans neither of these applies. Culture shock. We crossed the Mississippi that night on the Crescent Connection Bridge over to the West Bank, which is really the East side of the River from downtown. Culture shock (and confusion).

Saturday we went to a Crawfish boil at a friend of my coworker’s father’s house. This was so much better than the festival we went to in Texas, much more intimate and you served yourself as much crawfish as you could eat with all the potatoes, corn, mushrooms, onions and garlic you wanted. You grab a big tray and a scoop and fill up your tray with deliciousness and then start tearing the heads off the crawfish. So spicy and delicious! My coworker ate 3 trays in the time it took me to finish one, what can I say, I’m still learning! Culture shock.

Driving back to the West bank we passed houses that had been destroyed by Katrina. Some of them have large X’s spray painted on the sides, apparently this means that there were dead bodies inside those houses. It is clear that some areas have been rebuilt, while others seem to have just been abandoned. My coworker and his sister explain what housing projects used to be where newly constructed apartments and houses stand. Some houses have recently been raised and in a few places if you look really closely you can still see waterlines. In some neighborhoods the water was 10-14 feet high, in others it barely flooded at all. It was mind boggling to realize how damaged the city was by Katrina, especially being a “northerner”, it was impossible for me to imagine what was happening when hearing about it on the news, and even after seeing the destruction 5 years later, it is still nearly impossible to imagine. Culture shock, in so many ways.

From the West Bank we took the free ferry across the River to the French Quarter. We wandered through the French Market and various streets. It is so humid in New Orleans! I felt as though I was breathing underwater and even my lightweight sundress stuck to me. Definitely the most humid place I had ever been! After dinner at Port of Call, a burger place where instead of fries you get a baked potato with your fresh delicious burger, we wandered down Bourbon Street. Bourbon St has to be seen to be believed. The street is blocked off so no cars drive down it at night and people wander in and out of neon signed bars, drinks in hand. As the night progresses the wander transitions to stumbling for some. We meet up with some more of my coworker’s friends and head to a dance club, Mimi’s. The beer is good and the dj plays groovy funk. Upstairs everyone is dancing and sweating. If you want to dance you must switch to water, it is simply too hot to imagine drinking anything else. People in the south get down! No one cares about what their neighbor is doing, they are there to get their groove on and it is refreshing and invigorating to be dancing in this environment. I could have stayed all night. It was already 4 am. We ended the night with “breakfast” at an Italian café that was still open. I think that while in Colorado last call is often at 1:35 even though closing is at 2, in New Orleans there is no last call. Beautiful culture shock.

Monday we went to a Hash BBQ. From what I understand these are running clubs and they are all over the country/world. But in New Orleans they are also drinking clubs. Everyone arrives midafternoon and drinks beer from two kegs set up in City Park and eats food grilled there on grills people have brought with them. The park is beautiful, huge Live Oaks with their arms draped in moss stretch over walkways and shade us from the burning sun. At about 6 when everyone is good and buzzed the running part starts. You follow a trail created by one of the members made out of circles of flour. I did the walking version since I was wearing sandals. After the run, every one forms a circle and sings raunchy songs and drinks beer. Groups are called into the center of the circle; I was called in with the “Virgins” since this was my first hash. Others were called in for being absent for a long time, for talking, for being visitors, for…you name it. Now my home hash will always be New Orleans. I can’t wait to find a hash club in Colorado and enter the circle as a visitor! Culture shock.

Now I’m back here in Nixon, TX. Back on night shift. Back to analyzing the Eagle Ford Shale. The moon is a sliver and the sky is still just a little orange on the horizon. I realized the other day that this is the longest I have ever inhabited a place where there were not mountains on one horizon or the other. It’s starting to feel a little strange. I’m soaking up the south. The dirty, dirty south, the vibrant, sticky south. Often these days as I traipse from strange place to unexpected beauty and dancing I’m reminded of my conversation at Vantage, WA with Harry. I still stand by the conclusion we reached that night in 2006. I love America because nowhere else can you experience, with ease, the diversity of people and place and love that I continually find in this country. I’ll probably end up saying “y’all” instead of “you guys” one of these days. Yeehaw!

Peace out!

Pinky

 Crawfish Boil!

 Mighty Mississippi, only about 1 foot from the top of the Levees! Those trees are normally on dry land!

 On the ferry leaving the West Bank with downtown New Orleans in the background!

Bourbon Street!

Houston: The hot, sticky, yucky

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.