Can't Wait.

Guess who's not going to get any sleep tonight? Fabulous. Can't wait. Good times. I've only been up since 5am...

And three's a crowd.

Let's just say the past day or so has been very frustrating...

Glacial, baby.

So normally when you drill a well you drill through all the surface sediments and down into bedrock, where you'll place your surface casing. Then you'll drill out the main hole with a smaller bit size.

To change things up a bit, they wanted to core part of the surface glacial till, and our first attempt failed. After they got the bit out of the hole, we figured out why. You'll get boulders and such in the glacial till pretty often, and our bit ran into one that was the perfect size to plug it up...

Requests fulfilled.

Possibly my one and only reader asked for more pictures. A friend recently asked for pictures of my 'interior shots of my personal dwelling'. So I took a few for him, and have them on hand to share now. So my home is one half of a shack that sits maybe 20 yards from the rig. And this is what it mostly looks like inside. Small, but fully functional. And easily able to be picked up by a truck and moved to a new location every few days.

Guide to Canadian Slang, pt. 1

Gong show. One of my favorite Canadian terms. Basically describes what going on at work right now, but what's new?

Blarg.

So. Awhile since the last post here and even longer since I had anything of substance to say. Last night - all night - was my first day of real work this winter - I've done a fair amount of sitting around waiting for work up until now.

Didn't go great. Not badly. But not great. If we drill too deep, there's a $50k fine, and one thing I'm out here to do is to prevent that. So when I see signs that it's time to stop, I stop. Better safe than sorry, y'know. But sometimes geology is complicated and not helpful, and it was last night.

So I saw my indications that it was time to stop drilling even though in my heart I didn't think it really was. But better safe than sorry. So it would've been nice to drill a few meters deeper, but no real harm done that we didn't. And I would make the same decision again based on what I was seeing.

But it costs a lot of money to drill these holes, and I'd like to be making perfect decisions. But I did the right thing stopping when I did, and I'm not second guessing myself. And I'm standing by my actions. I just wish I could make perfect decisions all the time and not have information out there that indicates I should do something when ideally I wouldn't.

That and I didn't sleep all night; got a few hours earlier this morning, but I'm still not feeling too hot right now. I'll have time in the next few days to catch up.

That and my communications out here have been awful. Usually the satellite internet is great, but I think there are way more rigs out working right now than they'd planned on, and conswquently there's nowhere near enough bandwidth. It's been painful. Worse than the worst dial-up connection you can remember. Hopefully will improve in the next few weeks, but we'll see.

Good luck with the move.

No real topic.

But I figure I should write something. In a hotel. Was in Calgary over the weekend but then sent back out into the field today. Long day of driving, and a few more hours tomorrow and I'll be out at my site for the winter. Rig will move in tomorrow as well.

My father reports that aside from the remaining water in my toilet bowl having frozen that the house is fine, if cold.

Got the last of my grades from this past semester posted today. Good semester. One class wasn't ideal, but overall I'm satisfied, and I'm happy to have many months off before going back.

What I do at work.

One of my few (I'm not really going to tell friends about this blog despite S-H's urging) readers asked about my job.

So. Here are some things I do:

a) I look at (and describe) a lot of dirt through a microscope.
b) I am 'the eyes in the field' for the geologists back in the city.
c) I communicate between the very different worlds of office guys and field roughnecks - there's some skill in being able to communicate and translate between these different worlds.
d) I oversee coring and wireline logging operations - I make sure cores get marked up correctly and that idiot Canadian oilfield men don't mess things up, because cores lose meaning if you don't know what depth they've come from.

And other stuff.

My winter projects are nice, though, because I don't really have that much to do. Often I'll only do something like three or four hours of work every three days. I may have slightly more to do this winter, but it should still be pretty relaxed. So I have time to myself to do all the things I mentioned in the first post. Which is nice.

It's a pretty good gig, all around.

Annoyances.

So. I finally realized that I had comments to moderate. A few days late. Sorry about that. I probably can set it up so I get emailed when that happens. I'll look into it.

So I've been around Calgary the last few days, and a few things have been mildly irritating.

1) Last night. I went to get a new cell phone. Back in the day when I used to spend more time in Canada than I do now I used a *totally* old-school analog bag phone. Imagine the very first car phones in a leather carrying sack. Huge. But analog service had better coverage than digital. For when you were in the boondocks and not a city. But they finally got rid of the analog service which means every place that needs to be - even remote ones - are supposed to be pretty well covered by digital.

So since I'm only going to be here a few months I went with a pay-as-you-go phone, the sort of thing I used to have when I lived in England. Anyway. I bought it in the store, no problem, and I had no problem paying with my Canadian credit card with a US billing address.

Brought it home to activate and - trouble. Got on the phone with the company and had a really nice gal help me through with a whole host of problems that probably don't happen to most people. Then came my ability to recharge my credit. As I'll be in the middle of nowhere I can't just get a top-up card at a 7-11 and need to be able to do it online. So I tried to pre-approve my credit card. Which didn't work because Canadian credit cards with US billing addresses are confusing to computers - I got rejected with two different cards trying both on the phone and on the internet.

So. I had this guy fill out a form on his end to do a manual credit check. And there was some computer error for the phone guy. And he starts telling me how I need to talk to my band - this is after I'd been on the phone with them for something like an hour and a half. And that made no sense and pissed me off - I mean, the phone company is having an issue filling out a phone company form - me talking to AmEx isn't going to help anyone.

So I spoke to a manager who realized that the employee was speaking foolishness and he filled out the form again and finally got it submitted. So hopefully in a few days my card will be approved for use so that I can recharge my pay-as-you-go credit.

2) So the site I'm working at this winter is remote. And as such, there aren't any normal gas stations to go to to fill up. There's a cardlock run by some company, and I need to get a card to be able to get gas there. So a few weeks ago, while I was still in the US, I spoke to this guy and he emailed me some forms and asked me to email them back, filling them out as completely as possible. Which I did promptly.

I get home from taking my last safety class today and have a voicemail from this company - I call them and it turns out that emailing the forms back wasn't sufficient and that they need a signature to run this credit check.

Right. If they had told me this weeks ago, I would've mailed it to them. He told me just to email it back. Which I did. So I start rushing around - like an hour ago - to find a fax machine and fax in this one form. But their fax machine isn't picking up. So I scanned it and emailed it. And I better be able to pick up my card in two days like I need to.

But the point is a) that he specifically told me I could email it, and b) if I couldn't email it and they needed a signature, they should have told me this weeks ago after receiving my paperwork.

Both issues are hopefully resolved, or will be soon. But they taken up loads of time dealing with the past two days and both things should be non-issues.

But it's nothing like getting one's house robbed, so no big deal in the long run.

Well.

So I suppose I've capitulated. That and it's 6.16am in a hotel room in Great Falls, MT and I don't really need to be on the road for a few hours yet, so why not.

Admittedly, the information flow has been fairly asymmetric, and there has been curiosity expressed about the A commenter. Not that it'll all be alleviated here, but I suppose I'll leave open the possibility. It could be fun.

At any rate, here go secrets, spilling one by one. I occasionally work as an oil geologist in Canada. Out on the rig with the Canadian roughnecks and whathaveyou. I came up and worked for ten days last January, but in general haven't done it in about a year and a half now because of other things going on in my life. But I'm heading up for a few months and am pretty excited about it. Freezing cold temps and Canadian roughneck guys who cuss a lot out in the middle of nowhere. It isn't the perfect job for a lot of people, but surprisingly it's sort of the perfect job for me.

I actually end up having a fair bit of free time in my winter projects, so I'll get to read and knit and snowshoe and do other projects unrelated to the immediate work. I usually have a lot of free time. It's a great job.

So by this afternoon I'll be in Calgary if they let me across the border and give me a new work permit. And I'll be having dinner and staying with SM, who may or may not be friendly with E. And after a few days in Calgary I'll head out to the middle of nowhere for the winter, and home will be a shack next to a drilling rig.

I've always sort of been a letter writer, but don't think I have too much of that on the agenda for this winter, so maybe the 'You win' blog will take the place of that.

So how's that for an information overload from your anonymous commenter?