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01/02/05 |
     
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9/4/04 Omar, Armonda, and I are "celebrities" in Chinook. 9/6/04 Labor day off right? 9/7/04 My first hail storm! 9/9/04 Bethany's big news! 9/10/04 Winnifred, FSU, my longest job to date 9/12/04 Leaving Chinook 9/14/04 Survivor meets Mutual of Omaha 9/18/04 UF vs UT, and Jenny's pics! 9/22/04 Pat, the most sarcastic (and fun!) woman in hotel service Jenny Zichi Be careful what you ask for... 9/23/04 Congrats Armando! 9/25/04 Random friends in Williston 9/30/04 My last week in Williston
Omar, Armando, and I had tonight free so we ventured into one of the two local bars here in Chinook. I feel like a celebrity being around Omar, because so many people recognize him and say “Hey Omar” anywhere we go in this town. Well we instantly had conversations with the locals, who bought us drinks, just to hear where we were from. We also saw LSU win in a great overtime game, though it was scary that it took a couple bad kicks from visiting Oregon State to secure the victory.
I celebrated my labor day by working two jobs in a row, starting Monday morning at midnight, and getting back to the shop around 8:00 pm.
Today I worked at a rig ½ mile from Canada. During the day it started to rain, and a drop hit my lip – hard. I looked up and saw hail bouncing off the helmets of the roughnecks. My first hailstorm. It only lasted 15 minutes, but the realization that it was barely Sept and hailing at noon soon sunk in. After the job, the company man, who also was part owner in the drilling company, bought us dinner. John Finstald or something similar was his name.
I found out that a good friend of mine, Bethany Sedik, met her biological parents for the first time. That’s crazy, I can’t even begin to process the emotions involved, but it defiantly is big news, and I wanted to say congratulations (is that the appropriate response?) to her!
Today there was supposed to be a job at 3:00 pm. Well, it’s 1:00 am, and we still haven’t started yet. To kill some time, we drove to the nearest city, Winifred, and went to the only café/bar in town. Again we were instant celebrities to the locals, including the bar owner who was real friendly and played 6 games of pool with us. We were invited to write our names up on the wall, and I chose a spot next to a “Boone Preston”. This was my 2nd “Boone” encounter since I moved up here 3 weeks ago. I lived my life in the 5th most populated state in the country and never met another Boone. I also saw Chris Rix, the quarterback for FSU set a collegiate record to be the first qb to lose 5 games to the same team. Miami won in overtime, gosh that made me happy! For those of you who don’t know, I’m a huge UF fan, but grew up loving Miami as well because they would consistently beat FSU…well the tradition continues! By the time I got back to the shop, it was 43 hours after I left. During that time I worked on 2 different wells, about 200 miles apart. I only slept 2 hours during that time, and had 1 "meal" (the dinner at the tavern in Winnifred), the other 8 or 9 meals that I "missed", I either went without food, or had some combos from Exxon.
Well, I’m returning to Williston (will be there around 1:00 am), after a 12 day stay in Chinook Montana. We did 10 jobs during that time. I slept in my hotel room only 4 nights during that stint. On the upside I feel a lot more comfortable around the wellsite.
Matt Bowser would be proud: Back doing deep well (around 10,000 feet) oil rigs near Williston. I’m in the badlands right now, which is hard to describe, but a smaller, greener Grand canyon would be the closest description that I could give. The hills are all “cut away” so that you can see their strata. While we were logging down the well, aka, time for me to entertain myself, I took a walk around. I noticed a ton of funnel web spiders. There was also a lot of grasshoppers. I decided to play “Survival of the Fittest” and put a grasshopper at the mouth of the spider’s web. I chose not to ponder the greater implications of me playing god and interfering with the food chain, but instead focused on the potential of a new syndicated series: Boone Baxter, North Dakota Grasshopper Hunter. I already have the accent for the show. The fact that the last similar adventure I had (last Thanksgiving) I cornered a snake only to discover it was an albino rattlesnake. I still caught it and drove to the nearest woods and released it there. Matt Bowser is a close friend who now lives in Alaska. He majored in Entomology, and we always have good “animal talks”. And to answer the unasked question – yes, I stopped maturing at age 11.
UF vs UT game!!! Out of all collegiate teams my most favorite is UF, and my least favorite is UT. My sister went to Tenn, so I've been able to see every UF/UT game live since 1998, so it was a little nostalgic missing the game this year. To make myself feel more like being at UF, I dressed up in full gator game and went to a local sports bar here in Williston. Besides the fact that I had to ask them to change the channel to watch the UF game, it was a good experience :) Until the end that is! I don't like harping on ref's calls, and that was an amazing kick to win it, but that 15 yard personal foul penalty when we punted the ball away was ridiculous and greatly affected the outcome of the game! The ref was staring at the two players, how you gonna call that on UF? At the very least it should be either a no-call or offsetting penalties, *or* a personal foul on the UT player which would have given us a first down!! Such is life, eh? Also, a good friend of mine, Jenny Zichi is in China teaching English at a Christian School! How exciting is that? Anyway, she put an online photo album of her adventures over there. There's also a link in the photo gallery.
Pat, the night clerk here at the El Rancho Motel (my place of residence in Williston) continues to give me a hard time whenever she sees me. Today, when I received my digital camera in the mail, she said, “Had I known this was for you, I would have sent it back.” After that comment, I politely observed that she must have had a very large family to visit this hotel and give her all the compliment cards that litter the front desk. She’s great J I also got my parachuting pictures developed (click on my pictures to see them). They were from early August when I took my sister skydiving to celebrate her graduating high school. She’s now attending Sante Fe Community College in Gainesville – the best town in the world! This week I’m not supposed to go on any jobs in lieu of studying for my PEPTEC test. I need a score of 75% or higher to continue my employment and go to Scotland for my training. The test is 9/29/04, I feel confident that I can pass.
Jenny Zichi, my good friend who is in China right now, was a little perturbed that she did not get an entry entirely by herself. So I decided to give her one.
Day 37. Thursday – for whatever that’s worth. Time has lost its meaning for me, since August 7th, my last day that I did not report to work. Armando “broke out” today – which means that he starts the much sought after “rotating schedule” where you work 12 days on, then 6 days off. My time will soon come (early February most likely). It has to. In other news the new crew of Halliburton guys came into the motel today. They’re taking over, it seems like there’s a new 6 trucks every two weeks up here.
Well I just got off of tech support with dell – trying to fix my laptop, no headway. Oh well. Today during lunch I went back to my room to pick up some things and there was about 35 retired women on a women’s retreat from a nearby city of Wolf Point, MT. They needed a person to click the picture and I obliged. They could instantly tell I wasn’t from around here, and asked where I was from, I yelled back, “Jacksonville!” I heard random “oohs and ahhhs” from the crown which looked bewildered. Finally one brave lady ventured, “Where’s that at?” I replied, “Florida!” And they actually applauded in their enthusiastic recognition. They clapped for me, because I was from Florida….it was humorous J In a similar event at lunch I started a conversation with one of the serving lady’s while she was restocking the “steak tips over rice” at the buffet line. She asked where I was from as well, but she grew up in North Miami. I instantly asked what brought her up here. “Oilfield” she said. I told her my story, which probably sounds familiar to her. She is about the 5th or 6th person that I’ve talked to that is from far away, moved to ND for the oilfield, and I assume had to find other work in the down cycle of the business (which I know will be coming up for me once gas prices drop). I also added some pictures of my office and nearby views on my pictures page. Armando even made it!
Well this week has been tiring. I took, and passed, my test that allows me to go to Scotland. I also found out that they cut off the last few of my days there, so I’ll have from the 22nd to the 28th of December “free” in the British Isles. Richard Dubay’s very cool roommate Steve, who is from Wales, has invited me to their house for Christmas, which I hope I can make. Then I plan on coming back to the Sunshine state (a.k.a. hurricane alley) for about 4 days before I head back “home” to North Dakota. I’ll be in Jax for new year’s eve, and so will a lot of other of my friends – it’ll be cool to catch up with everyone and hang out. Too bad Owen doesn’t live at his beach house anymore. So anyone in Jax on new year’s something’s going down! (as always I guess.) Every day another person asks me, “so are you new to town”…It’s crazy how much a younger person stands out up here. There are a lot of high school age kids down, and a lot of 30 year olds and up, but we mid-twenties are something of an anomaly up here. A cool family from the church that I’ve been going to (Boone is the husband’s name) took me out to lunch, and have already talked about me to their 3 daughters, the youngest of which is also 25. All three have moved away, and Boone and his wife told them, “See, there are young people moving here!” The only other interesting news besides the fact that tomorrow’s high will be in the 40s, is that I’m about 70 pages into Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. This last fall I read Crime and Punishment, which was an amazing book, so I’m trying this one. So far it’s great, not nearly as “dark” or as realistic as Crime and Punishment, but the author has an amazing way with words, and the characters are very unique and interesting. For example, do you know that feeling when you are upset over something, but you don’t want consolation, indeed you want to be upset, and that sometimes ironically helps things? Here’s how Dostoevsky puts it when describing a woman who just buried her son who was 2 months shy of his third year: Lamentations ease the heart only by staining and exacerbating it more and more. Such grief does not even want consolation; it is nourished by the sense of its unquenchableness. Lamentations are simply the need to constantly irate the wound. Those sentences describe a feeling/emotion/belief that I always knew existed, but never had the words to express. The book so far is full of such examples. It’s also a neat way with connecting to the common human spirit…ok enough book crap…. Oh, and almost for sure I will be getting my first days off this weekend before my trip to Scotland. One of the days will be spent preparing/packing, but Saturday I plan on visiting Teddy Roosevelt National Park – the most northern part of the badlands. I’ll defiantly put up some pictures when I get back.
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This site was last updated 10/02/04