Pemex

Once again, it’s been a while since I last posted. Hopefully my last small series gave you a taste of my chaotic life.  I should add this disclaimer. Most of my rigs aren’t like that. Lately, I seem to have some sort of rig curse on me that causes everything I touch to fail in dramatic and unheard of ways. But that’s not normal.

Today I’m on one of those normal jobs. With the exception of some bad signal and a generator overheating causing a loss of power for entire night, we’re doing pretty good. It’s been at least a week since I lost any sleep. I thought I’d take this time of tranquility to describe for you some of my favorite people. Pemex.

One of my Pemex rigs. So pretty!

Ah Pemex. The love-hate relationship we have with our dear, (in-direct) client.  Now you should know a few things before we get started. Pemex is one of the largest oil producers in the world. Their offshore operations are supposed to be very tightly controlled and well run. I wish I could say the same for land. If I had a dollar for everytime I’ve heard “Well the logical thing to do is___ so naturally Pemex wants to ____(opposite thing)” I could retire.  Realistically, Pemex isn’t all bad. If they didn’t have at least some of their stuff together, they couldn’t make billions of dollars every year for Mexico. So, instead I’m going to focus on some of the people I encounter every day. 

The Engineer

On every Pemex rig, there’s an engineer. Generally speaking, they’re never sure what to make of me. I had one engineer who refused to speak to me for almost a week. He asked the SLB company man to relay everything to me in meetings. That was a little awkward. I’ve had other engineers request I print logs every two hours. Not that big a deal, but a lot of work for me. I’ve had other engineers who absolutely love me. They email me thank you notes after I send the logs every day and ask me what kind of wireline tools to run. They’re honest and tell us ‘well, we’re lazy, so it’ll probably be later than that.’ When my tool fails, they call my office and tell them that it wasn’t my fault and please don’t take away the pretty engineer.

Saturday

2 am comes quickly. I get up and immediately notice that David hasn’t come back and gone to bed. This is a bad sign, he was planning on going to sleep at around 12 and leaving Paula by herself for a few hours.  I come to the work trailer and sure enough, they’ve been having more problems. In the few hours I was sleeping they changed more cables and did everything they could think of. At one point they gave up and told Pemex to stop drilling and bring the tools back to surface. Lucky for us, they decided to keep drilling and the problem once again mysteriously disappeared.

I arrive in time to see the end of their hard work. We have good data and good signal. I send David to bed. They get stuck briefly, but manage to unstuck the drillstring pretty quickly. This is a good thing. Getting the drillstring stuck often means our tools get lost in the well if they can’t get unstuck.  It’s expensive, time consuming and stressful.  I’m on high alert for further signs that the well is going to cave in on itself and take our tools with it. Then I send Paula to bed.

Without problems, this is an easy job only requiring one person on shift at a time. I can sit and monitor drilling operations from my computer. Make my reports. Write. Read. Watch a movie. The last few days have not been easy. Even this morning I feel the effects of little sleep and a lot of stress weighting down my mind and my body. The generators, which we are unfortunately right next to, cause a constant roar that makes it hard to stand being in the trailer. We wear earplugs inside and have to talk with raised voices and occasional hand gestures (polite ones of course).

Friday

I wake up at 2 am Friday morning with Paula telling me it’s time to calibrate. I get dressed fast and grab the stuff from the trailer.  This calibration is for our depth tracking sensor.  Depth is really important to what we do because the tool doesn’t know what depth it’s at. It only knows what time it is. Our surface system keeps track of what time matches what depth. That way, when the tool sending information, the computer can match the time with the depth.

This means we have to keep close track of depth. Starting first with calibrating properly the sensor.  This requires two people, one at the computer and one on the rig floor. Since last time Paula was on the rig floor and I was on the computer, we switch. I go up to the floor and attach a tape measure to the top drive. The top drive is the part of the rig that moves the pipe up and down inside the derrick. When you think of a rig, you’re thinking of the derrick which reaches up 100 ft or more.

I have the driller move the top drive up and down and take the right measurements, sending them to Paula to input in the computer as I do. I get covered in mud as it drips down the pipe onto my hard hat and back.  When I’m finished the driller tells me I have mud all over my face. We start to test the tool again. I’m fully expecting it to work perfectly, but Paula comes and tells me we have no signal. We start troubleshooting. By now it’s about 3:30am. We wake up David and try everything we can think of. Eventually we get signal we are satisfied with. I’m not convinced it will work at bottom, but at this point there’s nothing left to do. We send Paula to bed since she’s been up for a long time and is obviously tired. 

In that time we’ve arrived at bottom and are preparing to turn the tools on and start collecting data. I’m not surprised when the problem is even worse.  We again start troubleshooting. It seems like every fix we try makes it better for about 10 mins and then it gets worse again.  We have our Operations Support Center (OSC) working on the problem alongside us.  Finally the Pemex engineer comes and tells us we’re going back up the hole, to the casing shoe.  There’s less risk when you’re in the casing shoe because here the hole is enclosed in steel and not likely to collapse around you. The trip up to the casing shoe is a sign of defeat. We’ve lost a lot of time and our client is not very happy with us. We’ve ordered back up parts for Villahermosa so we can try again to fix the problem when they arrive.

Thursday

Thursday starts with attending the crew change meeting. My first few meetings I went to, almost a year ago, were very intimidating. Since then I’ve mostly gotten over this, but on occasion I still get nervous going into them.  For whatever reason this is one of those meetings. Maybe it’s because the doghouse (drillers cabin on the rig floor) is very small to cram 10 men and me in or maybe it’s the bikini clad woman taped on the door.  Whatever it is, I’m not excited about this meeting. Luckily the questions are few. What flow rate do we want to test our tool with. Finally we can start.

Bottom hole assembly pick up can take hours. It used to be one of my favorite parts of my job, although why is still hard to explain.  We work hard to get to this point and once it’s all done, we get to sleep and relax for a few hours. Maybe it’s the promise of sleep. Whatever it is, it’s exciting.  As I’ve done more and more BHA pickups, the excitement has worn off, but there’s still something about controlling the floor, giving instruction to connect thousands of pounds of steel, watching it go away and hoping it all works like it’s supposed to. Maybe it’s just the control freak in me.

In this case, nothing seems to work like it’s supposed to. While standing in the work trailer, about to head up to the drilling floor, the power goes out on Paula and I.  We figure the generator ran out of diesel so we go to fill it back up again.  It quickly becomes obvious that we have no diesel.  I ask David if they filled the tank the day before and we eventually conclude that about 200L (53gals) of diesel has been stolen from our tank. Our trailer is hot, dark, and full of bugs. We have a backup power supply (UPS), but it won’t last for long and we need power to test our tools in a few short hours.  I stand on the floor while David tries to find some diesel.

Wednesday

Wednesday starts at 12:01 with us still working out where to lay our cables on the rig.  During the time it took to get the permission to start working, David comes to us and tells us that they can’t put the work trailer in the original location we thought.  This changes how we decide to rig up our sensors.  Everything connects to a box that we lay usually at the bottom of the rig.  Then we run a cable from that box to our trailer. But if the box and the trailer are further away than our cable will reach, then we have to change the location of the box. We decide it will probably work but decide to run the cable to the trailer first just in case it’s too far. 

Luckily, we have just enough cable to get to the trailer. This is a relief for us because our box location means the other cables will be very easy to lay.  If we changed the box location we would have a much more difficult time with the other cables.

During this entire time, our food has been sitting in our van without refrigeration while they work on installing the generator to our living camper.  Finally, we have power.  I immediately start unloading the van and putting all our cold stuff in the fridge and freezer.  It still feels pretty cold, so I don’t think we’ve lost any food. With that, our driver can finally make his trip back to Villahermosa after sitting and waiting for the camper and trailer to be ready. 

We also discover a slight hitch.  In a bizarre coincidence, this camper and trailer are the exact same ones that Paula and I were using at our last job.  We locked everything up and took the keys back to the office, but since they moved the trailer directly to us at this new rig, they don’t have the keys and we don’t either. They managed to break into both the camper and the trailer, but this means we can’t lock anything.  It makes us nervous, especially as we’ve already had a sensor cable go missing and we haven’t even been on the pad for 6 hours.

Tuesday

Tuesday I woke up early because a storm was coming through and a huge clap of thunder went off right over the staff house. It also rained so hard it created a 6 inch puddle that took up the entire parking lot. I got up and showered, ate breakfast (mmm leftover pasta from the night before, no ants) and took the car to the base. I breathalyzed into the base (Again, sober) and went into the office.

Once again, I ended up in the back room. I locked down my computer and went and said hi to some of my friends who came back from days off. Then I sat around for a while. I read a little, I paid bills, I talked to coworkers. When I’m at the base with no current job there’s not much for me to do. That’s not completely true, I do have some re-certifications to work on online and some new training to do, but I’ve been waiting for a nice quiet rig to work on them.

Finally, at around 2 we had stuff mostly ready to discuss my next job. They were still missing a lot of information from the client, which happens a lot, but we knew the basics.  We talked mostly about what frequency to program the tool with so that it could send me information up the hole and I would actually receive it.  Low frequencies travel further, but can get lost in the ‘noise’ the mud pumps create.  We finally came to a decision and got other critical information figured out. 

The next step is always to get PPE (personal protection equipment) from the base store. I also ordered new coveralls (yay!) and rain boots (which are two sizes too big, but better than wet feet).  We always get plenty of gloves, ear plugs, safety glasses, duct tape, electrical tape, and WD-40.  The necessities.

We packed up everything from the office and got in one of the vans we use for transport and stopped to pick up everyone’s stuff. That usually takes an hour or more. Then we shop for groceries.  Lately, all of my rigs have been ones where we cook for ourselves. I’ve gotten better at figuring out what meals are that people like to eat and what it’s possible to make on the rig. But it’s always nice when there’s someone around who actually enjoys cooking and does it well. One of our three person crew assures us he can cook rig-gourmet and so we leave the major shopping decisions up to him.

Monday

I’ve been wanting to try something a little different for a while now and I think I found a good chance to do that.  After being in Colorado for a while I’ve realized how hard it is to figure out what I actually do day-to-day. I’ve decided the only way to give a picture of that is to actually write about the day-to-day on a day-to-day basis. Of course I’m under no such delusion that I’ll actually be able to do that all the time, so we’re going to try it for a week.  Originally I wanted to start on Monday because I was in the base and figured I’d start a new job and you’d get to see all aspects of my job, at the base and in the field. Of course I was correct and thus it’s already Wednesday and I’m at the rig after being up all night and I have no internet to post. So I’m going to still start with Monday, but you probably won’t be reading this Monday. Or Tuesday. Or even Wednesday depending on when my internet gets here… So think back to Monday. Pretend its Monday.

Monday I woke up to someone slamming their door downstairs. I looked at my phone and realized I didn’t set an alarm and the car to the base was probably arriving in 5 mins.  I got ready super-fast and sure enough the car was there. They didn’t have to wait for me very long and we were on our way to the base. I breathalyzed into the base (I was sober, not a surprise at 9 am) and went into the office. 

We have a million trainees right now, and a lot of them are at the base getting ready for school or getting their training done so they can go to the rig. Because of this the engineer room was full and I went back to sit in the conference room at the back of the office with a few others. I arrived back from a job on Sunday, so in addition to my computer, I was also responsible for the two work computers we had with us on the job.  I locked up all three computers. I also introduced myself to two new trainees we (more Americans! I’m not alone anymore!) and checked in with another trainee about to take his pre-school test.

Week of the Mariachi

Have you ever been to a really tacky Mexican restaurant? Or to a really good Mexican restaurant?  If there was a live band playing (without an accordion) chances are it was a mariachi band.  Guadalajara is famous for them and believe it or not, actual real Mexicans do listen to mariachi music. They even occasionally hire mariachi bands to come play at special events. On rare occasions, somebody drinks a little too much tequila or Corona or Modelo or whatever and decides that a Tuesday night at the staff house is a special enough occasion to warrant a mariachi. Or a half mariachi because a proper mariachi is 10 or more and our mariachi was only 5, or so I’m told.

First, some background:

This is actually from a different party,
But the hat is awesome. 

This last week there must have been some strange alignment of planets because a very rare event occurred. There were about 20 engineers in from the field.  Normally, when I’m in Villahermosa I’m surprised if I see 4 or 5 of my other field engineers. For 20 engineers to be in from the field all at the same time has never happened in the (almost) year I’ve been in Villahermosa. Usually when it does happen, it’s because the rigs have been evacuated or something. This time was much less dramatic. Of our normal 15-20 rigs, only about 4 of them happened to be drilling. Which meant all of us sitting at the base on standby, waiting for a rig to need us.  Now, as you can imagine of people who work 24/7 in a demanding job, we usually blow off a lot of steam during our time in the city. We go to the movies, we play video games, we go out dancing, we drink wine, and we get together in normal clothes and try to have a kind of normal life for a few days.  However we are not normal people and attempting this occasionally creates confusion and strange situations.

My Legacy

On June 16^th, the day before Father’s Day, my grandpa passed away.  He slipped away quietly that afternoon after about three days of, for lack of a better way to say it, dying. It was fast and relatively painless yet not unexpected for those of us left behind.

I was, where I always am these days, on the rig and because I had an entire night of hard and stressful work ahead of me, my parents waited until the next day when I was on my way back to my apartment in Villahermosa to call me. I cried a little (probably confusing the driver who might never have seen someone crying to be leaving the rig) but mostly tried to process through what this meant.

I’ve always been very proud to say that my grandpa is the strongest grandpa in the world. I say this with the weight of his two world records behind me. (Bench press in the 80-84 division and another bench press in the 85-90 division). Fitness was always very important to him and he was always telling my mom that he wanted each of his children to be able to bench press their own age (much to her amusement).  The last Sunday my grandpa spent here with us was passed working out in the gym and then sunbathing afterwards. He was 94 and everything he accomplished in those 94 years leaves a legacy for his children and grandchildren. 

My grandpa made my mom who she is and she in turn made me who I am.  Without my grandpa first getting his civil engineering degree at Notre Dame I can’t say that I’m a third generation engineer. If it weren’t for my grandfather working on the Alaska Pipeline for ARCO, I couldn’t talk about how the oil industry is such a part of my family I feel like it’s in my blood.  And if it weren’t for my grandpa continually pushing me make sure I “graduate with a BS and not just a MRS” who knows what might have happened to my Mines career! 

As time began to rob my grandpa of his memory it became easier to see his priorities. He began to forget conversations events and eventually all sense of time and place. I remember visiting him and talking with him, replaying the same conversation over and over again. How’s Mines? How many women are in your program?  Do you go to the gym? It was in these conversations that I can see where my Grandpa laid his priorities.  School and education. Health. And finally family.

The best legacy left by my grandpa I think was the way he loved his family. I never for a minute doubted his love for us. I remember living in Luanda, Angola and him coming all the way over from Dallas, Texas to visit us.  Now without him around I wonder what will happen to our spread out across the country family. Will we manage to gather without him? What will he think now watching our lives and seeing what we’ve done? What would my grandfather have told me if he had full awareness of my life? Is my grandpa with my grandma watching us, finally seeing what his memory has clouded out for so many years?

In the end it’s what my grandfather left for his family that brings me comfort. That part of us that comes from him hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s still a part of my family even if he’s not here and so we will always have a piece of him.

I’d rather pay the gym than pay the doctor – J.R. Heizelman

Up/Down/Up/Down/Up/Down

Lately I've felt a little like a yo-yo. Or one who operates a yo-yo. A yo-yo-er? Now that I've confused myself I'll attempt to clarify.  Lately I've been doing a lot of BHA lay down/pick ups back to back.  What does that mean? Well...

Okay see the tubes on the right? Drill pipe. Waiting to go
in the hole and make the BHA reach bottom.

The BHA is the bottom hole assembly. It's everything from the drill bit up, from my tools, until basically the start of normal drill pipe. I'll try to keep it simple here. Basically, every time something goes wrong way down at the bottom of the hole with the bit or the motor or one of my tools, in order to look at it or change it out we have to 'trip' out of the well back to surface.  This means removing 30 m (90ft) lengths of drill pipe one at a time until we reach the part we need to change. This 'trip' can take anywhere from 3 hours to as long as 24 hours. So we don't like to do it very often.

Once we get the BHA on surface, we usually change out everything. This is called picking up/laying down BHA depending on what you're doing.  Every time the BHA comes to surface we have to take our tools out, 'dump' the data from the tool memory, then check functionality, make sure the tool will survive another 'run' into the hole and the drilling that goes with that, and then reprogram. Then we 'pick up' the tools again, test them again and trip back in the hole.  All told, this process at it's most efficient takes about 8-10 hours.  And it's completely exhausting. 

Especially with the tools I'm running here.

Spain

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So I've been meaning to post something about Spain for a while now. But I've been busy and it seems like I'm only getting busier each day. So with no relief insight, I've decided to post this lovely photobook that I made for my mom for her birthday.  Then eventually, one day, I'll get a shift/job/rig with fewer problems and have a few days to get through everything I need to do.

Dubai

Me at the top of Burj Khalifa

My parents are probably the only people that can confirm this for sure, but I’ve wanted to go to Dubai FOREVER. Or like 8 years. Same thing. One year we even had tickets to go. Then we canceled. And I was ridiculously upset. Anyway, I finally managed to fulfill my lifelong (kind of) dream of seeing Dubai. And it was cool. We were only there for a weekend but we managed to cram in quite a bit of stuff. Here’s some of the highlights, a bit scattered around and a little long but I wanted to get it up before I forgot anything else!

We arrived early evening on Thursday, having left as early as we could after class. We checked in to the three bedroom apartment we rented for the weekend. Looking out from the 10^th floor it reminded me a little bit of Las Vegas with all the lights everywhere, but with much taller buildings.  That night we had an un-remarkable dinner and then went out dancing until late. The next morning, we got up at the reasonable time of 11 am. We then walked to McDonalds for breakfast. Ya I know, but after living in the middle of nowhere for the past two months it was cool to be able to walk anywhere except to more desert.

5 New Experiences from Abu Dhabi

I know I said that I wouldn’t have exciting pictures from popular tourist destinations in the UAE but as it turns out we did manage to do some pretty fun things.  Here I present to you my list of 5 new experiences I had in Abu Dhabi (in no particular order):

     1. Ate Baby Garlic-Cow. What is baby garlic-cow?  It is the imaginary offspring of a cow and a piece of garlic. Impossible you say? Oh I beg to differ… Let me back up a little. One night we ended up at a Brazilian steakhouse.  If you’ve ever been to a Brazilian steakhouse, you know how tasty they are. If you haven’t, then go and find out for yourself. This particular place had all the usual tasty cuts of meat cooked as you like. They also had a magical type of beef. It was beer and garlic marinated beef. And it was amazing. It was tender and wonderfully full of garlic and steak flavor in perfect balance.  We named it baby garlic cow and it lives in infamy among those of us lucky enough to have been witness to its glory. And now, I will move on because I am making myself hungry.

     2. Went on a desert safari.  While a dessert safari might have been even cooler, the sandy dune filled kind of safari was pretty cool too. We left in the afternoon and met our vehicles on the side of some random road. After piling in and buckling up (it was a bunch of SLB people after all) we started out.  At first we went down a gravel road, drifting from side to side a little, no more violently or dramatically than we might at home on our road in AK.  That about as mild as it would get. We started the course as the third car. As we approached a dune, we watched the first car, then the second, drop suddenly and completely out of sight. Then it was our turn. From that point on, all bets were off. I alternately laughed hysterically and screamed for my life as we continued to drop off the front of dunes, slide sideways at angles that no vehicle should ever be at, and race around at high speeds in the giant sandbox.  We also saw a dead camel.

Our Desert Oasis

My suspicious absence from the world of blogging: Explained!

I realize I have been very suspiciously absent from here for a few months. That’s something that might happen periodically. I usually walk around thinking about things that would make good posts. Then I have plenty of downtime while on the rig and I write out my narratives.  Unfortunately, since I haven’t been on a rig for 3 months I haven’t had the same kind of pace.

I’ve been quite busy the last few months, all of which I do plan to write about. It might be piecemeal and not necessarily in chronological order as I’ll probably just write whatever I happen to be remembering most strongly at that time. 

So in case you missed it here’s a quick re-cap of what I’ve been up to for the last three months:

I spent 9 weeks in Abu Dhabi at school. The first few weeks were fun. Then school definitely got a little harder. In the end, I prevailed and received a lovely certificate and a classroom full of exciting and very intelligent people to use as references when I have no idea what I’m doing.

After my Abu Dhabi adventures I moved on to spend two weeks in Spain with my family.  It was very fun and relaxing.  We hung out at the beach, saw some very unique twists on the normal “European” tourist destinations, and ate some wonderful food. I’m pretty sure whatever pigs I was not consuming in the UAE, I made up for in Spain.

I’ll be writing about this stuff in a lot more detail shortly, I simply wanted to let everyone know how much I appreciate you being patient with me! 

The Perfect Beach

Beach with the city in the background

I haven’t gotten much of a chance to explore Abu Dhabi. As I said previously, I’m here for school first and foremost. Tourism, unfortunately, comes second.  However, I have gotten to have some fun on the weekends.

This past weekend was action packed all by itself.  On Friday (remember, weekends here are Friday and Saturday) a bunch of us dragged ourselves out of bed to go to the beach.  Abu Dhabi has a great waterfront area full of public beaches. We arrived in the main city, went to the grocery store for essentials (hummus, bread and a beach towel for me. Others were more practical with water and fruit.) then took a short taxi ride to the water front.

Thus began our extensive search for the perfect beach.  The Corniche is two kilometers long and split into gated beach areas. We were aiming for an area of beach we noticed with volleyball nets, but we found it extremely crowded and decided to go to the next gate.  At this gate there were umbrellas and chairs set out – perfect!  There was a small fee to get in, but when we went to pay it we were informed that we were not allowed in.  It took us a few minutes, but we eventually figured out that this was a family beach. Which apparently means you can only enter with an equal number of males and females. We were 2 girls and 3 guys. Not allowed in. 

Eng-1 School Intro

I arrived in Abu Dhabi for my Engineering-1 school 2 weeks ago today. Now for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll back up a little. As part of my training I am sent off to school for 9 weeks of intensive learning. I spend 9 hours a day, 5 days a week in the classroom, on the rig, or in the shop learning how to do my job. Then go home and do homework and study for the rest of the day. Now you might ask, what were the past 5 years of university for then? Basically they were to get me to the point that I can understand, absorb, and then regurgitate all this information I’m getting in a very short time.

After Mines it might not sound very hard. And really it’s not. Except that the stakes are infinitely higher. At school, studying for a test was very abstract. ‘What happens if I fail this test?’ – my class grade goes down, maybe I have to retake the course, maybe I stay an extra year at school, maybe I lose a scholarship, maybe I get yelled at by my parents, maybe I make my teacher angry etc… Here, studying for a test is very concrete.  If I fail this test, I get a warning letter from the company, my boss finds out and if I fail two tests I get two warning letters and lose my job. Not to mention, if you don’t understand what you’re doing at my work, you can lose the company hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars with one small mistake. The incentive to study is infinitely greater.

A Touchy Cough...

After my pre-school exam I was sent out to the rig for a little more than a week. I arrived just as I was starting to get a cold and rigging up in the rain then lack of sleep from switching to night shift schedule meant that I very quickly got really sick. After 5 or 6 days my crew got sick of hearing me cough and I was having trouble keeping enough energy to get through my 12 hour shifts. My coworker finally called a car to take me to see the doctor. Unfortunately it was a Saturday, so going to the doctor meant going to the emergency room. 

Now one reason I chose Villahermosa over my other Russia offer is that Villahermosa is said to have some of the best hospitals outside of Mexico City. I can now confirm that they do seem very nice. I walked in with my coveralls still on and announced that I didn’t speak much Spanish but I was sick and wanted to see a doctor.

My rig Spanish is definitely getting up to a sufficient level and I can communicate everything I need there. However, medicine was a new region of Spanish I hadn’t explored before. I saw the doctor and explained that it was hard to breathe and “No puedo dormir porque yo toque todo vez”.  Now what I thought I said was “I can’t sleep because I cough all the time”.  What I actually said was “I can’t sleep because I touch all the time”.  I’m not really sure what they thought I was trying to say.  Anyway, cough is tos and toque is touch.  Apparently easy to confuse. 

Back to Villa

I’m back in Villahermosa after more than two weeks back in the US. I had an amazing time with my family and friends. It was nice to just go back and fit again. But it was also nice to leave again. And don’t take that as a negative thing. It was hard to say goodbye again, especially not knowing when I would be back.

When I left Villahermosa I had a slight fear that I would get home and not want to leave again. I mean, what if all this time I’ve been delusional in thinking that I love my job and my life so much? It’s such an unusual life choice. What if I went back home and saw people living normal lives and coming home to their families every night and decided that I am actually completely crazy?  Well I’m back in Villa, so that should tell you something about how that turned out. I might be completely crazy, but I really do love what I’m doing.

Coming back to Villahermosa was strange. I never expected for it to feel so familiar.  To come back and start speaking Spanish again, to see my friends here and be excited (only to have them all abandon me quickly for the rig, sigh). Anyway, the point is that leaving and coming back only served to cement in my mind that I am doing what I’m supposed to. It’s hard. But somehow, life in the States now seems too easy. Where’s the challenge in doing your job in your first language? Seriously…

Since being back, I’ve studied for, taken, and passed my pre-school exam. Which means that the only thing between me and Abu Dhabi is less than two weeks and getting my airline tickets. After Abu Dhabi, I’m meeting my family in Spain for a two week vacation. I’m pretty psyched already and if you have suggestions on where to go and what to do, tell me! 

Also, I didn't put any pictures in here, but I have all my vacation pictures here! They're pretty much all pictures of snow... And a video of my dog wearing booties. 

A Change in Climate

I recently experienced a dramatic climate change. No, it's not global warming. Two weeks ago Tuesday my boss emailed me with dates for a two week vacation so I could go home. It wasn't unexpected, but I was still really excited. I immediately booked tickets.

 I was thrilled, but very busy. We were in the middle of changing out a failed tool, which basically means a lot of reports to close out an old job, then reports on the failure, then opening up for the new job and then physically changing out the tools, a process that can take about 6 hours. Wednesday morning, after being up all night working, my boss called me and asked if I'd like to go home for New Years Eve. He said I could leave the rig the next day and start my vacation Friday.

I spent the next day and a half handing over the job and dealing with the airlines. Trying to get a flight was a challenge and quite expensive. Luckily, my dad has a special talent for dealing with airlines and after I got fed up talking to them, he managed to get me a flight out.

Thursday I left the rig at 6:30 pm, getting back to my staff house at 8:30 that night. I dealt with my work computer, getting cash, arranging transport to the airport, feeding my self, and packing then went to bed for a few hours before waking up to go to the airport. I flew all day. From Villahermosa to Houston, Houston to Seattle, Seattle to Anchorage. I left my apartment at 5 am and arrived in Alaska at 9:30 that night. My parents met me at the airport with a fur coat and fur boots.