Oh yeah, and it was 104 degrees at 6pm today

My first 10.5 months in the oilfield saw me on nothing but land-based rigs. My next 5 months saw me entirely offshore. Now I'm finally back on a land rig, except that it's not really a land rig. It's a test facility run by my company to test out new technologies while drilling before they get marketed to clients.

So in other words, the tools don't work very well yet. In the week that we've been here, we have only been drilling for about 15 hours so far. There were significant delays in the beginning when the experimental tool was stuck in customs longer than expected. Then when we finally got to drilling, the test engineers started to see something they didn't like after about six hours, so they pulled out and spent the next day fixing it. Then we went back to drilling and the same thing happened six hours after that.

The tool was then sent to Oklahoma City and has spent the past 3 days being worked on in the shop there. We've been drilling now for about two hours, and we'll see how long it lasts this time.

I've been staying in a hotel my entire time here, so I've been quite comfortable. It's lucky there's a pool and a gym, because there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO in a one-hour driving radius of where I'm staying. Actually, scratch that. There is a museum in town which was built inside the old jailhouse. I have yet to visit it, though, because it's only open 8am-12pm five days a week, and I am invariably asleep during that time.

Maybe one day I'll stay up late enough to see the museum when it first opens. In the meantime, I'll try to maintain as high a vegetable-intake as possible. Mexican food seems the diet of choice around here, so the main vegetable options available are the condiment-based ones. One cannot live on chips and salsa alone! (No matter how much practice I have doing just that)

Everything's bigger in Texas... except...

The Vegetables.

My first day on the rig out here, the tools hadn't arrived yet so a bunch of us all headed out to "Big Bob's Steakhouse", a highly touted restaurant in town. We drive through what looks like a dead end industrial park, and finally find the restaurant at the dead end. It looked like it had been built into an old corrugated steel warehouse ... or maybe it was always that way.

The restaurant offered ever steak in two sizes: Mens' size (16 oz) and Ladies' size (12 oz). I ordered a shrimp & scallops dinner, which came with a salad. One of the other engineers with me decided to skip his salad, and when no one else seemed inclined to want it, the waiter offered to double the size of my salad; yay!

When the salads arrived, the waiter came from behind me and placed my salad first. One of my dinner companions looked at it and said "Wow, that's big!" which caused me to look down and laugh, for i could only assume he was joking. But sure enough! The rest of the salads were served (swimming in dressing, which made me glad I had asked for oil & vinegar), and were precisely half the size of mine.

Ha!