Merry Christmas!

I was enjoying the crazy tinsel garlands so much that I decided to grab a few more.



This red garland had sparkly green holly leaves coming off of it, so I was very happy about that!


The directional driller called his daughter to wish her a Merry Christmas.
It was a very blue Christmas! (My company's color is blue).


A blue view.

A few thoughts on Christmas Eve

At four o'clock in the morning on the day I came to this rig I entered a 24-hour CVS to grab some snacks for the four-hour ride to the heliport. While there I made an impulse buy in purchasing a strand of plastic tinsel-ated garland with foil snowflakes to decorate my offshore workspace with, for I knew with a gloomy sort of certainty that I would be working on Christmas, so goshdarnitall if I wasn't going to celebrate.

That strand of silver tinsel snowflakes now sits hangs off the bottom edge of our supply cabinets, just at the top of my range of vision when I stare at my laptop screen to type this. It has been added to by a pair of red and green tinsel garlands we gleaned from the shipment of Christmas decorations sent to the rig along with the regular grocery delivery.

So we are beset on all sides by lengths of mercilessly garish plastic. The most heinous of all petroleum products, these tinsel garlands are a fitting celebration for a Christmas on an oil rig. The silver one I purchased is small and dainty, barely offensive if given no more than a cursory glance, but the red and green garlands absconded from the rig supplies are wrist-thick swags of fake pine needles; a raccoon's tail drapery of hideousness.

And yet these glaring shades give me a sense of joy, a pure feeling resonating from whatever sense memories recall my happiest holiday moments -- which are alas too few and far between the times when I spent Christmas a whining and moping brat-- giving me a giddiness one might not expect for someone which such a dreary holiday prospect.

This is a good thing to offset the difficulties of the past week. I finally got enough sleep last night, but woke up just in time to spend the next four hours outside in the rain (and wind so hard it was blowing the rain straight down my ear canals) preparing for our next bit run. After all the equipment failures we had (two computers, one peripheral device, and a danged tape measure!) I'm working with the bare minimum to run my job and the weather is too rough (again, the wind) for the helicopter carrying the replacements to make it out here.

But writing this is putting Christmas carols in my head. So God rest ye, merry gentlemen, for I have some oil to drill for and some tunes to sing.

1 Year

Today marks exactly one year from the day I started working in this company, and it's been one doozy of a year.

I remember leaving Boston and flying to Houston the day before. I was excited to be starting my new job, but inexpressibly sad at what was the inevitable end of the recent era in my life. I remember arriving at the hotel in Houston the night before orientation began, unpacking my suitcases, and ordering Greek food for dinner. As I waited for my food to arrive, I sat down on the sofa and curled up in a ball and stared into space. I was terrified. I was finally out on my own, and I was more scared than I could ever remember being. But after a few self-indulgent minutes in the fetal position, I gave myself a mental shake and pep talk. One day at a time. I can handle it.

It's now been 366 days (it was a leap year!), and I've come a long way. I'm still scared a lot of the time because this job likes to throw a lot of curve balls my way, but at least I now know what to expect. Let's revisit a few of the highlights from my year:

For work was sent to 3 states I had never been to before, bringing my total up to 23, so I can no longer say that I've been to more countries than I have US States (I've been to 22 countries). I was drenched by a stunning waterfall in the Ozarks, saw Old Faithful erupt in Yellowstone, and I went skydiving over the fields of Texas.

I spent the 4th of July kayaking through the bayous of Louisiana. I spent my birthday exploring Little Rock, Arkansas. I spent Labor Day on the beach in Duxbury, MA. I went to my office in Lafayette on Halloween dressed in a costume I had made and won a prize. I ate deep-fried Turkey on a rig in Wyoming on Thanksgiving. I spent Christmas in Pennsylvania with my family, and I went to bed at 7pm on New Year's Eve so I could be up for the start of my shift on an offshore rig at 6am the next day.

I certainly look forward to sitting down next year to write about all the interesting things I've done. With any luck the list will be twice as long and ten times as interesting!

Offshore, at last!

I have been employed with this company for approximately 10.5 months, and I have FINALLY been sent on my very first job offshore (although I did once spend 6 hours offshore in August performing a rig-down, but since I didn't spend the night there it doesn't count). This length of time is shockingly high for someone who works out of an office based not thirty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, my office is not even supposed to be handling jobs in Colorado and Wyoming. They don't want to have jobs in Colorado and Wyoming. But the Denver office apparently wasn't up to the task, so one thing led to another.... and I spent six months in Wyoming.

So how do I like it? Well it's a lot noisier than a land rig, since everything is much closer together, but I like the white noise. It's almost always windy and I have to be very careful that my hard had does not blow into the water (I'm supposed to have gotten myself a chin-strap for it, but it slipped my mind as I have not needed it so far!), but the air smells fresh and it's warm enough that the breeze on one's face is quite pleasant. They have a galley and a rig cook so I don't have to prepare my own meals. The food they serve is very "southern": lots of beans and barbecue, sausage, etc. They have some variety of "vegetables" of which I have seen canned corn and peas, collard greens, and lima beans cooked with some sort of meat to the point where you really only tasted the meat. But, processed though they are, they're more vegetables than I'm inclined to cook for myself and so I fill my plate with the thanks that there are vegetables at all.

I sleep in a trailer known as the "penthouse", for which reason I can only ascribe to that it's seated on top of the helipad, the highest point on the rig next to the top of the derrick itself. It's tiny, but adequate, and the gentle shaking coming from whatever machine it is downstairs that causes the entire platform to vibrate enough to make reading dizzy-fying is lulling and conducive to sleep. The logging unit (my office) is directly next to my sleeping quarters, so I get a nice view of miles and miles of water when I open the door and walk out onto the helipad. There are a few rigs within range of eyesight from here, and on a clear day I can see the tiniest fraction of a millimeter of land (getting to our rig was about an hour by boat). Last night was lovely for I saw a row of buoys with their blinking lights in the horizon, flashing away like a far-off holiday decoration.

I'm not really working yet. They had some delays and they won't start drilling until tonight or tomorrow so I've been napping, reading, and filling out paperwork throughout today. During the short 10-ish hours I had in Lafayette between returning from Christmas and leaving for this rig (I got the call at noon while I waiting for my flight in the Philadelphia airport to be ready to leave for this job the following 6am), I purchased a few New Year's noisemakers with which to celebrate. Of course, I realized that since I'm going to be working the day shift of 6am to 6pm, I will probably forgo the countdown in exchange for a more solid night's sleep, but I can enjoy them nonetheless . . . once I wake up.