Monthly Archives: May 2012
Yea Piper, Too . . .
Well, our granddaughter Piper’s karma continues. This girl needs to buy some lottery tickets.
Last night (Thursday) while attending the awards ceremony at Moody Gardens in Galveston for the four year full scholarship she won, they also gave away door prizes.
And Miss Piper won an iPad2!
Should be a lot of help when she starts college in the fall.
Beautiful and smart!
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Although we have Verizon cell/Internet service here at this gate, it’s been a little spotty. Sometimes we have 1-2 bars of 3G, sometimes 1-2 bars of 1x, and sometimes no data at all.
Even the cell service would sometimes drop calls. So I decided to set up the Wilson booster that I bought to use at our other gate where we had no service at all.
And it worked there, getting us cell and data service for an hour, only to receive the phone call that we were moving to this gate.
So I set it up here yesterday afternoon and boy did it work miracles.
Here’s the amplifier itself. It’s about the size of a large paperback book.
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And here’s the directional outside antenna on a 10 foot antenna pole.
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And here’s the inside antenna.
I set up everything outside since that’s where we spend the most time.
And boy does it work great. This unit is the Wilson db Pro 65 and we have now have 5 bars of rock-solid 3G service with no dropouts.
Well worth the money!
And now for some new Landon pics. Here he is with his daddy just being cool.
And here he is with his Aunt Sherry (Lowell’s sister). You can see where he gets some of his good looks.
That’s about it for today. They’re having a big push today to get back on the drilling schedule so we’re not supposed to let any salespeople in.
So I have to disappoint a lot of pretty young ladies.
Bummer!
Certainly wouldn’t be the first time.
Or the last.
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Thought for the Day:
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people. – Orson Welles
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Sales Day . . .
Apparently at this Marathon site, Monday is Sales Day. At our earlier gate, it was Tuesday and Thursday. Don’t know yet if they have more than one day a week here yet.
Sale Day is when all the sales people come into the site to try and sell their products and services to the “Company Man”. He’s the head guy over the entire site, in this cases, from Marathon Oil. At our last site it was Petrohawk.
Anyway, they seem to have a better class of sales people here, or at least cuter. All we got for sales people with Petrohawk was grizzled old oil guys. But here, like in the pharmaceutical industry, a number of cute young women called on the Company Man on Monday.
Don’t know if they sold anything, but the view was certainly better. BTW I get to talk about the cute sales women since Jan gets to talk about the cute guy oilfield workers. Turnabout is fair play.
FWIW, there’s a day Company Man and a night Company Man, but both of them live onsite. They seem to only leave to get groceries and the like.
Since this is a 24 hour gate we’re working longer hours, but not 12 in a row. I work from 2pm to 6pm and Jan works from 6pm to 11pm. Then I take over at 11pm and work till 7am. Then Jan finishes up with a 7am to 2pm shift.
So I work an 8 hour shift and a 4 hour shift, and Jan works a 7 and a 5.
The work is certainly not hard, and kind of entertaining in a way, watching the drilling rig operate and all the different trucks come in. All we do is write down the name, company, license plate number, and time when a vehicle enters. Then when they leave, we write down the time and if they were injured on site while here. This is something that we didn’t have to do with Petrohawk.
For all this hard work we make $1000 every 8 days ($125/day).
And we do have a nice view.
The last few nights it’s been kind of cool here, cool enough to make me put on a jacket. The temp has been in the low 70’s, but with the constant wind, the wind chill makes it much cooler.
Last night they must have had a problem on the rig because alarms started going off and guys came running out of the trailers and up the tall stairs to the rig control room.
But after a few minutes, the alarm stopped and everyone went back to bed.
That’s about it for today, Another wonderful day in the life of an oilfield gate guard.
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Thought for the Day;
If you can count your money, you don’t have a billion dollars. – J. Paul Getty
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