Daily Archives: September 7, 2013
Birthdays and Boats . . .
First off we want to wish our granddaughter Piper a Happy 20th Birthday. It’s hard to believe how fast she’s grown up, and how quickly she went from this,
to this beautiful young lady.
One thing we’re enjoying about this gate is the fact that we’re not close to the action. On two of our four gates last year we were within rock-throwing distance from the drill rig, with 3 big tractor trailer-sized diesel generators running 24 hours a day. The noise never stopped. And if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, the smell of the drilling fluids could get pretty strong too. So this peace and quiet is very nice.
After my scare about losing my Droid phone yesterday, I spent a few minutes playing with the Where’s My Droid system. I was curious about how accurate the GPS location was. And the answer is that it is really, really accurate.
That is exactly where we are parked. Neat program.
Hopefully our cooler fall weather may have started. Our high today was only 90, and the 10 day forecast is for the low 90’s the rest of the time. We’ll see.
But with cooler weather comes the possibility of rain. In fact we had a small cloudburst this afternoon that lasted for about 2 minutes from a clear blue sky. Just out of nowhere and then it was gone. Strange.
When I talked about Jan making Chili, Four Ways last week, she said I was remiss in not mentioned her Pasta Boat.
She says it ‘s the best thing she’s found for cooking pasta in the microwave. And it comes out perfect every time. You can get it here. Pasta Boat from Amazon
This afternoon about 4:45 there was a really big gust of wind and our generator just died. In hindsight I don’t think the two were connected, but it sure seemed so at the time.
I went back to try and restart it and found it completely dead. It would not turn over at all. I then put in a call to Austin, our support guy, but he was off for the weekend. So I called Jamie, our supervisor. And after telling him the problem, he said he’d be right over with a new battery and a new alternator. And about 15 minutes later Jamie and his wife showed up. And he was right.
Turned out the alternator had died and the generator kept running until the battery died. But what was a little strange is that after hooking up the new battery, the generator would crank but would not run. Somehow the fuel pump had cut out before the battery died completely and so the engine had run itself dry. And diesels don’t like to run out of fuel. They get air in the fuel lines and it can be hard to get them restarted.
But Jamie just loosened the fuel injector connections and cranked it until a little diesel started leaking out. Then after tightening it all back up, it started immediately. Shutting it down, Jamie changed out the alternator, and about 10 minutes later we were back up and running.
Turns out the Jamie had been in the middle of cooking dinner when I called and he dropped everything to get us fixed up. Now that’s service,
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Thought for the Day:
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
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