Our RV Adventures

First off, Jan and I want to wish a Happy 23rd Birthday to our beautiful granddaughter Piper.

Unfortunately the other night at another party she fell and broke her left arm. . . again. This is the same arm she broke in a ATV accident two years ago.

Ouch! That hurts just to look at.

But she still got to celebrate anyway.

And these are a couple of my favorite photos of her. She has this Mona Lisa face thing going on with those eyes just looking right through you.

The rig spent most of the day drilling through some really hard rock which made it sound like if you put rocks and tin cans in a washing machine and turned it on High. I have never heard a drill rig sound like that. It was hard to even talk over. But now it’s not nearly as bad, but louder than normal.

It’s been two weeks since we actually started drilling, so last night we got a new Company Man and a new Tool Pusher. We’re also getting new crew, but they change out every week, so this is our first time seeing some of these guys, but we’ll learn their names and faces pretty quickly

One thing different at this gate is that we can’t see the vehicles coming toward us like our other gates. We just hear the bell and then the vehicles suddenly appear around the back of the rig, meaning we can’t see their tag numbers. And their tag numbers are how we start to recognize the drivers.

Jan and I are both good about remembering numbers. So we know if we’ve seen a vehicle before, and if we have we just wave them through, only stopping ones we don’t recognize. Then we just we just get their login info from the last time they came in. Of course with Louisiana-tagged vehicles, we have to double check if we recognized the vehicle since they don’t have a front tag.

But since we can’t see the tags as they come in here, we have to stop everyone, at least until we’re sure we recognize them.

One thing unusual about this new Company Man is his rules on when he’ll see salespeople. Most CM’s only allow unsolicited sales calls on certain days. The previous CM only allowed them on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, no other time. Other CM’s may  be Monday, Wednesday, or Tuesday, Thursday. But this new CM said to let them in any time. Makes our job a lot easier.

Because it can sometimes be tricky differentiating salespeople from workers. One clue is that the sales guys are usually in ‘civilian’ clothes, not the FRC (Flame  Retardant Clothing) coveralls that the workers wear. But then some salespeople wear FRC’s to fake you out. And some will just plain lie to you. Over the years, both Jan and I have gotten phone calls from the CM complaining that we let somebody in we shouldn’t have, but it’s always been that they lied to us.

Another clue is that they’re with a company that you don’t recognize as already being onsite, which means they’re looking for business.

And a dead giveaway is if they’re female. We have occasionally  had women coming in driving big rigs, (not this year so far) or women drivers delivering parts in a pickup truck, but normally if it’s a cute young lady driving an SUV, she’s in sales.

Picture Penny on Big Bang Theory doing pharmaceutical sales.

In the past, we have occasionally seen women geologists come through, but again they’re usually wearing FRC’s, so it’s easy to tell.

But all this picking and choosing salespeople coming through goes out the window if they say they’re here to get a ‘ticket’ signed. They get let in anytime.

A ‘ticket’ is basically a bill or invoice that needs to be signed by the CM so that it can then be submitted to the oil company so they can be paid.

But then we’ve been lied to about this in the past as well.

I’m always amazed at the many different people we have reading our blog. I’ve had a blog reader in Africa correct my identification of an animal we’d photographed at a wildlife park. Turned out it wasn’t me though. The sign on the enclosure was apparently wrong.  

And once I was talking about the Potatoe Patch restaurant north of Houston, and how they advertise ‘Throw’d Rolls’ like the famous Lambert’s Throw’d Rolls chain. I mentioned how Potatoe Patch doesn’t really throw them, but more like tosses them from a couple of feet away.

Turns out a blog reader used to be the insurance underwriter for Lambert’s, and she said that was probably because of lawsuits. She said you wouldn’t believe how many lawsuits they get due to people being hit with soft, fluffy rolls.

So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised how many current and retired postal workers we have reading the blog who chimed in on my recent Post Office woes.

Based on their input, I may  just buy a cheap mailbox and stick it out in front there and see how that works. Of course I’ve still got two other packages in the pipeline so I’m not sure what’s going to happened with those. I guess I’ll find out eventually.

I’ve now pretty much given up on using the pad Wi-Fi. I got the code for the new setup this morning, but as I feared, the signal strength is too low for me to stay connected and it keeps dropping out. So I guess in the next day or so, I’ll pull out my Wilson cell phone booster system and get it set up.

But it probably won’t be until Friday, since tomorrow is grocery day in BCS, as well as Chicken Express day coming home.

Hmmmmm! Fried Okra!

Thought for the Day:

An Oldie but Goodie.

“The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.” – Ambassador Kosh

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