Our RV Adventures

or Home Sweet Shack

Todd called this morning about 8:40 telling Jan he had a gate for me, and then texted me  the directions. And by 9:30 I was logging in vehicles at the gate.

This is brand new gate, one that has 3 holes that eventually will be fracked, but needs to be prepped first with coil tubing.

When I got to the gate about 9:15, there was no gate there. Todd had just arrived and was rolling out the containment pad that goes under the generator trailer to catch any leaking diesel. So no generator trailer, no guard shack trailer, and more importantly, no potty trailer.

Since we already had people on the pad that hadn’t been logged in, and I didn’t have any log sheets anyway, I just started logging people in using tag numbers and times. About an hour later,John the maintenance guy showed up with the generator trailer. Of course with no shack yet, we had nothing to plug into it.

But finally about 11:30 Todd showed up with the shack, and he and John got it set up.

So by 12:30 I was logging in for real, with a lot of trucks circling through with load after load of big equipment and large drilling fluid tanks. The rest of the afternoon was steady, but not really heavy, so not too bad.

Even though we’re about 10 miles out in the country, I’ve still got good 3G on my Verizon aircard so that’s good, and the over-the-air TV signals are fine as well.

My relief, who was supposed to show up at 6:30pm, didn’t make it until about 6:40 because he took a wrong turn. Turns out he’s two spaces down from us in the park.

It’s kind of confusing about the shift times at different gates. So far we’ve been at 5 to 5 gates, 5:30 to 5:30 gates, 6 to 6 gates, and now a 6:30 to 6:30 gate. Not sure why it works out like that.

We don’t know yet where this gate is going to go. It could expand to have a greeter on the pad and one on the staging area, as well as my gate out front. Or, I guess it could all go away tomorrow. You never can tell.

Next up is to try to figure out the night time guard and I can switch. He would rather work days, and I would rather work nights. So I need to sit down and figure out how we can switch shifts. It may be our wives can help us out, but I’ll to write it down to be sure.

Now I’m going to bed. I have to be up at 5:30AM ! Yikes!

Thought for the Day:

“It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government.” – Thomas Paine

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Today turned out to be a nice rainy stay-at-home day. Not very heavy, but just steady for on and off for most of the day.  Very nice.

Hopefully it will settle some of the dust on the roads around here. And the cooler weather that the front is bringing is very nice too.

After a text from Nancy, the RV park owner, to be sure we were here, her husband dropped off a package from our son Chris with our mail. Jan was impatient to she what the hospital bills from her September kidney stone problem were going to be.

So far, we’ve gotten two bills. The one we got today for $18.10 was for the CT scan, but Chris said another one came in after he’d sent this box off. That one, for the hospital itself, is for about $170. Not bad, I guess.

One thing that always amazes is all the hoops you have to go through to pay one of these bills. I not only had to enter 3 different numbers from the bill, but then had to answer a couple of security questions and enter the last 4 digits of my Social before I could pay the $18.10 bill.

Is there really a problem with hackers logging in and paying other people’s medical bills?

If so, I’m all for it.

Long time blog readers will remember our late lamented Mister, and his love for boxes.

Big boxes.

Small boxes.

Even smaller boxes.

And ‘if I can’t see you, you can’t see me’ boxes.

But as it turns out, Miss Karma is not a ‘box’ kitty, and couldn’t care less. I put the box that our mail came in down on the floor to see what Karma would do.

And the answer is Nothing. She just stared at it and walked off.

Figuring maybe being a semi-feral stray, she didn’t really know what to do with a box, I picked her and tried to put her down in the box.

Bad Idea.

She didn’t want any part of it. In fact she got all ‘bitey’.

Though I bet if I had squirted some whip cream in there, she’d have hopped right in.

I did a couple of chores around the rig, one of which was to finally put the doors back on the washer compartment. That project had gotten pushed aside after I repaired the broken wire on the washer’s water pump, and then we were trying to get started on a new gate guarding location. But now it’s done.

When Ray came by to drop off the package, I double-checked with him about using the my pressure washer to get the mud coating that we acquired on our way down from the Colorado River Thousand Trails. There were two 10 mile long construction zones that left the rig covered in mud.

So once we’re down with rains that are forecast over the next few days, I’ll see about cleaning things up.

One thing I’m going to do is call the Ocean Express Car Wash down in Webster to see if they will tell me the brand of spray car wax they use. Whenever we have the truck washed and waxed it comes out with a shine that makes it look like new.  And I wanted the rig to look the same way.

Hopefully  I can find out what brand they use, and then buy some online. Or maybe I can talk them into selling me a gallon or so. Either way it would really make the rig sparkle.

Of course the mud’s got to come off first.

“In a government of laws, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy .†Olmstead v. U.S., 277 U.S. 438 (1928)

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