My Oklahoma Experience So Far

I'm back in the Bible Belt, and the land of humidity and country music. This past week the temperature stayed in the low 30s for the first time in the almost month I've been here. 50-60°F is too warm for January!

What am I doing in Oklahoma? This semester I am working as an intern with Geosearch Logging, headquartered in Edmond, OK, just north of Oklahoma City. So far I've just been attending classes on well logging and training with experienced loggers, but soon I'll be logging a well on my own. What do I mean by logging? Basically I spend a long day in a trailer at a drilling rig, and as they drill an oil well I sit at a computer watching as equipment monitors the gas coming up from underground, and every once in awhile one of the rig hands brings me a bag full of crushed rock and I file it and tell them what it is. In between, there's not much to do, so I get to read books and watch movies... and get paid for it. Paid quite a bit, actually.

I feel like I've already been all over Oklahoma, and at some point I might be transferred to New York/Pennsylvania area. So far the towns I've done more than just drive through in Oklahoma are Oklahoma City, Edmond, Cushing, Yale, Woweka, Seminole and McAlester, all in just one month. Cushing, OK is known as the pipeline crossroads of the world, because practically all the oil pipelines from the Gulf of Mexico area pass through Cushing. I never got around to taking picture of the sign for Cushing, but I found a good one online:

When I left Idaho, it was anywhere from -10 to 10°F the whole drive until I got south of Colorado. I took a route through Wyoming through some familiar territory from a previous field trip, including Pinedale (and I saw the Camp Davis Formation outcrop all covered in snow). I took a few pictures as I travelled:

One last shot of the Menan Buttes covered in snow before leaving Rexburg.

Snow-covered mountains near the Palisades Reservoir in Idaho.

The Palisades Reservoir covered in ice. Where there wasn't ice, there was steam.

Aspen trees at the Palisades Reservoir.

The icy highway near Pinedale, Wyoming. There was so much ice I had to slow down to 35mph and put my Jeep into four-wheel-drive just to stay on the road.

Snow-covered rocks in Wyoming. This is just east of the Camp Davis Formation outcrop my geology friends will know very well. I saw that outcrop as I was driving, but didn't feel like turning around and stopping to take a photo. This was a better photo, anyway. I didn't notice the Moon was in the photo until I looked at it on my MacBook.

Once in Edmond, I spent some time in the Geosearch office being trained by the office geologist, Bill Graham. The company owner, Joe Struckel, is a major technophobe, and was having trouble using PowerPoint, and since I'd met him before he asked me to help him out, so I earned major bonus points by helping him put together a presentation he was going to give later that day. I also helped Bill Graham do some copy-editing on some of his training materials, and he insisted I put my name on the cover of the sample description manual so there would be more geologist names on it. So if anyone in the future goes to work for Geosearch as a mud logger, one of your training manuals will have my name on it.

After that I got some in-the-field training from a cool guy named Marshal Etter, and between working on rock samples we discussed Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. He was sure to point out that Jimi Hendrix's middle name was Marshal. I got a bit of training from another guy named David Mardis, and then spent one morning on a well with a guy named Dave Schmidt. Dave Schmidt and I talked a lot of politics, and he kept making jokes about having tickets to Obama's "coronation" (sarcastically, of course, we agreed on pretty much everything). It was a fun morning even though I got so much second-hand smoke in four hours that it probably would have been healthier if I had simply smoked a pack (seriously).

At the moment I'm working along side two guys on a well in McAlester, OK, as a last bit of training. One of the guys, Steve, despite being just a few years younger than my parents, is into a lot of the same music as me, and has even heard of Apocalyptica, Emilíana Torrini and Sneaker Pimps, which really surprised me and gives me hope that when I get older I won't be a crusty old man who only likes the music I grew up with. He has a lot of LDS family, which made for some pretty interesting discussion. The other guy I'm logging with goes by Hoover, and he's cool, too. He gave me the coolest keychain ever, a miniature drill bit like the ones used on the drilling rig:

I've taken a few pictures down here in Oklahoma, too:

On I-40 between Edmond and McAlester I saw three trucks parked on an offramp carrying blades for windmills. You can't appreciate the scale of the windmills until you've stood next to one of these.

It was early morning, and the Sun made for cool effects.

We just had a big ice storm, something I haven't seen since I lived in Missouri. Naturally, I went nuts on the photos, and took about a million:

There was even ice on the drilling rig:

This is a good shot of the rig I'm working at right now. They're drilling a well for XTO:

Last night I looked out and saw the Moon and Venus right behind the rig. I'm still trying to get the hang of night shots, but I'm definitely getting better, and it was a chance to try some cool shots that I couldn't pass up. Here's the best one:

I wish I had a tele-photo lens, so I could take this shot from farther back and make the Moon look bigger next to the rig. Another time, maybe.

Meanwhile, this has been a nice break from blogging about politics, and this gets the personal info aspect of my blog caught up to the present. I hope you enjoyed the photos.