Internship Update

So, I had no idea that having so much free time would make it so hard to blog! Part of the problem is working 24 hour shifts with 24 hours off in between is pretty exhausting; it also doesn't help to have such inconsistent internet access here. I'm still in McAlester, Oklahoma, still training, but in about a week or so I should be "breaking out" as they say, done with training. I was getting really worried that the guys training me were lazy and had really no idea what they were doing despite being hyped as awesome well loggers by the guys in the office, and I've recently found out that I'm exactly right.

One of the guys I was working with left for a vacation, after arranging for me to cover his shifts for the rest of this well. The first day I was supposed to work on my own, another guy, Pat, shows up unannounced saying that the office had sent him to finish training me and help cover the shifts. I was kind of annoyed at first, since I hadn't been kept informed, and since I was looking forward to just working on my own, but it's basically the best thing that's happened so far. I'd had a lot of questions about things I didn't understand regarding well logging, and no helpful answers. Also, the other guy I was training under expected me to know things about logging I that seemed way over my head, until I started suspecting he didn't know what he was talking about.

As it turns out, he and I were making a fairly useless well log, and within one day working with Pat all my confusion has been straightened out, the log finally makes sense, and I finally feel like I've learned something and can handle this job. Even better, at the next well they're sending me to (for British Petroleum), I'll be working opposite shifts with Pat, which makes me feel much less nervous about being solely responsible for the data I collect knowing I've got a good senior logger to set me straight.

There's still a lot of downtime, though, and now that I've gotten into the routine I can get to some non-leisure reading I'm supposed to do for one of my geology professors, which requires more concentration than the light reading I've been doing (I've gone through books seven and eight of the Wheel of Time series since coming out here). Also, I've been rewatching The Office from the beginning, and also watched several new movies. If I feel like it I'll post my thoughts on them (in detail for some) in future posts. For now, super brief reviews:

Iron Man: Awesome! I didn't expect to like it as much as I did, and it is a must-see.

Evan Almighty: Didn't want to watch it until Orson Scott Card said it was worth seeing despite Bruce Almighty. It was surprisingly good, and thought-provoking.

The Pursuit of Happyness: Another must-see. Will Smith is amazing, and so is Jaden.

City of Ember: Very good family movie. Not perfect, but highly recommendable.

The Mummy - Tomb of the Dragon Emperor: Don't waste your time. To sum it up: Yetis. And the Chinese chick can talk to them.

I've also been getting sick of fast food, so I bought a burner and a pot and some utensils, and I made soup. It's one of Kate's and my favorite recipes, called Spaghetti Soup, and it's fairly inexpensive and extremely easy to make and makes awesome leftovers, which is why I made it. You may have noticed I put a little spot with links to posts where I include recipes, and there's only my salsa recipe there so far. I mean to expand that section to include many different good recipes that Kate and I like, and I'll post Spaghetti Soup there soon.

I've also been looking for more photo opportunities. There are apparently some good scenic drives within an hour of here, and if I can manage it I might take my camera to some new places, especially since my photos have been getting positive responses on this blog. We had a big thunder storm here tonight (the first I've seen in forever!), so I tried to get a good lightning shot, but no luck. I guess I need to practice and experiment, but a good lightning photo is one of my big goals. I also might try to take some photos on the drilling rig itself, since this one is particularly dirty and has to be seen to be believed if you've never worked oil before. A drilling rig like the one I work at was featured once on Dirty Jobs on the Discovery channel. I did get a cool shot of the rig the other day as the sun poked through the clouds, and I'll use it to close this incoherent post:

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.