The hottest day ever

Today we hung out with Reggie who maintains the iron. He is in charge of making sure that each piece of piping, chicksun (I guess how to spell that every time), and valve gets taken out of rotation for inspection at the correct interval and he also tests the equipment (trucks with pumps and so forth) before they go back into the field after they come in for maintenance. Testing of the iron is done at FMC (we were told this stands for Food Manufacturing Company... a company that has expanded beyond it's beginnings obviously) which is just down the road. Reggie drives over there to pick things up and drop things off daily. That's what we did this morning... except that he left us there for 30 or 40 minutes to help the big guy running the forklift organize the old jumbled iron sitting outside. Yep, we spent that time team lifting very heavy lengths of 3' and 4' pipe onto pallets and shuffling chicksuns from pallet to pallet so they were more organized. I sweat more than I have sweat so far this summer. Partly from the lifting and partly because today we were under a heat advisory and doing all this lifting in the morning sun. I know that I was ripe by the end of the day.

On a fun note we ate at a place named Holly's today for lunch. It's a place where a group of women just make what they want to make and you file up cafeteria style and just pick out a main dish and two sides and then pay at the end of the counter. I was good! Like having mom cook for me... miss you girl!

We (Anjelica and I...Nick's on his three day weekend) spend half of tomorrow with Reggie again and the second half we have to clean out the cabs of ALL the trucks in the yard. I'm not excited about this but I bought ForceFlex trash bags tonight for the cause and I plan to sneak some rubber gloves from the lab before we start tomorrow. Saturday we are to "inventory the trucks" which means we need to know what trucks are in the yard and what they all do. We also have to be able to diagram all the workings of a cement truck by the end of Saturday. Should be interesting.

Sunday begins frack. We'll call in Saturday night to find out our yard time and on Sunday we ship out for a 12 to 16 hours and then come home for a shower and brief nap before doing it again the next day. I don't think this will be my favorite part but I don't think I can get out of it. I've begged Kyle to come kidnap me and he refuses. He told me to be tough and that I could do it. It's like he talked to Dad. Suspicious. Anyway, Reggie used to be a fracker so he had some advice for us today. We went to Wal Mart (a theme of my life these days sadly) and got not-UnderArmor, Gatorade, and fruit. He assures us that these will be much needed items for the coming week. We are grateful to have had this talk with Reggie.

On an unrelated note I've eaten Toaster Strudel for breakfast for the past couple days. I haven't had those things in years and I've missed them. Mom wasn't one for random junk food but she did let us do the Toaster Strudel thing. Thanks, Mom!

Oh yea... it's PAYDAY!!!! My favorite day of all... something good on the hottest day ever.

Too cool for school...

Day one of our training was kind of intense. It was also a bit of a cluster. We started the day by attempting to get on the bus (the only one we were initially told) but because we are engineers, we know that 80something people will not fit on one bus and so we don't try very hard. Another bus is soon to arrive we are told. Ok but there are still like way more of us than will fit. Ok so bus driver numero dos tells us he knows this is a problem and he called for the first to come back...in 30-45 minutes. So we wait. I napped next to my new Canadian friend Donald (Donny, RapMaster D... ok that last one is my own creation and he may not be on board with it...) both in the lobby and on the bus. I think it made him vaguely uncomfortable but we've since become closer (I asked him lots of random questions in order to get to know him). ANYWAY... We arrived approximately 30 minutes late and missed some of the safety info--no worries, we caught the most important bits about Tornadoes and the tail end of the brown recluse spider lecture. Awkward start to our day.

We were split into four groups (red, blue, yellow, and green) and the red group (my group, obviously...) spent our day learning about fracking--hydraulic fracturing. It's quite the deal. Here's what I learned in a nutshell (aka Scarlett and anyone else not really interested in the oil industry should skip past the tilde's):

~Wells sometimes don't produce as readily as they should (due to plugging of various origins and natures that you don't really care about or because the rock is not as permeable as you would like) and so you must frack them.

~This means you pump first a substance that is essentially water in at such high pressure, that it cracks the rock around the well.

~You then follow up with a slurry of sand to prop it open. It's called propate. Yup... prop for short. Not sure about spelling but yea you get the idea.

~Under some circumstances you would frack with acid that erodes the cracks open.

~These new cracks can reduce the "skin" of the well (the random hindrance to the wells production) to less than zero, meaning you can force the well to produce more than it would naturally.

~Fracking is an intense endeavor (that may just be my opinion).

So there. Now you know. And so do I.

Once we completed our day (including about an hour of walking around outside in full PPE and turning ourselves into sweaty beasts) we sat and waited to get on a bus again. This time for 1.5 hours. Yep. Add the half hour drive and we wasted two perfectly good afternoon hours. Oh well. When we made it back we ate and went to WalMart and saw a woman with teal boots, a jean dress complete with jean jacket, and a teal hat complete with giant teal feather. It was epic. I also found the little kid hair ties that have vanished from all Manhattan retailers. I bought two packs.

Tomorrow we get to sleep in a little and just catch the second edition of the bus run (interns get the shaft...jk we literally clapped when they announced this) and we are hoping and praying some kind of similar arrangement will be made in the evening so we aren't sitting on the sidewalk like second graders waiting for the bus. Fingers crossed on that one. Also on tomorrow's agenda: Dinner and Glee at Jennifer's apt. She's making tuna helper and we're a bit excited about it. There may even be wine. Because we're classy.