Not a moment too soon

It's been a good weekend and half week. Last Saturday I availed myself to some of my flex days that the company has given me (as a consolation for the wage rollbacks) and flew out to Washington DC to visit my sister, who is currently working there for about 3 months. It was very relaxing (and in fact, likely saved my liver from a weekend of binge drinking just to forget about work). I did visit DC once, a long time ago when I was still in elementary school, but I don't remember a whole lot of it, so it was fun to revisit a lot of the sites that I barely remembered and visit some sites that I didn't (It was also somewhat painful. I really didn't think that The Mall was that big, and I am fat and lazy.) I also managed to catch a great performance of The Pirates of Penzance at Wolf Trap (the only National Park for the Performing Arts) and have a burger at Ray's Hell Burger (it was good).

Now I'm back home for a week of work and stress and gnashing of teeth before I take off again, this time for two weeks up in Calgary while my dad get's his old kidneys repossessed.

Also, I have house guests. A pair of barn swallows have decided to make a nest in my front porch. They currently have eggs as well. Hopefully they don't make too much of a mess. I rather like having them flit in and out around my yard.

Just like a bad sitcom

I have a new alarm clock. It takes the form of a woodpecker whom, every morning decides that my eaves troughs are a good place to peck at looking for his breakfast. He's also getting there earlier each day. Saturday it was 8:30 a.m. Sunday, 6:45. This morning: 6:00. What really amazes me is how much he sounds exactly like a jackhammer.

More Wildlife!

I might have a problem. What used to be a nice little hobby - plant a herb garden and some trees - has grown into an obsession. In the last few weeks I've entirely rebuilt the front flowerbed, and built two more in the back, filled them with all sorts of flowers (okay, some roses and 3 different types of lilies, but still), planted blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries, and replaced all the trees that died due to wildlife getting at them, my own efforts (or lack thereof), or the guy from Tru-Green running over them.

It was while I was poking around the back fence, looking for a good spot to clear out the overgrowth so that I could plant grape vines that I realized a.) that I might have a small problem; and b.) I was looking at a snake sunning itself on the fence.

It's strange. Arkansas is infested with snakes. My neighbor keeps seeing them all over the place, and yet it's taken over two years before I've finally seen one in my yard (I've seen a couple of dead copperheads at work). Fortunately, I don't think that it was venomous. I wasn't able to get a photo of it (batteries in the camera were dead as usual. By the time they had charged up enough the snake had left) but I think that it was a Black Racer. About 3 feet long. On the one hand, I'm kinda happy that I've got more wildlife in my area, but I'm still going to be a little nervous clearing out my overgrowth.

Also, since when did you need a computer sciences degree to repair a fridge? The EPA or the DOE or something recently decided that the model of fridge I bought was using more energy than the manufacturer said that it was supposed to, so they sent me a kit to "fix" it. Said kit includes a circuit board that appears as though it would work very well in my next computer. I feel old now.

It's officially spring

We've now had our first local tornado watch of the year.

There is nothing I can say that will improve upon the pure win that is this video

Kovbasa: P. Eng.

About time.

I finally got it. Squee. I recognize that in the grand scheme of things this isn't particularly special. After all, there are thousands - if not tens of thousands - registered engineers in Alberta alone, and my job down here doesn't even require it. Still, it's nice to finally have.

Of course, now I've finally realized that there's a decent amount of bookkeeping just to maintain it (Continuing Professional Development forms). The upside of this is that they require me to actually attend conferences and classes and such - something that only happened on rare occasion while I was working in Canada, but has a slightly higher frequency of occurrence down here.

The other big pain in the ass is registering down here. If I was working in, say, Saskatchewan, it would pretty much just be a matter of contacting APEGGS with my APEGGA information and paying a fee. Not so down here. The process is a little more complicated, as in they might not even view my degree as having come from an accredited institution. It might also involve me having to, in essence, rewrite every final exam from my last year of university. Somehow I don't think that will happen.

Oh well. Yay me.

I have a superpower

My power is not so practical as flight, nigh-invulnerability, or heat vision. No my superpower is the ability to, with only a few words, manage to cause a shit-storm of a fight between my two bosses.

Now if I just figure out how to harness my power. For good, for awesome, I don't really care. I'd just like to be able to decide when to use it.

*Facepalm*

I just talked to APEGGA today to find out the status of my P. Eng application, as I have not heard a thing one way or the other from them since October. I do know that they had to be processing it, though, since they had billed me the processing fee, and all of my references had notified me that they had filled out the forms APEGGA needed filled out.

Unfortunately, APEGGA didn't get that last memo. They are still waiting for the forms from two of my references. This means that it will likely be at least another three months before my application gets processed.

I'm surrounded by assholes

Okay, maybe "surrounded" is too strong a word. That said, there do seem to be a lot of them. The latest one, whom I met this week, really takes the cake I think. This particular asshole worked for an auto-parts store (nothing wrong with that) until our customer hired him as a field consultant. He had NO experience in the oil patch before hired for this job that is grossly under qualified for. Now, a year and a half later, he seems to think that he knows everything about his job, when he proves his incompetence every time he opens his mouth (any consultant who doesn't know what an isolation valve is should be shot). This gets him my scorn and derision, but what really pisses me off about him is an incident that happened a couple of days ago.

We had a line part earlier this week. For those of you who do not know a line part occurs when, for various reasons (worn iron, too high pressure, human error, etc), a steel line that we are pumping through bursts under pressure. There are a lot of safety controls to limit this (regular iron inspections, check valves, pressure relief valves, etc), but they still do happen infrequently and they are always dangerous. We were fortunate that nobody was seriously hurt (one guy was shaken up and a little bruised, but that's it). This particular asshole, immediately after the line part, asks simply: "When can we start pumping again?". Yup, this guy's a real class act. Honestly, it's people like that that cause the oil patch to have such a shitty reputation.

In completely unrelated news, when I came to work this morning, I saw that somebody had actually plugged in the block heater on their truck.

Also, for your amusement, I present the following picture. It was the response from one of the guys in our lab when asked by our Calgary for some pictures of the pumps running some of our testing equipment (a really stupid request, for reasons that I won't go in to here). I hope you get as much enjoyment out of it as I did, since it's the funniest thing that I've seen in a long time.

Time for a public service announcement

This piece of helpful advice is for some of you landowners out there.

IF you own land in an area where oil & gas wells are being drilled...

and IF you and your neighbors still have the mineral rights for your land...

and IF you are feeling like you are missing out on some money because the producer has not drilled any wells on your land, just your neighbors...

It probably will not help convince them to do otherwise if you blockade a public road and try to extort money from a service company in exchange for allowing them past.

Shooting at them won't help either.

Just a tip.

And now begins the drinking

My parents arrived on Sunday, and my sister arrived yesterday. Somewhat unsurprisingly, yesterday was also the coldest day in Arkansas since I moved down here. Coincidence? I think not.

I'm a little stressed about having to actually be the host for the holidays for once, despite the fact that it's a small group (unlike a couple of my friends, who felt the need to host something like 19 people for Christmas day, the masochists) and I'm bound to get a lot of help. Fortunately there is eggnog and rum.

Anyhow, I hope everybody has a Merry/Happy Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Dies Natalis Solis Invicti/Holidays/etc.

Just like old times

It's been below freezing all day and raining for the latter part of it. This is the first time since I moved here that I've actually had to scrape my windshield. I can't believe how right that feels.

I'm actually hoping for a really good ice storm tonight - I've never been in one before.

Heat's on.

Furnace is fixed. Apparently it was just a loose connection, and the filter wasn't forgotten, it was left out deliberately because there's another one farther up the line (that I also forgot to ever change) and having two filters would restrict the air flow too much. Mea culpa. I'm glad I limited my righteous indignation to here rather than spewing it all in the furnace guy's face.

My rage keeps me warm at night.

Another exercise in the mundane and extremely irritating.

I got home last night and it was - unsurprisingly - a little cold in the house. Thus did I go to turn on the furnace.

"Hmph" says I. "The furnace is already on, but there's no air coming out of the vents. Wonderful." I started to check the system out right at the beginning. The blower outside was working, so the problem was somewhere in the furnace. I checked the furnace. It was warm, so the heater still worked. It wasn't too difficult to find the culprit though. I went to check to see if the filter was clogged only to find that there was no filter, so most likely anything that the filter would have caught is now plugged in the ducting somewhere down the line. Wonderful. Thank you furnace man for forgetting to install such a simple and critical piece of equipment.

I swear if you could channel my rage directly into a generator you'd solve the world's energy problems.

That's not severe...

AccuWeather just informed me of a severe weather alert for the area tonight:

A FREEZE IS EXPECTED IN PARTS OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS FRIDAY AND
SATURDAY MORNINGS.

A VERY COLD CANADIAN AIRMASS WILL SETTLE OVER THE AREA TONIGHT THROUGH SATURDAY...AND BRING VERY COLD TEMPERATURES TO PARTS OF CENTRAL ARKANSAS. MORNING LOW TEMPERATURES ARE EXPECTED TO BE IN THE MID TO UPPER 20S OVER CENTRAL ARKANSAS BOTH FRIDAY AND SATURDAY MORNINGS.

For god's sake, put on a sweater and quit whining about it.

And get off my lawn.

Phrases that I don't want to hear:

"I found a brown recluse spider in your truck. I tried to kill him but he got away. Fast little bugger."

The bad news? He wasn't joking.

The good news? It wasn't my truck.

Reminiscing

I don't think that there is anything that takes me back to my youth as well as good homemade chicken soup does.

Just sayin'

I guess I should be flattered

One of our supervisors down here has come up with the most incredible - in his opinion - Halloween costume for this year.

He has purchased a Chewbacca costume, and is combining it with a pair of my coveralls and a laptop bag (slung over his chest like a bandolier). Considering that for the last year people have been making wookie-like noises whenever I'm present, I guess that I shouldn't be surprised.

Important update! - Nothing interesting has happened!

Meh. That about sums it up, really. Some of the larger producers down here sponsored a shale gas expo last weekend. I've been to a few expos like this one before in other parts, but this one was by far the most enjoyable. Probably the main reason was that the people attending were genuinely interested in what we (and other companies down here) do rather than just looking for a scapegoat. It's nice to talk to people who don't automatically assume that because you work in the oil patch you're some kind of moustache-twirling villain.

That said, yesterday put me in a nearly psychotic state. I think that I've mentioned one of our customers before, who never shuts up. I was in the field for about 10 hours yesterday, most of that sitting next to him, and all of that time had him talking. Not about anything relevant. 90% of what he says is just to hear his own voice and he seems to assume that since I'm also an engineer I must actually care about his ramblings. By the end of the day I was torn between wanting to gag him and wanting to cut off my ears. Now I know how the protagonist in Sounds Like felt. Still, at least the guy's not an asshole. He's just really, really, really annoying.

Also, since I haven't mentioned the wildlife recently, a story: I was driving home the other day and saw something crawling across the road, so I swerved to avoid it. It was a spider.

Let me repeat that: It was a spider. Large enough for me to notice while driving, and kick in the "avoid hitting that thing" reflex. Specifically, I think it was a tarantula of some type.

I can't swallow this tripe

I consider myself a pretty adventurous eater by western standards. I've gone to Chinese restaurants and ordered pig intestine, I was all too happy to try a durian milkshake in Singapore, and one of my favorite things to order at Dim Sum is tripe.

I may or may not have mentioned it before, but Arkansas is a bit of a culinary wasteland. There's plenty of barbecue places and more than a few steak houses, but if you want to step out of a western comfort zone - culinarally wise - you're pretty much S.O.L. There's one good sushi place within a decent driving distance but that's about it.

So I've been craving good asian food - especially dim sum - lately, and the other day I was wandering through the Wal-Mart grocery section and I noticed that they actually sell tripe there. What's more it doesn't look like "larry's discount tripe" - it's actually clean and relatively appetizing. I pondered this for a day or two while I searched for recipes* and then returned to purchase it with the intent of making an at least passable attempt at recreating some of the flavors I had missed.

Thus did I return home and put the trip in a pot of water to simmer for 2 hours, as most of the recipes suggested. I quickly determined that this might have been a mistake, though, as my kitchen almost immediately began smelling like a feed lot. Still, I persevered, convinced that the end result would be worth the minor inconvenience of a bad odor.

Two hours later, I removed the offending offal, rinsed it and cut it up. I then placed some to steam with ginger, green onion, and sesame oil in the same fashion as the dim sum style. The rest went into a frying pan with another sauce. The smell didn't really improve. Undeterred, I plated my creations and tasted them.

As I said, the odor was like a feed lot. If you could translate the odor into a taste, you'd get the flavor in my mouth. I managed to try one bite of each, and then promptly tossed everything in the trash. It was by far the worst thing that I'd ever tasted.

Tonight I'm going to try something a little less daring - pork chops, or maybe lamb if I can find it.
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*I was very surprised how few recipes I was able to find when searching for dim sum tripe recipes. Maybe my google-fu is just weak.