it's been the busiest few weeks in my working life so far...exhausting but very rewarding!
I finally had my first lie-in since holidays this weekend, not quite caught up yet...
In the meantime, progress with my house has been incredibly slow...the 'two weeks or else' deadline came and went and everything was still progressing at snail's pace...then the builders stopped coming for a couple of days.
On top of all the work this last week, after a stormy windy weekend there were electricity issues and my house started flashing like a Christmas tree. 20 seconds on, 20 seconds off. Couldn't even run a couple of light bulbs, let alone heating or the water pump...called in the contractor company who couldn't find anything wrong as it had stabilised agin. However, next day, same story. This time they came in time to witness the problem. They managed to get me a stable 200V input, meaning I could have some light but that was it.
At this stage I thought a nice warm meal would cheer me up after a long day's work and a freezing house. Eek! No gas :-(
The electricians were due to come back the next day to fix things properly. My guard told me they had come and said they would return later but never came back. Needless to say, when I got home it was like Christmas all over again. This time a different chap came, fixed my gas and fiddled with my stabiliser for an hour and a half in the freezing cold (well, you know) and fixed it. Not sure if it's a permanent or temporary fix though as the mains seemed to be really low (180V). Anyway, no problems since.
Next day, I came home to the gas alarm beeping away! Gas leak...another chap came to try fix it.
Next day again, got a call from the guard, gas alarm going off again!! This time the proper gas man came around and found that the chap who had changed the bottle had wrenched the pipe too hard and caused a leak!!!
So with this in mind, on top of the crazy workload, I went to the people who are supposed to be helping us with housing here, and 'threw a strop' - not shouting, but next best. I think the chap was a bit shocked as I usually am nice&polite with people in the office, but it was about time.
So he ended up promising to go follow up every day and scuttled off to get things moving...
That day, 3 large palm trees were planted in the garden and lights and filters fitted in the pool! And the path is being re-paved (they has had to rip it all up as they had forgotten to put in cables - duuuhh!). Here are the latest pics of the garden:
Apart from that, work has been this busy because I was duty operations geologist again, meaning I could -and did- get called in the middle of the night if anything goes...not according to plan let's say, at the rig. Of course, the day after I came back from hols was the day we started logging...straight back in at the deep end.
Yvan, the main ops geologist, was at the rig. In fact we have hardly been in the office at the same time in the last 3 months...though we are both full time, we have been back-to-backing this whole time!I am really enjoying the position of operations geologist. I am also conscious that I still need to get a fair bit of experience interpreting seismic, which I can also gain here. So I really need to specify in my plan for this year how much of each I am going to do and make time for the interpretation, even though I prefer ops!
But for now I need to cover when Yvan is away and I love the fast-paced decision making that comes with the job. And negotiations with the drillers :) And simply the responsibility of making often costly decisions...as you can tell, they haven't gone wrong yet or I might be revising that statement!! ...the big one that I have really pushed for is coming up, just as I go home for a visa trip next week 0:-) good luck Yvan!!!
To be honest, there is a fair bit of pressure to keep costs down at the moment so it has been quite a lot of work presenting to higher management to try and convince them that we do, indeed, need this data. I just hope the logging works...the geology is pretty tricky and there is a high possibility of our not getting any data!
In fact Halliburton, our main contractor, doesn't have the right tool for this so we are now going to run with our back-up contractor, Schlumberger. Whilst I am pretty pleased to be working with them again, they had better deliver!!! They also have a huge amount of pressure to perform from their side, so it's all fun...
Anyway, that's it for now and I can go into much more detail about my work unfortunately but hope it gives a vague idea of what life is like here.
Apart from that, had a housewarming party on Thursday which was good fun, nice to have loads of people round to celebrate finally being in!
No container delivered yet by the way...
