Jay’s Realm

So I was helping Erik all week with his launch for South Centre mall in calgary. Sunday at 10pm he’s like ‘Alright. I’m going to come pick you up. We’re going to burn through it. And we’ll be done by midnight.’ Ok. Sounds good. Five am rolls around and we shut off the lights and head’er home. Piss around for a bit and head to bed.

No sooner than my head hits pillow than I get a call. ‘Be at the shop ASAP. You’re heading out.’ Well fuck. Throw all my clothes, ppe, laptop and ds into a bag and head out. Wait at the shop for over an hour and a half until my lead shows up. Only then do I find out where/when I’m going.

Ensign 114. Out by Grande Prarie. Three weeks. Two if things go well. By my calculations at current ROP and depth left we’ve got 6 days 4 hours 26 minutes. I forgot to bring shampoo.

Anyways, we’re on the road by 10am. Get into the rig at 5:30pm. Luckily, since we’re rather late, they’ve got lots to do. I got to go pound ground stakes. In snow up to my tits. Fuck. I’m so out of shape. Our first tool is bad so we had to switch to another one. By the time we’ve got everything tested and laid out it’s just past midnight. Three am before our tools finally hit hole and they’ve still got 1.5km of pipe to lay in before we even kick off.

My lead was feeling kind so let me get a few hours sleep around then. He also hadn’t yet shown me how to actually work spectrum and the like so I was fairly useless anyways.

So that was my first day. Tired as fuck. Sore as fuck. Confused as fuck. And I was so obviously new that you might as well have painted me green and slapped a sign on my back.

Second day I learned how to shoot the survey’s they wanted and use PACEON a bit. Lead hand seemed to get the idea that I would take to it like oil to water rather than er… whiskey to coke. He got a few hours and came back. I was willing to go straight on through until 7am but he told me to grab some sleep so I have another four hours under my belt.

I was very nervous and confused but now things are starting to click. I’m starting to get a feel for everything and to understand my place in it all. Once I starting getting into it and gaining confidence everyone seemed to start treating me a little better as well, which is good.

Oh, I also put the DD’s truck in the ditch today. I’ve a feeling that won’t make it on any official report

It has become fairly clear to me that I’m not going to be blowing the six hundred bucks it’d take to recover my drive. So that means I’m starting from scratch on a virgin page and pretending the last several years of entries don’t exist. Mostly I have to write a bunch of stuff for English class and I decided actually writing anything is the most productive way to procrastinate. I also found a bunch of stuff I wrote when I was off in the bush that I’ll throw up here as well.

Anyone who knows where I can find free recovery tools for a hard drive formated for Solaris on Sparc (apparently there’s a difference), please email me. I still can’t believe my hard drive died in the middle of me copying my backup off of it. If you don’t believe me, because the ironic richness is just too much, ask Erik. He was there.