notice given

The night shift Sunday night turned out to be the busy shift. Seems like they are starting several new drilling operations within a 20 mile radius of us and we seem to be a magnet for people needing directions to the new sites :-(. I'm not sure why we get so many "lost souls" but we seem to get more than our share. I guess since you can see our rig from the highway and our entrance is nice and wide maybe that entices them to stop. The bad thing is we have no idea where most of these places are they are asking about. These oil rigs tend to pop up like mushrooms overnight and being tied to our little patch of real estate we have no idea what is going on around us most of the time.

Needless to say I was pretty pooped by the time daylight rolled around Monday morning and I crawled in bed pretty quickly. The rain did wake me up one time ..... rain! Oh no! Well nothing I can do about it so I rolled over and went back to sleep :-).

The rain lasted most of the morning and there was a thick layer of clouds the rest of the day. Since the traffic had slowed back down we didn't have to venture away from our patio so the mud wasn't an issue and it should dry up fairly quickly.

I called our boss Roger this morning and broke the news to him that we needed some relief. He was fine with it and wanted to make sure we were still interested in this type of work. I told him yes as long as they still wanted us. He said absolutely and to give him a call when we were back in the area!

The plan is to have our relief arrive next Monday morning. We will have everything ready to roll when they get here so we can move out of the spot and they can get parked and set up. We will give them all the info we can on the location and surrounding area and then we will head out. We are looking at landing in the Del Rio Texas area. We plan on visiting Seminole Canyon State Park, Lake Amistad and do a little motorcycle riding/sightseeing if the weather cooperates.

We got a call from fellow Hoosiers Jimmie and Becky Owens who are motorcycle buddies back home. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that he was diagnosed with cancer and came to Houston for treatment. The news he gave us wasn't what we had been praying for. The doctors are saying he has stage 4 cancer with up to 40 tumors in his lymph nodes. They also detected it in his bone marrow. They are mapping out a course of treatment but it looks like it will be a long spring and summer for them. Since we are so close we made loose plans to drop in on them for a short visit on our way through.

So now we start our last week here at the gate. We have enjoyed our time here and are looking forward to seeing some of what Texas has to offer in the next few weeks. I'll keep you posted.