"if you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room"

Friday, February 28, 2014

two down!

We have completed two full weeks at our current gate and have settled into a routine. Our hats are off to the folks who do this job months or even years at a time. The money is good but the days are mundane and repetitious. We do enjoy working with the crews on the rigs. They are all very polite and we do our best to learn their names and memorize their license plates. Rudee is a lot better at it than I am and our dash is littered with "cheat sheets" of names to help me out. :-)

We have made a lot of progress on our move to Texas. Our license plates, registrations and titles are all being processed and should arrive at our address in the next few days. We have updated our address on just about every account we can think of and have changed our insurance policies over to Texas. We still have to change our drivers licenses so I'm not running out and buying a cowboy hat just yet. :-)

We did have some rain here on Tuesday which made things a muddy, sloppy mess. Our pad is pretty well packed down and wasn't too bad but the road getting in was a mess. We are 3/4 of a mile from the main road on Pena Rd. which, for the first 1/2 mile is a mix of blacktop and hard packed gravel. The remaining 1/4 mile is mostly red clay and sand which turns into a quagmire when it gets wet. Once you pass our gate the quagmire continues and there are at least two more gates further down so we at least have it a little better then they do. :-)

We are not sure what the future holds for this job, they have finished drilling one well and are moving a few feet on the pad to drill another one. We figure that will take another 2-3 weeks by the time they are done and moved out. The next major step would be to Frac (hydraulic fracturing) the wells but I have no idea when this would be scheduled and information is a little hard to come by on this job. We are hoping to stay a total of 7 weeks before heading North of course I'll keep you posted. I will leave you with a sunrise shot of another day on the gate.





10 comments:

  1. From one set of new Texans to another: Welcome to Texas! As soon as I got my Texas driver's license I got some cowgirl boots.

    If they're drilling another well and then fracing, you will most likely be there a couple of months. When we were gate guarding, it seemed like fracing put the operation on a fast track and we had many trucks coming and going all hours of the day. Lots of water and sand trucks lined up to get in the gate. We had four pads at our site. One thing we remember, too, is how polite the oil field workers are.

    Oh how I remember the caliche roads when it rained. When those heavy trucks drove over the caliche mud it made big ruts.And to try to walk on caliche mud...well, you might as well be trying to ice skate!

    Thanks for the memories, I think.

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    1. Susan,
      Yep, fracs are a pain in the rear end for sure. We are hoping the drill rig will be here for another 3 weeks, that would put us at 5 weeks total, throw in a work over crew for both holes and that could stretch into a couple of weeks and we would be gone and miss the frac! :-)
      The food they provide during a frac is a plus but I'm already eating too much and sitting around not doing much! :-)

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    2. I know what you mean about the food. And most of it is red meat. Bob doesn't eat red meat so we ended up throwing out a lot of pork chops and steak. I ate what I could, but I just couldn't keep up cuz they kept bringin' more!

      Is there a good time to visit you? You're near Cotulla, right?

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  2. When we're back in San Antonio we'd love to plan a time to come down to see you at your gate. We'll be in touch.

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  3. Hope Rudee is able to keep her boots on!

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  4. You guys better practice up on your card skills. We have to have a game night!

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  5. Welcome to Texas and your new home state. Wish you would send some of that rain to me in West Texas, San angelo.

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  6. I'm wondering why you picked TX over FL for your new residence. It seems FL would have been the natural choice since you own property there anyway. Does TX have that much of an advantage over FL?

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    1. TC,
      We chose Texas vs Florida more for convenience and to save a little money for our registrations. We are currently in Texas which makes the transfer easier, we are already Escapee members and they have a first class mail forwarding service and getting an address was a breeze. Florida charges a one time fee of $225 per vehicle for new registrations while Texas only charges $90 which is a difference of $405 for our three vehicles. We will probably become Florida residents at some time in the future once we hang up the keys and move into our rental home there but we are hopeful that will not be for a long time to come. :-)

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  7. Sounds like things are going well there. Hopefully the rain wont cause too many mudslides :-)

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