Well, Keith is coming home a week early since there is really nothing they can do out there in Nowhere North Dakota. He says he has actually enjoyed the trip, seeing a different way of life and meeting new people, but Boss Bob has hated every minute of it. Except for the part about playing hooky and driving to Montana and the part about the Indian Casino.
He'll be bringing pictures home with him, pictures I'm very interested in seeing, since I've never been to Nowhere North Dakota and lived in a Man Camp.
There is a town about 20 minutes away from where they are staying, a town that normally has about 14000 people and is the county seat and the ninth largest town in all of North Dakota or something like that, a town that has a Walmart. Since the oil boom in those parts started, prices have skyrocketed and there isn't a spare room to be had in the whole town. Keith and Bob checked into the price of a hotel room and it was $700.00 a night. If it weren't for the temporary trailer houses in the Man Camps, all of these guys working out there would be sleeping in their cars. It really sounds like the Gold Rush days when you could charge whatever you wanted for a gold pan and a hot bath and those miners were glad to pay it.
He had a long talk with his boss about the future of their shop here in Wasco, and it doesn't look good. They have enough railcars to work for a few months and a contract to fulfill that probably won't be renewed when it runs out around October, and then Savage will probably decide to shut the whole shebang down. Unless something comes up before the bitter end, Keith will stay on and then go on unemployment until he finds another job. Hopefully by then there will be another job somewhere. Maybe closer to town so that he's not spending so much in gas every week to get there.
Anyway, I've been keeping plenty busy this past 5 days and kind of enjoyed my little vacation.
Showing posts with label savage man camp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label savage man camp. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Ants and Man Camps
This morning I'm wondering why there are what appear to be cookie or cracker crumbs all over my bathroom sink and then I realize that they are moving and the cookie crumbs are actually very tiny little brown ants. Why are they all over my bathroom sink? Because I washed my hands last night with some sugar scrub stuff and apparently a little drop of it was left on the sink. Tiny brown ants like sugar scrub I guess.
I was going to use the sugar scrub in the shower, I had bought it for a gift and then gave the person something else instead so had this sugar scrub in a drawer and found it the other day, but it says right on the label that it may make your shower slippery and that's all that I need is to slip in the shower, crack my head open, and die while Keith is out of town and then the cats would eat me when they got really hungry because nobody is alive to come and feed them.
So, to keep the cats from eating me I tried it on my hands instead of in the shower. It is now in the trash can.
Well, Keith's big adventure at the Savage Man Camp in The Middle of Nowhere, North Dakota is turning into a big fiasco. The company is overseen by Savage but is actually a subcontractor or something like that, and they built this big refinery to refine the oil that is sucked out of the sand or shale or something, and now they need tanker cars to take all this oil somewhere else. They have only actually been in operation for a week and they got in a big panic about whether the tanker cars they leased are operational and needed experts to come look at them. Of course they provided no tools or anything else to make any repairs, and you can't just start welding on rail cars that have carried oil even if they had provided welding machines, because oil is toxic and flammable and all that (duh) but the guy running the show there thinks that Keith and his boss can magically make all of these tanker cars shiny new so that they can put the oil in them.
So, it is turning into a big mess and Keith's boss is so mad that he is trying to change their plane tickets to fly out of The Middle of Nowhere as soon as possible. So, who knows when Keith will be home, maybe a lot sooner than originally planned. What a waste of airfare, time, hassle, etc.
He did say that the nearest 'big city' has a Walmart and restaurants and is about 20 minutes away, so they were able to get some groceries and anything else they needed. The Savage Man Camp doesn't have a canteen but did give them a trailer with a refrigerator and a TV in it.
It also rains out there in The Middle of Nowhere, a rare treat for someone from Bakersfield. It's also a whole lot cooler than it is here right now and of course nobody thought to bring a jacket.
I was going to use the sugar scrub in the shower, I had bought it for a gift and then gave the person something else instead so had this sugar scrub in a drawer and found it the other day, but it says right on the label that it may make your shower slippery and that's all that I need is to slip in the shower, crack my head open, and die while Keith is out of town and then the cats would eat me when they got really hungry because nobody is alive to come and feed them.
So, to keep the cats from eating me I tried it on my hands instead of in the shower. It is now in the trash can.
Well, Keith's big adventure at the Savage Man Camp in The Middle of Nowhere, North Dakota is turning into a big fiasco. The company is overseen by Savage but is actually a subcontractor or something like that, and they built this big refinery to refine the oil that is sucked out of the sand or shale or something, and now they need tanker cars to take all this oil somewhere else. They have only actually been in operation for a week and they got in a big panic about whether the tanker cars they leased are operational and needed experts to come look at them. Of course they provided no tools or anything else to make any repairs, and you can't just start welding on rail cars that have carried oil even if they had provided welding machines, because oil is toxic and flammable and all that (duh) but the guy running the show there thinks that Keith and his boss can magically make all of these tanker cars shiny new so that they can put the oil in them.
So, it is turning into a big mess and Keith's boss is so mad that he is trying to change their plane tickets to fly out of The Middle of Nowhere as soon as possible. So, who knows when Keith will be home, maybe a lot sooner than originally planned. What a waste of airfare, time, hassle, etc.
He did say that the nearest 'big city' has a Walmart and restaurants and is about 20 minutes away, so they were able to get some groceries and anything else they needed. The Savage Man Camp doesn't have a canteen but did give them a trailer with a refrigerator and a TV in it.
It also rains out there in The Middle of Nowhere, a rare treat for someone from Bakersfield. It's also a whole lot cooler than it is here right now and of course nobody thought to bring a jacket.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Going To Camp
On very short notice, Keith is headed off this morning to camp. Savage Man Camp that is.
On Tuesday he calls me from work saying that he has been asked to go to North Dakota to a Savage facility in the booming oil fields there. They have a number of tanker rail cars that need inspecting before they can fill them up with oil and send them somewhere else. Nobody in North Dakota knows how to inspect and repair railcars, apparently, so Keith and his boss Bob are flying out this morning on their way to The Middle of Nowhere, North Dakota.
They are going to a place called Trenton, which is not a town but rather a township with a population of 42, something like 22 men and 20 women according to Wikipedia. They actually have a post office in this little township, but probably not much of anything else. Maybe a gas station. Obviously, in a town of 42 people there are no motels, so Savage has a trailer park Man Camp set up for the refinery workers and Keith and Bob get to stay in a trailer. They each get their own bedroom at least. They have a canteen for the workers to eat at, because in a town of 42 people there are probably no restaurants either.
Keith got picked to go because the less productive workers were asked first and one said no, the other said he couldn't go until Monday, so Keith was asked as a last resort. Bob doesn't pick Keith to go anywhere because he is about the only one that actually works in the yard on the railcars and if he is not there productivity goes out the window. So, finding that out kind of annoyed him at a time when he is already so annoyed at how things are going at work that he almost quit the other day.
Anyway, he will be there until the 13th, Bob is staying until Tuesday, when he will be replaced with the guy who couldn't go until Monday.
Their flight out of Bakersfield was at 5:30 this morning, so I drove Keith over to the airport to drop him off. I don't drive in the dark much anymore because I really can't see very well, the oncoming lights kind of blind me and if I'm on a street with no reflectors in the lanes it's very hard for me to see where I'm supposed to be driving. I did want to drive over to make sure I could make my way back home again in the dark, and since I'm typing away, obviously made it back home again. I had a death grip on the steering wheel the whole way, but I made it.
The airport isn't all that far away, just a little ways past the post office that I go to, about 8 miles from the house. It's a very small airport with only one terminal and doesn't have a whole lot of flights in and out. It's so small that they only have one security station. They do have a body scanner, which I got to watch Keith go through.
They are flying to Denver, then on to Minot, North Dakota, which is the 3rd largest city in North Dakota at something like 40,000 people. The entire state of North Dakota has less than 600,000 people. For comparison, Bakersfield has like 350,000.
So, it should be an interesting 12 or so days for him, and a very quiet 12 or so days for me, with a vacation from cooking for me and a vacation from being nagged by me for him.
On Tuesday he calls me from work saying that he has been asked to go to North Dakota to a Savage facility in the booming oil fields there. They have a number of tanker rail cars that need inspecting before they can fill them up with oil and send them somewhere else. Nobody in North Dakota knows how to inspect and repair railcars, apparently, so Keith and his boss Bob are flying out this morning on their way to The Middle of Nowhere, North Dakota.
They are going to a place called Trenton, which is not a town but rather a township with a population of 42, something like 22 men and 20 women according to Wikipedia. They actually have a post office in this little township, but probably not much of anything else. Maybe a gas station. Obviously, in a town of 42 people there are no motels, so Savage has a trailer park Man Camp set up for the refinery workers and Keith and Bob get to stay in a trailer. They each get their own bedroom at least. They have a canteen for the workers to eat at, because in a town of 42 people there are probably no restaurants either.
Keith got picked to go because the less productive workers were asked first and one said no, the other said he couldn't go until Monday, so Keith was asked as a last resort. Bob doesn't pick Keith to go anywhere because he is about the only one that actually works in the yard on the railcars and if he is not there productivity goes out the window. So, finding that out kind of annoyed him at a time when he is already so annoyed at how things are going at work that he almost quit the other day.
Anyway, he will be there until the 13th, Bob is staying until Tuesday, when he will be replaced with the guy who couldn't go until Monday.
Their flight out of Bakersfield was at 5:30 this morning, so I drove Keith over to the airport to drop him off. I don't drive in the dark much anymore because I really can't see very well, the oncoming lights kind of blind me and if I'm on a street with no reflectors in the lanes it's very hard for me to see where I'm supposed to be driving. I did want to drive over to make sure I could make my way back home again in the dark, and since I'm typing away, obviously made it back home again. I had a death grip on the steering wheel the whole way, but I made it.
The airport isn't all that far away, just a little ways past the post office that I go to, about 8 miles from the house. It's a very small airport with only one terminal and doesn't have a whole lot of flights in and out. It's so small that they only have one security station. They do have a body scanner, which I got to watch Keith go through.
They are flying to Denver, then on to Minot, North Dakota, which is the 3rd largest city in North Dakota at something like 40,000 people. The entire state of North Dakota has less than 600,000 people. For comparison, Bakersfield has like 350,000.
So, it should be an interesting 12 or so days for him, and a very quiet 12 or so days for me, with a vacation from cooking for me and a vacation from being nagged by me for him.
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