New Site

  We finally got moved off of our other site. Someone at Marathon messed up and did not call Gate Guarding to release us, so we spent a little over a week doing much of nothing and both going to bed at night. Worked out well as we were still getting paid....but it was really boring.

  We went back to the yard in Whitsett and lost two days pay waiting for a new assignment. We are at a drilling rig this time. First time for us. Most people who working the drilling rigs stay with the rig when it moves to the next site. The folks that were with this rig were going home, so we ended up here. It typically takes about 2-3 weeks to drill a new well.

  We will most likely be with this rig until we leave on May 18th.

  Most people who are gate guarding do not want to be here in south Texas during the summer. It is way to hot and humid, plus all of the critters are out and about.....rattlesnakes, scorpions, and lot of assorted bugs. They even sell snake repelent in the farm stores, but reports are that it does not work very well. Reports are the moth balls work better, and on our first site Linda spread a whole box of them around the rig....really smelled bad!!!!! Plus its not healty to breathe all of those fumes.  No snakes thou..
I took one of Linda's socks and put mothballs in it, and taped it to our water hose to keep the mice away.

  An update on the storm damage......the new satellite dish is installed, the new refrigerator is installed and after installing the new dish we discovered that the HDMI input on the tv was also burned out by the storm....so we will be replacing the tv in the living room as well. The insurance covered the full cost of the new bedroom tv and the home theater system.....but only a small percentage of the refrigerator and dish...they prorated these items. Cost was around $7600 and we had to pay $4650 of that.

  A real bad day for us.....just as we thought were going to be in good shape for money for the summer and until we return here in November we have to pay out $4650....
I guess at least we had it to pay out, but it will sure put a crimp on this summer.

  Hope all is well with you.....write when you can, and hopefully we will see some of you this summer.

Love to all of ya
Jim and Linda