May 22, 2009 at 10:52 am (Meanderings)
Tags: Blooging, Drunk Students, Engineers, Fort McMurray, Meta, Oilsands Geology, Pitcher of Water, Slip Circles, Wait? When are you going to write about WoW again??
So, this is my brain.
The one on the right, full of lemons? Yeah, that’s what I know about Shell Oilsands geology.
These are my co-workers.
Actually, more accurately, this is representative of the sum total of time and interest that my co-workers have to learn about Shell Oilsands geology. Putting what I know into what they have the ability to learn has been exhausting on all count. I’ve had to delicately distill and decant the lemony essence of oilsands geology into their shotglasses in the short time they had before they flew off up north to do their jobs – the jobs that I should be going to go do but I can’t because I’m at a course all next week to refill one of those pitchers. (Likely the one in the back, full of cucumbers. Cucumbers are good. It might be more apples, though, the course description wasn’t clear. Either way there will be even more stuff in my brain, and I’m actually pretty happy with that. My mind is a Crazy Cat Lady. Except my mind collects thoughts and facts not tabbies. And my thoughts won’t eat my corpse if I happen to keel over dead and no one notices for over a week. I hope.)
The point is that my brain feels like a dishrag that has been wrung and refolded and wrung again to get every last little drop of moisture out of it before laying it out on the clothesline to bake in the hot sun and dessicating wind. In the Gobi. I keep looking at my drafts folder and thinking maybe, maybe I should write something but I’m so tired from writing what is basically a summary of everything – everything – I’ve learned in the past two years so that my northward-bound colleagues have something to do on the plane instead of watch some crappy movie that I just don’t have the energy.
I’ll try harder, I really want to get some of these posts out there but the only thing I can think right now is how to tell an engineer that the defining feature of the MM1/LM2 contact is a scour feature that is sometimes pyritized and also to make room in my head for what he’s trying to tell me about slip circles and swamp muds but slip circle information is somehow completely immisicble with lemon-flavoured water and it just didn’t stick. I’m sorry Mike, it’s not that I wasn’t listening, it’s just that my brain was busy pouring at the time.
I think the pitcher on the front left is vodka, not water. So the weekend might be ok. I wish you all well and I hope all you Amurricans have a happy long weekend and don’t get into too much trouble!
Post Scriptum: The full shotglass I think is one of the students. Everytime I try to tell them something, all they have on their minds is beer. I miss those days.
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May 13, 2009 at 8:48 am (Meanderings)
Tags: Don't Panic, Geologists, Geology, Limestone, New Posts, Portrait of a Raider, Raiding, Scotch, Venture Co., Work, WoW! Geology!
So, I worry I might have to start seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go, looking for the places only they would know.
Layoffs have begun at my company and while we got the expected Calm The Troubled Waters email from the company bigwigs, I’m not so foolish as to believe that there isn’t an element of uncertainty in my future. I’ll keep my head down and do my job and hope that the spotlight doesn’t shine on me.
I know what it’s like to be unemployed for long stretches of time, I know what happened to me and my home life last time and I know that I don’t want to have to go back to that dark place.
Though, if I do get laid off, I could always just move to New Zealand.
But, to keep my mind off things, I have been planning a whole slew of new and exciting blog topics. I find that my muse is a capricious creature and I have decided that if I can create a few regularily occurring topics to blog about when all else fails, I might be able to muster up the words to say something relevant and readable.
The first series of posts I want to work on will be called “Portrait of a Raider.” I will be looking at different ‘types’ or ’styles’ of raiders, how to recognise them, what they bring to a raid, what type of guild they work well with and what sorts of situations they don’t work well with. I have a few raider archetypes already planned, but this post is also a call for ideas and suggestions. Talk to me about some of the recurring types of raiders you’ve seen and how they’ve worked (or not) with your guild and your raiding style.
The second series of posts will hopefully hark back to my theme of examining the intersections of WoW and my life. I intend to call them “WoW! Geology!” posts and I will be looking at occurrances of geology in Warcraft, or using geology (and perhaps a smattering of other sciences) to explain and illuminate facets of Warcraft lore, maps and items. I’m open to suggestions on this topic as well. Did you seem some bit of WoW topography and wonder if it has any basis in reality? Have you seen some geology-related terms used in Warcraft and wondered just what the heck that term really meant? Do you want to know why the Venture Co. Geologists in Stranglethorn Vale shoot balls of lightning from their hands? (An unholy combination of scotch, limestone and a book of engineering jokes – known only to a few select initiates of a shadowy cabal.)
Bottom line is, work is good (though precarious) for now, raiding and recruting are doing very well, and the weather sucks bilgewater. Only amazing blog posts can come of these conditions. I can feel it.
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