This is the first day in ages that I've had time to even get near my computer. It's a busy time of year, and this year seems busier than most.
We travelled to Calgary last week to attend my brother's wedding. They had a wonderful day - the weather was perfect and lots of friends and family were able to share the day with them. There was a little bit of suspense for a while at the church as the bride was 20 minutes late getting there, but everything turned out fine. That city is growing so fast that I think it expands overnight. City planners just can't keep up with how to move the exploding growth in traffic numbers. It's a great place to visit, but Glen and I were more than glad to get back to the quiet backwaters of rural Saskatchewan. At least life's pace doesn't make a person dizzy out here.
Glen works part time as a Cat operator for a company that does oilfield maintenance in the area. This spring one company has opened up a whole new oilfield just a few miles east of here, just into Manitoba. It's amazing how many wells they've drilled over the past months, and they haven't been easy holes either. There has been so much rain that preparing well sites (scraping a level work area and building a dike around it to contain any spills that may occur) has been next to impossible at times. I'm sure that the work would have been put on hold till things dried up except that the price of oil is so high that they can afford the extra costs involved. As well, the crude coming from this field is premium stuff and much easier to refine. Glen and I own the mineral rights to three quarters only 10 miles west of the action, and we dream of them some day moving the action this way. We have two more kids to put through school - how those oil dollars would help with those bills!
A few days before we left for the wedding one of the drilling rigs southeast of here hit a pocket of gas and water on the way down. Once a hole had been poked into this formation, the pressure it was under forced the gas and water to the surface in a 20 foot geyser. No one was hurt, but they couldn't stop it either. There was another well blowout at Brooks, Alberta last week that erupted in fire and sour gas killing one worker - as far as blowouts go, this is more the norm, but the emergency crew that came from Alberta to seal this one off said this was dangerous enough too. At least when the escaping gas is on fire you know where it is and that it's being burnt off. With this well they had to rely on moniters to tell them what they were dealing with.
The crew that Glen works for weas there around the clock "squeezing" the lease (pushing up dirt and mud to build a wall that edged the water away from the work area so that the crew could stop the flow. The rig never did hit the ground, but with the instability of the ground around it, it developed a 15 degree lean. They had it tethered to a huge winch truck which was anchored to a Cat. Glen was super impressed with the professionalism of the crew from Alberta and was pretty disappointed that he had to leave for the wedding - he wanted to see the job through to the end. He says that if he were 30 years younger he'd be off to sign up for that kind of work in a flash. I think it's a testosterone thing myself.
Since we've returned he's been getting ready for harvest. The rye is almost ready to cut, and he's trying to decide whether to cut barley for green feed, or not. When he planted it he planned to combine it for feed grain, but it was so wet this summer it never got sprayed for weeds so it is a mess of all kinds of vegetation. It would make better bales than grain, but we already have enough feed up to last us two years, and from the amount of bales we saw on the trip out west, there won't be a market for hay sales either. He's still debating what to do.
And I'm two weeks behind in yard work: holidays do that to a person. Guess I'd better get back to work here.
No comments:
Post a Comment