Friday, January 14, 2011

Being An Adult....

Its been a while since I last got on here, and its becaused work got super busy. I speant the calendar month of December on a job in Texas. 28 nights at the Gainesville, Tx Holiday Inn made for a pretty nice set of rewards points, and a $2979 hotel bill.

Crazy.

Since June 1 the hotel nights are as followed: Holiday Inn-41, Marriot-21, Best Western-12, for a grand total of 73 hotel nights out of around (im not doing the math) a possible 175 nights. We did get to go home for Xmas and got done New Years Eve night around 9pm and drove back to Lafayette. I rang in NYE on the side of the road with a Texas State Trooper because our truck was dirty and he couldnt see our plates. I think it was an excuse to pull us over on NYE.

I finally got back out to the lacrosse field after being gone since before Thanksgiving and it came not a moment too soon. The team had its first scrimmage Jan 6 agains St. Thomas Moore HS, the Louisiana State Champs for 3 years running. I watched this team beat the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Granted, UL-L is a first year team but you get the point. The varsity lost really badly but the JV only lost 2-5. Considering the entire team can play JV except for Seniors, I think they did well. The first game is tommorrow in Biloxi, MS so Im excited for them to get the season rolling. Hopefully I can make it to a few games.

I finally got to give my 6 month presentation at work-after I had been here 8 months. It is just a review of what you have learned so far, and what you need to work on. I think I did well enough, but because they are testing my knowledge every line of questioning always ended with me saying "I dont know". That never feels good even when they asked something they didnt expexct you to know.

I just turned 25 years old. It feels strange. Im now closer to 30 than I am to 20 and gettng closer every day. I didnt really do much for it. I went to Ttown to see friends and all, but a huge ice storm kept everybody in for most of the weekend. It was still a good trip, and I always look foward to going back. My Mom's Bday was on that Monday so I went home to visit and watch the BCS National Championship Game.

You know in Star Wars when at the end the good guys win and you feel great?

You know the next installment of the series when the bad guys win and you feel awful?

Thats what the 2009 and 2010 BCSNC games were for me. I hope Auburn is happy with selling their souls for this one. Newton and Fairley both decided to take pay cuts and enter the draft this year. I wonder who Auburn will sign in Free-Agency this year?

For the first time I am beginning on a major adult milestone. Im looking at buying a house. I feel like I can make a house payment for no more than my rent is now, plus i would be building equity. Its still a long way off as I have until May n my lease but if anybody has any tips I would be more than happy to hear them.

For now though its back to the grindstone. On sunday I head back to Texas for at least another week. The grind continues, being an adult.....

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Being Held Hostage Is Not Fun.....

Today I walked out of the work unit(essentially a large closet on the back of a flatbed, filled with computers) only to be pushed back in and held hostage for the next 6 hours. If I were working closer to Mexico, I would actually be worried that it was humans doing this to me. But no, they were......


Thousands of bees

There were so many bees that they kept finding ways to get into the unit. We must have killed 50. This is no exageration. It got so bad that I had to duct tape a seal around the door frame to keep them out, and even so some still got through. I never realized how small our unit is until 2 grown men try to swat bees while trying not to hit each other and not get stung. From the outside perspective it was probably funny. Was wasnt funny was not being able to get out, stretch the legs, get a drink, use the restroom, etc. until the swarm moved away. Stuff like this always hasppens to me when I go on jobs with Barrett "Stanky Leg" Nicholson as the other engineer. Read how he got that knickname from one of my earlier posts about finding a "dead body" on the side of the road.

In fact, the first job I ever went with him is quite a story in itself that happened before I started blogging.

We were going to do a job in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. We had alot of luggage so we check most of to meet us in Williamsport.
Our flights are from Lafayette-Dallas-Philadelphia-WIlliamsport. We get all the way to Philly and on the way the job cancels. We get the message when we land. It is like 8:30 pm so we decide that we will see if we can catch our luggage and stay in Philly for the night instead of going to Williamsport.

We were switching airlines for this last flight and apparently this was the last flight for American Airlines cause when we got off there was no AA employees anywhere. We keep searching for someone for us to talk to. We finally leave security thinking the ticket agents might be able to help us. There is noone at the ticket gate. SO we then go try to find our next airlines gate, which is no small feat when you have to walk it. We finally find United Airlines and go in and talk to someone only to be told that this was "United-National" and our flight was "United-Regional" so we needed to go to another agent. When only had an hour between our flights and this is cutting a large section into it.

We make it to the right counter and they points us to the Luggage desk. We walk over there. We now have 30 minutes before our flight. I explained our situation to this lady and added "If you cant pull our luggage we will go to Williamsport but we need to know now. What should we do." I have never seen anyone so awful at her job. She tries to get on the radio, says she cant reach anybody, plays on the computer, takes a phone call and then just stares at us. I ask again, "Should we just go get on the flight?". She says "Hold on" and goes in the back and doesnt return. So I am pissed now. We may not only not get our luggage but we may now miss our flight.

We decide that lets just go to Williamsport. We have like 10 minutes cause this lady screwed around. We have to go back through security and while I'm going through I hear the final boarding call. Ileave all my luggage with Barrett still going through security, and takes off with no socks on towards the gate. I look at my ticket and it says gate 27. I look up and I am at gate 3. Uh oh. Bercause of my peak physical condition i made it all the way to about gate 18 before I hit the wall.

I finally make it to the gate, yelling for them to wait, as they close the doors. Im sweating my balls off. I explain to them what happened. They pull the plane back to get our luggage. It turns out the baggage lady never made the call, her radio was off. So they grab our luggage off and as we are leaving they say "All 3 bags will be waiting for you." The only problem is we had 4 bags. They call the plane BACK to get our 4th one off. At this point Barrett shows up with ALL our carry on bags running down and huffing and puffing. He looked like a patrooper.



So guess where we have to go to get our luggage.....yep, right back to old Radio Lady. When we get there she has our bags and she has the audacity to say "I really saved you guys, huh? Where would you guys have been without me?".

Barretts face did this:



I swear to God he had to stop me from reaching across and:
funny animated gif

We got out of there as quick as possible to drink the biggest beer in Philly. Apparently things like this just happen when we are on jobs together: Luggage, Bodies, and now Bees.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Mexican Jerry Springer is the Funniest

Im currently working 4 am-6 pm shifts outside Gainesville, TX. Its not bad work...once we got our tools set up we really dont do much but watch computer screens for 12 hours. I've played alot of XBox and watched the following films:

Get Him to the Greek-Way better than I thought it would be

Grown Ups

Inception

Jonah Hex

Machete- I was simply stunned how awsomely bad this movie was


Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

Robin Hood

The Social Network

Valkyrie

All 4 Indiana Jones'

The first 3 Harry Potters

Garden State

The Sorcerers Apprentice

And the whole first season of "Its always Sunny"

Tough job I know......I am running out of movies. One of the highlights is when I actually get to the hotel and flipping through and catching Mexican Channels. So far I have come up with a list that seems to be in every Show:
1) Big ass fake titties-seriously, every woman in every show has these
2) Rediculous rules for game shows


Just what the hell is going on here

Some times I just sit back and really wish I knew Spanish well enough to know what the hell is going on. I ran across this one time on a Lacrosse trip. We were sitting in the hotel room wondering what the hell was going on so I call up a player down the hall who is originally from Venezuela. I said "hey hurry down to our room we need you real quick". We hear the door bust open down the hall, heavy footsteps coming down the hall, and an out of breath Alex Perez standing in our door. We say, "Please tell us what is going on", not knowing that we woke him up from a nap and he thought there was an emergency. Needless to say he wasnt happy and I still dont know what is going on.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Pay Attention Class.....We have alot to cover

I know I have been absent from my blog for the past two weeks but I went on vacation from work for the Thanksgiving holidays. I would have posted at my parents house but that internet has what I like to call "a case of the SLOWS". I mean, this thing make dial-up look quicksilver.

So I leave work for vacation and head to Tuscaloosa for the Georgia State game. The next morning Hunter and I are going to the ATM for cash at about 10. We pull up to a T-Crossing trying to make a right. Hunters stops for this motorcycle and this lady makes a left onto our street and never sees him. He is going about 40 and never touches the brakes. He hits her passenger front wheel and cuts a clean 270 over the hood and lands flat on his back in front of our truck. It kinda looked like this but much, much less funny.



The helmet saved this dudes life no question. He was in a lot of pain so we kept him down until the cops showed up. We learned later that he was ok but this seriously ran in my mind in slow motion for the next couple days. It was surreal and scary.

So Darby and I end up at the Ga. State game in my parents seats. These seats are awesome. 3rd row endzone. We end up drinking a little and start just making random comments on the game and we have the crowd around us craking up. The biggest thing was us cheering for #13 Rob Ezell, the 5th year 5'9" white walk-on reciever to get some playing time. You may remember him from this:



So anyway we are yelling for 13 to get into the game and he finally does in the closing minutes...our section goes wild. He even took snaps on the last series at QB. As they are running for the tunnel (right under us) we had the whole section going "EZELL! EZELL!". As we were leaving one woman said "I dont know who yall are, but we had an awesome time" which felt really good, we were just cutting up like we do all the time.

So I basically eat too much, drink too much, stay up too late, and all the other things after the game and up to Saturday. I would have made hedonismbot proud.



On the way home sunday I am felling sick from the previous days (duh) and my tire blows out 6 miles from home. No cell service, the road has no shoulder so I am sick, changing this tire in the middle of the road. I get my donut tire on and this thing blows about 1.5 miles from the house. Bad day to say the least. I have to leave my car on the side of the road untile monday when I got it replaced. The rest of the week I spent hanging out trying to get over my illness.

For Thanksgiving we had 55 people at my parents house. Woah indeed. My Mom is one of 8 children and my Dads side of the family came too. Thais is the first time I can remember both sides being togwether and probably the last. I dont think my Dads side was ready for my Mom's side.....who are "loud and country" to put it nicely.



The Iron Bowl is the only rivalry I know of that has names for its games:
1967: The Run in the Mud
1972: Punt Bama Punt
1981: 315
1982: Bo Over the Top
1984: Wrong Way Bo
1985: The Kick
2005: Honk If You Sacked Brodie
2008: Fear This!
2009: The Drive

and it's newest:
2010: The Biggest Choke Job In College Football History

Thats all we are going to say about this game. Although the one good thing that came out of this was our recreation of Cam Newton Getting Paid (with his little "blowing kisses" thing he does):

Monday, November 8, 2010

....dary. This weekend was Legendary.

Friday afternoon arrives and 12 people make the trip down for the LSU game here. Darby, Thomas, Tweeder, Hunter & Ginger, Will Hodges, Sarah & Will, and new friends Wes and Elaina. As soon as they get here, Darby decides to "ICE" me from the game "Bros Icing Bros". Needless to say I was not happy. Check out the rules here.

According to the rules, the following photographic evidence must be shown.

I just got iced........bro

Since a trip to South Louisiana would not be complete without Cajun food, I took everybody to Randols here in Lafayette, one of the best places for this sort of thing. Everybody really enjoyed it, to the point where i thought Darby was gonna make love to his Etoufee. We go out that night to a bar near the house and partied pretty hard and got in pretty late. Everyone fit into the apt pretty comfortable between my beds, couch, and air matresses they brought. In the morning we started getting up about 8 and by 9:30 everyone is dressed and ready to go (an impressive feat with two showers and 13 people-including 3 girls).

We made it to campus by about 12 because traffic was awful. We are clearly outnumbered here. Its like that anytime you go to an away game but it seems like there are expecially few Bama fans down here. And contrary to popular belief, all the fans arn't bad down here, its just that the ones that are bad make up for it by being super awful. One guy gave us all beers and gumbo on our way to the stadium because I recognized the high school jacket he was wearing was from Lafayette. On the flip side I gave some dude a high five after the game, he then realized I was an Alabama fan and asked if I wanted to fight about it. I declined his invitation.



Thomas, Will, Hunter, Sarah, Darby, Ginger, Stephen, Will Hodges, Wes, Tweeder....Elaina was taking the picture

So we make it to the game and I am sitting with Thomas on the first row of the 17 yd line. Pretty cool seats but we speant about 80% of the game watching the jumbotron.
I will say this, Alabama is a good team, just not a great team that we have been the last two years. To beat Bama, you have to play a perfect game and hop we make mistakes. USC and LSU did exactly this. They made the plays that they had to, and took advantage of our mistakes. All credit goes to those teams. We as a fanbase got a little spoiled these last two years but hopefully we will back to form next year when our defense is not so young. Hell, Bear Bryant was at Alabama for 26 years and had quite a few 8-4, 7-5 seasons. You simply cannot be great all the time.


These seats were super close to the field, so much so that you couldnt see over the players on the sidelines

After the game we end up meeting up with Darby's cousin Paul who lives in Baton Rouge. He showed us around and took us to a tailgate. They had so much food and drink at this thing it was amazing, including the best muffalettas I have ever had. They also had frozen applesauce and moonshine. Lets just say it gets you there quick. Elaina was the only one of us that didnt go to the game. She went to a bar during and.....lets just say had such a good time that this happened at the tailgate.


And boom goes the dynamite

We went out to a bar and most of the group was ready to go back to Lafayette. I gave them my keys and Darby, Paul and his girlfriend, and I all stayed at the bar and stayed the night at Pauls.



Paul drove us back to Lafayette the next morning and when I got there everyone was up and actually had the house clean. That was a huge help let me tell you. One of the funnier stories from the weekend came between Thomas and Ginger. Thomas is uber-competitive and likes to be the best he can at anything he is doing. Ginger and he both buy scatch off lottery tickets and Ginger wins some money. She kept trading them in for more tickets. Thomas bought the same amount of tickets and won squat. He was getting so frustrated that he wasnt good.....at a game of chance. He was almost as frustrated as Tweeder was when Thomas was beating him in NFL Blitz for the Nintendo 64 after talking trash all the way from Tuscaloosa. Since i've known Thomas, I think he is, and this is approx., 800 wins-1 loss at that game.

Ovearall I think it went well. 72 hours, 13 people, gallons of booze, no accidental deaths or dismemberments in hostile territory.....i'd have to say it was Legendary

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

This weekend is going to be Legen....wait for it



I am so pumped to return to Tiger Stadium and end LSU's season. Im mostly excited about everyone coming down and partying in Lafayette the night before the game. It should get wild

Oh The Places You'll Go!




This is a map of all the places I have worked for Halliburton in the last 6 months. (click on it to enlarge) We drive everywhere, so those Penn and ND jobs take a long time to get to. Hell, the Alabama jobs take the least amont of time to get to and those were 6 hours drive away. I placed a pin everywhere I have went and they are named for the company we did work for. Im hoping to get out west and into the gulf soon.