Weee

Hi everyone. Another fast post before work. Sorry, no pictures yet, I just haven't had the time! Phill, go ahead and post the ones you took, if you want.

I have to admit, it sort of cracked me up to see Eric talk about getting up at 7- I try to be at work at 7, which means that I try to leave by about 620, which means I have to get up about 530. It's not so bad though, I could come in at 8 if I wanted to, the guy across the hall does, but I'd rather get there early and leave early than sleep an extra hour. I work 9 hours a day, but then I get every other Friday off, which is REALLY nice.

My job is going great. Yesterday we started a turnaround, which means that they empty all the product out of one of the units, and the inspectors go through everything and inspect it all from the inside. This means that I will probably have some good chances in the next two weeks to crawl inside pipes, go in storage tanks, see the inside of columns, etc etc. Yesterday they basically were just opening things up and cleaning stuff, so there wasn't that much to see, but it was still pretty cool. The inside of a tube sheet heat exchanger, which of course probably means nothing to you, but trust me, it was cool. ;-)

Of course, the tricky thing with turnarounds is that you never know what you are gonna find. A lot of times, the inspectors open something up and discover that this metal, or this pipe, or whatever, is corroding faster than expected. Then it falls to the engineers to figure out if it'll be ok to the next turnaround, or whether it needs to be repaired now, which of course can be extremely expensive. You can imagine how hectic things can get, although luckily, since I'm not much of a help in anything yet, not much of that falls to me. My main responsibility is to learn as much as possible.

Everyone at work is really friendly and nice. I'm starting to make some friends at work, yesterday I went running with one of the process engineers. She's about three years out of school and lived in Houston working in a refinery down by the San Jacinto Monument until last October. She's really nice. We ran four miles and I actually made it without stopping, although I was running reallllly slow. Heh.

I'm also getting friendly with the other engineers and the inspectors in my group. They are all great guys, and I'm getting to the point where I feel comfortable joking around with them a little bit. A lot of time is spent hanging out in people's doorways and chatting about things, sometimes engineering, sometimes not. It's nice.

Anyways, must get to work. Hope everything is going well with you guys!

Carley