I'm Baaaaack

Jut arrived back at the Lakeland.  This could be the last time, could be the last time, may be the last time, I don't know.

Final Post (for now)

Well, I am home and tanning. This will be the last Cold Lake post, unless I go back. Really don't know when or if that will happen. I had hoped to sum up everything in this post, but the blog really stands on its own.

Hope you got some enjoyment out of it and learned something, I know I did.

If I move on to another blog (if anyone comments and wants that) I will post it here.

Now, fill your boots!

Where ya'll clicked in from

I signed up with clustrmaps to keep track of the visitors to this blog and the map as of Monday 3/26/2007 is below. I really don't know what to make of it, but I think it is interesting.

Gone

When you leave after being in a place for 6 weeks you would hope to have gotten to know that place. I'm sure I have utterly failed that.

My time in Cold Lake was delimited by the demands of work and the schedule left no real time to explore and get to know the place and the people. Outside of the initial ski trip and that ill-fated Sunday trip, I really didn't do anything but eat, sleep, work and ride to to work.

Somehow I got more than 100 non-work related posts out of that, I really don't know how.

So, as I am leaving and contemplating this place, I guess I am going to have to come back (with a car of my own, I hope) if I really want to get to know Cold Lake.

I'll be back with a post about the future of this blog and my blogging from home sometime in the near future.

Repetitive Music Syndrome

Nearly everyday for the last 36 I have had breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. Nearly everyday for the last 36 I have heard the following songs:
Martina MacBride:My Baby Loves Me Just the Way That I Am
Alan Jackson:Summertime Blues
Lorrie Morgan:My Night to Howl
and
Brooks & Dunn:Rock My World (Little Country Girl)
I believe some people can ignore the Muzak, but the above list is a little hard to ignore, day after day.

Other things I didn't get a picture of

Northern lights. Not evident on the 2 whole clear nights in Cold Lake so far.

The 'east german guard gate' that I mentioned very early in this blog. It has been retired.

The 'first nations' people ice fishing. They did it at Primrose Lake twice, but I couldn't get a picture from my station.

The scraped snow mountains in grocery store and mall parking lots.

The black background signs. I've been wanting to take a picture of that since I went to London, Ontario.

Wildlife

I promised Maria I would put these up tonight. I did not take the deer photo, one of my coworkers got that one before I got here. I did take the skunk picture. You should have seen me stalking it (from behind, like a moron) trying to take its picture. I didn't want to get sprayed, but I wanted the pic.

From the archive

Brown snow. I could take guesses on how brown snow is formed. But I probably couldn't publish the comments. Brown snow is formed when you through out the coffee that got cold walking between buildings.

That reminds me

Somethings you won't see now that the camera is dead.

Farm equipment rising from the melting snow. It appears that they just leave farm equipment in odd places to be covered with snow and emerge sometime later, so bits of it are coming up now that we are getting a little melt up here. Unsuspected hay bails have been popping up these last few days.

Actual snowmobile stop signs.

The rotary phone in the lobby. How can it still work?

The whole layout of my cold weather gear. That's a promise I now won't be able to keep, sorry.

How coin operated car washes work up here.

The driving range and boardwalk.

The imperial oil energy center. They are building this huge building in -25C, snowy weather. It's been pretty amazing watching it go up.

Deer, wolves, coyotes or foxes.

I've seen a bunch of things that I haven't been able to photograph while moving at 100 kilometers per hour.

Camera is well and truly dead

Photos in posts after this will be from the saved shots on the hard disk. Oh well. Maybe I'll get a new camera when I get home.

Beer and Clamato

I noticed no one commented on the Beer and Clamato post from yesterday. I cannot get across how discussing this is to observe. Some guy even ordered it in the coffee shop on the Sunday night after I got out of the "frontage road".

Camera on last legs

My camera is really, really near death. Here's a few pictures that were taken the last couple of days.This is me using the (rotary dial) house phone at the hotel. I really wanted to get the rotary phone, you don't see one of those every day.
This is a copy of the NWF Daily News on my knee in the car on the way back to the hotel. This is the page where Maria's picture was Sunday. The only paper from FWB that we got up here since January and it happens to be that one.
Here's out the window from the car. Still trying to fix the camera, but no luck. Vicki, I need a new digital camera.

Oil Sands

These silo looking things all over Cold Lake (and down at least to Bonnyville as flingy-lingy finally guessed are part of the oil industry.

Imperial Oil (2/3rd's owned by Exxon-Mobile) runs several projects getting oil from the oil sands in Alberta. Its biggest project is the Cold Lake in-situ field where they get the oil out by injecting stem into the ground and extracting the oil underneath.

Canada's oil sands reserves are said to be greater than the entire rest of the world's petroleum reserves combined.

These "wells" are all over. The oil company gets the mineral rights from the provincial government (the landowners only own the first 1 foot of dirt under their property unless they owned it before Alberta became a province in 1907), and only have to pay the farmers the value of the land they are occupying (in other words the annual value of the amount of say wheat that could have been grown on the area the oil well is taking up), although the farmer does not have to sell. If he doesn't they buy land from his neighbor near his fence and just drill at an angle.

Because of the explosive growth of the oil patch in the last few years, salaries are out of sight in the area, home prices are going through the roof and 21 year old mechanics with Royal Canadian Air Force training are leaving the service when they get to Cold Lake to work the oil patch making $150,000 a year (Canadian). It is also why the Edmonton Journal help wanted classifieds are full of quarter page ads from cover to cover begging for workers. Not just in the oil industry, either, because everyone went to work oil there are no craftsmen or service people to be found. This was a major reason we couldn't find anyone to tow us out of the snow, all mechanics and drivers work for the oil industry and none of them work in service stations or drive tow trucks commercially anymore.

See what you can learn waiting for a tractor to pull you out of the snow?!

Bleg for Golf Camps

Does anyone know of a good summer golf camp near Ft. Walton/Destin? Thanks.

Secrets of Waffle House

Since flingy-lingy was so amazed that I can bring Waffle House menus into Canada, I must now reveal that I have the keys to the secrets of Waffle House. Here you see the cook's guide (cheat sheet, really) to the orders of his customers, how the position of condiments on the platter reveals the order of the customer. Perhaps no non-Waffle House employee has ever been privy to this kind of information and I ask you dear reader to use this advanced knowledge carefully.

We have a winner

Flingy-lingy has a correct guess. More later tonight. Meanwhile I will post this in flingy-lingy's honor, the only prize he gets.

Worst Thing about Canadians in Cold Lake

...a lot of them (and I mean a LOT) drink their beer mixed with Clamato Juice. I am not kidding about this. Clamato Juice is Tomato Juice mixed with Clam Juice, and I don't even want to know how they get clam juice in the first place. Apparently it is an Alberta thing, and the vast majority of Canadians do not commit such atrocities on beer.

Last Clue

3 of the smartest people I know have failed to identify the object on the right. Although they each had well reasoned analyses.

The clues so far have only been that they are in a lot, but not all of the farm fields in the area. They come in ones, twos and threes.

The final clue is that they are part of Alberta's biggest export to the U.S., a part which makes Canada the biggest exporter of this commodity to the States in the world (reason enough to put up with "that great big sucking sound" that is NAFTA). It is also why Albertans are somewhat touchy about being compared to a certain U.S. state. But I don't want to make it too easy.

Guesses?

Still haven't gotten any guesses (serious ones anyway) about the thing I went to photograph the day I got stuck on the "frontage road".

Here's one that I see everyday on way to/from range. There are tons of them around, all out in middle of fields on farms (or ranches).

Ask and ye shall recieve

I have quite a few topics I had been saving, for the days when I didn't have any "fresh" material. One of these had to do with moose. So I got a comment with a request for moose pictures and I am happy to oblige.

This is a "cow" and her offspring. They are regularly in the woods on the west side of the road to the range, but always in the trees. Never very close to the road, but not very far either.

Mooses around here are infested with ticks, and there is no easy way to get them off. So with the cold (these pictures were taken when it was -19C, about 1 below 0F) they are quite lethargic. The do move when you stop the car to take their picture, though, but they don't go very far.

I was told they are named after what they were called by the Algonquin Indians, "mooz" or something like that. It means twig eaters, and I can tell you that twigs are about the only thing they could be eating in these woods.

Big Snow this morning

We got about an inch of snow this morning. An inch of rain is nothing in FWB, but an inch of snow can look pretty impressive. Here's an idea of what it looked like coming down.

A day in the life

Not for the faint of heart or easily bored, this is what everyday (except Sunday) has been like here in Cold Lake for me. Note that this is a little exaggerated, since I picked one of the good days. This past week has been much, much more boring and spirit-killing. Next week threatens to be even more horrifyingly dull.

4:50 Alarm, Check weather on Channel 50, read news on-line
5:30 Shower and dress (need to do a post on just this ordeal)
6:00 Breakfast in the coffee shop
6:50 Get gear duffel and Laptop and head to the Lobby
7:00 Through gear into back of SUV and climb in
7:05 Get Coffee at Esso Station, make locals do Star Trek Hand Signal and call us aliens
8:00 Arrive at Range, get gear out and put in high bay
8:15 Gather in break area and plan day
8:30 Put on gear
8:45 Go and open 2 of the 4 systems, troubleshoot the ones where the TIVO won't boot
10:00 Log into control room and take control of a station
10:10 Check settings, turn on IR and do initial calibrations, tune cameras, 10:40 stand outside freezing trying to get e-mail
11:15 PB&J in break room, talk about problems you've had getting system going
11:45 Begin Calibrations
12:30 Test Calibrations
12:45 Aircraft taxi's, check cloud cover, notice that ceiling is <2000 ft and you'll be seing lots of gray on the scopes.
13:15 Attempt tracking
15:30 Complete tracking
15:45 Archive data, stretch legs, make Morrocan Mint tea in break area
16:00 Get print outs of calibration tables and put with archive disks for Sys Engineer to process
16:30 Go and close 2 of the 4 systems and perform graceful shut down on the systems
17:15 Close control room, log off of work stations and lock door
17:40 Remove gear
17:50 Put gear in SUV and turn on SUV to warm it up.
17:55 Begin trip back to hotel
18:40 Arrive at hotel, put gear into room and run to sports bar attached to hotel for dinner, watch curling while eating
19:15 Call from home, too tired and mentally exhausted to be a good conversationalist, feel guilty about it.
19:50 Hang up
19:55 Blog some, to try and lift spirits, watch weather, read
21:00 PJs, teeth, cholesterol meds, bed
21:30 Lights out

Thoughts on a month in Cold Lake

I've tried to keep the blog on a relatively even keel. It is pretty hard being away from your family and friends for a whole month, in any place, let alone one so DIFFERENT as Cold Lake.

Part of the problem was, of course, being here during the extreme weather. It was scary and sobering and a bit overwhelming at times. Wind chills of -30C and below can kill you, but mostly you can get killed if you are stupid (see previous posts), and stupid seems to get worse as the weather gets pleasant. Today got to about 38F, about +3C!, and it did actually seem pleasant, but with the melt and refreeze cycle it is actually more dangerous, driving and walking-wise than previously.

What gets me down (and I am pretty down as I type this) is the sameness. Every day is the same, and no matter how many pictures of strange and entertaining (to me) things I post, it is no vacation here. It is work, but I'm not blogging about my actual work.

I am going to put up another post tonight to try and get across the crushing sameness of everyday here for a month.

It ought to be an opportunity, being in another country, living in a very strange (from my perspective) land. But as far as being a tourist goes, I think I haven't done anything.

As far as blogging goes, this has been an enlightening experience. I thought this would just be an easy way to share pictures and experiences with a few family members and friends, but I guess it has become therapy (and yes, I needed therapy after last Sunday) for me.

I truly appreciate the comments. Especially Dave, Flingy-lingy, RKW and TaraEliz, but also from those anonymous people I didn't even send the link to. It keeps the world from closing in.

What will I do when I finally leave Cold Lake, and the time is not now so far off?

Apologies

I promised 2 long posts for my 1 month anniversary here tonight, but it isn't going to happen. I am beat and don't feel well and it turns out that yesterday was the actual 1 month day. So instead I will try to do it tomorrow or Sunday.

Here, to tide you over, is what the smooth, driven snow surface looks like as it begins to thaw. Since it gets so cold here every night, what is happening is that the sun melts a little of the surface that then sinks through the fluffy porous snow and causes these pockmarks to show up. Underneath slippery ice is building up and becoming dangerous, especially for Floridians.

1 Month

Today is my one month anniversary of being here. I expect to do two rather long (and probably pictureless) posts this evening.