Thursday, February 27, 2014

27 Feb 2014

I'm in Saskatoon right now in a motel that, when compared to the Tree Line or whatever the craphole from Hudson Bay I was staying in was called, is the height of luxury. In all honestly it's decent at best, but it's so nice to not have clown paintings, radiator heaters, white cinder block walls, a squeaky bed or dingy yellow bathrooms. Unfortunately my body is still on night shift so I'm not making much use of this comfortable bed except for to lay here and relax and write this. I tried sleeping earlier. I think I slept from about 9:30-11, but then I tossed and turned for about two hours and well, here I am at 3am.

We got to the hotel at around 7 tonight. We drove an Expedition from the field site out here. One guy had a flight leaving tonight but the other guy and I leave in the morning so we met for dinner. I can't express how nice having a dinner at some place other than the diner I'd been eating at for the past 3 weeks was. I started with a chicken curry soup, had a main course of a vegetable stir fry with naan bread and finished with strawberry cheesecake. Life is good.

The project is over. I can relax with the fact that other than being on an airplane to Denver tomorrow at 7:25 I have nothing to worry about. I can't wait to be home. Canada has been a good adventure, but it's always good to go home, eh? I'm going to try to get 10 days off. The unfortunate thing about these projects is that being salaried I don't get any additional income for them, just some extra paid time off. Extra time off is nice, but I'd rather have the bigger paycheck. Jes can't just take time off to go somewhere, so I'll probably just spend some time playing the xbox.

I made some good contacts up here. It was nice to get exposure to extreme cold conditions for field work as I'm sure it won't be the last time I end up working in Canada during the winter. I hopefully was able to sell my modeling abilities to the field manager for the project to get some additional modeling work going forward. If I end up running into any of the people I worked with again I'll already know them and as unfortunate as it is, even in an industry about the knowledge and science, contacts are invaluable and without them your abilities aren't worth much.

I guess overall this blog wasn't much to keep, I don't imagine I'll look back on it in the future with excitement, but this is the journal of my first real international work experience. Canada is a nice place, I hope to visit it again sometime, but hopefully some place a little more urban than Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan.

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