Andrew Underwood

What Ho!

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged on here, and for that I blame Facebook. I’ve been communicating on a more personal level than the public level. As a result, only a few people know what I’m up to. I suppose I should endeavour to strike a balance between the two mediums. Facebook has brought back the old style of personal level correspondence which I hadn’t really been engaged in very much for a few years.

At the moment, I’m sitting in the front seat of a Suburban heading from Fort McMurray to Sycrude. For those who don’t know, Ft Mac (people just say/write Mac instead of Mc) is the closest town to the Alberta Oil Sands. It’s a small town but everything about it is a day at the horse races. It’s a town populated by temporary residents, mostly from the city. There is no small town feel, it’s a town that’s lost it’s innocence far too early. Syncrude is the biggest of a handful of companies extracting oil from the dirt.

I’m working for a company called the Alberta Research Council, it’s a summer job. Four other guys and myself are studying the reclaimed land they have up here. After they are finished getting the oil out of the ground they are left with a ginormous hole in the ground which needs to be put back to normal with plants, trees, and birds. The guys who install the birds get around to that after they finish installing the insects. Anyways, we are seeing how the reclaimed land is doing. Can’t really say much more than that since it’s private contract work we are doing. Half the time we are up here in the field, and the rest of the time I’m at the lab back in Edmonton working with the data we collect and working on various other things.

We stay at relatively nice hotels up here, relative because they are suppose to be 5 star but 5 star for Ft Mac isn’t up to par with a 5 star in New York. I just ate a free buffet style breakfast at the hotel with omelets, bacon, sausages, pancakes, pineapple and coffee. There are more things to choose from but there is only so much room in my stomach. I’m just taking it one day at a time, we shall see if I gain any weight with this breakfast. When I eat like that there isn’t a need to eat much for lunch, as by then I’ve still got fuel in the tank.

In other news, I’ve entered the mobile computing world with a used laptop from Ebay and a Palm Treo PDA from XSCargo. These devices are no longer prohibitively expensive for me. I’ve got Ubuntu Linux on my laptop instead of Windows XP, which came installed on it.

So that’s the skinny on the latest happenings in my life that’s suitable for public viewing. Thanks for reading.