My Fllights!!!

So. My bags are packed! I have bought everything I think I am going to be able to buy and fit into my luggage. I have organized my purse, my bag, and my bookbag. Annnnnnndddddd FINALLY!!!!

Here is my flight plan :

EY11 (Etihad) to Londone Heathrow - 0240 to 0645

AA 87 (American Airlines) to ORD (Chicago) - 1015 to 1255

AA 437 (Chicago) to Manhattan!!!! - 1445 to 1630

Ta da!

I can't wait to see everyone. I love you all :)

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Becca

Final Projects, Airports, and ALMOST DONE!!!

Briefly, I would like to state how EXCITED!!!! I am to be coming home in 2 and a half days!! I cannot wait for cold, snow, family, edible food, WALMART!, boyfriend, good food, clothing stores that sell things in American sizes., pork products, and pasteurized milk. If I was going to be there long enough, I would also say that I am looking forward to Netflix. :)

There are a couple things in my way, however. First off, I have a final presentation over my class and the major job we just did after lunch tomorrow. My group's plan is to stay up all night (and part of the morning) finishing it, then rocking out the presentation and going to sleep :)

After that all we have is a group dinner, round table about how school went, and packing.

I plan to be packed by Wednesday night before I go to bed. "Why?" you ask, as you know I don't flight out until early Friday  morning (well, if you didn't know before, you do now). This is because of the flight situation in Europe.

Did you know that most of the major European airports have been closed this week for a couple days? Yes. This is true. Which means that if the airports don't get on the ball, my flight could either be cancelled, or I could be delayed by a day which is something I do NOT want to happen. Pretty much at the bottom of my list of "fun" things to do with my Christmas Eve/Christmas. Though it does seem like the weather is getting better and the flights are kind of opening up now, I am still extremely nervous about my flight hitting Chicago on time, if at all.

So now I am obsessively checking the weather and potential flights I could tranfer to in case this situation occurs.

Oh! Yeah. I'll post all my flights on here as of Thursday, when I know for sure I am going. I will try to be patient until then.

Fun fact : A Mexican engineer's flight has been delayed for 3 days at this point, and he has spent all 3 days in the airport in Abu Dhabi because he "refuses to go back to that hell-hole of a prison and eat that food again." I thought this was kinda funny, but at the same time, I feel I would make the same choice if it came down to it.

Anyway, time to go back to class and prepare more stuff for the final presentation. I love you all!!

Stay warm,

Becca

Home stretch

Briefly before I pass out. A random listing of words to describe my life because having good sentence structure is almost impossible for me right now (two sentences took 5 minutes to type).

Tired

Head hurts

8 hour rig assessment tomorrow

two tests tuesday

praying thursday comes quickly

dream about edible food

overwhelmed

miss you

bringing presents

SNOW!

tired

sleep

'night.

Love you

Becca

ALMOST DONE!!

Hey People! Sorry I haven't written anything in  awhile. School has been incredibly busy for the past week. I actually haven't had a day off in almost two weeks. It's not bad, but it does make the class feel like it is going a bit longer.

In other news : I passed my MaxWell!!!! It was a rough 7 hours and a scary 4 day wait for the results, but I am so so so happy I am done with it. It was my second to last really difficult test, as well as my longest one. As I can only really fail one test without negative consequences (though I haven't yet), every subsequent test I pass is a bit of a relief. Today I had another test, ADN (Azimuthal Density Neutron...one of our tools) and though it wasn't easy I feel like I did pretty well! Now I only have two tests, one practical assessment, and two final presentations left!

So that is my life right now; studying, tests, sleeping, then waking up and then doing it all over again the next day. :) Such is life.

Then there is....PLANE FLIGHT HOME!  I plan to sleep the whole way in an attempt to jump onto Kansas time so I have as little jetlag as possible.

Can't wait to see everyone and everything! I am definitely going to layer up when I step off that plane in Manhattan.

Love you guys!!

Becca

In Which I Convince Zhuzhu to Try a Pringle

This may not seem like an epic feat of awesomeness to those of you who understand the deliciousness of a pringle. However, it took me at least ten minutes of badgering her at the dinner table today in order for her to cave in and try one. I may've had to bring up that I tried jellyfish because I was her friend, and couldn't she just try this one little thing for me? Yes. I emotionally terrorize my coworkers. However, I feel like this is acceptable because if I have to expand my horizons, I definitely don't want to do it by myself. Last time I tried that I got some weird version of food poisoning for a month and a half.

Anyway, distance from the rig practical of yesterday has made my view on my abilities as both a leader and engineer slightly less harsh than they were. Now I am only partially dreading the final in two weeks, as opposed to having daymares about it (as I did last night while trying to stay awake when talking to Adam). The other group has theirs tomorrow and I am hoping it goes better than ours. Kind of. I don't want them to completely fail, but prefer if they didn't blow us out of the water with their skills.

This week marches on. My virus-y computer is not fixed yet, as there was ANOTHER holiday, but my computer seems to be doing ok. I am just crossing my fingers that it doesn't fail during my 8 hour MaxWell exam, which takes place entirely on computers.

I've decided I want to own a baby camel. "Why?" you are asking yourself. I say, "WHY NOT?!?!?!" They are so adorable and slightly small. I could give it nicknames and give Raegan camel rides as she is the only person small enough to ride it right now. It would also be a good provider of mulch for mum's garden. I see no negatives here. :)

Besides that I am just excited for my day off tomorrow that I will spend studying and sleeping (and running!!). It will be my last day off for the next eight days, so I will definitely be savoring it a little bit.

I hope you are all having a wonderful two weeks and four days before Christmas! Eat a pringle!

Love,

Becca

In Which I Realize I Know Less than I Previously thought.

So today was my first, and only, rig practical before my final rig assessment in two weeks. This practical incorporates almost every single thing I have learned in the past 7 weeks about tool maintenance, programming, communication, running in hole, and various wellsite tests. And it has to be complete in 8 or 9 hours. This would be awesome if everything was in the place it was suppose to be. HOWEVER, other groups use the rig and move around our cables to different computers, and on the day of the final assessment, the job of the instructor and roughnecks is to make it as challenging for us as possible. This means they challenge us when we give them instructions, walk off with our hand tools if we leave them in the open somewhere, and move our sensors and cables around while we are working with them. Then we end up having to troubleshoot a problem they created. So yeah, it'll be a stretch.

Today was pretty rough though. Everything that could go wrong during the first part of the day, did go wrong, which led to way more troubleshooting than I've ever done before. It was more stressful than on a real rig, because we have the instructor there demanding answers the second I am a little bit unsure, and sometimes I feel that if I don't know something, no one else in my group will know how to do it. Thus I feel like I have to know absolutely everything and it is frustrating when I can't remember tiny details. And my external hard drive got a virus that turns everything into .exe files and it got to my computer. So tomorrow i get to hand over my computer to IT and let them not only clean up the external hard drive, but also reformat the C drive on my computer to fix it. I feel kinda violated...like my external hard drive is a carrier of stds or something.

The second half of the day was better as it mainly involved running in the hole with our bha (bottom hole assembly..our tools) and some pipe. There were still problems, but none of them were unfixable to too frustrating. Or I might've been too tired at that point to really care. It's so possible.

Anyway, the end of the day has arrived! I am almost ecstatic about this. I am ready to not be dealing with today and everything it has involved. All I have left is to create a job report with my group tonight (only 3 or 4 hours more, I think), then I am home free for tomorrow and I can SLEEP!!!

Hope your Mondays are full of less headaches than mine was!!

Love,

Becca

It's like a replay

Another of my friends quit today. My oldest Schlumberger friend actually, who was based in Africa. She had been having a rough time in school and decided that she was done. Finished. She and I used to joke that if we ever quit, we would quit together in a blaze of glory. Or next spring we would take a vacation in Italy together, dragging our respective boyfriends with us to Italian food cooking classes. Oh well. She is fun, nice, exciting, and one of the few females that I love to talk to because we both talk really fast and have so many things in common that a conversation never gets old. And those things haven't changed, nor will they change just because she has decided that schlumberger is not for her either. I am a little sad though, because that is one more name that will disappear from my MOC. :( And I'll miss that, and her, just a little bit now.

Love you guys.

Becca

Cars, Fireworks, Walking, and naps!

This week has been a little bit hectic. Still playing catch-up due to our large amount of holidays, our class spent most of the week learning, studying, and preparing for our two practical examinations that took place on Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. Each exam took 40 minutes, and I think (crossing fingers and turning around 3 times) that I passed them both. I know for sure I rocked the first one, and the 2nd one was a bit dodgy. Well, I guess as long as I don't get a warning letter (which we get after failing our first exam) I will be doing ok.

This week has also been significant because it is the first time I have truly felt the pressure of trying to learn so many things at once weigh down on me, as well the first time I have had friends (2..one here and one at another school) be sent home because of not passing 2 exams. It felt like a bit of a reality check; as if for the first time I realize I am not invincible and that it is actually quite easy to fail school here. All you need are 2 off days.

So, needless to say,  my entire class was a little bit stressed as Wednesday approached. Since we had Thursday off (UAE national birthday celebration..39 yrs old today!), we decided to go out and enjoy ourselves on Wednesday evening. A couple of friends went to the gold centre and a couple more went to the pool in the city all day. The rest of us just relaxed after our last exam, then went into Abu Dhabi to a Chinese restaurant, where our Chinese friends ordered the food for us and we got to try 6 or 7 different dishes. My favorite? The wontons. My least favorite? Well, that would be a tie between the jellyfish bits and the deviled duck eggs. I tried way more food than I would ever had the guts to try if I walked into the restaurant alone, and for that I am greatful for Zhuzhu and Ni Jie. After that I went to see Harry Potter again with a couple of friends, then we headed back to MLC.

This morning was the last morning for people I am good friends with from the other ENG-1 class to be here before they flew back to their respective countries so we decided we would go out and make a day of it relaxing in Abu Dhabi. We got manicures and pedicures (I have purple nails now..KSU!!), we found a hotel with a nice beach and took naps on it for several hours while some of our friends jet ski-ed, and then we headed to a mall to watch another movie (Tangled!!). The entire day was awesome and fun and completely laid back. Probably the craziest part was trying to get transportation through the city. Due to the holiday, the people of this country like to drive around in their huge (and decorated) cars honking, and spraying silly string, and letting their children stand up through the sun roof while they are driving. Also, most taxis are very busy, so in order for us to get a taxi home tonight we had to hike about 4-5 miles across town to even find taxi drivers. Tanya's and my taxi driver was an incredibly nice guy from Ethiopia and he played us traditional music in the car on the way back!

I could definitely handle a couple more days like that. Instead, I am starting on MaxWell tomorrow and working on it for the next 2 days straight. Oh yes, the joys...:) Anyway, I love you all but I am tired and full  of the need for sleep. I hope youa re having a wonderful Thursday!

Love

Becca