To pick up where I left off, I continued to work in the Geolog yard helping to prepare a brace of mudlogging units for their return into the field. I can see the benefit of doing this as I am sure I'll have to rotate units through the Balikpapan office, but it did get boring when I got to my first double-digit day. I learned a fair amount about how to restock and recondition the equipment and supplies, but the main thing I discovered is how beneficial a good rig down is to ensuring a quick turn around - something I'll be encouraging the Indonesian crews to do.
On the eleventh day I returned to the main production office and carried on building sensors for the upcoming work in Indonesia. My main focus has been working on a gas trap - a device that agitates the mud that has been pumped up from the well and extracts the dissolved gas for analysis by a gas chromatograph inside the mudlogging unit. I built two in parallel with one of the engineers, and then he instructed me to finish off the fifth one on my own. I did manage it, unaided and without any instructions, in four hours but made a few mistakes. Luckily they were spotted and I corrected them before the device was tested.
Having spent two days building this particular type of gas trap I feel I've become one with it, and I have started to see some non-oil industry uses for it. So I'm going to acquire my own and plumb it into the toilet in our Balikpapan house because I'm convinced that it'll reverse the Coriolis Effect and force the water to drain in a Northern Hemisphere fashion. It'll be just like flushing the bog in Britain, and I'm sure the expats from miles around will want to come and enjoy the spectacle.
In the next few days I'm hoping to get fed some current information on the status of the Indonesian contracts so that we can determine a schedule for finishing my training and my extraction from Europe.
Being British it's now time to talk about the weather: the hot and humid weather has finally broken and we've had ran for the last two days. It started on Monday night when a "storm" broke over Milan and dashed the land with a heavy shower. The locals are impressed by the amount of rain that's fallen since but I've seen more rain in ten minutes back in Blighty. I'm not sure whether to pity the Milanese for their lack of precipitory experience or congratulate them for the great summer they get to enjoy.
One thing I'm not sure about is how the mosquitos will reacte to the rain. While it has been hot there haven't been too many and my bite count peaked at sixteen (they're fading now thankfully). Will the current wet conditions cause a population explosion? Hopefully it will all happen next week while I'm back home in Huntingdon.
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