Prayer For the Stressed

I need to remember all this as i say my nightly prayers to lord Buddha

My Life As A Money Slave

Well it is now confirmed, I am leaving for Russia Saturday, going directly to Russia not passing GO and not collecting £200, well actually the monopoly game is far more interesting than my trip to Russia, I have to fly to my company's office in Florence and have my passport that has the visa in it given to me also the winter weather clothing and anything else they think I should have and then after a meagre 12 hours there I get on the next flight for Korea and then a short trip to Sakhalin island. There are some meetings organised for the main office in Yuhzno so I may spend some time there, sounds better for me. I am unsure about what is going to happen after that.
I am seriously thinking about taking the rest of the year off after I have completed my 1500 hours on my contract and I have 650 left to do this year before I can go on permanent holiday, that would be a 5 month holiday and then I could not sign a contract immediately. I have to get the house sold in Spain before the housing market collapses. But it will always be a nice place to take a holiday even if it doesn’t get sold. My wife as you can imagine is not very happy about the events unfolding now. I wasn’t sure that my company would actually make me go directly, they even used the mandatory word to me, meaning I am contractually obliged to do it, I have a clause written into my contract stating that I have no right of refusal for any job they give to me. This sounds pretty hard but all jobs are offered, I know I cannot refuse anything, I can make requests for other big projects but if I am given something I have to do it, or I can quit but I will never get a job that pays as good as this for the amount of work I actually do. Plus I do get to visit some interesting places.

Life is a Beach

I was invited to go on a trip to the local tourist beach in Luba on Sunday, I wasn’t sure what was involved but I thought a few hours away from the plant would be good anyway. I got ready at 10.30am Sunday morning and put on shorts and T-shirt and some money thinking we may have to eat out there. I was picked up and driven to the Marathon camp where the bus was going to pick us all up and take us, we got on the bus at the allotted time and we were told some of the guys had only just arrived back from a night out in town, so probably very drunk and tired and not very sociable I was wondering, we waited a good while and when they had all arrived we were then informed we had to go and pick up the beer and food, we went to one house to get some beer and then another house to pick up someone else and more food then another apartment for more food and salads that had been prepared, this was something I wasn’t expecting a complete picnic style beach party. As we set off as we got to the gate we then found one of the guys hadn’t brought his gate pass so couldn’t leave, this meant driving back like lost tourists to the first house to get a pass, now this was taking so much time, we had been driving around picking up stuff and guys for 1 and a half hours, it was now 12.30. One of the guys had launched into large vodka and red-bull drinks while picking up the food and beer and by the time we left the camp 1 ½ hours later he was really drunk to the point of slurring and talking drunken crap, I wasn’t amused at this point. Everyone else was taking beers and having fun which isn’t too bad, they were playing loud African style music and then shouting above the music , not my favourite past time.
We set of and then I was informed we were going into Malabo to get bread, now this sounded very strange and I was thinking I had made a mistake in accepting the gift Trojan horse, during the drive around Malabo to get to the bakery I was exposed to the town during daylight and I was horrified by the dreadful poverty of the place, large shanty towns and piles of garbage everywhere. Just shocking, really, and we ended up at a bakery where all the bakers were wearing what you would call shanty town clothing for the baking, not a great appetiser. All of the young guys were flour covered and were shirtless and looked really poor but then I realised that everyone in the street were staring at the bus we were all sat in. It felt strange to have all these people in the street staring at us and it was the start of what was going to happen all day to us, they have many oil related workers in Malabo but to them we are really strange folks with bizarre sun glasses and fat mostly, here most people are very thin and look ill and underfed. We took about 10 minutes to get the bread and then set off and then I heard the guys mentioning they were picking up another guy from town, so we went into Shantyville again and went to some not too poor looking houses and found a large group of very happy people waiting with children and many young men and girls that we then squeezed the guy, his family with children and sisters and brothers and friends onto the already fullish bus, and now 2 ½ hours later we finally set off for the beach. The trip what I thought was only 20 minutes down the road took and hour, but we drove out along a very nice road through what looked like virgin jungle and arrived at a tiny beach with about 20 shacks built amongst the trees. There were already a group of engineers here from my project and the security officer whose turn it was to provide safety for the foreign oil workers. We all unpacked the beer and the food and while a large group of the guys went into the sea, that was a murky brown colour and not that warm,
There was a samll group of Korean workers, probably engineers for some oil project and they were behaving as though they had been eating magic mushrooms all morning, they were running up and down the beach only wearing underpants, not nice underpants but those horrible worn out baggy type with the elastic strecthed in the leg so they were hanging all baggy and ugly, but what was more bizaare was the games they were playing, one older guy was throwing large handfuls of sand onto the heads of the other while it was photographed, this obviously plunged into throwing large handfuls of sand at each other while running at high speed across a very crowded beach, it looked ridiculous but not surprising of Korans actually.

I stuffed my face with fresh bread with roast beef that was very nice, I had a few beers but all the time I was being watched by all the locals who were intent on seeing how a white man eats his sandwiches. I found it a bit disconcerting at first but then a bit irritating, we had the local alcoholic come along and ask for beer, he was told by the large Australian guy NO, very loud several times and he didn’t come back, we ate and drank for about 3 hours as that was all we had left of the day. It did rain for a while and we had to shelter under the front veranda of the local beer shed as that is all you could call it, we were watched intently by the locals who would point and whisper to each other, perhaps it was the sequined full swimsuit I was wearing or the floral display I had in my hair but I didn’t care, life is too short to not come out of the closet and enjoy yourself in Dark Africa where no-one knows you, actually I was wearing swim shorts, but I had you going for a minute there. We headed back along the jungle road and I felt relaxed finally, the initial set-off was a nightmare of organisation but once we got to the place, it felt like a picnic and everyone was having a laugh, apart from the guy who was so drunk he couldn’t talk, and then he slept all the way back to the camp. He spoiled himself in the first hour and then missed all the fun, I got the impression he was deeply miserable inside and needed to eliminate all the demons running around in his head by medicating himself with large doses of knockout vodka, but he could also be that other thing I have spoken about before an alcoholic engineer, just slowly wallowing in misery while always away from home if he has a home or a wife. This is something I am going to avoid as my plans don’t include doing this for many more years full time.

Changing Schedule Daily

Well my future is about at stable as a 3 foot high jelly in an earthquake of 9.9 on the Richter scale. I have been told that I cannot leave this site by the site lead until I get a replacement. Now again this means nothing as if someone higher up in the food chain demands that I travel then I leave, irrespective of what the customer here says. I would rather stay here anyway as the weather is better and there is guys who I can have a drink with. So I also received a mail from the Russian project manager and he told me I was expected on site the 1st of September. This is ludicrous as even if I had flown the day of the mail I wouldn’t have got to Russia on that day, he is in a dream land. He neither asked me if I was at home or on a job or lying in the sun on some island in the pacific. He didn’t care and will only think about it when he gets a message from the service department telling him I am indisposed in Africa. The biggest problem is that there is too much work and not enough people, so my company is spreading out the guys trying to keep everyone happy without pissing everyone off at the same time. What happens is that everyone gets really pissed off and no-one is happy especially the guys who are working themselves silly with all the hours and flying. The first result is I am definitely not going to Russia for two trips, things have slipped on the schedule so much that the guy who is taking over in Russia is starting in October that means I will only do September, hurrah as I want looking forward for a winter trip, I am acclimatised to warm weather sites only, give me desert and jungle but not a miserable snowy miserable place.
Tonight I am off to the bar with a leaving party being planned for Mr Bechtel’s son and I hope he is picking up the tab, not that it is needed the beer is $1 a bottle and there are going to be snacks and other things, some people are getting excited, unfortunately I am only thinking of getting home to have a rest and have this growth removed from my thumb.

What I Face on My Trip to Sakhalin Russia

This is some of the things that i will face on my trip to the Russian Island of Sakhalin, November will be worse.

The Local Bus for the Snowy Roads




The snow filled car park




The offices under snow




The Train for the 16 hour journey to the north, quite nice actually




The sleeper compartment




The sea freezes in winter and can coat everything to an incredible thickness




this is what i can expect on my trip to Russia, i will survive, but i willnot be happy, lets see where i will end up afterwards

Strange Calm Has Settled Over Me

Since I arrived here I have settled into a very deep solemn mood, no sure what it is all about, reflecting on how shite life as a travelling engineer can really be. Once again there is really nothing to do here apart from having a few beers and talking shite with another load of old fart engineers reliving stories of past glories. Not really entertaining but better than Peru, I think the last Peru trip put me into this mood as I haven’t really had a proper break form work in almost 4 months, the relentless flying and no sleep is getting to me, I am in a deep need for some pampering and relaxing but I am not going to get it as I am off to Russia 1 week after I get back to Costa Rica. My time here has slid into the tidying up my bird book and getting some quotes for the CD duplication and web page design. I think I am being reckless selling this thing on the net as I will be liable for copyright infringement but that will be some years down the line. By then I could have my feet up retired on the beach in gods own back garden of Costa Rica. Project wise here things are going slowly, but without any detriment to my reputation, I know a wee bit more than the contractor engineers and that let's me talk down to them, I had a customer engineer come and start trying to give me the third degree over a part of the equipment and I was rather rude to him and lectured him about how easy it all was, he was apologising for his interruption and was backing out of the control room but I kept following him throwing words of lecture at him like stones. I do like it when I really do know more than some know-it-all engineer. Unfortunately the looming date of my trip to Russia is coming and I am trying not to think about it as one of the other controls engineers here has just returned from there only 6 weeks ago. He tells me how horrible the weather is and how bad the food is and how long the journey is. Tomorrow the pictures from frozen hell.

Living almost Normally

Well life here is a stark change from the jungle camp in Peru, the food is pretty good and what I would call normal food, not peasant food. There are vegetables and fruits and gravy and ice-cream, plenty of fries and most important of all there is a clubhouse with a pool and a bar with cheap beer. This let's you do something after work, you can chat and let your hair down and make conversation, and for me some chance to talk in English. I was very isolated in Peru and that was almost depressing. But here I can mix and practice my Spanish at my leisure, there so many nationalities here, covering all the world basically, with the main contractor pulling all the best people from all over the world. So this weekend was quite entertaining, I went over to the Marathon clubhouse Friday night and met all my old buddies and as it was happy hour 7-9pm, strange happy 2 hours actually. We drank many beers and joked and told silly stories until late into the night. Only problem was that I had to walk back to the other camp along the lonely road at night, whilst staggering, good thing it wasn’t raining and there is not many robbers inside the camp.
The work onsite is pretty interesting, this is my first Liquid Natural Gas project and is a very impressive plant,

the compressor station with 6 gas turbine air inlets



the compressors are pretty enormous and I feel quite proud to be working for the company that is producing them.

the huge methane gas compressors




We are here as supervisory staff only so I am observing only, I like this and could get used to it. The most fantastic item on the plant is the huge pipe-bridge and it is very long maybe 300-400 meters.

the giant pipe-bridge to the tanker loading station




It just shows you how much money is being spent here and how much money is going to be made out of the international LNG market.

here is my small Frame 5 Turbine Generator set



I am still lost on how long I am going to be at this site and when I am going to Russia. It is going to be great on my Airmiles. I spent Saturday doing some office work but mostly getting my bird book up to date and making some other minor changes to the layout and inserting the latest pictures I have. I never realised how long it was all going to take. I thought I had found a company to make all the CD’s for me but they have not replied, I checked out their website and it looked from the pictures that they were working out of somebody’s house, complete with iron railings outside, all very funny.
Sunday was spent just chilling and relaxing and an early start at drinking, and I drank and chatted all afternoon until the evening, and then after dinner more drinking, I was pretty drunk and I got a light headache that never left me all night and when I got up this morning it was still there a little but after 1 litre of water it has mellowed to almost knighting thankfully, I am not sure that having access to cheap beer has many benefits other than giving me a laugh while drinking. We will see what the rest of the week brings, the project manager keeps banging on about how I need to produce a plan with all necessary steps on it, he doesn’t want to know if we think we will keep to the schedule just these goddam steps he needs to tell his boss, all so pointless and a waste of my time. This is how all main contractors talk these days, how to appoint blame for delays and how can they claim money back from the vendors for being late.

Wild Changes To Destination

I travelled to Florence to the head office for the company I contract for and found the destination of my new job had been changed at 1 days notice. I was now going to Malabo, Equatorial Guinea. This was my old project before Peru, I wasn’t that bothered as it has beer and many brits working there and many I knew from my last stint. But the fact it was changed at such short notice is laughable. I actually find this lack of certainty quite entertaining. I had only 1 day in Florence and then off again flying for the third day in a row and missing many hours of sleep once more. I got into Malabo at 5.00am and nobody seemed to know I was arriving and I went on the Marathon Oil bus and I had no keys waiting for any accommodation and got a really shitty room in the canteen. I spoke for about 2 hours with the guys in the office and went to bed to grab a few hours sleep. When I got up I was told not only was I not meant to be there but I was actually on the wrong plant. Small informational disparity, I was told wrong information and ended up in the wrong camp, all very funny but for me a far better assignment, I was going to go on an installation job working on new plant and not on shift work on operations. Woohoo, I almost felt happy but was so tired I couldn’t cheer. The new camp was built by the biggest contracting company in the world and they really know how to do it right for the guys, there is a bar and a swimming pool and mini Walmart and the rooms are pretty good, so much better than the crappy place I was working in Peru. I have an office of great Italians all shouting and waving their arms about and making super strong coffee to help get you going in the morning. I will take some pics and post them once I get over the rotten jetlag and start working on the plant proper, 1 important problem is the fact that the new plant is meant to be working in 8 weeks time, I think just like my buddy in India the company is hopelessly optimistic about the start date and I reckon if it is working by Christmas it will be a miracle.

Charles De Gaul Airport, Paris, The Worlds Worst Airport

I have flown through the world’s worst airport yet again, I wish I could avoid it but it is becoming a major hub and I have no other alternative. The airport is Charles De Gaul international airport and the fact it is French means that the French workers hate everyone else, they have that arrogant shitty nose in the air pose that just pisses me off just by looking at them, they treat everyone like we are there for them to abuse, surly and chiding at every opportunity,

There are many reasons why I detest this place but I will tell you the worst. The plane parks maybe 5 Km away from the terminal and it takes forever to get the busses there and get on them, the drive back to the terminal takes 10-15 minutes and then takes you into the worst designed terminal in the world, they thought they could produce an arty farty terminal building but part of it collapsed and killed 5 people last year, they should tear it all down and start again. The corridors are so goddamn long that you are walking on and on forever, no trains, the queues are terrible, today for a plane of 300 was 1 immigration officer and that is for dealing with potential illegals and the rest of us, it was a nightmare. The seating in Paris is also for certain the worlds worst, with the chairs reclined at an angle to make it impossible to have your feet on the floor and it cuts off the blood supply to your feet within 10 minutes, and also breaking your back as there is no lumbar support, no support for your head and you cannot sleep irrelevant on how long you are there for, all pure torture. Again only designed to make all travellers suffer, probably an insecure French balding transsexual with penis envy.
I had 1 hour to get to my plane but with the immigration screw up and I new my bag was wrongly addressed, I went to try and pick it up but I didn’t have time to wait long, I got to the gate nearly at closing time but that isn’t late, boarding time is from when the gate opens to when it closes and late is when you arrive after it has closed but the miserable toffee nosed surly bitch who was collecting tickets abused me for being “late”, screw you, you skinny assed blonde air-headed bimbo, I just hate that attitude. She was on the bus with us and was walking around as though she was the queen of Sheba about to launch a new ship, strutting her skinny ass up and down the tarmac, I really wanted to just kick her right up that skinny ass with pointy shoes, and what is she, a goddamn ticket collector, well screw you again and all of Air France, yes my bag was not on the plane and this is twice in that last two flights with Air France, they don’t even give you an overnight bag for the hotel when I get here so I have to wait maybe 2 days to get my goddamn bag again, man I am so irritated I could ring Jacque Chirac and call him a useless soft wingeing stinky Frenchman. What is it about the French that provokes such a strong emotion, maybe the arrogance , and what have they to be arrogant about, their wine is crap and expensive, they have worse weather than the UK, maybe anyway, they have expensive toll roads and they have no significant military victories to speak off, yes they did run around Europe for a while with Napolean but only until the Brits on tour kicked some ass, they really hate being reminded of that, they have no political clout in the world and they stink. They produce some terrible films and no music at all so they should be more grateful for all us paying customers using French planes and airports maybe even smiling and saying thankyou from time to time and producing some better wine, and stop sucking the European Union dry of money you greedy people.

I Found an Emerald

Everyone should know i am a keen wildlife nutcase but today i am acting as god, I was walking along the road near my house after doing some shopping, it was near Chuck Norris's mums house,( enormously big house )and i almost trod on this jewel i saw on the floor, it was a tiny bright shimmering green hummingbird that was doing its impression of jesus on the cross, it was on its back with its wings out and playing dead, i really thought it was dead, but being me i picked it up to look at the fantastic feathers on this bird, even though i was looking at it i was still convinced it was dead and i still was going to take it home for the Jenny and the kids to take a look. but as i was walking back to th house with my green dazzling jewel in my hand i noticed its miniscule eyelid flicking up and down, i took a really close look at it and i saw a faint chest movement and a slow blink of the eye, but it was dazed to nothing, it couldnt keep its eyes open and was out for the count, it must have been hit by a car or something, i was even more careful with it and when i got home the first thing i did was make some sugar water and put some on a spoon and gave it a drink, these things burn food faster than you can imagine and can die of lack of energy, so this was drinking lots and lots and even though it looked drunk it was taking it from the spoon. i then put it down as i was preparing for my next crazy journey for work, out on the patio on a plant away from the ants. i went back an hour later and gave it some more food and it was looking perkier but not happy and still wasnt able to fly, so i put it back and went to watch some TV, the good news is that when i went back 1 hour later it had flown up to a small branch on a fern and was looking almost alert but it still let me take hold of it but it was complaining this time and didnt take any food so i just put him back and hopefully tomorrow it will be able to fly and feed, i am putting out my feeder to perhaps give it a start but i am still not really hopeful , these poor tiny creatures are so fragile that this may just be too much for the tiny thing to be able to cope with but once again i did try and do my part. this makes me so angry at what we humans are doing with this wonderful planet, taking all and leaving nothing behind apart from piles of garbage. Tomorrow i leave for the end of the world, equatorial guinea west africa , for an emergency visit so i was told, via Florence in Italy for my visa, what a crappy route i am taking, suffering shitloads of jetlag and crappy airline food all for 20 days in Africa, what is it all coming to.

All Aboard the Crazy Job Express

If you have read this before you may have noticed that I have been banging on constantly that I need a change of project, it had become almost desperate that I get out of the Peruvian jungle and get me to some place where I can do normal things, Peru was an open prison. So I had officially left and was sent to Florence , the home of my job giving office, and met loads of people involved with my so-called new project and did loads of paperwork with the project and then when I got home I was sent back to Peru for a two week filling in as they needed to get this other guy to Tunisia or some other place in the desert, well I left Peru with gladness again thinking I was going to Russia, I went to the Caribbean for a small break after I got back and turned off the cellphone to make sure we didn’t get urgent calls for anything. when we turned it back on there were many messages from my manager and asking me to contact them urgently, this meant something somewhere had turned to shit and life was going to be difficult again, I checked my email when I got home and there were going to send me to Qatar, which again if you had read this is a favoured destination of mine, so I was happy but they wanted me to go that day, well this is basically starting to turn into slavery, I have been home 4 days and now they want me to leave again, I got them to call me and found out the date had been put back a little but still it is this week I leave, giving me not much time to arrange my dental trip , sorting out all my expenses and timesheet paperwork, checking out all my photographs from the beach, to make a small aside we went venturing out into the mountains on the return from the beach and it is so sad to find the forests have been smashed into nothing and leaving bare grass fields for cows to graze in, but we walked passed the cows and towards some trees that we supposedly down the side of a small creek, we found a huge gorge actually that descended to some rushing river and it was a tricky walk down and along the way we found these Blue jeans frogs that are poison arrow frogs and as small as froglets in the UK and USA, we then got down to the river to find an almost crystal clear and pristine river that supported the dipper birds here and it was very nice uplifting to find something like that amongst the bare fields, I also saw some fantastic birds in the woods behind the beach, I wish I had a holiday home there or that I could retire there next week, I have been seriously thinking about how long I can take this crazy job for, I was planning on 10 years before I start working part time, I have a plan to deal with my money that is tied up in my Spanish house. I am thinking of travelling to Spain and building a thirds floor on it , with a huge master bedroom with on-suite bathroom and a roof terrace to allow secret nude sunbathing, and also build a garage and walled garden behind the house in the pines, this will make it sell easier as it has been on the market for 3 years without a buyer, I could drop the price to nothing to give it away, but if I spend $20,000 I will make $40,000 back and then I could start thinking about working part time as the house is worth $250,000. that would let me just become a beack bum and keep taking pictures all the time on the beach, pity my pictures are so average.

My average photo of a Dipper




Crazy Poison Arrow Frog