The Week in Review

Well, I am currently enjoying a relaxing weekend in beautiful Colorado. Lucky for me, although I don’t have any vacation this year, ConocoPhillips has a flexible work schedule called 19/30 where if you work 30 minutes extra each day you can take one day off a month. So I am taking Monday this month and therefore have a 3 day weekend.

The flight here was uneventful except for the beginning. As we were boarding the power went off in the plane so everyone had to find their seats using only the emergency lighting. I guess I never realized that planes run off a sort of generator while on the ground and rely on the power from the engine while in the air. We took a drive into the mountains yesterday and stopped in Idaho Springs. It is a quaint little mining town (with a gold mine you can take a tour of). They had a neat little Celtic/Irish store that we looked in before continuing our journey. We also stopped in Georgetown, were there was a Colorado wine tasting place. They had some nice wines (I liked the "Late Harvest Chardonnay" which is an ice wine). While we were there we saw the strangest thing....one a (frozen) lake at the edge of town the locals had set up yellow cones and were having ice races in jeeps and other 4x4's. Anyway, we soon left and headed towards Vail. Of course, because of all the snow in the mountains and it being a weekend Vail was packed full of people so we decided not to stay. We headed back to Golden, where we had dinner at Ali Baba's (excellent Middle Eastern food, always reminds me of Edgeware Road). Well today will likely be a similar style day, primarily enjoying the nice weather and exploring Denver. I imagine Don will do some school work also.

The past week has been good. We got a new announcement at work that the Mid-continent region will be headquartered out of Midland but still don’t know if that means we will have to move there. I hope not, but we will have to wait and see. Maybe I will be in a different area by then (since I am supposed to do 8-9 month rotations through different areas). My apartment in Houston is finally coming together. It has taken a while but I have made some major progress (like finally getting brass rubbings from 2002 put up). I will try to put some pictures in eventually, once I figure out how. Not much really exciting happening actually. I spend most of the day at work and then come home to relax before going to sleep and starting over again. Well, that’s all for now!

Life in Houston

Okay. So I've been in H-town for about two months now and am starting to get the hang of life in the big city. For one this town is soooooo spread out and the traffic is pretty bad so it takes 1-2 hours to get across the city. Plus, I am always getting lost, particularly near downtown and the Galleria. Work is good, and thankfully within walking distance from my apartment. Everyone is worried about the possibility of having to move to Midland or Farmington, New Mexico once the acquistion gets finalized. I try not to think about it much because I dont really want to move (well not to Midland or Farmington at least). Outside of work, life is good. I am keeping busy with arranging my apartment and reading. I am going to start French class again (I guess after being there for 8 months its a "you cant live with them you cant live without them" kinda thing). As far as that goes I cant wait to get back to Europe. Luckily with a company the size of ConocoPhillips that may be possible. So for now I am trying to learn all I can and be as useful as possible. Nothing really eventful is going on here...we got a cold front so its like 60 instead of the 75 degrees it has been for the past few weeks. I am finally getting all the pictures I bought in Paris framed and hung up so that is good. I never realized how expensive frames were. Its amazing, I think the frames cost more than the pictures. Its good that I have some wall space in the apartment so I can hang them all up. Also I was thinking of framing all the theatre books, I thought it might be a nice way to display them...any thoughts?? It is nice to not have to worry about school work on the weekend, although I do have a paper to write....my reasearch paper from France is going to be published in a journal (if I get it revised and shortened). That is going to be pretty cool...me, published! Speaking of I guess I had better go and do that...I will try to keep up with posting on this website at least once a week but we'll see what happens.