Survived the quick 24 hour turn around in Edmonton. I've been back in town and trying to get caught up on the laundry and dishes that were left since last weekend when I was out camping.

Not really in the mood lately for blogging. I'm sure that won't last long.

This time tomorrow night I will be at the airport. Yep, I'm outta here. For 24 hours. I am attending a one day training session in Edmonton on Thursday. I'm looking forward to meeting some more of my co-workers and to learning something new.

I had hoped to have an extra day to meet people and spend time with them, but that isn't possible given the staffing shortage we are under going--anyone want a job? So I fly in Wednesday night and back Thursday night. Just in time for the long weekend!! WHOO HOO!!

No time for shopping in Edmonton...boo. Guess I will have to wait until the next trip--September.

This picture will explain my weekend...

I left the office Friday night to sunshine and blue skies. I stopped at Walmart and picked up the cooler and by 6pm I was on the road to the Gregoire Provincial Park. It is about 20ish km from FMMA. Close enough to home if you forget something but far enough away that you no longer feel that you are in the city. And you aren't. The campground is off the highway and the whole park has trees, trees and more trees. They are 30+ feet tall and provide some wonderful shade. My campsite was a great size and I was very impressed with the amount of coverage between sites. What's the point of getting away if you can look out the front of your tent and into your neighbours.

I quickly set up camp, collected my fire wood and the weekend was off to a great start. I cooked my steak--which I must say tastes so awesome cooked over charcoal. After supper I managed to get my campfire going and enjoyed the evening in front of the crackling logs. Around sunset I headed to bed and read a bit before finally falling asleep. Without the cats to get me up I was able to sleep in until around 9am. Record breaking. It had rained during the night which I found very peaceful and relaxing. It was still raining when I got up so I was a bit damp when I returned from my little walk around the campground. It wasn't a downpour  but a light sprinkle yet enough to discourage sitting on any of the furniture at the site. I made my tea and oatmeal and was then trying to decide if I should pack it in and head back to FMMA or stay and see if the weather would improve. I wanted to stay and so decided to set up rain camp.

The back was high enough that I could comfortably stand and the front was low enough that the rain didn't pelt me. Basically it was a good shelter considering I tried to put it up by myself with out help of chair or ladder. And my shelter went up much faster with my one woman team than the one at the next campsite with two guys and two ladies attemping to set it up...and their wasn't any taller than mine.

I happily set up my little kitchen and my book, radio, etc and happily spent most of the day in my shelter. It was quite nice actually. The putting up the shelter part left me wet and dirty but a change of clothes and I was dry for the remainder of the day.

Lunch time...chunky soup and some delish french bread with melted cheese on top.

My chair got wet over night in the rain so I put my rain coat over the back to keep me dry and a bag from Ikea on the seat. It worked.

One of the holes in the roof of my shelter. The tarp is recycled from my trip across Canada so it has a few holes in it. This is by far the biggest one and it didn't really seem to leak much so it's ok. I can't see me investing in a new tarp this year when this one will do.

So the first picture of this post...is one of the sides that helped to hold up the tarp.

The rain let up late in the afternoon and I spent about 90 minutes wandering up and down the roads and paths at Gregoire. It's quite nice and I'm hopeful that I can head there again--soon.

 Saskatoon berries...they were a big attraction for not only the people camping but also for bears. I was warned when I checked in that there had been some bear sightings prior to my arrival. No bear viewing for me which is quite fortunate as far as I'm concerned.

 A picture of Gregoire Lake...or as much as I could see of it given the overcast skies.

 Berries of some sort. They look like they have wings on them.

Good weekend all around. Looking forward to the next camping trip. Maybe next time Lac La Biche.

The cats were good as gold and didn't destroy anything in the apartment...nothing was even out of place. I think Tundra my little stress eater managed to put on a couple of pounds but other than that no damage to anyone or anything. Way to go girls!

Camping trip is booked but prediction is for rain. I'm going anyway.

I waited until last night to book and early in the evening the weather showed sunny all weekend. By the time I made the reservation and checked the weather again the prediction was for rain. Ah well...it could change again.

Went out tonight and bought some supplies. Will probably stop tomorrow night and pick up a cooler before I head out of town.

The only worry is what I will find when I arrive home on Sunday...I suspect two cats will be a bit annoyed when I do not return home to wait on them hand and foot. Ah well. I'm obviously willing to take the risk.

I missed the weekend. I was out for a hike today and realized it was Sunday...which means Saturday is long gone and I return to work tomorrow. Huh. Where did Saturday go? Oh well...guess that happens every weekend.

I headed out across the bridge today to the 'other side' of town and up into a park area. It is quite a large park and my walk was about 6km in total. I took a very odd set of trails. The unmarked fork in the road meant I walked a bit farther than intended but still a lovely time. Apparently there are 130km worth of trails here in town. I am not going to make it my mission to walk them all.

Got the living room re-arranged this weekend which makes me feel better...having art work leaning against the wall with two cats who love to find new ways to entertain themselves daily was making me nervous. I essentially flipped everything in the room so I am no longer sitting right beside the AC/Heater. And the tv is now sitting on top of the coffee table instead of being up on the wall well over my line of site causing me a pain in the neck.

Making rosemary scalloped potatoes with salmon cakes for supper. Doesn't that sound yummy? The fresh herbs on the deck are getting used on a regular basis. Too bad the tomato plant is going to die soon without bearing fruit. There are tons of tomatoes on it but the leaves are all turning yellow and dying...boo. I was really looking forward to fresh tomato still warm from the sun.

Looking into a camping trip next weekend. I drove by the closest park on Tuesday so I know where it is and a few people from work go there all the time so I understand it is pretty nice. I'm scheduled to be in Edmonton for work on the 28th and had thought about staying down for the long weekend but realized today that it might not be a good idea to leave the two munchkins alone for so long. I would need to leave here on Wednesday night...and without my truck I'm stuck using taxis cause the public transport in Edmonton isn't the greatest unless I want to go in a straight line. Most of the sites are booked up for the long weekend, so the weekend before should work. And I'll aim for a long weekend in/around Edmonton in September so I can stock up on groceries.

Life in FMMA continues to be enjoyable. I like the view from my apartment and while I'm not wishing away the summer am looking forward to seeing the leaves change colour around me. I'm meeting lots of nice folks at work and over all two thumbs up.

Morning. The problem with falling asleep at 8pm is waking up at 4am and not being able to get back to sleep. I see a nap in my not so distant future. I guess I had a hard week if I feel asleep so early in the evening.

Good news came by email yesterday. You may or may not remember--and I may or may not have mentioned it. I just doubled checked the old blog and apparently I hadn't mentioned this before...so here it is. Back in October I wrote the first half of my HR designation and found out in December that I had passed. Wanting to get it finished and have the actual designation (and yes, more letters behind my name LOL) I signed up to write in May. I'm not sure why I thought that was a good idea considering I was arriving back from India 5 days before the exam but I did. One day in India I suddenly stood up, stopped what I was doing and let out a few swear words along with "I'm writing an exam in a few days." By the time I arrived back in Canada it was too late to postpone the exam so feeling stressed about the lack of a job and knowing I was travelling the very next day to FMMA and still being jet lagged I wrote. I was the first one to leave the room.

Here's the thing. I hate tests. I've had to write a few minor tests since arriving and my stomach always ends up in knots before I write and I am in a panic that I might not pass...I always do...but I suffer from test anxiety.

Anyway...I left the exam and felt that at the very least I knew what to expect in October when I re-wrote the exam...all this to say that I will not be re-writing in October....I passed. I can now officially put CHRP behind my name...too bad my business cards just came in. LOL. I am a Certified Human Resources Professional. WHOOOO HOOOOO!!!!!

Insert Happy Dance here...

Finally made it down to Heritage Park today. I had free admission from my tour Canada Day weekend...and today was our only sunny day during my long weekend so off I went in search of heritage.

The main thing I learned it that FMMA once produced salt. Yep, salt. Go figure. The exhibits are somewhat interesting and somewhat well put together. I'm not sure what I was expecting but...oh well. It was on the list. FMMA has a long, deep, rich history that kept me busy for about an hour this afternoon. Here's a few pictures from today.

Here's the front of an old Ford truck.

 One of the first pieces of equipment to be used in Fort McMurray at the xoil strands.

 I don't think anyone has used this tractor in a while.

 High class eating establishment in FMMA...a long time ago.

 Wooden church at the park.

 Does anyone know what this is?

 This is another view of the same thing...thoughts????

 Produced in FMMA until it was too expensive to barge it out of the area.

 Love this coffee bean grinder...would love to have one for myself. If you have one or find one somewhere pick it up for me.

I managed to get some scrapbooking done this weekend along with finishing off my vision board. And hit the pool tonight for the first time since I arrive in town. It was great. The MacDonald centre is HUGE and I highly recommend it to anyone who lives here. So much to do. As I was leaving I found flutter boards and leg floats so my next visit should be nice too. Oh, and I found the library...and they have 3 rows of books on CD. I am in LOVE. I just need some more road trips to make full use of them. Plus a lot of great books, magazines and newspapers to read. Oh...I see a few trips to the library in my future as well.

Good weekend overall...and you?

Apparently I'm not good with dates. Yes, the birthday was today. How did we celebrate? Extra time out on the deck. Yep, wild times.

I have tomorrow off. YEAH!! It's all part of an earned time off system at work. Basically, every four weeks you get a Friday off. So..it's official I've been at my new job for a month. Hard to believe. Still loving it...and everyone. I made brownies earlier this week and they were certainly well received.

I had thought about camping this weekend but the forcast is for rain the next three days...although at this point the sky is still blue so I guess I would have been safe for tonight. Oh well. I need to do some running around town with offices who have the convienent hours of only being open between 8-5, M-F which happens to be the hours I work. So chores for Friday. Perhaps that will mean I get out on the weekend for a walk and photos...or not. We'll see...taking it easy.

October 2009 about 3.5 months old.

grown up kitty pictures taken just shy of their one year anniversary of birth. The girls turn one on Wednesday.

Happy Birthday Tundra and Hudson!

The big event is July 7...we will not be having a party...there will not be gifts....but there will be love.

XOil Stands tour. Or, how I spent Friday--Canada Day.

The bus boarded up just past 10am and approximately 30 'tourists' hit the road to learn more about the oil sands. Our tour guide is a 5th generation Fort McMurrian and  did a great job.

Apparently there are approximately 76,000 people living in FMMA (Fort McMurray, Alberta) proper and 104,000 in the Wood Buffalo Municipality--the largest municipality in Canada. I'm not entirely sure what a municipality is or what advantages there are to being one but there you are. The municipality takes in the surrounding areas and communities like Fort McKay.

So...off to sonxcore we went...the whole tour is basically a big PR thing for them but I still think there was a lot to learn and even though one of the gentleman at the back of the bus complained that we were only seeing what they wanted us to see (duh!) I think he was wrong. I had my own site tour the other day and saw the same as we saw on the bus tour, more in some areas and less in others...but the whole site is open and it would be hard to 'hide' anything.

According to our tour guide there are about 4,000 employees on site everyday. During a shut down there are about 5,000. You might be wondering why there are more people during a shut down than when it is not shut down...I know I did at first, but being in shutdown doesn't mean what you think. Basically they will shut down one part of the plant or where they have 3 cokers they might shut down one and leave the other two running. Shutdown means they are taking things apart, doing maintenance and cleaning and generally making sure everything runs the way it should be. The company I work for does a lot of work during shut downs...we do the dirty work.

Shifts are usually 8-8 and the rotations vary but you might work 4 days, 4 nights and then have 4 days off. It all varies by company you work for and the job you do. The sites run 24/7/365.

How do you get to site? You drive. The first site out of FMMA is suncorex and it is about a 20-30 minutes drive to the North (they are all to the North). When you get to the site there is a giant parking lot.

This is not...how most people get to site. This is....

The bus. There seem to be hundreds of these that run the highway to all the sites from everywhere in FMMA. I'm not entirely sure what time you need to catch the bus to get work on time but I gather it is early....like an hour or more ahead of time. But I must say the buses are comfy and cozy and I understand that a lot of people will catch a bit more sleep when they are headed to site. But don't fall asleep close to site or you might miss your stop. I would guess that the big O&G companies pay for the buses to site...but I'm not entirely sure. What I do know is that I think they are a great idea. Much more environmentally friendly than 4,000 people taking their own vehicles out and I can only imagine how much traffic there would be compared to the amount on the roads now. Crazy! I know our staff working farther out in Fort McKay (FMKA) take a company van out and back. One employee drives it and picks up everyone else. It is a safer, economical and yep, better for the environment.

So...back to the tour. This is the first sign you see just before you get to the security booth.

And this is where the pictures will end. I am not supposed to post photos on the net of anything I took photos of without written permission of the company. If you want to send me an email at northofnain (at) hotmail(.)com or my personal email account (if you know it) I would be happy to send you the pictures--which I am allowed to do. This is a small town sometimes and I would like to keep my job...so I will follow the rules.

Security isn't as crazy as I had expected and we were on our way after a quick head count. One of the first things you see is a tailings pond. This is where all the stuff goes from the processing. Picture making coffee right from the beans. The beans are the 'earth' that the machines dig up, the coffee filter and hot water are where they separate the oil from the sand and the grounds left over in the filter go into the tailings pond and the coffee itself is the product they produce. It isn't quite right, but it gives you a bit of an idea...and that wasn't my idea....the tour guide told us about the coffee analogy.

On the opposite side of the road is a reclaimed tailings pond that now looks like a field. There are grasses and some dead trees and lots of seedlings....600,000 to be exact. There are lots of pieces of dead trees around--this encourages bugs, spiders and other creepy crawlers. They have planted dead trees some with their roots in the air to encourage the birds to come back and nest. And you might think that they would plant grass but in fact they plant oats and barley I think she said. The oats and barley don't crowd out the saplings and they will have a better success rate with other flowers and plants coming back than if they planted grass

We stopped at the end of the tour at the reclamation spot to view it, read up on it, etc. It is too bad that it is inside a secure area because it would be nice to come and visit on a regular basis. Oh well.

If you see photos of the O&G sites you may see places where the pipes are bent into U's and wonder why...it is for the expansion and contraction of the pipes and product during the cold/hot temperatures. The entire site is about 4,000 square kilometres.

As we toured the site they try to take us from the beginning to end in the proper route...ie, how it actually happens. That means the first part of the tour was actually started at the mine. It is an above ground mine and yes, that's where the big boys are. I would give up my cats to be able to drive one of these machines. They are sooo cool.

797B truck
Here's the wiki link if you want the details.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterpillar_797B
The tires are 12 feet tall and weigh about 3 tons each. They cost about $60,000-$70,000 each--that's per tire. The entire truck without the tires is worth about $6.5Million. The buckets on the back are around 6X5 metres and hold 2-3 shovel fulls of tar sands. The trucks are about the equivalent of driving a 2-storey house. Imagine that?

Here's a video of one backing up that I found on line. It isn't as exciting as one driving down the road but if you look at it and see the truck in front you get an idea of size..including watching the guy help them back up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-qjrQ36WbA

Oh, and here's a couple pics...

I took the top one...but not from the site I wasn't allowed to take pictures from. This is a highway drive by photo.

Ok...so the tour is interesting and you get to see what 'site' is...because in FMMA everyone talks about site. Here's a funny video about dating...and the people who work at site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_pH-rDy1Dc&feature=related

There are a ton of these videos about 'Steve' that have been made. I find them all funny--and apparently they all have a ring of truth in them if you stay here long enough.

At the end of the site tour we headed out to Crane Lake. It's another little PR place but still worthy of a stop. I will be headed back here on my own at some point. There is a little 2km walk around a pond and apparently it is a great place to go and view a number of different species of birds--including sand cranes. Go figure.

Site is this amazing place where thousands of people are working and interacting while wearing almost identical suits. The whole thing looks like a big futuristic place with pipes running in all directions and steam, smoke and fire coming out of hundreds of places. It has a distinct smell to it and I can't wait to spend more time at 'site'.

The tour ended at 2pm back at the XOil Stands Discovery Centre which the entrance to is included in the tour...along with entrance to a heritage park down the road which I haven't been to yet but hope to see soon. And that...is how I spent Canada Day!

It's been a while. I know...I'm a bad blogger.

I was working a 7am-4pm shift last week and it was making me very tired. Getting up at 5:15, 5:30am to get to work for 7 meant I was in bed around 8:30pm...so I switched over to the 8am-5pm shift. Now I can get up at 6am and bounce in the door for 8am feeling rested and ready to go.

Work is awesome. The folks I work with are great and while I did grumble for having to work at 5:30pm on the Thursday of a long weekend...I ended up staying until almost 7pm long past when I needed to be there--why? Chatting with one of my new managers about life in Fort McMurray.

Today I headed out on a tour of the oil sands. It was a 10am-2pm tour mostly on a bus. Tour was excellent. I will write more about it later this weekend what I want to write about now is Canada Day. Earlier this afternoon I was very disappointed to find out that I had missed the fireworks. Apparently they were last night--at midnight, which technically yes is July 1. Yep, sad. Oh well.

When I was younger, so younger than today...I would celebrate Canada Day with a core group of friends. We would bbq and spend the afternoon together always a fun time. I came across a photo of us in our much younger years when packing and it reminded me of those fun times. Anyone remember when Shannon and I lived on Burns Avenue in that basement apartment. We bbq'ed in the back yard and passed things out the window. We had this little table sitting under the balconey above (a little table I had painted with this pink paint that was crazy texture and that table is still around), and took crazy pictures of us on a blanked in the back yard...which would now be the back of Walmart. I have one of BD putting out the grill and it all is at a very awkard angle. Great photo.

I don't remember Canada Day celebrations in Newfoundland but since I was there for 4 years I'm sure I did something...oh wait, I went to a beach once with Pam and some of her friends. Yes, we went swimming...that was nice. Nunavut must still be my best CDay celebration...hiking through Auyuittuq National Park. I always need to google the name to spell it right.

And then there was the CDay I went sun tanning on the beach in Iqaluit...

Lot's of good Canada Day memories. I had planned on going to the parade here but when I called to book my tour for some reason decided on Friday instead of Saturday or Sunday. No regrets. It was great.

And now some token cat pictures....