cc: file, Tony Hafen, Pauline Nelson via mail, Sara and Des Penny, and Maxine Shirts
"As Andrea and I flew to Amsterdam on Saturday the September 7th, I was trying to come up with a word to describe my week, and to map out in my mind what I would write about when there was time. The word which came to mind was surreal. The definition in the small dictionary I use at the desk for surreal is `having the intense irrational reality of a dream.' That is a pretty good definition of the week I am writing about, especially a week after it happened. Needless to say we are safely back from Nigeria, and I'm catching up on two Thoughtlets.
The main reason the week was surreal week had to do with sleep, or should I say the lack there of. On the plane, once I woke up and got bored, I created a table to show what I mean:
Now the difference between these two is only 12.5 hours.
Thomas Edison claimed he got by on 3-4 hours a night
(21-28 hours of sleep per week). The week I went to check
up on the China Team, I doubt if I had 10 hours of sleep.
So why did it turn into a relatively big deal for me?
Maybe I'm getting old. Maybe I've become soft in my old
age. Or maybe I just need more than 32 hours of sleep in
7 days. So what was I doing that resulted in this week of
little and sometimes no sleep?
Monday and Tuesday nights I wrote 8 reports, with a total of 333 figures. I delivered these to Dr. Emanuel O. Udegbunam just before he left for the airport to fly to Nigeria on Tuesday morning. I missread my calendar, and ended up missing a lunch with Mike Dunn of GDC to go to a meeting with MechDyne at Landmark Graphics at 11:00 AM, when the meeting did not start until 2:00 PM. I had lunch with Walden 3-D's new salesman, Rod Fries, who had helped move the Landmark Licenses from Continuum over to II&T. Good guy, and there seems to be some synergies. The Landmark meeting was with Lamar Traylor, who was there when I left, and who is helping me make contacts with Landmark the Managing Director in Nigeria. I went from here to II&T and finally started doing some interpretation work on Emerald Energy Resource's OPL-229 Block. I was too tired to do too much, and went home, fell asleep on the couch, and ended up having a good night sleep. Wednesday was spent interpreting the faults in the north central part of the block. Wednesday night I interpreted the faults in the northeastern corner of the block on 3-D data. Thursday Basal Nuanko, Emerald Energy Resource's Exploration and New Venture Manager came down from Dallas, and I introduced him to the Landmark projects in OPL-229. Thursday he interpreted the horizons in the 3-D survey area, while I started by mapping a horizon in the north central portion, on the 2-D data, created a 3-D project for a grided map of the horizon, created the map of the horizon and calculated the area of closure, and interpreted the faults in the northwestern part of the block. It is fun work.
Friday Basal finished his map, while I mapped a horizon across the northeast block. We got these results on CD and Basal left for Dallas by 2:00 PM. The next time I saw him was when we both got off of the plane in Lagos. Friday night was spent interpreting 2 more marginal fields, finishing up the mapping on OPL-229, and then capturing images of all of the sections and maps from the two marginal fields, and the three portions of the OPL-229 block which were worked up. We were suppose to have 60 mile per hour winds from a tropical depression on Saturday morning, and it was not near as bad as had been predicted by the weather service. Les Denham came in and made a couple of CD's which included all of the interpretation results on the 10 marginal fields and OPL-229. I got home about 8:00, and felt like I was walking through a dream. After reading the paper, I went in to check the mail, and ended up making a poster summarizing one of the large stratigraphic exploration opportunities I identified in OPL-229. By the time I finished it was time to pack, and we were a half-an-hour later than intended leaving for the airport. Andrea drove.
We had to meet Dr. Vince Eleri of VRMT to pick up a power supply, and several CD's to take to Nigeria with us. We met him just after a little rain squall in an Exxon-Mobil service station parking lot at the tollroad and Highway 249. The result was we were late getting to the airport, there were long lines, and we almost missed the flight. It was really getting like walking through a dream by this time. We were about the last folks to the gate, and they would not put in the Continental Mileage Number. We were in each in the center seat on the two front rows on either side of the front restrooms. Those next to us did not want to change for a center seat. Oh well!
I was sitting next to a man from Lebanon, who had been at the University of Houston when I was running the Seismic Acoustics Laboratory. He owns a truck stop by the medical center now, and was on his way to Romania to spend a week with his cousin. He was 5'4", about 220 pounds and was wearing a Tony Hilfiger shirt. Pretty hard not to think about Al-Queada. On the other side was a PhD microbiologist, who has his own consulting company cleaning up shallow oil and gas spills, and was on his way to a conference in Copenhagen. His 14 year old son is working on the geology merit badge. He lives in the Memorial Area by BP.
The surreal part of the flight was probably the movie. It was Spiderman. The movie had Dutch subtitles. So I learned that Vader is Dutch for Father. Darth Vader. They kept flashing words up like Ich Ben Spiderman, and my mind went to Roice, Ben, Paul. Or Ich habe Vader, and my mind went to Rob and Matt. Or `Zeg chess,' and I thought of the Internet Chess Games of days gone by. I saw each of you girls in Mary Jane (M.J.), at various times in the movie. I was on my way to Nigeria to meet with an indigenous Nigerian oil company and potential Chinese investors, watching a movie based around the phrases `With great power comes great responsibility. This is my curse and my blessing.' Maybe the whole experience was tied to sitting between a microbiologist and a man from the middle east, at the same time I was watching a movie about microbiological changes and the green goblin. I guess it doesn't make any sense as I try to find words to write the experience, and then again maybe it is not suspose to, since surreal is tied to words like intense, irrational, and dream.
I guess I was glad when the movie was over and I fell asleep. When we got to Amsterdam it was Andrea's turn to be surreal. She bought a journal, and a few minutes later was saying: `Where's the journal I bought?' in a very anxious voice. It was 3:00 AM Houston time, and I responded, `Under your arm.' We learned that you need to go to the Transfer Desk to get a boarding pass, when you fly to Nigeria by way of Amsterdam.
Then we got to Nigeria, and were walked through all of the customs people by the lady who expidites folks from the U.S. Embassy and other groups. As we got to the cars, there was a young boy who had his arm cut off a few inches from the shoulder wiggling his stump at us and asking us for a handout. We had no Nigerian money. They finally got us in the cars, and 30 minutes later we got out of the airport parking lot. We drove to Victoria Island, and then way back in some new developments to a compound with barbwire all around the surrounding wall, armed guards, and a honeymoon suite for us to stay in. There were about 10 staff, and it looked like Basal, Emanuel, Andrea, and I were the only ones staying in the hotel (or should I say guest house?). As I fell asleep on the board of a bed, I couldn't help but think about the experience, and about the word that described all that had happened: surreal."