Missing in Action

Well, Missing in Idaho anyway. I apparently haven't been in a blogging mood lately. I tend to get out of touch when I'm travelling for work. I get some news and such, but my only real connection to anything else is Franny. Outside of her (and by extension, the Mizz), I don't really deal with the rest of the world much. Odd, since I have more free (stir crazy) time out here than I do at home, so I can't say I've been too busy.

I'm in Pocatello (still). We've been here since Friday night. We had Sunday off, but that's it. Other than that, it's been pretty busy days.

We actually had a pretty rough day Monday. We went to Soda Springs, Idaho, which is a little town not on the way to anywhere. From what I hear, at the time when Brigham Young founded the town in it's current location, there were a number of geysers in the valley that had coated the area in mineral deposits. So of course we built a dam and made a lake over the geysers. Now the best they have is the only man-made geyser in the world. Building a hotel, they dug in the wrong spot and found the aquifer that fed the old geysers, which started leaking or geysing or whatever. They decided to attach a bunch of plumbing and regulate it, so now they have their own old faithful. All the excitement of a small town fountain mixed with the slight smell of rotten eggs. Cool.

They also have, and actually are proud of, a slag heap. For those who don't know, slag is the leftover stuff from smelting ore into metal, in this case, into phosphorus. And a heap is a big pile. In this case, a REALLY big pile. Anyway, the slag comes out of the furnace REALLY hot, and when they pour it on the heap at night, it supposedly looks like lava flowing down the sides. This was mentioned to me several times that day, so either it's REALLY cool looking, or they REALLY don't have much to do there. From the looks of the town, I'm guessing the later.

I actually worked at the phosphorus plant with the slag heap. Apparently they make the purest elemental phosphorus in the country. It's used in all sorts of things: food, fertilizer and weed killer (go figure), toothpaste, etc. Plus it's insanely reactive in air and melts at around 100 degrees, both of which make it interesting to handle. It's kept under water at all times, as it bursts into flame when it touches air. Nice stuff. But, mix some other chemicals with it and it whitens your teeth or grows your potatoes.

(start complaining) Anyway, this place made for the rough day. When we first got in town and contacted them, they said that we'd have to wait until later because their power was going to be cut off for a couple hours. I went to help our other guy work on some stuff elsewhere, when I got a call that the power wasn't going to be cut off after all, so come on over and get started. Needless to say, after an hour of safety video and discussion and stuff, the power went off. I was resigned to having to make the trek back some evening to finish, but the other guy got so delayed working on his stuff that we were still in town when the power came back on. By this time, it was too late to do anything back in Pocatello, so my partner waited in the van while I went in and calibrated for two hours plus. He hadn't done the safety stuff earlier, so he was out of luck. Longer work for me and boredom for him. Everybody wins. Anyway, we rolled back into our hotel at 8:30 that evening after leaving at 7:00. And by the end, we had barely managed to do work that should have taken one person a normal day to finish. Good times. (end complaining)

Other than that, it's been long days, but not near as annoying. One of our customers even gave us cake today. It was their September company birthday party, and they weren't taking "no" for an answer. Since they had triple chocolate something cake, I wasn't giving "no" for an answer. Everybody wins.