Job Change

After 7 months here it became clear that while we really liked the town, the company I hired on to was not a good fit.  Seems I am a bit crusty and set in my ways and it is hard to find the right fit.  So I changed firms after finding a boss who is a bit crusty and set in his ways.  Now I am working a three week on, one week off rotation in a fly-in/fly-out arrangement.  This is a bit unusual for the US, but not uncommon in Canada.

I was going to include some Google Earth shots of the projects I am working on, but it seems the rural plains of Canada don't get updated very often.  Even so, here is the jobsite in Alberta:

See the big open area in center of the picture next to the fertilizer factory?  It seriously does not look like that any more.  It is the future site of the Northwest Redwater Partnership's Sturgeon Refinery.  The first new refinery in North America in 30 years.  An interesting aside is that our across the street neighbor in Kitimat was born in Redwater.  Redwater being the closest thing to a town anywhere near the site.

And here is the site in Saskatchewan:

Each of the little square boxes is a square mile, Canada was also sectionalized in a pattern similar to the US.  Here there is little to no evidence of the project.  As with Alberta, it looks much different now.  Not really close to anyplace the actual project is 20 kilometers (15 miles) down a dirt road from the nearest highway, and just over an hour's drive from Regina.  On of the big parts of this project is to build the housing (camp) for the workers on a fly-in/fly-out rotation.

Not all of the work is interesting, but the job is constantly changing and it is hard to get bored.