Discovery has a new show called Time Warp that is exceedingly interesting. I’ve spent hours watching slow motion videos on YouTube and looked forward to seeing new material. One thing they showed was a hot blonde pole vaulter doing her thing. Tangentally I went looking for pole vaulting photos on flickr and found a very lovely girl named Melanie Adams. Apparently she’s not some random girl, but an Aussie girl with modeling aspirations. Hopefully we’ll see more of her!
I’ve been kicking myself for not going anywhere on the weekends lately. Saturday afternoon I set off for Midland. My GPS was on CST, so it wound up being an hour longer drive than I had planned. It was very dark when I arrived and it was interesting seeing all the lit up rigs on the horizon. It reminded me of a bunch of Burning Man men all spread out. One of the first things I saw was a hugeass fire. At first I thought it was a rig burning off gas, but after I found it, it turned out to be some sort of tank farm burning off something. The smell of H2S was in the air, which smells like money being made!
At first glance, both Midland and Odessa around I-20 looked pretty old and run down. This morning when I went out to forage for breakfast I headed up to northern Midland. Much better area, clearly where all the new development and suburbia area. I also got a good luck at how utterly flat and open the Permian Basin is. Which makes sense, since it was an ancient sea bed.
I did quite a bit of driving around the oilpatch this morning. I drove down to Crane where some of the original fields were and it was quite dense with pumping jacks. Unfortunately all the roads were blocked so wandering on country roads was as close as I could get. The rigs were considerably harder to find compared to being lit up at night, not to mention being very spread out. I found one with a backdrop of wind turbines on a mesa I wanted a photo of, but it was deep in the middle of a lease I couldn’t get to.
I thought it was interesting that gasoline in San Angelo was $1.91, yet in the Permian Basin it was over $2.50. I thought there was a couple of refineries in M/O, but may be other things at play.
I left Midland around 2 to head home. This time I headed back to Crane and onward to I-10. Got home around 7:30, wee!
