Under The Weather!

I felt really sick this morning, I don't seem to handle weather changes very well and I just woke up feeling really terrible. It was a mixture of lack of sleep, allergies, and lack of coffeeage. I had a terrible time staying alert at work yesterday, partly due to my lack of interest in drinking coffee. This really sucked, and I guess I woke up with a little bit of withdrawal symptoms from the caffeine. Yes I am an addict, I know. But at least I can call in sick, which I did this morning. I don't think I got a replacement, but my shift is a 4 man crew and can afford to lose one guy if the work load is minimal. However, Ideally when I called in sick, the crew on shift would have called other operators and informed them of the oppurtunity for overtime. Hopefully someone volunteered!?!

Filling Up On The Petro

I filled up my truck at the gas station yesterday on my way in to work, I really hate filling up. It has nothing to do with the high gas prices, it is a necessary evil I think. Heck, the price for regular old diesel was $3.09 at a gas station near the house. One thing that I do hate about these higher prices is that I can't fill up anymore, I hate paying with cash, but if I use a credit card (depending on the gas station) you only get to fill up to about sixty bucks! I can't fill up on that, not anymore, and I hate paying inside, and I hate having to use my card twice! This isn't a problem at my bio-diesel gas station, but their hours suck, and I am never in need of gas when they are open. I keep on getting mad props about my truck now that I keep it clean all the time, it's nice having an unlimited supply of some high quality H2O! While I was filling up, the guy that volunteers himself to wash your windshield was coming up to me, and I was ready to say no, but he told me I had a nice truck instead! I was like, "Thanks Yo!".

Sleep Through Anything!

I guess we were having some power shortages today that caused some rolling blackouts across the Southland, I heard about it on the way in to work. We were still at full load on both our units when I came in, this should make for an interesting night. Apparently we had some trouble with some high voltage line somewhere up north, I even think it was coming from Oregon. Either way, we lost that source, so in a mad scramble all the local power plants had to startup to make up the difference. Heck for the last month or so our unit pair has been the only two running plants in the station, now they are finally starting up the other plants! This sucks since we make the water for the station, and our tanks are getting kind of low since all four plants in the front are starting up at the same time. I am sure glad I washed my truck yesterday! Anyway, with the megawatts lost from up north and our other units from the station running soon, their should be plenty of reserve for tomorrow's California power usage! Not that I really care since all we do is generate electricity, Cal ISO worries about the distribution!

Caught Up!

After a night of drinking cup after cup of coffee, I was finally able to catch up on some sleep! It felt really good just waking up on my own instead of that annoying alarm clock this afternoon. I even came in to work a few minutes early instead of a few minutes late like I did yesterday. I still need to catch up on my stack of mail that I only seem to clear out twice a month to coincide with payday, and thus I effectively have money to pay any bills when I open them up.

Can't really think of a title...

for this one! I had a really odd day, I did not get the sleep that I should have since I will be working nights for the next couple of days. I don't think that will be that big of a deal, but I have a new coffee mug just in case. I was driving on the I-10 westbound when some moron decides to merge right into me, the funny part was that I was not even in his blindspot, I was actually in front of him! I saw someone coming at me in my blindspot, I immediately checked my left and had about a foot of clearance, so I changed lanes abruptly and avoided an accident. I was so proud of myself, since the guy never even stopped merging and would have probably spun me out. After that I was taking the streets to get myself a haircut, when I noticed a guy who got his wheelchair stuck in between where the sidewalk ends and the blacktop starts, you know...most streets have about a foot of cement from the curb before the blacktop starts, and depending on how bad the street is it is usually in bad shape. So the poor guy was stuck and nobody seemed to notice, I was not even on that side of the street, I was not even a pedestrian, and I noticed this. I pulled some crazy taxi maneuvers to get to him, stopped in the middle of the street turned on the blinkers, flipped of a guy who honked at me, and helped the guy cross a street. I felt ashamed that no one had helped him earlier, I think the light went through at least two cycles before I helped him, and who knows how long he had actually been in need of help before I got there. I am really depressed on this one, nobody seems to care anymore, nobody seems to notice when people are in need of help.

My First Startup!

I accomplished something today, and it was awesome! My first startup alone, from start to finish. A startup at my plants can take about 26 hours, it is a "supercritical, once through type boiler", and just about all of the sartup stuff was accomplished by me, without any help or backup! But since we operate at 3600 psig steam pressure, heat ups take just that much longer! I commenced the startup on Saturday, the relieving shift ran into some problems they had to take care of, and so I essentially came in and finished all of the startup the next morning, all by myself!!!! Man was I exhausted! And so far so good, It went well! All 500MW were me!

Uber Exhausting Day!

This is the most exhausted I think I have ever been in my life! It started out like any other day at work, nothing big like, I even decided to give an old buddy of mine Rob a call. I hear he is the RC div LPO now, I felt kind of proud and sad at the same time, heck I turned over the Mojo to him years ago. I remember when it was given to me long, long ago. It was a keep sake turned over amongst Reactor Operators back when breakers were made out of wood....Argh!!!! Ok, enough of that diggity stuff, but it made me feel kind of proud that the guy I helped train is now running the show. Anyways so while I talked to Rob our unit was called up for a startup, and I had to bust my butt all day. Turning huge valves all day, one feedwater valve for example had about 1000 psid across it and it took me like 30 minutes to open it. I almost gave up, but I forced myself to keep going. This was my first startup by myself as an outside operator. I started up the Engine Room...so to speak, all by myself! So far so good, now we just got to get pressure and temperature up slowly before we are up and running!!!

After work we celebrated my girlfriend's brother's Birthday at Joe's Crabshack a seafood place near my job. They do the whole birthday thing, but a step further than most! That is the only reason why we chose to go. We had fun! A couple of kids were even playing in the red tide that has apparently been plaguing Southern California for the past couple of weeks, it even glowed blue when getting disrupted, but no noxious smell yet! Kids, if they only knew what they were touching!

Not Much Going On!

I drove in my cousin's truck to work, he is flying to the dutch harbor somewhere in the northwest (I think that is in Alaska but don't quote me!) and asked us if he could park his truck in our driveway. I decided to bring it in to work and park it here, we can store RV's, boats, and cars! No hassle, no nothing, which is why I am digging this job. You don't have to ask for permission to do anything, management does their job, and we do ours! There are very few instances where the two need to come together!

If You Use Stamps......Then Check This Out!

This is my girlfriends organization and I am trying to do my part helping out, so if you guys need stamps just click on the pic. Thanks!

Lou...The Crocodile Hunter!

I started my new side job tonight! Does it count though if you do it for free or if you weren't successful? I don't know if you guys have heard about the gator in Southern California, but apparently a gator is loose in one of our lakes! It is in Harbor City, by a public golf course that is very near the industrial part of town, whereas by industrial I mean 69 different refinery companies. Anywho, I decided to hop on the bus (figuratively) and drag my butt over to check out this gator. I was soooo ready with my Australian accent to wrestle this gator, catch it, put it in the back of my truck and haul it over to the L.A. Zoo, all while smoking a cigarette! Problem with this being...I have a terrible Australian accent, I wasn't driving my truck, I don't know where the zoo is, and I don't even smoke anymore!

Fun With Simple Green!

Is what I should have named my post yesterday! I still can't get over the fact of how clean my truck is looking, and I still feel a little guilty that I found a little pleasure in using some simple green to wash my truck. I even decided to look up if it is even a recommended cleaner for washing cars, and sure enough it is! The simple green people suggest a 30:1 ratio of water to cleaner when doing the exterior of an automobile. I might just have to bring in the motorcycle to get that thing cleaned up one of these days. Speaking of which, I need to get out more often on the bike I might even be looking at a carb clean soon with it's lack of use. I must and will tomorrow if it starts, but only after I rotate the tires in my truck!

At the Car Wash!

Well...not really, but sort of! I am actually at work, and not at the car wash as the title of this post might lead you to believe. However they can be one in the same! I was let in on a little secret the other day, I had noticed from my first days at work an indisputable fact...really clean water = really clean car! It's true, I read it in a math book somewhere, something about the conductivity of the water being directly proportional to the dirtie'ge of the car!!!! The secret is that many operators before me have known this fact, and have setup a line right at the discharge of our RO system. High pressure, and very high flow ultra pure water, this stuff is some high quality H2O! At about an inch in diameter and about 100 psi this stuff shoots out like a fire hose! As the end of the shift approached I had a few minutes to spare and in about ten minutes tops, I had accomplished the best car wash ever in Lou history!!! With little to no effort, I was so proud. There is a rubber hose set up connected to our air header to dry off the car, and this by far was the coolest thing ever. First off, this is dry, oil free, and filtered air at 110 psi, which dries a car completely in about 3 minutes!!! I had so much fun doing this last night that I did it again tonight, I took my time making sure everything was spotless! Oh and by the way I used simple green as the soap, I don't think I have ever had so much fun before with simple green! In fact it brought back so many bad memories, wiping the same darn spot every week for no apparent reason. Maybe it was to keep those evil dust bunnies from scramming the reactor, for some reason I felt vindicated cleaning something I actually owned for once while at work! All those years down the tube for this, Yeah I think it was worth it $$$$!

Critique.....NOT!

Dorkus Maximus = Me. I apologize ahead of time if this sounds a little like the old job. I hung the wrong tags on the wrong components, Oops! You see when we hang clearances, (a.k.a. Danger Tags for you Navy Folk) we don't really name each individual tag. Instead, when we isolate a component for maintence or whatever, we just put the clearance number on all of the tags, and hang said tags on all of the isolations. So for example: if I wanted to isolate a pump, and it required 5 tags, we would assign the work order the next clearance number available "1005", therefore all of the tags isolating that pump would have the number "1005" on it. So how does one hang the wrong tags when this process is pretty easy to begin with? Well fret no more and leave that up to me to mess up! I was tasked with hanging two separate clearances, and sure enough I mixed up the tags. It is not really that big of a deal since the isolations are what's important not the tags, plus they will only be hanging for tonight. But just in case, I fixed the problem and the correct tags are hanging on the correct equipment! It was only four tags per component, for a total of eight that were wrong. I am such an idiot hah? Now I will have to stay late tomorrow for the incident report, oh wait we don't play that game!!!! We don't even have any actual supervision, oh wait...I am the supervision! So I punished myself, "Bad Ted, Bad Ted!" and I made myself walk down the clearance to triple check it.

New Plan, New Phone!

I switched over to Cingular today, I just got tired of exceeding my monthly minutes and since my girlfriend uses Cingular I figured it would just be easier this way, free mobile to mobile. I still have my same phone number and for a while I was getting calls on the old phone but would have to dial out with my the new phone, but all is good now...my new phone is up and running! I pay a little extra a month for now, but in a few months I might lower my plan since most of my airtime will be free!!!!

I was unable to spot any meteors last night, the marine layer came in bringing us some cloud coverage. The shutdown went well last night, and we are now only running one out of the two units! I just can't wait to have both units down, it is nice to have to peace and quiet at work every now and then.

Meteor Shower Tonight!

I am here at work tonight, and hopefully I will be able to spot a meteor shower that is supposed to go down some time tonight. I just can't wait, and with a shutdown on one of the units at midnight I sure hope I am done by the time it happens. Not much else has been going on. So did anyone else here about that girl that jumped out of a limo in the middle of the 405 freeway? My brother got caught up in that traffic jam on the 405, preliminary reports are ruling it as a suicide. There are also some weird ties to the band Rammstein, the limo guy claims that the lady and her boyfriend told him that they were part of the band. This obviously is not confirmed yet, plus I don't even think Rammstein has any female members in it anyway, it is still kind fo weird though. So go figure!

"I'm Gonna Need You to Come in Saaaturday!"

I got called in to come to work today, one of the guys called in sick. My cell phone had rung first and by the time it woke me up and I picked up it was already on voicemail. I checked the message and kind of fell back asleep. They called the house phone a couple minutes later so I guess they really needed someone and thus I decided to come in! I am finally back in business again, I went gambling yesterday and came about even. I felt great though since I essentially won all my money back I had lost the first hour in the last 20 minutes I was there! It was getting late, and traffic can be a pain on Sundays so I decided to throw in the towel! Ok, so it wasn't really Saturday...but it was a day off nonetheless!

"Last Days" the Movie

I watched that new movie! Actually it has been out for a long time now, only that it was just recently got released in the states, so it feels new! So I watched it and I was slightly let down. I hope some of you out there go see it, if you do I am kind of curious as to what you think? This movie I am talking about is essentially about Kurt Cobain's last days and the events that led to his unfortunate demise. I don't think it is out everywhere so some of you might have to wait a bit, but let me know nonetheless!

Just Busy as Heck!

Don't really have much to blog about lately, it seems like the weather is cooling down for a little bit which might be good since we have been running all of our plants non-stop for the last couple of months. Today is my last day of work for a while, my long break is coming up and I don't know if I want to come in to work some overtime. I think I am due for a some time off!

It's About Time!

I finally got my bowling ball in! It works great. I still need to work out a couple of bugs and get confident with spinning the ball, I bowled a 157 just trying to figure how to use it! I really dig it.

At work I got told I was getting a raise too, I did not ask for it nor did I really do anything in particular to get it. Maybe they are just glad I did not quit! I have been kind of blowing off my checkoff book though, it just seems easier to learn the systems by operating them and using them instead of just memorizing silly drawings and procedures.