Wind Scorpion -- Fri., May 25

Cotulla, Texas:

Yesterday, the last two workers on Pad A finally left at 9:30 p.m. The oil field workers arrive early and stay late. Some of them work 14+ hours per day...don't know how they do it in the blistering Texas sun and dust.

When Bob arrived home from San Antonio last night, he looked at pics of the different weird bugs "that look like scorpions, but aren't." He pointed at the wind scorpion as the bug that he and the other worker saw a couple of days ago. (See this article for more info: Wild About Texas )

Today the gate has been slow-to-medium busy.

This morning Bowie must have bit or sniffed a bug that sprayed him in the face. He rammed around the 5er, danced onto the bed, ran across the dresser, and Bob said he was "acting weird" in the living room. We found a small dead beetle in the living room so we're wondering if he had been "hunting" it when it must have used some type of defense mechanism on him.

Today, I saw a new bird with a longish, curved bill. The bird is medium gray above and a light buff beneath with a black mottled pattern on its breast. It sits in a tree right across from our dining room window a lot of the time. I get a good look at it with the binoculars. It runs around on the ground with its beak wide open. I don't know the significance of the wide open beak. The bird in my Audubon book that best fits the description is a curve-billed thrasher, although the description states it has "faint streaking on breast." The thrasher I saw has definite black mottled streaking on its breast.

One thing true about gate guarding, at least to us, is that we don't know what day of the week it is and hardly remember there's a holiday coming up. The oil field work is 24/7, 365 days a year. Normally, we would have had plans for a three-day weekend and gone out to a movie and dinner, visit friends, or explore a new area. Not now. Not with this job. We are tied to the gate day and night. It's all a new experience to us.

Today two of the crews working on the pad right next to us went together on food and did a barbeque. They brought us a plate with barbequed flank steak, sausage, four grilled flour tortillas (they looked and tasted homemade) and salsa. That was so nice of them. I walked up and personally thanked the cook. He wanted to give us more, but I politely declined telling him we had plenty for both of us. I said, "We don't eat as much as you guys. You work much harder than we do!"

Because of the rains in the past two weeks, new wildflowers are blooming: small white ones; magenta-colored, daisy-like ones; yellow, mustard-like ones; and black-eyed Susans. On Bob's drive to San Antonio yesterday, he saw many wildflowers lining the freeway.

Today Bob took a picture of me checking in a behemoth. I am 5' 8" tall. Notice how my shoulder is at the same height as the floor of the truck's cab. Huge semi; even bigger equipment!