email i sent to lots of people

***** Feb 23 2007 *****

Hi Everybody, I made it. I'm here at the camp for Crew 52 in southern Oman, near Marmul. I've told different people different bits and pieces about being here, so sorry for the repeats, at least the pictures will be new.

My flight to Muscat was 24 hours total. I flew from Houston to Chicago to London to AbuDhabi to Muscat. The time difference here to CST is 10 hours. I got in at 11pm Muscat time, so about 1in the afternoon my time - I was a little out of it. The Muscat airport was filled with very Omani looking men, all wearing plain white robes, distinctive hats, and beards. Exiting the terminal was like walking the red carpet. There was one small path roped off for people coming out and tons of people packed in waiting eagerly for people to arrive. I wandered down the aisle till I found a guy holding my name on a piece of paper. He was Abdullah and he drove me to the office.

I spent a day in our comany's Muscat office. There are a bunch of rooms to sleep in on the floor above the office. It looked just like my college dorm. Without a car I was confined to the office building all day except for a foray into the city proper for a very comprehensive Medical exam. That was strange. No one spoke much english so I never knew what was happening untill they brought out the needle, or the EKG clamps, or something like that.

The next day I caught another flight to Nimr. The Nimr airport consisted of a landing strip, some trailers, and a bunch of Omani and trucks. I got to the Camp, an hour and a half drive later.

It is really flat empty desert out here. I think it looks how it would look if we colonized Mars. Camp consists of 20 some trailers and 225 people, of which I'm the only woman. I have my own little room, it also reminds me of a college dorm. People in the camp wash and fold my laundry every day and make my bed and serve me food...that part is pretty posh. The work day starts at 6:00am and goes till about 7:30pm. Almost as long as Thomas's used to be :P I woke up at 5:55am the other day and refered to it as having "slept in". Never though I'd say that.

Now instead of running the industrial drainage ditch in Houston I just pick a direction out of the camp and go. The land is really flat, but it's starting to have character for me. I'm getting to know a lot of the bushes. There's the dead one, the big one, the one with different leaves, the one that has an old campfire by it, the one with a plastic bag stuck in it, etc. There is a pipeline that runs just north of camp, and it shows up as a little ridge of rocks that goes on forever in both directions, I usually follow it when I go running. There is a place where a truck dug deep ruts in the sand.

It's nice to go into the desert at night too. You can see a lot of stars. The ground is lit from the camp for miles because the ground is so flat, but aside from that its completely dark. Hard to describe, but its a really strange sight.

Yesterday morning I watched camels fight over trash. The best fight involved 4 camels and a cardboard box. There was no box left when they were done, they ate it. And they payed no attention to the small Omani man trying chase them away, even when he got in a car to chase them. They hung out at the camp for the rest of the day.

I work with one other guy - he's the Senior QC seismologist. He's named Hamish and he's from New Zealand. The people I work near are Brits, Australians, and Indians for the most part. All the guys that work labor in the field are Omani arabs, but I'm not around them very much. A lot of people have been on this crew in Oman for years and years. Since before Digicon even! A guy named Sri who waits on us in the Mess trailer has been teaching me bits and pieces of Hindi. It took me about three days to remember 'Aap kayse hai' and 'mem acha hai' (how are you and I am fine). He also taught me the word for sister. 'behen'. I tried to remember where I had heard it, and then I remembered...'behenchod'. Heh heh a very bad word.

Oh right... my job that I got sent out here to do.... It actually requires very little sitting and staring at data in Expose, and for that I am thankful. We have a daily routine for checking data that is shot each day using perl and expose. We have a weekly routine for processing data that comes in from uphole shooting, where they take much much less data, and only at the near surfact. We have another weekly routine for presenting a week of data to clients. All that, and it doesn't nearly take up all our day. The other time I can spend trying to fix problems on the computer, or make things run smoother with scripts. That's on an inspired day. On an uninspired day, like today, I can sit and read my book (Angela's Ashes) and write emails.

Well that's a pretty long email for now...I don't expect you to read any more. I do, however, expect you to look at my pictures: www.flickr.com/photos/selah

I miss you all!
Selah