December 5, 2006

I finally made it to an oil platform. I kept waiting for the cold snap to end and I timed it pretty well. It was a tolerable 34 degrees today. It was a bit windy, but comfortably warm.

The wind seemed hardest on the airplanes I flew today. The flight across Turnagain Arm down to Kenai was bumpy. The helicopter ride to the platform was pretty smooth. It might be that the winds were pretty steady out over Cook Inlet but gusty out of Turnagain Arm. The helicopter ride out included an inspection of a pipeline. I wasn’t inspecting it, but the helicopter was. They may have had thermal imaging equipment to look for leaks. I don’t know exactly what was going on, but we took a little bit of a detour, flying over the corner of the Kenai Peninsula along the route of one of the major pipelines that moves oil, gas, and oil based liquids around South Central Alaska.

Cook Inlet was awesome. It was full of chunks of ice. The larger pieces were rounded from constant collisions. It looked like craters on the moon. It was most disturbing when I got on the platform. The tidal currents were moving the ice at an amazing speed. It provided a real sense of movement on the stationary platform. This sensation increased as I walked around on stairways made of open grating. On the lowest level of the platform, even the walkways were open grating. The lowest level was probably still more than 50 feet off the water. It was an odd experience combining uncomfortable heights with a dizzying sense of motion. I watched some of the larger sheets break apart on the legs of the platform, but I started to get a little motion sickness so I stopped watching.

The platform seemed smaller than I expected. I can’t imagine being cooped up there for a week like the workers. It was a maze of staircases leading from one deck to another. It was amusing to see that lifestyle and to talk to the long time oil workers. After completing the tour, we sat down for lunch. It was then that I discovered the platform is not as stable as I expected. Every time a larger piece of ice hit a leg, the platform shook like a small earthquake.

After two small plane roller coaster rides, two helicopter rides in a survival suit, and a couple of hours of hanging out on not so stationary platform in rapidly moving water, I am lucky to have been able to eat dinner. Actually, the worst of it was the plane rides and those weren’t all that bad.

We got some snow late last week, almost 8 inches. We did a little cross country skiing along the greenbelt on Friday evening. The new lights along the path make it very nice for winter use since darkness is now arriving by 4:00 pm. On Saturday, we got to play in a little bit of fresh, soft snow at Alyeska. Since they aren’t open during the week, the snow was still waiting. We skied intensely, making small, quick turns in the quickly forming moguls. Our legs were fried. We decided to take Sunday off to let our legs recover.

Apparently I am suing my former employer again. This time it is a class action suit brought against them by employees who suffered significant losses in their 401K accounts after the accounting scandal in my old division. I received a notification yesterday. I am pretty sure I am a member of the class. I also think I should receive an above average allocation of the proposed settlement. I don’t think the class is all that large. I guessed at some numbers and I think it is likely that it will be over a thousand. I think the best case might be over ten and the worst case could be only a couple hundred if larger shareholders like executives are somehow included in the class. It is amusing to think they will be giving me more money. It is fun to speculate on the amount.

It must be our week for class action law suits. We are also likely part of the class for a suit against the car dealer where we bought Kris’ Saab. Apparently they were charging an illegal $200 fee that must now be refunded. Maybe I should have read the fine print a little closer. So I lost money in the stock market, got ripped off by a car dealer, and now I am excited about recovering some of that money while the lawyers skim a chunk off the top. I think this is the same stupidity as overpaying taxes throughout the year to get a bigger refund. I used to really enjoy our tax refunds.