Staying Warm

Wow, I can’t believe it has been two weeks since I posted!  I’ve been sort of busy, but mostly I just haven’t been in the mood.  Well, snap out of it, Elaine!! 

The second week of January was mostly taken up with helping out Eric while he was hauling frac sand.  Frac sand is what the drillers use to open up spaces in the shale so the oil can flow out of it.  It is not really sand, but tiny ceramic beads, about the size of poppy seeds.  They come in two ton totes from China and cost about $6,000 a tote.  He was shuttling loads from Sidney, MT to Watford City (where we are staying), a 110 mile round trip, sometimes getting up at 3:30 am to fit in four trips in a day.  This meant getting up and making breakfast, back to bed (or off to the coffee house), then meeting Eric with lunch or dinner and a visit while he waited to be unloaded.  Then the weather turned bitter cold and slowed down everything.

This brings me to what we’ve been doing pretty much the rest of the time—dealing with the cold.  It got down to 19 below zero, not counting the wind chill, bottoming out at around 40 below.  This causes diesel fuel to gel, gas lines to crack, and plumbing to burst, generally wreaking havoc everywhere.  Our equipment fared well, due to preparation, but the camper needed lots of attention.  Our camper is designed for cold weather, but for something like fall hunting camp, not this.  The water pump froze, as well as the black tank (sewage), and the gray water tank.  A hair dryer and electric heater thawed out the smaller black tank, thankfully, but the gray tank is still frozen.  I wash dishes into a pan and fling the used water out the door frontier style.  There are two forks and a spatula frozen into the ice outside (oops!)  Miraculously, the water pump thawed with no cracks, and Eric is working on the gray tank right now.

All this week I was feeling crummy and thought I had Eric’s cold, but the violent sneezing only happened at night.  Thinking allergies, I stripped the bed (more on that process another time).  The bottom of the mattress was frozen to the wooden platform, and when I peeled it loose, I discovered spots of black mold—lots of it.  No wonder we both felt terrible!  The bedding was washed with bleach.  We elevated the mattress and thawed, dried, and sprayed it down with bleach water then dried it again.  Voila!  No more symptoms.

Great, but how to prevent the moisture from re-occurring?  One word: insulation.  Now, ever since we parked this camper, we have been insulating it.  From foam board skirting to bubble wrap on the windows, we have done something like thirty separate projects to stay comfortable, making the camper look like a patchwork of pink and blue foam board along with aluminized foam, foam sheeting and R-22 fiberglass all held in place with plastic sheeting and several rolls of duct tape.  Not exactly elegant, but quite cozy with only one 1500 watt ceramic heater and limited use of the gas furnace.  The beauty of a tiny living space!

I will post much sooner next time, I promise!

Scroll down for a photo of our humble little home plus “North Dakota Still Life with Loader Tire”

Job Description: Swamper

This has been a busy week.  On Tuesday, I was up at 4:30 am, making breakfast for Eric and helping him get ready for a long workday driving flatbed.  I spent the day inside reading, surfing and napping.  Eventually I began to feel slothful which made me want to take a run. So at sunset, the least windy part of the day, I did a quick turn around the block (1.8 miles) and finished with some pushups and some ab work.  Much better!

Eric called from somewhere near the Canadian border to say he’d be really late.  Cook’s night off.  I had a salad and some canned soup—bleh.  Later Eric called to tell me he had another job up by Williston the next day at 6:30 am, so it didn’t make sense to drive all the way home just to turn around and drive back .  That’s the way work goes around here (not that I’m complaining!)

 The next day I was scheduled to work at 4pm but I wanted to have dinner ready.  I had a large batch of split pea soup in the crock pot and cornbread just about done at around1:00 when Eric called to see if I could drive the pickup   about two hours north so he could use it to pick up a loader to unload his trailer at a rig site. (The company he was driving for had a breakdown and would pay me to do it)  At more than double my barista wages, I said of course!  (The coffee house has been quiet anyway, and my boss rescheduled me.)  

It was a beautiful, sunny day to drive across the prairie.  Miles and miles of wheat stubble, frozen creeks and ponds, grain silos and farmhouses.  Scoria pits, pump jacks and drill rigs.  Old abandoned farmsteads, slowly succumbing to the ravages of wind and sun, rain and snow.  Herds of black cows were soaking up the sun and grazing happily.  I listened to classical music on NPR and snacked on popcorn and almond Snickers.  Happy, happy.

Due to bad signage and my horrible sense of direction, I missed a turn and added a few (OK, thirty some) miles to the trip.  Finally, I arrived in the tiny town of Ross, ND.  Eric led me to the drill rig, which is the first I’ve ever been right next to.  They are BIG.   He got a call that the breakdown was fixed, but they would pay for my time anyway.  With that we began to unstrap the load, and I gained a new job description: Swamper.  You got yer roughnecks, roustabouts and yer swampers.  The first two are drill rig laborers, the last is a trucker’s laborer.  I’ve helped Eric loading and unloading trucks for years in the nursery biz, so it’s the same work, just different stuff, with much better pay and a colorful name.  It was all fun and good on an unseasonably warm day.  We’ll see how I feel when the weather goes back to its awful self. 

We finally got home at around 10pm and there was the soup, thick but fixable. What a nice thing to come home to.  Eric worked 40 hours in two days with 3 ½ hours sleep.  I think he was asleep before his head hit the pillow.  Awww. 

What I Did for Christmas Vacation

 It was hard for us to feel very Christmasy, missing our kids and home and cats so much.  On Christmas Eve we went to T. Roosevelt National Park for a run, our first since we were back from Idaho.   A storm was predicted, so we hurried to finish before it got nasty.  We saw three buffalo, one ridge away, otherwise no exciting wildlife encounters. 

Christmas morning we had our traditional eggs Benedict.  I made the most perfect poached eggs of my life, probably because I was making four, not eight or twelve like I usually do.  I had to use whole wheat bagels (first time I’ve ever bought a Wonder Bread product), and sliced them into thin little rafts.  Using a camp toaster, I managed to get four of them to various stages of incineration before I got it right (see a photo of the smoky mess below).  I’ve always been bad at bread.  Our kids say the garlic bread is ready when the smoke alarm goes off.  J

Next, I prepped the pork roast for Michael Chiarello’s Forever Roasted Pork, a foolproof way to make an inexpensive pork shoulder into a succulent treat.  After the pumpkin pie came out, in went the roast for seven hours.  Then we set about building our “addition” onto the back of the camper.  This will more than double our space and give us a place for boot dryers, dry goods overstock, crockpot, along with space for workouts, yoga, and shedding dirty, stinky work clothes.

For the subfloor, we used cast-off pallets set on smoothed out soil, then for insulation, we used grass straw raked from the field next to us.  I felt like Laura Ingalls gathering great armloads of dry grass and stuffing it into the pallets.  Next, we pieced the plywood floor.  The wind was coming up, so I hurried into the camper to finish dinner while Eric screwed down the boards and battened down the hatches.

Joey came over and we tucked into our Christmas feast—pork roast smothered in caramelized onions, chopped salad, baked sweet potatoes, broccoli and pie.  We settled in for a long winter’s nap, but the shrieking wind prevented that.  It was predicted to gust to 62 mph, so at first light, Eric moved all the big equipment he could to surround the camper and slow the wind.  It helped, but the camper was still shaking and rocking.

Not ones to be cooped up, we geared up (ski goggles and heavy mittens included) and went for a run on the little dirt road by the camper.  It was blowing so hard, running felt like swimming upstream, so I considered it an amped up workout. 

The rest of the week we fitted construction in between work, meals and manageable weather.  Around here, you can finish almost any description of an outdoor activity with the phrase “in the howling wind”.  Seriously.   We spend a fair amount of time just making the camper more winter-ready, with projects like taping a large sheet of insulation and plastic over the “nose” of the bed area to stop the condensate from forming on the inside of cabinets and walls.  It has worked well.

New Years was quiet, we had E-Bs and Mimosas for brunch and took a nice long run.  While we had some good times last year, we are happy to say good riddance to 2011 and are looking forward to a much better year.  We wish the same for you.  Happy New Year!