Dealing With North Dakota Snow; The Difficult We Do Immediately, The Impossible Takes A Little Longer -- December 29, 2016

I was curious how roughnecks are able to get out to the well sites with all that snow in North Dakota. A reader was kind enough to respond.

All in all, we honestly just had to sit it out for a day or two. It's a common maxim of all us local oil field guys is "in winter, things just take longer." Some of the higher-up guys in Texas just don't get it. But we know all to well.

Most operators have local roustabout/construction companies hired out to plow all the lease roads. Road grader with plow rig setup on front seems to be the most common for these private roads.

Secondarily for scooping up the big piles on location a payloader is usually employed. I have also seen a couple Bobcats with a hydraulic snowblower used to clear and widen paths near treaters and pumping units.

"In winter, things just take longer."

That sounds like the quote I often heard among US Army civil engineers when flying into bare base operations in northern Africa decades ago:

The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.

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Melancholy Evening

It's an incredibly melancholy evening for me. It's a personal thing. It will resolve in a day or two. Too many bittersweet memories swirling like a blizzard in my mind.

It's a good night to watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy again -- if I've watched it once, I've watched it 150 times -- one of the greatest love stories ever. Seriously. I think I talked about that before.

I could pull myself out of this melancholy mood in a heartbeat by listening to Talking Heads on YouTube with my vintage Beats by Dr Dre head phones -- a Christmas gift from our older daughter.  But for some reason, I want to watch TTSS again.