On Being True To Your Word - Part 1

As of this minute, I am keeping this promise. See below.

This photograph was taken (as you can see in the lower-left hand corner of the photo) on March 28, 2006. Our company took a tour to one of the drilling rigs operated on our properties. We had over twenty people on the tour, including children, investment bankers, lawyers (many, many lawyers), geologists, spouses, engineers, hedge fund financiers, and accountants. We were quite a group.

It was great fun.

It was a gorgeous day, although it had rained very heavily shortly before we got to the drillsite, leaving the drill pad very puddled, muddy and generally soggy (the drill pad is an area several acres in size on which the drilling rig, the camp trailers for the rig hands, the drill pipe, the shacks where the mud loggers do their mud logging, and other accoutrements of the trade supporting the drilling activity). You can sort of see in the picture that I have my jeans rolled up. This was necessary to avoid the mud. It was mostly successful. Some of the bankers and lawyers were in nicer clothing than was ideal given the mud, but folks were generally good-natured about it.

The drilling rig itself was a significantly more impressive structure than I had anticipated. It was really tall (maybe 150'). The footprint of the rig itself was quite large. Of course if I had thought about it I might not have been surprised by this. The rig is in the process of drilling a hole over 15,000 feet into the earth, so it makes sense that a pretty significant piece of equipment is required to achieve that result.